I suspect among the small scattering of people who know that I write experimental poetry, many people do not understand it, let alone are able to make sense of it. I also don’t care, my work is my work, but I am aware that, if anything, the work itself has always run the risk of me being labeled as other – as I quickly figured out when I would mix my own type of angry, liminal, non-structured rhetoric with slam poetry in performance, full of hyperbolics, violent epiphanies and thrashing about with my hands and arms, early on in my “career” as a poet.
Sometime in the early 2000s, after I had performed an especially difficult-to-digest, very “high affect” piece, I said to the audience, “You may think that this piece means that I’m schizophrenic…”
Then I looked out at them.
*Nervous silence*
*Nodding*
*Nervous silence*
“…but trust me, I’m not.”
*Nervous silence*
So I quickly figured out that just unmasking and letting everything hang out might freak people out. I’m good with that as well, but in the interest of being able to reach audiences (as well as not torching the chances of my getting work), I undertook a sort of performative camouflaging process. Especially when reading/performing publicly, I look at providing a narrative anchor to the audience as critical, if not a responsibility, so I’m not just casting people adrift in a barrage of words and stream-of-consciousness imagery. As such, I figured out how to channel experimentalism into more acceptable, less risky modalities: I’d mix in pop culture and commonly known historical references, and have pieces that were more like traditional slam poems, and fold in experimentalism and more difficult-to-digest pieces on the sly a bit, or selectively.
That was then. I’ve been trying to figure out for a few years now why my entire style of writing poetry – page-focused (as opposed to performance-focused) poetry in particular – non-linear, highly experimental, symbolically-driven, textually dissociative, but also, a reflection of how I process information on a daily basis – had turned into a process where I’d write very terse, very minimalist poems, less than daily, from 2009 until this year. In addition, I stopped writing for the stage, and gradually, stopped songwriting as well.
Figuring out ways to address this as a “writer’s block” sort of problem was completely intractable, which is also not standard for me. My usual approach to writer’s block is “If life gives you a writerly lemon, make a different kind of lemonade and move on.” If I’m not writing poems, I’m writing songs. If I’m not writing songs, I’m writing essays. If I’m not writing essays, I’m trying to write a concept for a TV series. No luck, nothing. While I kept doing other (mostly underpaid or unpaid, thanks for nothing, gig economy) work, and was moderately productive, if not as publicly visible – the poetry had just vanished. Simply put: my usual toolkit didn’t work.
I’d try to push the work out of its seeming rut – to “trust the process”, and write to it – nothing. The dense, fragmented rhetorics and poetics I would engage in my work, thanks to good mentorship in my MFA program, and a lot of personal experimentation afterwards? Gone. “I’m specifically trained not to fall prey to this sort of thing, ever. If the work isn’t coming, you step it up or change the approach. This though feels like an alien took over my head, and is running a lab up there. So what’s wrong?”
Give me a healthy, supportive environment, and I’ll *never* stop writing, as long as writing is my primary focus. My rep is for having deep pockets – ask me to read somewhere, I’ll be on point. Always. For example: I finished a full poetry manuscript, while unemployed, recovering from housing instability, trying (and failing) to get into Ph.D. in Literature programs, and the late stages of grief over my father’s passing. I finished part of that manuscript, right after finishing an MFA, in a small midwest town I’d never been in before, as part of a five week residency. Why did this work for me? It was a midwest winter, in a quiet town, where for the most part, everybody left me to my own devices. If anything, the residency staff gave me a polite side-eye and gently told me to stop talking about my entire life with them when I tried to so do (happy-yet-slightly-anxious info dumping!), and get back to work. So I’d wander on the good weather days, talk with locals when it felt safe (which it frequently did, even if I side-stepped certain things, like the actual damn noose in the case in the back of a cowboy store – I’ll just not be asking about this and go, thanks), and write. Productive as an upstanding member of society? No thanks. Productive as a poetic anarchist firebrand in a room of my own? Gimme.
Then that whole approach to being a poet/performer/writer just…stopped. It had been coming for a while, but not in a way that looked like the well running dry. Everything was good, or at least, ok – but this was different.
By way of (imagined) example, this was a good day’s poetic output, for about 2-3 years:
A tree.
In a forest.
Send ready help.
“OK, done for the day.”
So then, I’d spend rest of the allotted writing time trying to figure out what the hell was up, before I moved onto something else (much of which I couldn’t get off the ground, either) – but it still bothered me. Something felt off.
