Timothy Scott Bennett's Blog: Everything is Research: Life, Asperger's, and the Written Word, page 2

The Englishman Who Went Up a Neurotypical But Came Back an Aspie

As I said earlier, Sally and I are making moves to have a greater presence back in North Carolina, as it feels like the place we need to be to do the work we wish to do. Exactly how this will look we are not sure, but it will likely center around a home base somewhere in the Triangle area, and probably back in Chatham County.

I have a slurry of mixed reactions regarding this move. On the one hand, I’m excited at the thought of being back in a place where Sally can more easily share her great gifts. And there are possibilities that open up for myself as well, including working with Sally as a partner and facilitator, and getting involved with music and theater. The writing I can do anywhere, as long as my life is set up to minimize distractions.

On the other hand, the summer heat and humidity will be a constant source of discomfort, if I don’t find a way to make peace with it, and even embrace it. And the driving… It has been so nice, to live in small villages where I did not always have to get in a car.

But perhaps the thing I’m most concerned about is coming back to people who knew me before. Because I’m not who I was then. I’m eight years further down my path of discovery and understanding. And it feels like one of the most difficult things in the world is changing the way in which others think of you based on their past experience.

The most obvious change is that eight years ago Asperger’s was not even on my horizon as an explanation and self-descriptor. (At one point early in our relationship, I explained my reserved nature to Sally by saying that I was British, tapping into that myth in order to get to some piece of my truth.) Now Aspergers is something I think about, read about, and explore in my writing, as the diagnosis provides new and helpful insight into why my life has gone like it has, and helpful guidance about how to live in my day to day world.

But the word comes loaded with judgments and associations, and to use it with others who “knew me back when” risks a variety of possible reactions. This was made plain to me over the weekend, when a long conversation with an old friend, a conversation which included catching him up about the whole “Aspie thing,” evoked a reaction of disbelief and discomfort which included the word “contrived.”

I comported myself well, I think, and managed to explain and defend my use of the word Asperger’s as useful and appropriate. But the word “contrived” has bounced around inside of me since, poking at my heart and mind. It touches old traumas, pricking them to wakefulness, and my head fills with imagined conversations of self defense. And I don’t want to be in defensive mode.

None of it comes as a surprise. Every Aspie writer I’ve read has cautioned that one enters into disclosure at one’s own risk. I dove into this blog, and my own disclosure, knowing full well that it would not always be easy. But there’s a great difference between exploring my Aspie nature online through the written word, and speaking of it face to face with other human beings who knew me before. It’s hard. And going back home, reinserting myself into that old community, looks all the more difficult because of it.

And while none of it “comes as a surprise,” it’s also true to say that all of it comes as a surprise. Despite my fifty eight years of experience with the reality of the acculturated human ego, there’s a part of me that holds onto the fantasy, the vision, the hope, of who humans can be at their very best, and the great clarity and self-knowledge they are capable of. So I’m doomed to be surprised and disappointed, astonished that people keep turning out to be as limited and reactive as I am. Who knew?

Perhaps the thing that makes this all the more triggering is that it’s not the first time this has happened. In a similar way, I “went away” from my previous life and marriage, and the families of origin in which I was embedded, and embarked on my journey of healing and growth with Sally. The Englishman Who Went Up a Mainstream American But Came Down a Fully Feeling Outlier, perhaps. Only then, it wasn’t an Asperger’s diagnosis that had changed me, but the evil machinations of that scary™, prying™, therapizing™ woman with whom I threw in.

When you go up a mountain and come back down, you can lose people. Not everybody is up to taking the journey with you. And not all of them want to hear the tale upon your return.

I don’t know that there’s anything to be done about this. I’ll just continue along, doing my best not to hide anymore, speaking who I am, and trusting that it will work out as it should. There are exciting prospects ahead and I’m ready to get to them. That’s where my focus is. The rest will have to sort itself out as I go along.

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In My Wheelhouse

It’s been a choppy week here in Lake Wobegon. Many upsets to my routines, from visitors to unexpected or unwanted tasks to tragic news to stirred up old trauma. Emotionally and psychologically, I’ve been all over the map, which has made writing more difficult. I find, when I’m distracted, that I cannot easily sink back into my story with the freedom and focus I need to do good work.

