Choosing Solitude

I recently read a post by the operator of Autism Answers Back entitled Solitude is a Reaction, Not a Symptom in which they critique yet another shoddy piece of research published in the International Journal of Social Psychiatry. This paper, “Solitude, connection with society, low quality of life in relation to autism spectrum disorder”, concerns a study that was conducted in Japan and questioned over 3,800 Japanese participants who are on the spectrum and living alone, who may not view a connection with society as important. This is the conclusion these researchers reached: Living alone might strengthen the thinking connection with society is important for participants without ASD but weaken it for those with ASD.

As a New Yorker on the spectrum, I’ve got three words for the authors of this paper: No shit, Sherlock!.

If you’re not on the spectrum, and the majority of the people around you aren’t on the spectrum and neither you nor they are neurodivergent for other reasons (ADHD, schizophrenia, schizoid personality ‘disorder’, dissociative identity ‘disorder’, etc.), then why wouldn’t you think that connection with society is important? That society was made by people like you. You‘re not part of a minority because of how your brain works. It wasn’t necessarily made for you, especially if you‘re a woman living in a patriarchal society, but it can still find a place and a use for you. All you need do is follow the (mostly unspoken and unwritten) rules and refrain from asking too many questions. Oh, and don’t ask for anything in return.

It’s different when you’re on the spectrum. It’s worse when you’re on the spectrum and don’t know it because you haven’t been diagnosed. I know this from lived experience. You see, I didn’t get hit as hard with the autism stick as many on the spectrum have. Also, I was a kid in the 1980s.

Here’s the Devil’s honest truth: if you were autistic enough to get diagnosed in the 1980s, you were probably autistic enough to be institutionalized. If you were verbal and lucky enough to have rich parents and be in a part of the US where psychologists knew about Asperger syndrome, you might have gotten this diagnosis instead. These days we call Asperger syndrome “level one autism”.

My symptoms are relatively mild.

• My will to autonomy is strong enough that it often resembles demand avoidance; when I was reading Matthew Stover’s Acts of Caine novels and came across the phrase my will, or I won’t, I felt seen. It’s one reason I make a virtue of defiance. It’s also why I don’t buy the notion of “pathological demand avoidance”, but see it as a “persistent drive for autonomy”.
• I deal with psychological inertia, so it can be a pain in the ass to start a task and an even bigger one to task-switch. This is especially the case when the task is not one I have chosen for myself. It’s that pesky will to autonomy.
• I am prone to beating perfectly good jokes into the ground through repetition. Or so my wife has told me.
• I am not particularly good at reading people, though I’ve slowly gotten better. However, if I don’t know you well I might occasionally ask if I should take something you’ve said literally. Or, I might purposefully take literally something that you had not intended to be taken literally just to fuck with you, especially if you’ve annoyed me lately or are a boss prone to micromanagement.
• I usually have no trouble understanding allusion and metaphor. If anything, I am prone to it myself in my own speech and writing. The problem is that if I am not careful, my use of metaphor and allusion might as well be “Darmok at Tanagra” to others. (If you haven’t seen this episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Captain Picard must negotiate with the captain of an alien vessel whose language is translated into English by the ‘universal translator’ but is so heavily freighted with allegory that it makes no sense to outsiders.) This is something else that my wife puts up with.
• I was an extremely picky eater as a kid, mainly due to textures. I have slowly gotten better, especially since meeting my wife; I’ve made a point of trying things if only for her sake, especially if she made them.
• Certain high-pitched sounds, like dogs yapping or screaming toddlers, are hard for me to tolerate. Oddly enough, I have no trouble with high pitches in music, like Rob Halford’s sustained cry at the beginning of “Screaming For Vengeance” (title track from the 1982 album by Judas Priest).

However, I was not smart, let alone a genius or gifted. I might have taught myself to read by sounding out words when I was four years old, and I might have read voraciously as a kid, but that didn’t mean a damn thing. I still needed guidance. I still needed understanding. I still needed encouragement. I still needed acceptance. I didn’t get any of these things. I certainly didn’t get to be a kid any longer once my parents were told I had an IQ several standard deviations above the mean; I was suddenly “smart enough to know better” than to fuck up in all the ways kids typically fuck up while growing up. When I bothered to ask why other kids rejected or outright bullied me, I got platitudes and pie in the sky: They’re just jealous. or It doesn’t matter. Just buck up. If you work hard and do well, someday you’ll be signing their paychecks and they’ll have to kiss your ass. (Like I ever wanted that kind of power over somebody else and their families.)