In contrast, here’s a description of a given day for me, when things are well and I’m happily productive as a poet:
*Writes one to three poems*
*Moves onto refining the lyrics for the next EP, possibly writes part of a new song, or edits a poetry manuscript*
*Breaks for lunch*
In economically stable times, this can even look like having a part-time editing and production job! (Hire this neurodivergent anarchist troublemaker! I’m available most afternoons.) If I wasn’t working at a day job, I’d use the afternoons to rehearse, and the evenings to produce and record. All of that seemed on long-term hiatus, though, and shifting what I was writing around until something clicked wasn’t working as well. Why?
I went through a list of obvious culprits – needing to creatively recharge, life transitions, grief, stress, burnout, limited (and freelance) employment – and none of it mapped to anything that made sense, especially in an “ok, there it is” sort of way. All of those things were present, but addressing them, which I did, successfully – made no difference. I’m no stranger to any of those things, including experiencing all of them at once. Grief hits me hard, but it’s not like I can’t handle it, either. Burnout sucks, but I’ve been through that as well, and know how to bounce back from it. “Something is “wrong” with me, it seems. But what?”
What I now know: I’ve been cycling between interests for decades that include the following: poetry, prose, performance, anarchist/leftist political organizing and direct action, reading, watching TV and film, biking, hiking, traveling, wandering (and wandering and wandering…), graphic design and book layout, game design and interactive multimedia, audio coding, mixing and producing (which is different than writing or playing music), and last but not least, human systems and critical theory. While I’m a professional writer, and have been since my mid-20s, I’m still autistic, I have varied and deep interests, and it shows. Cycling out of writing performance pieces and poems is just part of the process. Eventually, things come back around, but I need to be patient with myself, and let things wax and wane as they do. If this means changing course and leaving people wondering where I got off to, so be it.
Back then, though? It was a serious head-scratcher. (CW/TW: mainstream stereotypes about autism/Asperger’s.) My usual response for several years to reading a fragmented, partial description of autistic traits in the mainstream press, or elsewhere: “That’s definitely me, alright, but…hunh. Isn’t Asperger’s about being some sort of male-identified super-nerd, though? I’m trying to get away from the (sexist, racist, misogynistic, sensory-hostile) office-based computer industry. Hunh. Still, though…hunh. What if terfs start doubling down on harassing me online as a result of me starting to ask questions about Aspergers? ‘SEE? You really are a man, a man, a man, a man… (echoes across a wide canyon).'”
So then I’d think “You know what…fuck it. Fuck the computer industry, fuck codifying someone into a box, fuck the psychiatric industrial complex, fuck the mainstream media, and above all: fuck men. I’m a self-empowered trans/intersexed/queer woman, I don’t need this shit in my life”, close the browser tab and try not to think about it. There was effectively nothing out there about autistic women (trans and cis alike), autistic POCs, autistic queers.
Also, a lot of the Asperger’s media coverage didn’t even mention the arts, they provided a “good at math, good at computers, silicon valley is interested in you and your math whiz brain!” white male aspie stereotypic profile instead, at best. Which is fine of course if that fits how someone’s autism presents, but otherwise? Like the saying goes: not helping. (It’s also true that I love trains, and have programmed since I was 19, for what it’s worth.)
Further, I was surrounded by neurotypical people, in a noisy, polluted (and sometimes, socially conflict-laden) environment – for over 10 years. In other words, everyday urban life in many an urban city, as well as everyday life in grad school and activist collective houses. Many of the performance gigs I was getting were tied to white-dominated and/or middle class, college-educated POC writer/performers and audiences, which I was working to expand beyond, and frankly, felt sort of ridiculous engaging with via experimental work that they both got and did not get, utilizing rhetorics that they both did and did not get, as part of a radicalized politics that they sometimes got, but also: smile for the camera and “can you tone it down a bit”? Nevertheless, I was starting to learn the queer performance industry in its then-present manifestation. I was optimistic, roadblocks notwithstanding.
Then the global economy melted down in 2008-09. No new work, both in terms of performance and high tech, which meant declining performance gigs, while looking for onsite tech work to make up for the loss in income, which I mostly detest. I was coming up with nothing on that front, either. Brokeish, saddish, sickish. An affrontive front of fronting, with no open front door, email only, please and a pile of “at this time…” replies. So then, I started a blog about the crash, and what I was going through. Somewhere between being flat broke, in debt, getting sick all the time (I get really bad hay fever) and not knowing when all of that was going to end, the blog dried up as well.