It has come to dawn on me this week that perhaps it will always be this way. I say that not so much to make a prediction as to create some space for me to accept and embrace a seeming fact: that I am filled with wild feeling, reactivity, contradiction, and paradox. Rather than fighting that, rather than thinking it an aberration, rather that working to heal it, get over it, through it, beyond it, or past it, rather than holding that there’s something wrong, rather than speaking in terms of upsets and routines and difficulties that toss me “all over the map,” it might better serve me to take my wild, contradictory nature as a starting point, and, in the immortal words of Stanley Kubrick, learn to “love the bomb.”

Maybe there’s no “signal” to be found within the “noise,” no calm route through the choppy sea, no “true” and “correct” and “real” me that gets lost or knocked down or interrupted when life intervenes and stresses pile up. Maybe I’m the signal and the noise. And maybe if I stop pushing away from the noise, something will shift. It’s worth a try. Working to keep the Ship of Tim on “an even keel” is probably a losing strategy when sailing such a tempest-tossed ocean as is this modern life.

I’m not exactly sure what I’m saying here. I don’t know if this “makes sense.” I’m just going on a gut feeling and seeing what pours out of my fingers. It may be that my wild interior landscape of feelings and reactions and wants and needs and desires is more the source of my superpowers than it is a distraction from them. Or if not the source, then at least a huge pallet from which I can find colors to paint my life.

So today, as I get in the car with Sally and drive for a few hours – to attend a funeral, to meet with some old friends, and to further scope out some possibilities for our future life – I’m going to try to give myself less grief about the fact that, most of the time, I’m a swirl of contradictory thoughts and wild feelings and conflicting wants and needs, and that I’m often steering my boat with only a rudimentary understanding of where it needs to go.

We’ll be gone for a couple of days. It’ll be interesting, to see where we end up.

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Strange Sensations

Sally was in the guest bedroom, sitting at her sewing machine listening to a podcast on her headphones. I came up behind her and hugged her neck. She took off her headphones and paused her podcast and began to tell me about what she’d been listening to. Something about probiotics.

“Aren’t you interested in why I came in to hug you?” I asked.

She smiled. “Yes! Tell me.”

“I was having these feelings,” I said. “I was just liking you.”

Sally laughed.

“I think that liking you is more important than loving you,” I said.

She laughed again. “Right,” she said. “Because if you’re liking me, you’re less likely to stab me.”

I nodded. “It’s true,” I said. “People do all sorts of nasty things to the people they love. Less so to those whom they like.”

We said some other things, and I came back out to work on the edit.

One thing this brief conversation shows is my relationship with the ideas and language regarding love, about which I’m often confused. But that’s not what I want to talk about right now.

I want to talk about that stabbing thing.

It’s an old joke between us, one that arises from the fact that, often, when we are together in the kitchen, and I have a sharp knife in my hand, I have an impulse, or a thought, of plunging it into her stomach.

Now, before any of you get all worried and call the authorities and shit, please know that this is not an overwhelming impulse in any way, and it’s not one I’ll ever indulge. (If I stabbed her, Sally would kill me!) But it is a thought, a strange sensation, and I find it fascinating.

I have another strange sensation. When I’m up high, on top of a mountain ridge, say, or a rock outcropping overlooking a deep valley, or a bridge, I have this impulse to run to the cliff and leap out over the abyss. So strong can this feeling be that I rarely get close to the edge, and usually take a seat as quickly as I can before I gaze out over the view.

I did a bit of research on these strange sensations. I found that regarding the jumping impulse, it’s common enough that it has a name: the high-place phenomenon. I didn’t find a term regarding the stabbing impulse, but I did find a discussion about a variety of strange impulses on an anxiety website, and an article about a form of OCD that gives one the desire to murder one’s loved ones.

But I don’t know the reality is, in my case. I don’t feel called to either suicide or murder. I just have these extreme, strange thoughts and sensations in certain situations. It seems that many people do.

Do you?

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Author Interview – Session 7

Note: As I continue to push through my final, smoothing edit, I’m concurrently working on a number of marketing and branding tasks. In order to help book reviewers, I’m making ready an interview to which they can refer. I sat for long sessions with a person named Q, and will post our discussion here in small sections as I go along.

****

Q: So early on in this interview you mentioned something about Asperger’s. Do you identify as an “Aspie writer,” and if so, what does that mean?

