Spectrum Confessions

I have recently met with an unfamiliar weariness ... I think we are introduced to this later, ... After you somehow make it through ... life has a special little reward. Is it peace of mind? A sense of deep satisfaction? Oh, no, nothing like that. No, you get a weariness that can dim and dampen and stomp down any fortitude or drive or even volition. Cheers!

I have had a long-standing affinity for Borges, an author of books I will never read. He was in love with books like I was. By his thirties, he was director of the national library in Argentina and surrounded by millions of books. ... My love of books did not come from reading them through, nor has my empathy for the tragedy of Borges’s loss of sight at a young age come from having impaired vision. I could always see, but, because of processing challenges, I am unable to read a book through. 

In a recent encounter, ... I wasn’t able to process what he was saying. I had been enjoying the discussion, so I kept going, as I tend to do to camouflage. I picked at and peeled my cuticles (stimming) as I became increasingly lost and confused. Then it happened, as usual, I was caught in a loop and kept repeating and rephrasing my point without letting him get a word in until he was a Big Red Rage. I looked down at my bloody cuticles. 

One of the few poems I have written. You can see the imprint from Jorge Luis Borges story, Delia Elena San Marco. Coming to grips with how brief life is and the uncertainty of how long we have together. 

Non-autistic professionals commonly believe in something they call “autistic masking.” ...  individuals with autism learn to mask or hide their autistic traits ... in order to fit in and appear more “neurotypical” or NT ... Given the behaviors in question are observed by NTs while the autistic person is under duress, to me, it seems more mimicry in a Paulo Freire, Mimicry of the Oppressed sense than it is masking. 

One of the most-quoted “facts” about autism I come across is the idea that autistic children have “excess” neurons in their prefrontal cortex, ... But where does this idea come from?

Would you believe it came from analyzing the autopsies of the brains of 13 children—only seven of whom were autistic?