I’ve come to the conclusion, years later, that relative poverty, illness, socioeconomic instability and the autistic closet were all at the core of an extended-yet-unfamiliar writer’s block. At the time, I was perplexed: it’s not like I haven’t been a broke-ass, sick, deeply frustrated, multiply-hyphenated poet before, or for that matter, a frustrated, multiply-closeted tech worker. For example, take your typical bro-dominated tech department, where I labored for years as a tech writer. This one place I worked for couldn’t handle my inability to context-shift and read tech guy’s social cues, and they were definitely higher on the pecking order, even if professionally, we were supposedly peers. My boss: “It’s amazing how impossible it is to fire someone here”, within clear earshot after weeks of arguing over things. Dealing with adversity in relation to work is just one of those things that comes up.
The difference with those jobs is that if I had the energy at the end of the day, which is definitely not a given, but has happened occasionally – I’d work on what I am actually passionate about on evenings and weekends. It’s sort of exhausting, but I can handle it, and the work itself recharges me, even if dragging myself to work is still…dragging myself to work. Frequently in an agitated, weepy, and angry, likely bordering on melting down state? Yes. “No there there, you are officially a non-poet poet”? No.
The happy ending: I’m back on track. I need to find work (or more likely, create an economic framework for myself on my own terms), but I’m not going to tank tomorrow. My mom passed, which hit me very hard, but I recovered. I had an eighteen month stretch where I taught myself game design, but that passed when I hit a major learning milestone, so I was clear headed enough again to go back to being hyperfocused on writing and music instead. (During that time, I’d keep trying to write, and would start thinking about coding and level design instead. Music was somewhat better – I released a new EP, and worked on my piano chops.)
What have I learned from all this?
1) Thank god I’m writing again! I’ll ride this particular wave for however long it lasts, and when I’m onto something different, I’ll ride that as well.
2) Given that I hadn’t self-dxed yet, I had no idea what interests were, and how they can play themselves out. I’d call all of them “projects”, even though my sense was that they weren’t *just* projects, either. I also had no idea that interests can consume all of an autistic’s person’s energy for a period of time – then one day, just sink like a rock to the bottom of some very deep ocean. When it returns – if it returns, which for me, it tends to, eventually – it returns. If not, not.
3) Living in close proximity to neurotypical people – large numbers of roommates, or a small, closely quartered apartment – is *not* healthy for me. It’s like having a dissociative meltdown in slow motion, directly proportional to how “normal” I try to act. While my current place is a lot better than my previous one, it still has its problems – street noise, loud neighbors, way too much sunlight, pollution, bad ventilation, no AC. I need to fix this – I’m not sure how or where yet, but I will.
My best estimation now is that because a) it’s unclear to me if I was diagnosed as autistic in grade school or not, b) I was lacking any neurodiversity support, save for a friend or two, for years, and c) I was surrounded by people who were either neurotypical, or unsupportive if not hostile to people whose form of neurodivergence differed from theirs for years as well, my creative work was starting to suffer. To some degree, this includes graduate school as well, which both helped my creative work, and hindered it, due to it being a frequently toxic, heavily overworked environment.
Further, earlier in the decade, I was starting to have meltdowns again on a regular basis, to the level of causing conflicts and concern among roommates, but didn’t have the words to describe why they were happening. These four aspects probably resulted in the work reflecting my newfound, relatively more “normal”, yet very terse, minimalist, experimentalist, almost dissociative, style, eventually. On the days that I’d write poetry at all. I was basically experiencing an extended shutdown, that built up over time, that was reflecting itself in the work.
4) Masking, even among like-minded social outcasts, torches my creative output and messes me up emotionally, as well as making it a lot harder to maintain a health regimen around even fairly basic things, like hay fever. “Ask me about the number of times I’ve had an ear-nose-throat infection!” Where I am right now has similar problems, but it’s also three stories up, which filters out some of the street noise, in a large enough apartment complex that everything pretty much runs on its own (sadly, corporate-owned) motion. It’s not cheap, and it’s definitely not perfect, and I need to find something better and/or cheaper – but it’s not a catastrophe, either. That said, I could do without wincing or my nerves getting slightly jumbled every time someone lets their front door slam shut – but that’s what moving is for, with time and enough planning.
Leave me alone, somewhere quiet where I can write and compose and produce? Without a truckload of ambient and street noise, florescent lights, noisy neighbors and allergens? Watch me thrive.