A: I’m kind of all over the place on that one. I got my Aspergers diagnosis right at the point where I was ready to finish the edit for Rumi’s Field, ramp up my online presence, increase my skill set regarding marketing, and finally take myself seriously as a writer. In fact, I would say that the diagnosis was instrumental in the matter of taking myself seriously, as it left me feeling more credentialed and self-aware.

But then I had to face the questions. Do I hide this Aspie aspect? Do I exploit it or use it? Do I combine it with my authorial pursuits? Do I keep these two realms separate? When I started my author blog, it just felt right to lump everything together, to write about all the aspects of my life. Hence my blog’s subtitle: Life, Asperger’s, and the Written Word. But I continue to question the wisdom of that.

Q: Why might it be unwise to lump it all together?

A: I don’t know that it is. I just know that I wonder. I guess I approach the question from a very utilitarian viewpoint, as I do many things. Does the Aspie label help or hurt my writing career? Does it bring me readers, or push them away? And, from the other side, does my focus on science fiction help me as I endeavor to connect with the Aspergers/Autism community? Does it bring Aspie/Autistic readers to my blog, or warn them away, or neither? Since I consider that this blog serves as the seed for a non-fiction book about my Asperger’s experience, that question has a utilitarian aspect as well.

And there’s a slight “sideshow” aspect to the phrase “Aspie writer,” it feels like. Akin to “dancing bear” or “chimpanzee on a unicycle.” It’s like, “Hey, look at that Aspie guy write novels!” As if it’s a wonder that I can do it at all, let alone do it well.

Q: Do you think it’s really like that? That people think that?

A: I don’t know. All I know is that there’s a feeling in me, an association that causes the fear to arise. I assume that this association or judgment derives from the culture in which I was raised, so I assume it’s in other people as well.

Q: But you don’t want your writing to be judged solely through the lens of “Aspie writer.” You want it judged on its own merits.

A: Yeah. Don’t give me a pass just because of the Aspie thing. Don’t accept mediocrity from me just because I am “different” or “special.” And don’t assume mediocrity about me either.

Q: It sounds like you have deep feelings about this.

A: I guess I do. But I don’t think I have it all sorted out. Maybe this is something other people can help me with. I know that I recoil from the phrase “Aspie writer.” But I am also excited by it, and want to embrace it. It’s probably all rolled up in the long history of autism, the whole cultural suite of associations and judgments and misunderstandings and abuses, the whole “difference versus disability” thing. I don’t feel disabled. I feel, in fact, like I’m super-powered. But maybe I am disabled™, and maybe I have to accept that more fully before I can go on. I do have some interest in confronting and challenging the cultural myths and stories about Aspergers/Autism. But I’m not sure I’ve fully confronted those stories inside of myself. In fact I’m sure I haven’t.

Q: Are there other “Aspie writers” out there that you’ve encountered?

A: Oh! Yeah. Just last week I read a great interview with Corinne Duyvis, who identifies as autistic and who’s latest book, On the Edge of Gone, is a post-apocalyptic sci-fi novel for young adults featuring an autistic protagonist. She’s great, and her books sounds marvelous (it even got a write-up in the New York Times Book Reviews). I have a lot to learn from her, I think.

Q: That must’ve been helpful, to find her.

A: It was, yes. It helps me to better embrace my own situation.

Q: So are there ways in which Asperger’s impacts on your writing?

A: I think so, yes. As I said, I think Asperger’s gives me as many superpowers as it does challenges: my intense focus, my ability to collect, remember, interpret, and weave together bits and pieces of data and analysis from all over the place into a coherent whole, my willingness to work long hours and stick to it. Things like that. When the bone in my mouth is a book project, I gnaw on it until it’s finished, even if it takes me five years, as Rumi’s Field has done. Or twenty years, if we go back to the original inspiration.

Q: And the challenges?

A: Well, while I think I have an excellent working rational understanding of human psychology, I have less or different access to human feeling, and especially in the matter of expressing those feelings in language. Given that, I should never be a romance writer. I’m great at plotting and suspense and the unraveling of mysteries. But I’m somewhat clunky – I am told – when it comes to languaging such things as love and affection and family bonding and things of that sort.

Q: Science fiction seems the perfect place for you then.

