The Mud that Woke Up
Prescript: In this post, a lot of different and remarkable human beings will be generalised into "people", or "the public". Please do not take this as an attack on your senses of self. Rather, allow it to give you an insight into my thoughts at certain moments, during certain moments of my every-day experience. Thank you, stay safe and please keep well.
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I have a special place to read in my garden.
It's a wooden arbor, flanked by two small jasmine trees and a couple of large, granite chess ornaments. Its beautiful. A real and tangible sense of place can be achieved by the simple layout. Pressed in by the jasmine trees, your peripheral vision is occupied by tones of pink, white, green and granite. You feel secure, affxed. Cosy, calm. Perhaps even important. For you are the subject. Its easily something you can envisage in an Emily Dickinson poem. Something to symbolically counter the ugliness, disorder and perturbation of human consciousness and, in her own words, "the menace of death".
For, with autism, the grandiose questions of human existence play just as heavily on the mind as neurotypical people. Sure, most people with autism are below average intelligence, but humans are the only organism on Earth aware of our impending death, as well as the eventual death of our planet and the cosmos. I'm sure, just as you or I, that they also get moments lying in bed where, suddenly and lucidly, the temporariness of our existence becomes shockingly apparent. A liberal dose of adrenaline cannons through our veins and we rise from our state of semi-slumber, totally at the whim of our body's frightened and anarchic blood chemistry.
To ease this feeling we'll often panic and sprint into the next room, maybe to loving relative's awaiting arms. Or make a coffee. Or switch on the TV, to BBC Nightnews, where a Political Editor is panicking about US-China Phase One trade deal as experts reckon there's no chance that this will last. When placed next to the big questions of existence, coffee and Sino-American relations seem minor and even trivial. They are minor. But the central part of existing as an autistic person, I would argue, is the fundamental inability to instinctively seperate the big, existential issues that face us and the minor, trivial issues that defines the day-to-day human condition.
For, some days, going for a walk is too much. Going for a drive is too much. Eating a crisp and browned cheese toastie noisily on the bus is an absolute no-go. The ease, abandon and self-adulation with which people use public spaces is disconcerting. A dog might skitter on its adorable little paws across my path in the park, and I'll give it an ear-to-ear grin that I don't afford humans. It often escapes the rational half of my brain that people are outside to reflect on their own anxieties, loves, projects and wishes. Sometimes in the same manner as me. But there's a sense of importance and purpose that seems to define their experience. Their walk in the park will one day become an anecdote about how they overcame, and in overcoming they assert themselves above life's struggles and obstacles. They may raise a toast to it one day. They may tell people who have no use for their stories.
I have no such illusion. Perhaps it is unfair to call it an illusion. After all, I'm pushing my own feelings immoderately into the public realm. But my philosophical and moral compass tells me that I'm not important and one day, when I fade, all traces of me will fade too. I think I'm (rather heavily) conveying this to you, too. As such, there's no need for me to walk two-abreast down a narrow pavement, sending other autistic people into physical meltdowns about their inability to navigate this problem. I'm not important enough to obnoxiously overstate my case on Mother Earth's pavements. Or fields, or streams or beautiful Welsh seaside towns where I grew up.
I don't resent people for walking two-abreast. I resent their inability to defer to my nihilistic mindset and predisposition. If they could perhaps, for a split second before our impending collision, reflect that Mother Earth wouldn't much care for their abreastness in this situation, or any, perhaps, for who am I to say, they'd appreciate single-file as an option. Are they not plagued by the same thoughts that inextricably link the big and powerful questions with the small and meaningless?
I'm sure they are. Sitting in the afternoon sun, writing on my laptop in the security of a home that I sometimes worry about, on behalf of my wonderful parents, it would be unreasonable to assume that people in the selfsame situation don't think deeply and often about the world and existence. They could even use certain smaller events as a conduit to understand more existential issues.
For example, maybe a small girl has an anxiety-inducing experience such as the one I described earlier because her pet hamster has died. She finds herself rooted in the very existence she, in her small life, has hitherto taken for granted. The small blades of grass of her front lawn she can now liken to the stars, each one forming a more holistic and valuable whole like the cosmos in which she now knows she is situated. Her mind starts to race. She excitedly tries to tell her older brother about the profoundness with which she has just thought, to which he throws a plastic spoon at her and yells 'GET OUT OF MY ROOM'.
This important and formative experience that the little girl has had is how I experience the world, and the smaller happenings in it, every day. Maybe if the little girl is autistic, she will carry that profundity into every area of her life. Maybe not. A woman loudly talking about her investment portfolio in an ornate, Mancunian cafe will instinctively make me consider how greatness is relative, and therefore doesn't exist. Hannibal, crossing the Alps on elephant-back into Roman territory, worried about the there-and-now. He was probably cold, a little fatigued and wanted to ensure his divisions didn't rout or flee. He wasn't bothered, in that specific historical moment, about exigent ideas of greatness and honour.