I sure as hell didn’t get anything resembling an explanation for why the world and society felt like it wasn’t made for people like me. At least not until I was in my early forties and trying therapy yet again because my wife was being treated for breast cancer and I knew that I had no business falling apart when she needed me to keep it together.

I don’t blame my parents, even if I am still paying the price of their failures. They didn’t know what they were doing. They were paying the price of their parents’ failures, but determined to do better. If they failed me in turn, at least it was in different ways from the ways in which their parents had failed them.

Long before my diagnosis, however, I had decided that it didn’t really matter why I had never felt like I belonged. Knowing why didn’t change anything. This was the hand life dealt me. Never mind that nobody asked me if I had wanted to be dealt into the game. Never mind that I found myself at the table with no idea what the rules really were, and the only explanations I got were from people who might have understood the rules but were incapable of explaining them to me. I had a hand of aces and eights, so I might as well play them to the hilt even if it was the “dead man’s hand”. Because nobody’s getting out of here alive.

There are reasons that this passage from Alexandre Dumas’ novel The Count of Monte Cristo has resonated with me ever since I first read it as a young man of nineteen:

I have never felt that society has protected me. I have never felt truly welcome in this world. I am, instead, an uninvited guest whose presence in the world is tolerated only because I am not entirely useless to others. I certainly know better than to believe in unconditional love, having never experienced it from what I am expected to call my fellow human beings.

Don’t mistake me: I know that my wife loves me. However, that love is not unconditional; she has her reasons for loving me, and I had to win her heart. I suspect that my cats love me, but I’m the guy who feeds them, cleans up after them, and plays with them most. God’s love is really just man’s love filtered through ritual, and is hardly unconditional, as anybody rejected by their church might attest.

If not for my wife, I would indeed choose solitude over society. Without her, my social life would be strictly transactional; I would only interact others in order to make a living or to engage in commerce to buy what I need. I am not a misanthrope by nature. I have not come to distrust and dislike people because of my autism, but because I have come to believe that most people who aren’t autistic either don’t know how to deal humanely with people like me, or can’t be bothered to do so.

My willingness to reveal my autism is not an act of courage. It is not meant to inspire you. It is a sacrament of defiance, an offering that I make to myself. It is also declaration of war: me against any of you who might be foolish enough to object to my existence. That might even be a fair fight; I might die on this hill, but my hatred will outlive me and take on its own tenebrous life. I’m here, and I’m not going away until I’ve been killed by death.

As for autistic research? If it wasn’t done by autistic people it can fuck right off. I’m done with nothing about us without us. As far as I’m concerned, autistic people should be making the following demand: nothing for or about us except by us!

I don’t merely want a seat at the table; I want the whole damn table. Nor will I settle for representation; I want sovereignty, because my right to exist as I am should not be subject to a debate or a majority vote. Neither should yours, no matter who you are. Aleister Crowley was right, you know: every man and every woman is a star. Stars don’t ask permission of the surrounding galaxy to exist, let alone to shine.

While others might praise researchers who try to do better, I will not join them in that chorus. I suspect that as long as neurotypical people are the ones doing the research, they will continue to treat autism as a tragedy and autistic people as a burden. Any such research will be used to justify the erasure of neurodivergent people by the neurotypical. They can’t help it. They’re only human, and thus their compassion is reserved for their in-group. Those of us who can should therefore reject any research that suggests that we have a condition that can or should be cured or prevented. You know damn well that should it become possible to test for predisposition to autism in utero, conservatives will abandon any remaining pretense to caring about the sanctity of life and embrace selective abortion to stamp out autism. Those who most admire Greco-Roman culture might even try to put infanticide back in the table as an option for inconvenient children.

I would love to be wrong about this. I would love to be wrong about people. I would love for history to prove that my experience of people being short-sighted and selfish and discarding me as an inconvenience when I’m not immediately useful to them was just part of the hand life dealt me and not the general rule.

In the meantime, however, with the exception of my wife I choose solitude. It’s not because I don’t need you, but that you’re not worth it. If I choose to keep my distance from others, it is because I have only ever felt lonely around others and I’ve learned the hard way that Jean-Paul Sartre was right: Hell is other people. It is better that my need for connection go unmet than my need for autonomy and security; a cat is fine, too, and two are even better.

In solitude lies safety and freedom. Nobody can hurt me if I am alone, nor presume to command me. My life is my own, my life matters if only to me, and I will not willingly yield up my life because it isn’t the sort of life others think I should live. If you think you’re ‘normal’, check the ‘wiring’ in your own brain before you worry about mine.

I am not a tragedy. I am not a burden. I am not a mistake. I do not need — let alone want — to be cured. Label me at your own risk, lest I dub thee unforgiven.