Author: Selene De Packh,
Artist, Writer,Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Usa
Social Signals
One of my dearest friends is someone I’ve never met. I wouldn’t know
him if I passed him in a store or on the street, although that’s unlikely to
happen. I’ve never seen a photograph of his face, only of his sturdy boots and
weather-worn hands as he strokes the head of a beloved dog whose sleek black
beauty he wanted to commemorate on her passing. We correspond faithfully, with
Victorian precision, once a week. I will call him Richard, since that’s one of
the names he uses in the many veils he keeps over his personal life.
I’ll respect his treasured privacy by not revealing any more than I
can help about his particulars; a few are relevant without showing too many hints
of his identity. We had been corresponding about a year before I dared openly take
a guess about where he lived from the clues he’d dropped over that time in our
exchanges. By then, he wasn’t too alarmed that I’d figured out the puzzle; I
wouldn’t have presumed on his chosen isolation any earlier. Had I gone by the
expectations most people have of their friends, I would have lost the
connection before it ever took root. For all that, the friendship is worth
recording; its essence is a connection between minds of a particular type. Despite
the huge outward differences in our lives, we are much alike. We are writers
with shared interests and ideals, and we are both autistic.
On Simon Baron-Cohen’s Autism Quotient test, I score a forty-one out
of fifty; my friend scores a forty-five. A ‘typical’ person is said to score in
the mid-teens; autistic ‘impairment’ begins at around thirty-two. There’s much
to be questioned about some of Baron-Cohen’s assumptions about autism, but the
test is a convenient one. I don’t care for a lot of the conclusions that have
been extrapolated from it, but it points out traits that isolate those of us at
its higher-scoring end. We in that region by definition struggle with everyday human
interactions.
My friend has dealt with the stresses of living among people by
moving to a spectacularly beautiful but isolated area; I deal with them by
living reclusively in the anonymity of an urban center. We were both diagnosed
as adults—we were able to appear ‘normal’ enough to get by in life until the
anxiety and depression of maintaining the charade drove us to find answers in
our brain structure. We deeply resent the way autistic people are labeled and
defined by American society at large, but at least we finally understand why
our lives seem so bitterly hard.
"Loon's eye" - an illustration created by Selene De Packh
We were introduced by a common online acquaintance, a retired
British woman with fiercely left-wing politics who has made friends across the
world from her French country home by creating computer artwork using the pure
mathematics of fractal-generating software. She made the connection between my
friend and me because she knew we were both coming to terms with our diagnoses;
she also knew I write, and have lived with another woman for almost two decades.
My friend writes a well-followed homoerotic fiction blog, and has lived with
his partner more than half his life.
I first wrote to Richard to ask for technical advice in writing a
scene in my first novel; he had noted in his blog journal that he and his
partner were avid survivalists and spent weeks at a time far in the wilderness.
He agreed to review the scene; he found it accurate for the most part, but gave
some details that were richly helpful in deepening the immediacy of the
segment. He was interested enough that he asked to read the book. It pains me
now to think of what I inflicted on him; I’ve learned quite a bit about the art
of fiction since those early drafts, thanks to a group of professional writers
who were kind enough to include me in their regular peer review meetings. Back
then, the work had a few bright spots buried in the matrix of amateur
foundering, but Richard plowed through it without reservations.
In the process, I sought out his perspectives on queer life, the
sense of wilderness, and autistic experience; the work became better rounded in
the process. He soldiered through the next draft and the next; we found
ourselves with a friendship somewhere along the way. Each chapter and its
weekly commentary were accompanied by anecdotes of common interests and shared
frustrations, gradually leading to deeper discussion of the fears and struggles
we have in common in our different forms of remoteness.
