Autism – Mapping The World Was Never Instinctual

One of the most unsettling things about having accepted that autism is part of my story is not the label itself. If anything, that recognition has given me a sense of finally having solved part of a long-running mystery. The unsettling thing is that the new lens is having the effect of unraveling the past. Every time I turn around, I realize that some part of my past was more than subtly shaped by how I processed information.

As I discussed in my post acknowledging my autism, my mental image of myself has always been the “smart kid” – and I think as an adult the feeling stuck around, but had far less social significance. It was more like being a one-hit wonder in radio terms. But it carried with it the self-perception that I thought I was a fast learner. And it very much depends on the content. While social and emotional processing was a challenge, my brain excelled at structured information like names, dates or even narratives. If I wanted to learn arcane trivia about Transformers, superheroes, or science fiction shows then I was in my element.

When it came to absorbing facts and details, my brain was not necessarily special but it certainly excelled. Yet at the same time, people’s names eluded me, and I bought a house for which I could describe no detail of the kitchen when a friend asked later that afternoon. I could remember every room around it, but not the room that held no real interest for me.

By contrast, in other parts of life, I felt very slow to grasp what others would have considered instinctual. Parts of life others seemed to take in as if they were downloading a map update on broadband internet. Meanwhile, I felt like I was trying to gather those same updates through a 14.4 modem. It wasn’t fast, and I’m not even sure that analogy is wholly correct. In retrospect, it seems like I needed exposure to the same map update over and over before it finally updated. It was as if someone added a whole new subdivision to the map, and I needed more time to find it.

Being Vulnerable
(Maybe too much so for some)

I’ve mentioned a few times feeling very behind my peers in my teens and early adulthood. To be honest, I have probably always felt that way, but it was very profound then. I don’t think I’ve ever really explained how deeply it ran. Do you remember the first time you discovered masturbation? I know I was in 9th grade, and I know I had vaguely heard it discussed around me in ways that never quite landed for me. I don’t remember the exact context, but I know it came up in 9th grade health class, and the little light bulb connection finally came on. It was far from innate, and I was on the late end of the scale from what I’ve since read. I even wonder if the place, a classroom, had some role in taking on new information.

The next detail is something I almost mentioned when I was in therapy a couple of years ago. I didn’t know how to broach the subject then, but it’s related. In those early days of masturbation, it was like I had the physical understanding, but I lacked the emotional fantasy world that usually goes along with the act. There was no imagining being with someone. If I imagined anything, it was usually being someone else rather than being with someone else. For further abstraction, it was typically a guy in a magazine, a TV star, or someone otherwise unknown. Years later, when I first heard the phrase, “Do I want to be with him, or do I want to be him?”, it was eerily familiar. I think the beginning of my internal world revolved around an inherent confusion about what it meant to have an object of desire.

I’ve written a lot about the lack of representation and how it affected me, but I never explained how fundamentally I feel that is true. I think this lack of role models is a large part of the confusion that I expressed in the previous paragraph. I think so much of my lack of understanding could have been far less severe in a world with more examples of queer relationships. Although I was born after Stonewall, most of the early examples of gay characters in popular culture were abstract, extremely one-note characters.

If a queer character was ever explicitly said to be gay, they were usually lone queer characters depicted in opposition to the “normal” main characters in the show or movie. It was vanishingly rare they were depicted in relationships with friends or lovers or anyone else. I’m not exactly sure when I saw my first gay movie, but I think it was either The Truth About Alex or Maurice on HBO. Both of those would have been when I was 16 or 17 years old. The former was a story of being outed, so not an ideal example of representation. Maurice did offer a tiny glimpse into queer relationships, but largely it was a movie centered on queer characters struggling to live in an unaccepting world.

I think Tales Of The City in 1994 was probably the first time I remember seeing queer characters who were the focus of the narrative and straight characters were the tokens. When I saw it in 1994, I was 22, and although I didn’t really connect with the characters, I still give it credit for being my first glimpse of queer community. By that point I already had gay friends who had come out to me, but there’s a parallel with TV and movie characters. Simply knowing someone who is gay is not the same as being part of their daily lives. It’s similar to someone telling you they have six toes on each foot, but they are always wearing shoes. Unless you express some curiosity or desire to know more, it’s a surface detail at best.

The process of writing this has made me even more aware of how much I looked for and relied on external narratives to understand and relate to others. Not just mass media narratives, but also those playing out in the lives of people around me. My experience is just one person’s, which is rooted in a time and place. But I can recall so few examples of visibly queer behavior in public. I’ve written before that I was in my mid 30s on a trip to London before I saw a gay couple hold hands on the street and kiss briefly. I think even though I had queer friends, that part of their life wasn’t as visible because I never made a point of meeting them in queer spaces. So even those near and dear to me didn’t add a lot to my picture.