I can't live in the moment. The big and the small are just too entangled.
But it isn't always sad. It sometimes is. Sometimes I get angry at people walking two-abreast, or cyclists that leave it far too narrowly as they pass. The internal fireball starts growing and I have to autostimulate (self-stimulatory behaviour, or 'stimming'), often through finger-cracking, or repetitive hand motion, before I begin to cry. But sadness often isn't a colour that forms this painting.
Because if the cosmos is a large, vacuous expanse of darkness and light, heat and decay, vibrations and noise, the fact we exist at all is absolutely amazing. It is incredible that we are the ones who get to experience life, and joy, and sadness, and consciousness, and growing old, and sex, and disappointment (not linked), and exercise, and Nepal's uniquely-shaped flag. We experience what science can't yet understand, or what faith can't quite encompass. We are a product of a hot mess of electricity, fecundity, heat and energy and we are allowed, by our otherwise indifferent universe, to enjoy walks with our dogs, and projects at university, and the soothing taste of coffee made by your cherished mother.
We are the mud that woke up. We are the sludge that formed the Earth's early pools, and we are the fish that grew legs and sprang onto land. Our existence is awe-inspiring, but I, and other autistic people, often aren't sure how to seperate the sheer terror and confusion of existence, even if we don't explicitly think about existence and the cosmos, from everyday experience. With some intervention from my mum or my girlfriend, I can at least begin to place the social rituals that I don't understand into perspective. It doesn't matter that I don't understand, not necessarily because we don't matter or existence is sublime, but because I'm a looser part of a larger social animal, an animal that oftentimes doesn't pat me back. Admittedly, this rational mindset is usually absent from when stimuli gets too much. Stimming is a God-send (or should I say, universe-send).
Many autistic, and neurotypical people, will not consciously equate struggling down a pavement to the brilliance and sublimity of existence. Yet, I think autistic are all better at placing ourselves in the world. We know that in some circumstances, we are flawed, or incomplete, or less able, or more able, and we ask for nothing more than understanding. Not even acceptance. The confidence or wantonness with which others use the world, even if its just blocking a pavement, can provoke the deepest and most intimate responses from us, even if we aren't aware. Head down, earphones in or weighted headphones on, perhaps a side-dish of hand-wringing or other stimming, is how this process looks from the outside.
We are all the mud that woke up. Let us share that brilliance in awareness, together.
---
I have a special place to read in my garden.
It's a wooden arbor, flanked by two small jasmine trees and a couple of large, granite chess ornaments. Its beautiful. A real and tangible sense of place can be achieved by the simple layout. Pressed in by the jasmine trees, your peripheral vision is occupied by tones of pink, white, green and granite. You feel secure, affxed. Cosy, calm. Perhaps even important. For you are the subject. Its easily something you can envisage in an Emily Dickinson poem. Something to symbolically counter the ugliness, disorder and perturbation of human consciousness and, in her own words, "the menace of death".
For, with autism, the grandiose questions of human existence play just as heavily on the mind as neurotypical people. Sure, most people with autism are below average intelligence, but humans are the only organism on Earth aware of our impending death, as well as the eventual death of our planet and the cosmos. I'm sure, just as you or I, that they also get moments lying in bed where, suddenly and lucidly, the temporariness of our existence becomes shockingly apparent. A liberal dose of adrenaline cannons through our veins and we rise from our state of semi-slumber, totally at the whim of our body's frightened and anarchic blood chemistry.
To ease this feeling we'll often panic and sprint into the next room, maybe to loving relative's awaiting arms. Or make a coffee. Or switch on the TV, to BBC Nightnews, where a Political Editor is panicking about US-China Phase One trade deal as experts reckon there's no chance that this will last. When placed next to the big questions of existence, coffee and Sino-American relations seem minor and even trivial. They are minor. But the central part of existing as an autistic person, I would argue, is the fundamental inability to instinctively seperate the big, existential issues that face us and the minor, trivial issues that defines the day-to-day human condition.
For, some days, going for a walk is too much. Going for a drive is too much. Eating a crisp and browned cheese toastie noisily on the bus is an absolute no-go. The ease, abandon and self-adulation with which people use public spaces is disconcerting. A dog might skitter on its adorable little paws across my path in the park, and I'll give it an ear-to-ear grin that I don't afford humans. It often escapes the rational half of my brain that people are outside to reflect on their own anxieties, loves, projects and wishes. Sometimes in the same manner as me. But there's a sense of importance and purpose that seems to define their experience. Their walk in the park will one day become an anecdote about how they overcame, and in overcoming they assert themselves above life's struggles and obstacles. They may raise a toast to it one day. They may tell people who have no use for their stories.