A: Ha! Well, I think that’s based on some old and incorrect assumptions about science fiction. Sure, there’s a “nerd factor” to the whole history of sci-fi, which Steve Silberman touches on in a fascinating way in NeuroTribes. Certainly there’s some truth to the notion that much of sci-fi elevates hardware and plotting and adventure over the more intimate human aspects of its characters. But there is much sci-fi that I think succeeds in the latter category as well. Unless I’m not a trustworthy judge in the matter, which could, I must admit, be the case.

Q: So how do you address this shortcoming in your stories?

A: Well, I have Sally as one of my editors. She’s a heart person in a big way, a skilled and empathic counselor, coach, and therapist. I call her “the Director.” I write the scenes, put my characters on stage, give them actions and lines and do my best to write the emotional human element in. Then she acts like the director of a play, watching the scene and tweaking the emotional truth of the performance. Often that means calling out what feels like stilted or hokey or unbelievable language on my part, and sometimes making suggestions for different ways for my actors to approach the scene.

Q: So her job is to add in the human emotional element?

A: Not so much add it in as tweak it into language that feels real to her. It’s already there, either implicit to the scene or explicit in the mouths of my characters. It’s just, sometimes… as I said… clunky.

Q: Do you always agree with her notes?

A: Not always. I think I understand the situation, and the characters, in a different, and often deeper, way than she does. I understand the needs of storytelling more consciously than she might. So while I almost always agree with her, or just trust her sense of things, once in a while I hold my ground and keep things the way they are, or even find a whole different way to approach it that includes both her notes and my own. In the end, I sometimes reserve the right to be who I am and see things as I do. Which, I guess, is reserving my right to be an Aspie writer, and to let the book be a book written by an Aspie.

Q: Are any of your characters Aspie or autistic?

A: Not explicitly. Not so far. But some of my characters have distinct similarities to me, and so do display what might be considered Aspie traits and behaviors. That’s a judgment made in hindsight, since Aspergers wasn’t on my radar when the first draft was written. I’ve considered adding in more Aspie elements, but that felt false and forced. I do think it would be interesting to write an Aspie/Autistic character more explicitly, but that’ll have to wait for a future project.

 

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Trouble

Trouble

Oh trouble can’t you see

You’re eating my heart away

And there’s nothing much left of me

-Cat Stevens, Trouble

I was driving home from the post office. The car ahead of me pulls weirdly over to the shoulder. I pass it, then look up in my rearview mirror to see a police cruiser racing toward me, lightbar flashing. The screaming siren reaches my ears. I yank my Jetta to the right as the cruiser speeds past.

My heart is pounding. My legs feel like sandbags. An unwelcome sob leaps out of my mouth and falls onto my lap. A few tears spill down my cheek.

It’s a common enough experience, perhaps. Flashing lights and sirens can startle anyone. And nobody wants to be stopped by the cops.

But my sobs, though elicited by the proximate trigger, were not about that trigger. My sobs arose from the sudden and striking realization that my pounding heart and terrified muscles were so familiar. Indeed, the suite of feelings touched upon by that passing cruiser are perhaps the most abiding experience of my life.

I call those feelings “I’m in trouble.” That’s the thought that comes to mind when I try to examine them. That’s the association with past experience. My seemingly inborn story is that I’ve done something wrong, and that I’m going to be caught, and that when I’m caught, something terrible will happen to me. And the feelings are so strong that the “terrible thing” must be something on the order of annihilation.

It’s not that being stopped by the police would be an inconvenience or an annoyance. It’s not that I would get a ticket, or have to pay a fine. It’s that I would be found out. Exposed for the imperfect being that I am. Embarrassed. Found wanting. It’s that I would be thrust into a situation in which I would not know how to respond or what to do. And thus exposed and found wanting, I would die.

It’s easy enough to speak of this in terms of ego structures and reactivity and trauma, to look at this suite of feelings as a bit of additional programming installed by experience into my original operating system. I can look back at my life, at my upbringing, at my formative relationships, and point to any number of factors that would have left me with this abiding fear of annihilation. My mother, raising four boys, was often tired and irritable and angry. That, alone, could serve as explanation enough.

But I think the reality is much more complex. These feelings are so old in me, so abiding, so familiar, that I’m prompted to think that they’ve always been a part of me, that I came here with them, that they came here with me. Call it wiring, perhaps. An Aspie thing, if you wish. The expected consequence of self-awareness. Exquisitely attuned, highly sensitive, wide open and wildly wondering, I think I’ve been forever aware of the inherent vulnerability of my own human existence. As the great poet David Whyte says, “we are the one part of creation that knows what it’s like to live in exile.”