"Typing" - illustration created by Selene De Packh
We shared the minor annual dramas of the garden and the kitchen—me
envying his fresh-caught wild salmon pulled from an icy river and him longing
to taste a sunwarmed seed-started heirloom tomato from my tiny brick-lined city
plot. I told him about working with a trap-neuter-release program for the feral
cats that swarm my neighborhood, and how my partner and I took in some of the
flighty, intelligent, fiercely independent kittens. He shared his fondness for
an aging cat he’d rescued from a shelter, and his stunned grief when the cat
died in the care of a trusted neighbor while he was away hunting for the winter
larder.
He told me more of how he’d traveled through Europe ,
before the stresses of interacting with human society became too difficult, and
of the frequent disagreeable situations he still found himself in even in the
small outposts of civilization he still went to for necessities. I was able to
discuss my struggles with trying to get my partner’s exuberantly outgoing
family to accept my limited social abilities; he understood and supported me
more compassionately than the supposed ‘autism expert’ therapist I’d gone to
for several years.
Our digital conversations have covered differences and similarities
in our mental circuitry. I have considerable impairment in my auditory
processing; I founder on the telephone and have difficulty isolating speech
from background sounds. Richard is hypersensitive to sound, but protects
himself from that stressor by wearing earplugs almost constantly. Perhaps
because he’s been so careful with his delicate wiring, he can listen to
voice-synthesized text with excellent comprehension. He took in most of my
writing that way, listening to it in earbuds while working on his routine
tasks.
Both of us feel that, despite the challenges, we wouldn’t choose to
be other than what we are. We are autistic, as we are queer; we are different,
not broken. We reject those who would ‘cure’ us of the gifts our differences
give us—the magical concentration, the joy in profound study, the pure delight
in elegant logic, the meticulous patience while working in a loved craft. The
arrogance of organizations like Autism
Speaks, with its wretchedly insulting little blue puzzle piece to stand for
us, is hurtfully infuriating. Autism
Speaks and its allies presume to fix the ‘problem’ of autism that we
‘suffer’ from, and dare to say they ‘speak’ for us by begging for money to fund
research in how to eliminate autism from the human race. A survey of great
intellects past and present would show that we are represented in those ranks
at a much higher percentage than the general population. Never mind, says the
dominant paradigm, we must be expunged because we are too difficult, too odd,
too challenging to bring up.
"Don't speak for me" - illustration created by Selene De Packh
The same mental pattern that causes Richard to dread having to deal
with routine social interactions and makes me have panicked meltdowns in
crowded, confusing settings like airports allows him to read my work time and
time again and still discover new things in it. It allows me to work with him,
tweaking, smoothing, refining… and always, always learning… always with
renewed, patient delight in the process.
For Richard, it means needing to live in a quiet where the loudest
sound is the stars turning in the sky. For both of us, it means always having
to keep in mind our limitations, and where we must guard our fragile, hyper-attuned
systems from damage. For our friendship, it means not overdoing the connection,
not straining it with excessive interaction. I still miss it deeply, though, as
each year he takes his regular month-long sojourn into the back country. The
autumnal equinox is the season of silence in my email; the junk and chitchat in
it are superficial noises without resonance. The same thing that started our
communication is the biggest void in it. Each October when I see his
nom-de-plume in my inbox announcing his return I feel a quiet, rushing welcome
in my heart.
In his first note back this year, he wrote something that made me go
misty for a moment. The metaphor speaks in a larger sense for the way we live
our lives, and the undercurrent of wonder that’s the best thing about our
shared condition. I’d apologized for dumping yet another draft of the book on
him; he answered that reading it was like taking a rugged road he often uses.
It snakes its way through the wilderness terrain, and he knows every turn of it
as it heads for his favorite hunting and fishing grounds. The challenge of driving
the rough ground takes all his attention; it’s stressful and exhilarating, and
the destination is worth the effort. He takes the trail time and again, yet with
every passage he notices something new.
"Snowy road" - Illustration created by Selene De Packh
Perhaps one day we’ll meet on that road.
PS : Selene De Packh is a BPPROJECT contributor and she offers her articles to BPP for free and for the shake of our audience only.
Her brilliant Illustrations found above, created especially for this article.
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