What I Mean When I Say I'm Autistic: Unpuzzling a Life on the Autism Spectrum

by Annie Kotowicz

I thought communication was hard because I’m awkward and annoying. It’s actually hard because I put extraordinary effort into processing and analyzing words, meanwhile missing the hidden meanings in gestures and tone.

Historically, in the DSM, autism has been defined by a list of behaviors. On closer examination, most of those are traits that a certain kind of mind exhibits under distress.

Autistic people process information differently, because our brains are hyper-connected in some places and less connected in others. This difference is visible on brain scans—we have neural pathways that others don’t, like secret passages all over our brains. This results in a torrent of information for each of us to process, including physical sensations and pattern recognition. By default, everything is intense, which has been called “Intense World Theory.” We survive by filtering some parts out. It’s as if every form of input has a volume knob, and ours are all the way up by default—so we turn some down to compensate, but can’t control which ones. And here’s what creates the variety: Different people filter out different kinds of information. Then, what we don’t filter out becomes our focus. It’s comforting, and often necessary, to drown out the noise by turning all of our attention to one thing at a time, which has been called “Monotropism.” With such intense focus, we often miss clues about what will happen next in our environment and interactions. Thus, a lot of autistic distress comes from living in a state of constant surprise. This is one application of “Predictive Coding Theory,” also known as “Predictive Processing Theory.”

Autistic people tend to notice spoken language more than body language and tone. Most of us notice surprising sights and sounds more than consistent ones, and pay more attention to sensory input in general than the average person does.

We often turn to predictable foods, objects, phrases, and interests, because they shield our bodies from shock and our minds from mystery.

Meltdowns and shutdowns, which are often considered symptoms of autism, can result from the strain of pulling our attention in too many directions.

However, my favorite way to think of autism is this: I miss what others catch, and I catch what others miss.

A benefit of avoiding sensory distress is that it increases my ability to handle everything else. When a situation gets easier on a sensory level, it gets easier on an intellectual level too.

It’s like they’ve never considered the possibility that a person can be both smart and slow. I can’t handle a barrage of facts, descending haphazardly into my mind like Tetris. I freeze up, game over. However, I can handle extremely complex information if you give it to me one bite at a time, with pauses in between to digest each new fact.

but by that point I’d learned that meltdowns are a physical response, not a reaction to reason. So I gave myself permission to cry, and then time to recover.

One afternoon, after five minutes of ordinary conversation with Jake, I collapsed into tears on his shoulder. There had been nothing upsetting about the talk, and I quickly told him so. But there had been lots of multitasking and miscommunication in the previous few hours of work. I didn’t realize soon enough that the energy I needed for that five-minute conversation was the last ounce of energy I had.

you can’t control what happens to you, but you can control how you react. That isn’t always true for me. Often, I have more control over what happens to me than how I react to it. I can choose to avoid some stressful situations, and I can choose to exit others. These may sound like reactions, but I see them as proactive, preventative actions. I have less control when I’m reactive, and more control when I’m proactive.

It can take a lot of self-control to be the calm in the storm when someone you love is having a big reaction to a seemingly small trigger. It’s wonderful if your emotions can be an anchor for them to flail around, until they’re finally able to collapse into your peace—but

My reactions are a form of communication, but I often find myself among people who don’t speak the language of meltdowns or know how to handle them. In that situation, I find that it’s better to step away.