And so perhaps it’s that which gets touched when the cruiser pulls up behind me. It’s the same thing that gets touched when Sally looks at me. It’s the same thing that gets touched when I find myself in a social situation surrounded by unpredictable human beings. I might be found out. Exposed. “Caught red-handed showing feelings of an almost human nature.” The sentence: exile. Or annihilation.

It’s as if what I truly am is more akin to a flame or a spark or a whirlpool than a heavy human body and controlling brain. As if this is not really my home. As if I’ve always known that my hold here is tenuous, ephemeral, and out of my control. As if I understand that I am not this body, this ego, this collection of thoughts and ideas and habits of “looking good,” and that the game here is to hide that vulnerable spark or be forced to leave.

Which must mean that I really want to be here right now.

David Whyte says that it’s in our realization of exile that we can find our way to belonging and home, and that to find and sustain a life of belonging is a great human achievement. I think I know this. I think I know that the more I expose my vulnerable self to Sally, the more I belong with her. And I think I have experienced the same thing in some well-structured groups of fellow travelers.

It’s possible to survive once the wall has been torn down. Not only survive, but belong.

So again, we come to all of the above. There’s inherent sensitivity and wiring and an ability to sense this exile. And there’s the wounding and reactivity that arise from experience. Police cars race by and I’m in trouble and old reactions get triggered and my abiding sense of things gets activated. And then I write about it, or talk to Sally. And in speaking it, I find that I’m okay. Exposed, but still here. Found out, but not in trouble.

And maybe even a little closer to home because of it.

 

 

 

 

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Perfect Record #8 – Monster

What gives you the right, hey you, to stand there and tell me what to do?

-Steppenwolf, Power Play

Steppenwolf – Monster

I have these memories, see. I was at an outdoor street festival in Saranac, MI, a small town a few miles away from our home. I was twelve, maybe. There was a stage, and they were putting on some sort of show, and at one point, there was a motorcycle on the stage, and the music that blared from the speakers was Born to Be Wild. And something inside of me stirred.

I was in my room upstairs in our house. Next door was my brother Dave’s room. He was older, and had more music, and was listening to this long, weird, scary piece of music, a live version of Steppenwolf’s The Pusher that went on for about twenty minutes. And something inside of me stirred.

I was in the basement, listening to Monster/Suicide/America, looking at the cover – shirtless long-haired musicians standing in some weird foil cave with this otherworldly creature hanging over them – with John Kay singing about big things in an epic, three-part nine-minute song. And something inside of me stirred.

I’ve spoken of it before: that longing to be elsewhere, to be involved, to be a part of something with meaning and purpose; that sadness of being too young to join in; that wanting to be a part of the circus. All of it was hidden away from my conscious mind. It was not okay, to think and want and dream of such things. It was not for me. So I settled for listening, watching from the outside, and following the expectations that had been handed to me.

Had I been a little older, and had I had the self-permission I needed to do so, I’d have joined the circus for sure. Learned an instrument. Joined a band. Run off to the big show. I had the inherent talents necessary. I had the hidden desire. I had things to say. I had the love of rock and roll. I even had the hair. I’d have had a really great time.

But there were pieces missing, both inside and out. So I did not join the circus. But I loved those who had, and relished their music, and used it to keep me sane. Monster kept me sane. Draft Resister. Power Play. From Here to There Eventually. They kept me sane. Rock and roll kept me sane. John Kay’s rough and real voice kept me sane. The epic sweep of protest and cultural critique that was the title song kept me sane.

I was locked in to a set of expectations. Couldn’t have told you about them at the time. Didn’t know they were there. Didn’t have any mentors in my life who could help me find my way. But I could feel the chains and manacles on my soul. And these shirtless, long-haired musicians seemed to know how to get free, even if it meant escaping through dark foil caves, and battling strange monsters on the ceiling.

But I got from there to here, eventually. Made my way through the caves. Confronted the monsters.

Most of them, anyway.

America where are you now?

Don’t you care about your sons and daughters?

Don’t you know we need you now?

We can’t fight alone against the monster.