I have no such illusion. Perhaps it is unfair to call it an illusion. After all, I'm pushing my own feelings immoderately into the public realm. But my philosophical and moral compass tells me that I'm not important and one day, when I fade, all traces of me will fade too. I think I'm (rather heavily) conveying this to you, too. As such, there's no need for me to walk two-abreast down a narrow pavement, sending other autistic people into physical meltdowns about their inability to navigate this problem. I'm not important enough to obnoxiously overstate my case on Mother Earth's pavements. Or fields, or streams or beautiful Welsh seaside towns where I grew up.
I don't resent people for walking two-abreast. I resent their inability to defer to my nihilistic mindset and predisposition. If they could perhaps, for a split second before our impending collision, reflect that Mother Earth wouldn't much care for their abreastness in this situation, or any, perhaps, for who am I to say, they'd appreciate single-file as an option. Are they not plagued by the same thoughts that inextricably link the big and powerful questions with the small and meaningless?
I'm sure they are. Sitting in the afternoon sun, writing on my laptop in the security of a home that I sometimes worry about, on behalf of my wonderful parents, it would be unreasonable to assume that people in the selfsame situation don't think deeply and often about the world and existence. They could even use certain smaller events as a conduit to understand more existential issues.
For example, maybe a small girl has an anxiety-inducing experience such as the one I described earlier because her pet hamster has died. She finds herself rooted in the very existence she, in her small life, has hitherto taken for granted. The small blades of grass of her front lawn she can now liken to the stars, each one forming a more holistic and valuable whole like the cosmos in which she now knows she is situated. Her mind starts to race. She excitedly tries to tell her older brother about the profoundness with which she has just thought, to which he throws a plastic spoon at her and yells 'GET OUT OF MY ROOM'.
This important and formative experience that the little girl has had is how I experience the world, and the smaller happenings in it, every day. Maybe if the little girl is autistic, she will carry that profundity into every area of her life. Maybe not. A woman loudly talking about her investment portfolio in an ornate, Mancunian cafe will instinctively make me consider how greatness is relative, and therefore doesn't exist. Hannibal, crossing the Alps on elephant-back into Roman territory, worried about the there-and-now. He was probably cold, a little fatigued and wanted to ensure his divisions didn't rout or flee. He wasn't bothered, in that specific historical moment, about exigent ideas of greatness and honour.
I can't live in the moment. The big and the small are just too entangled.
But it isn't always sad. It sometimes is. Sometimes I get angry at people walking two-abreast, or cyclists that leave it far too narrowly as they pass. The internal fireball starts growing and I have to autostimulate (self-stimulatory behaviour, or 'stimming'), often through finger-cracking, or repetitive hand motion, before I begin to cry. But sadness often isn't a colour that forms this painting.
Because if the cosmos is a large, vacuous expanse of darkness and light, heat and decay, vibrations and noise, the fact we exist at all is absolutely amazing. It is incredible that we are the ones who get to experience life, and joy, and sadness, and consciousness, and growing old, and sex, and disappointment (not linked), and exercise, and Nepal's uniquely-shaped flag. We experience what science can't yet understand, or what faith can't quite encompass. We are a product of a hot mess of electricity, fecundity, heat and energy and we are allowed, by our otherwise indifferent universe, to enjoy walks with our dogs, and projects at university, and the soothing taste of coffee made by your cherished mother.
We are the mud that woke up. We are the sludge that formed the Earth's early pools, and we are the fish that grew legs and sprang onto land. Our existence is awe-inspiring, but I, and other autistic people, often aren't sure how to seperate the sheer terror and confusion of existence, even if we don't explicitly think about existence and the cosmos, from everyday experience. With some intervention from my mum or my girlfriend, I can at least begin to place the social rituals that I don't understand into perspective. It doesn't matter that I don't understand, not necessarily because we don't matter or existence is sublime, but because I'm a looser part of a larger social animal, an animal that oftentimes doesn't pat me back. Admittedly, this rational mindset is usually absent from when stimuli gets too much. Stimming is a God-send (or should I say, universe-send).
Many autistic, and neurotypical people, will not consciously equate struggling down a pavement to the brilliance and sublimity of existence. Yet, I think autistic are all better at placing ourselves in the world. We know that in some circumstances, we are flawed, or incomplete, or less able, or more able, and we ask for nothing more than understanding. Not even acceptance. The confidence or wantonness with which others use the world, even if its just blocking a pavement, can provoke the deepest and most intimate responses from us, even if we aren't aware. Head down, earphones in or weighted headphones on, perhaps a side-dish of hand-wringing or other stimming, is how this process looks from the outside.
We are all the mud that woke up. Let us share that brilliance in awareness, together.
Jake. Just beautiful. Nothing more to say.
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