You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know

The lack of connection with characters in media or friends I actually knew was part and parcel of new maps being slow to digest. It also felt very vulnerable to ask questions or inquire. On one hand at the time I would have said I didn’t ask questions of my gay friends because I felt it was an intrusion, but on a deeper level I suspect it just boiled down to not knowing what to ask or where to begin. The first friend who came out to me, I asked some very perfunctory “how/when did you know” type questions but as far as I can remember it stopped there. Undoubtedly I had some desire to know more, but I didn’t really know where to begin. My narrow lived experience didn’t expand the order of things that governed my internal and external worlds.

I started an essay last year about how I had recently discovered a wealth of queer films from the late 90s and early 00’s. I may still finish writing it later but the primary point of it was about how utterly blind I had been to it. My original hypothesis was more akin to the concept of filter bubbles, but I think fundamentally my curiosity ran out sometime after Tales Of The City. And on reflection I suspect that cut-off point was the murder of Matthew Shepard which I’ve written about multiple times before.

By then spicy content online had provided the basic mechanics of what happened between men which informed my internal fantasy world. Yet it remained very separate from the concept of queer relationships. Why people sought out connections in the queer community remained a mystery. I think, not only was the map slow to load, I may have been subconsciously avoiding the acknowledgement of any interest in subjects that were outside my lived experience. I centered my life on just trying to survive in a very functional utilitarian way with work and with sporadic, often failed, attempts, at cultivating friendships.

I understood what happened between queer people physically, but not in an emotional, relational, or communal sense. More broadly, I also lacked an understanding of heterosexual relationships. In my autistic fashion I tried to make them conform to a specific pattern. Most of my limited dating experience with women in my late 20’s and 30’s amounted to attempting to perform roles I’d seen modeled in popular media. Where some people would have seen those failures as confirmation they were gay, I took it more generally as a fundamental failure to relate. In a classic case of not seeing the forest for the trees, without realizing I was missing a bigger picture, I didn’t make the next deductive leap.

You’ve Got New Maps

The understanding I have now is new. But the process of taking on new maps is essentially a lifelong process that likely never ends. In the past, if not now, it was largely unconscious. It’s taken me a bit of work to try to understand what changed in the last couple decades of my life. How was two years ago when I came out substantively different to 25 years ago? On reflection, my world grew in little pieces. I had more queer friends online and saw them sharing photos and stories about their friends and loved ones. And even if I wasn’t actively seeking it out, I saw more queer media than ever before.

A vivid example of queer media I accidentally encountered was Schitt’s Creek. In 2020, in the most random way, I discovered Dan Levy’s beautiful little world. For months, maybe far longer, I had been sharing Schitt’s Creek animated gifs on Facebook. If you’re my friend online, you’ve learned I lean into gifs a lot. I think they are my way of summarizing how I feel and how I want to show it. And I kept finding David Rose gifs that perfectly fit the moment in my eyes. And yet I had no idea who Dan Levy or David Rose were.

Somehow those gifs captured a little piece of my internal landscape. It’s genius how the show’s social media team used those gifs as a marketing campaign with Schitt’s Creek as a watermark on each gif. I finally looked up the name and discovered there was a widely acclaimed show that was in its final season. I managed somehow to catch up before the conclusion.

I truly believe seeing David and Patrick’s relationship in a world where there was no question about their right to exist made a huge difference. Only now have I come to understand how much it mattered.

A New Way Forward

The past two years since coming out as queer have been a steady aggregation of queer community. It’s been a story of deepening existing ties as well as making new friends. Living in a small rural town, the bulk of it is online but it’s been no less real to have people who see me in a way that no one has before. So far I have been on the slower path, and it’s unclear if that’s subject to change. But the journey has helped me not only have a deeper understanding of the maps I lacked as well as the very autistic way I have been experiencing the world all these years. I am not sure I would have made these leaps as easily if I reckoned with autism frist, but it’s impossible to be certain.

Much of my explanation about how my brain is wired may come across as quite abstract, and maybe it is. I have found very few accounts that mirror either my queer or neurodivergent experiences. Maybe there are others like me but we are explaining similar experiences with a different language. Perhaps we will stumble across each other yet. Perhaps how I understand it may evolve as well. Regardless what comes next, this new realization has helped me put my experience in a framework that previously eluded me. And having a new way of seeing my past has been well worth it.

What has changed now goes beyond understanding myself more fully. It’s the ability to sometimes recognize when I’m editing myself. Even before autism felt like the right explanation, I would reflect on something a therapist told me when I talked about being afraid of being perceived as weird. He said to “lean into the weird.” I’m unsure how he intended me to take this, but I came to realize that holding back my genuine responses watered down who I am. Holding back just delayed the eventual moment when I would slip. Or even if I didn’t slip it was inauthentic when being myself was valued more than ever before.

That shift began before I recognized my autistic traits, but now, with more clarity than before, I feel more committed to this path.