-Steppenwolf, Monster/Suicide/America

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Long Time Coming

It’s been a long time comin’

It’s goin’ to be a long time gone

And it appears to be a long

Appears to be a long

Appears to be a long time

Yes, a long, long, long, long time before the dawn

-Crosby, Stills, & Nash – Long Time Gone

I seem to be filled with contradictions. As an example, on the one hand, I seek and require a certain clarity of rules, in order that I can function most efficiently in the human world. On the other hand, I regularly tear rules apart, toss them away, and step beyond them, in order to free my mind and spirit.

The contradiction I am pondering this morning has to do with sensitivity. On the one hand, I can be exquisitely sensitive to both the world of outer sensory input and my own inner thoughts, sensations, feelings, emotions, and reactions. On the other hand, it can sometimes take a very long time for me to notice things.

I can sit for hours, growing slowly more tired or irritated, only to realize that I have a slight but impacting headache, and that I’ve had it for quite some time. I can go about my business and get more and more panicked or hurried, only to finally realize that I’m cold. And then I can go even longer before it occurs to me that I could put on more clothing, or adjust the thermostat.

But it’s not just pain that I fail to bring into awareness. Sometimes I’m happy and don’t know it, and so therefore fail to clap my hands. Sometimes I’m sad. Sometimes I’m angry. And often, it’s not until Sally notices, and asks me a question, or looks at me with her empathic, gooey eyes, that I get in touch with something inside me that I didn’t know was there.

It was like that for Facebook, where eventually a series of interactions brought to awareness how deeply difficult it was for me to interact with others inside the FB structure a friend called “the fray.” How tired I was of the experience. How very sad.

It’s been like that with certain relationships in my life, where it took so very long, years even, for me to bring into awareness a truth that had long been true for me, and to then bring it to light, and turn it into change.

In general, it’s been like this with regard to becoming aware of what I want and need and feel.

I can look at this as a wiring problem. Circuits shorted and lines crossed and all that. Some sensations overwhelm the system and cause alarm bells to go off. Others override and shut the system down. I like to think that I’ve gotten better at noticing since I’ve become more clear about how my neurology seems to work. These days, when I notice an overhead light shining in my peripheral vision, I get up and go turn it off, because I know that, if I don’t, it’s just going to bug the shit out of me. (Note: I’ve been working on this post, off and on, for the past couple of hours, while also reading and tweeting. All that time, I was only peripherally aware that my back was cold. I just noticed that the window right behind me was uncharacteristically open. I closed it.)

But there are three other factors at play, I think. The first is that I was never really taught to pay attention, or assign worth, to “what I want” or “what I need” or “how I am feeling.” (While that might sound silly to some – the notion that we must be taught to know what we want – I would invite you to consider that we are born into, and live inside, a culture which works tirelessly to steer us away from getting in touch with what we most deeply and truly want and need, in order that it can entice us with its marketplace of substitutes.) I was raised and taught by busy, tired, distracted people who’d been brought up in a crazy culture. What I truly wanted and needed would have been an interruption and inconvenience to the systems in place. And why should I get what I most need, when they weren’t getting what they most needed?

It has often not been okay to want what I want and need what I need and feel what I feel, so why bother becoming aware of such things?

The second reason is this: my interior life can be so compelling, my “special interests” so special and so interesting, that I don’t want to be bothered by wanting and needing. I’ve got an article to read. A blog to write. A book to edit. A thought to think. A job to finish. I don’t have time to worry about such silly bodily distractions as cold and pain and grief.

The third reason is this: I have two defining stories that get in my way. One I call “Over the Rainbow,” which refers to my seemingly inborn belief that there is, indeed, a place where “there isn’t any trouble,” and that if I just work hard enough, stay the course, tie up loose ends, and be good enough, I’ll eventually get there. The other one I call my “Moses Syndrome,” which directly conflicts Dorothy’s nabob nattering by convincing me that, while this promised land “over the rainbow” might exist, I will not be allowed to enter it.

With these two stories arguing incessantly in the back of my mind, it’s little wonder I spend so much time in panic and shutdown, and disconnected from certain things.

So what is it? An Aspie deficit in “executive function”? An example of the eccentric, absent-minded professor? A study in learned helplessness? Like so many things, it feels difficult to tease apart the wiring and proclivities from the trauma and reactivity.

As is so often the case, the answer is probably “all of the above.”

(Note: It was not until I hit publish that I was able to notice that I am still cold, and I got up and found a sweater. And then some socks. And I put them both on!)

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The Gifts of Obscurity

Famous – Naomi Shihab Nye

The river is famous to the fish.

The loud voice is famous to silence,

which knew it would inherit the earth

before anybody said so.

The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds

watching him from the birdhouse.

The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek.

The idea you carry close to your bosom

is famous to your bosom.

The boot is famous to the earth,

more famous than the dress shoe,

which is famous only to floors.

The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it

and not at all famous to the one who is pictured.

I want to be famous to shuffling men

who smile while crossing streets,

sticky children in grocery lines,

famous as the one who smiled back.

I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,

or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,

but because it never forgot what it could do.

Right now, I’m famous in the way this poem describes. Famous to myself and Sally and our friends and family. Famous to my laptop and my drinking glass and my space heater. Famous to those of you who make it to my blog, or have read my book, or have watched our documentary, or who encounter me, even if briefly, on any of the many social media I sometimes make an appearance.

I’m not famous in the way it’s generally understood in our culture. No cheering crowds. No television spots. No magazine covers. No major awards. Not even a scandal to my name, at least so far as most people know. I don’t seem to get many likes or comments or shares. My book is not flying off the shelves. And my stats, which I tend to ignore, look pretty flat.

Now, I’m not averse to a greater sort of fame. As I’ve said, my compelling vision is to be one day sitting with Gillian Anderson and Robert Downey Jr discussing the Netflix series for All of the Above. I think I might be good at that sort of fame, simply because I’m so naturally reclusive that there’s no danger that I’ll get sucked into it. And, hey, that level of fame means my writing has found its readers.

But it occurs to me that my current relative obscurity comes with a great gift. Without a huge crowd watching my every move, I can pay no attention to the demands and burdens so often associated with fame, and experience the freedom to simply be myself, write from my heart, explore the far reaches, and, as Natalie Goldberg says, “go for the jugular.” This is not to say that I won’t continue to do such things once greater fame finds me, so much as that, right now, I can find that freedom more easily than I imagine I will once the fame sets in.

Time will tell whether that’s true or not, but for now, I can enjoy my obscurity, and use it to write as freely as I can. It may be, in fact, that this obscurity, and its attendant gift of freedom, are essential to the process, since it may be the freedom and openness of my writing that propels me to finding my audience.

Whatever. It seems to be what’s so. I’m gonna just revel in it and keep my vision in mind, and see where that takes me.

I’ll end with one of my favorite Genesis songs, one that always moves me. Because I am free to just be moved here.

Duchess – Genesis

Times were good,

She never thought about the future, she just did what she would

Oh but she really cared

About her music, it all seemed so important then,

And she dreamed that every time that she performed

Everyone would cry for more,

That all she had to do was step into the light,

And everyone would start to roar.

And on the road,

Where all but a few fall by the wayside on the grassier verge,

She battled through

Against the others in her world, and the sleep, and the odds.

But now everytime that she performed

Oh everybody cried for more,

Soon all she had to do was step into the light,

For everyone to start to roar.

And all the people cried, you’re the one we’ve waited for.

Oh but time went by

It wasn’t so easy now, all uphill, and not feeling so strong.

Yes times were hard,

Too much thinking ’bout the future and what people might want.

An then there was the time that she performed

When nobody called for more

And soon everytime she stepped into the light,

They really let her know the score.

But she dreamed of the times when she sang all her songs

And everybody cried for more,

When all she had to do was step into the light

For everyone to start to roar.

And all the people cried, you’re the one we’ve waited for.

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On the Road to Find Out

Well sometimes you have to moan

When nothing seems to suit you

But nevertheless you know

You’re locked towards the future

-Cat Stevens

Sally and I have moved about the surface of the planet a great deal in the past ten years. We’ve been looking for the right place. Trying to solve such problems as heat and humidity and cold and snow and ice and affordability. Looking for beauty and inspiration and belonging and community. Exploring such things as population density and accessibility and the differences between living at the edge and living in the center. Always the assumption has been that, mostly, we can do what we do wherever we are, and that “where we are” might provide our access to satisfaction and fulfillment and meaning and purpose and happiness.

And yet, try as we have, we’ve yet to find the perfect place. And so we continue to move about. This year we’re exploring a back-and-forth existence, following the birds from NC to ME and back again. But even that has its drawbacks.

It has become clear to us in the past few years, and more so in the past few months, that we may need to lead with the other foot. Which is to say that, while there’s some degree of truth to the assumption that we can do what we do wherever we are, it’s not the whole story. I might be able to pursue my writing career from any place I end up, but there are other things we’re interested in that seem to require a larger population from which to find collaborators. And we might be better served by using “what we do” as the determining factor, rather than “where we are.”

Sally needs to use her gifts and skills as a therapist and empath and group facilitator. She needs more daily connection with other human beings. I have interest in connecting through theater and music. And we’re both interested in working with groups and couples and individual seekers, helping them learn to process and heal relationships and conflicts, helping them to find and take steps toward the realization of their visions and the meeting of their needs.

We’d like to work with communities. Or businesses. Or other organizations. We’d like to work with Aspie-Neurotypical couples, and spouses of those on the spectrum. We think we’ve worked out a wonderful working ASD-NT relationship, and would like to help others do the same.

We’re thinking workshops, classes, seminars, groups, sessions, dialogue circles, and intensives. We’re thinking retreat center. We’re thinking of developing a program and writing a book and doing a podcast and making our gifts, skills, and talents available to others in any way we can. And it seems clear now that we need to have ready access to large population centers in order to do that work.

Where this will take us we’re not sure. Perhaps it will keep us in NC most of the year. Quite possibly it will take us back to the Triangle. Maybe we’ll end up someplace we cannot now see. Maybe it will keep us on the move. We just don’t know. Being on the move comes with its own set of problems, and we’re both inclined to be more settled than that. But perhaps its possible to settle more fully into being in more than one place, like we are right now.

We’ve learned not to project too far out to the future, as if we can predict where the conversation is going to end up, as if we can control the rest of the Cosmos. We’re learning to just “start close in,” taking the first step, the step that begins the conversation. And then we have to be patient, and “really listen,” and notice the invitations that come our way, and which doors open, and who responds.

And then we’ll take the next first step. Doing what we do. Going where that leads us. On the road to find out.

photo credit: Dr. Michael Gama shares on the Christian Eastern tradition via photopin (license)

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He Came From Planet Claire

As I continue to study Asperger’s Syndrome and the history of the autism spectrum, I am struck by how often those on the spectrum are described as having a special interest in, or knack for understanding, various machines, devices, electronics, computers, and the like. Asperger’s is sometimes referred to as “the Engineer’s Disease,” and “the link between engineering and autism is absolutely obvious”, according to Temple Grandin.

While I did put together a Heathkit or three in my youth, did well in electronics class, did a special project in holograms in High School, and am generally pretty good with computers, I’ve never considered myself to have any particular magical “knack” when it came to understanding our machine overlords. I don’t work on cars. I don’t repair lawn mowers. I don’t understand audio gear. And I am completely lost when it comes to performing a major update on WooCommerce. This particular characteristic of Aspergers doesn’t seem to fit me.

Or does it?

What feels true, in my case, is that I do, in fact, have a lifelong interest in, understanding of, and knack for dealing with perhaps the most complex and error-prone machine on Earth: the human being.

I remember watching you as a child. I remember watching you men converse together at family gatherings, and how different that was from you women’s conversation going on in the kitchen. I remember wondering what was going on inside your quiet, muttering skulls as I watched you work or play or just hang out. I remember being confused by your behavior. And I think I was aware, though these words were not available to me then, that the way you do things on Earth is not how we did things back on my home planet. And I think I knew, though again the words were not there, I knew that things didn’t have to be the way they were.

And that points, perhaps, to the reason why the human animal became my machine of interest. You made little sense to me, and you felt dangerous and irrational and unpredictable. I needed to understand you. I needed to put all of my brain power into observing you, so that I could predict your movements, and stay a step ahead of you, and keep out of your reach. And because I was wearing a human body myself, I had a ready source of data.

And that’s what I’ve done with my life, studying family systems and cultures and taboos and belief systems and scientific and metaphysical paradigms. Studying Sally, who breaks so many of your molds. Watching you. Watching out for you. Making notes and tallying instances and integrating over time.

Some say I’m from Mars.

Or one of the seven stars

That shine after 3:30 in the morning.

Well I am.

photo credit: Close Planet via photopin (license)

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