What is Autism: Black cats and claims about my brain

One of my friends at church asked me the other day how I would describe my mind, in terms of architecture and content. She described her own as a large, beautiful building with an interrogation room inside, and inside the room were tons of bottomless file boxes that she could go into and get files on various topics. Another person in the conversation described their mind as an old clock.

For me, I said mine would be like an ancient library that was run by cats, and only the cats knew the organizational system for the library. Even though the library was big, it only contained books about a few topics, although there was always room for a new section if needed. I chose this analogy because while my brain might not always make sense to other people, the cats know what they're doing, they just don't always communicate it with the library-goers. Analogies about a bag full of cats also made the mental image entertaining to me when thinking about my brain's relationship with autism.

What is autism, exactly? Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder that involves differences in social communication, including struggling with back-and-forth communication, having different body language, and having difficulty forming and maintaining social relationships. A number of autistic people also have sensory processing difficulties, meaning that static from a microphone can feel like nails on a chalkboard, or that feeling too warm or touching something sticky can be extremely uncomfortable, even distressing sometimes. Many autistic people also have conditions alongside autism, including ADHD, anxiety, depression, OCD, stomach issues, seizures or intellectual disabilities, so experiences of autism are often a lot more complex than simply "mild or severe."

What does autism mean for me? I think the biggest thing for me was realizing how different my internal experience is from everyone else's. A non-autistic person walks into a classroom, and they notice that their friend is wearing a new shirt. I walk into a classroom and notice that the light in the corner is flickering, someone's computer is buzzing, and I feel my heartbeat increase from the combining din of everyone's voices. The fact that someone is sitting in my usual seat is just icing on the cake. Autism isn't a superpower, but I do like Spiderman's analogy, "It's like my senses are dialed up to eleven."

In hindsight, it's funny that it took me so long to realize I was on the autism spectrum, because for so long I thought that everyone experienced all that, that it was normal to notice everything at once. 

Being diagnosed right after I turned 21 was definitely a frameshift for me, but not in the "earth shattering" way most of my textbooks see it. It changed my perspective. I realized that my internal experience was inherently different than most other people's. 

For me, as someone diagnosed with anxiety as well as autism, I could better understand how one could feed into the other. Being autistic means that my sensory filter isn't as good at filtering out extra information when compared to other people's. This means that if I'm anxious for "no reason," it might actually be that I'm hungry, or too warm, or that it's too loud or crowded in the room I'm in. Before being diagnosed, I would just notice the anxiety, but couldn't figure out the cause. With my autism diagnosis, I know now to take account of how my body is doing, and by relieving those areas under stress, I can put my anxiety on pause. Discovering a pause button for my anxiety has been vital to my mental health, and without diagnosis, it wouldn't have been possible. What neurotypical person would wear earplugs to decrease anxiety, or would get anxious from someone wearing too much perfume? It seems counterintuitive before I realized that my perception of these things was different than those around me. 

Outside of sensory stuff, there's a variety of things that I miss in the social sphere, various communications that go over my head. When a friend asked me if I'd gotten everything I needed for moving, I didn't realize they were probing with the intention of buying me a housewarming gift until they told me. Similarly, leading questions like "Are you doing anything right now?" can be difficult for me to answer because they don't ask the real question. The real question could be anything from "Can you grab something from the kitchen?" to "Can you come to dinner at a friend's house tonight?" and it can result in me either feeling trapped in a social obligation with very low social energy, or I'll miss the hidden question entirely and appear rude. Similarly, a lot of autistic people might be perceived wrongly for missing the question behind a "leading question" like I like to call them. 

Unfortunately, a lot of these miscommunications have resulted in an extremely skewed view of autism for most people in society, so I thought I'd spend some time addressing these things and how they have affected my experiences as an autistic person, especially in college.

As a biology major before going into occupational therapy, I actually found that the sciences are one of the worst areas for misinformation about and stigmatization of autism. A lot of my textbooks have seen these tendencies and came to the conclusion that autistic people are "deficient." I've had to learn in class that I "lack imagination," and that I "do not possess the innately human ability to read minds," implying that if I can't read minds like everyone else, I must be less human than my peers, I guess? I'm not sure if this is better or worse than the video in my classroom resources that stated that autistic people think others are the same as chairs...

I've been in classes where the lecturer claimed that autism was correlated with the mother's exposure to chemicals, and if any of my undergraduate classes mentioned autism at all, they mentioned it in conjunction with vaccinations, whether or not vaccines cause autism, or the fact that autism had no cure, spending more time talking about vaccinations than they did about autism itself. 

Generally, sources from 2015 or later tend to be slightly more positive in terms of how they describe autism, but the book I talked about above was written as recently as 2019, so there's still a long way to go. I've gotten more or less used to it, but the hardest part for me has been that my classmates are learning this stuff about autism, about me, and it's probably all they'll hear about it. 

These claims and others have all been spoken to my classmates with nobody to challenge these ideas but me, and I wasn't always up to the task. One time, though, I did open up in class about the outdated nature of our material when giving a presentation, and I was surprised when another student approached me after class, saying that they were on the autism spectrum too. They said they appreciated someone speaking up about it, because they were also frustrated by how poorly we were being represented by our learning material. We don't always know who our audience is, but they can still be hurt or encouraged by what's taught in class.

For this reason, when I got to grad school, I decided to be open about my autism. Those negative viewpoints will still be out there, but hopefully my openness throughout multiple years of school will outweigh that one reading during junior year. As I've disagreed with things in class, I've shared my viewpoints or the well-worded viewpoints of other self-advocates, and while I don't insist on being right, I open up the floor for other opinions. 

When it comes to autism, there's a lot of claims out there about it, and in the classroom, those claims are often presented as fact. While I don't have more formal authority than the professor to make those claims, I can definitely bring more opinions to the table. This lets people know that these statements aren't quite as black and white as they are portrayed to be, which encourages people to come to their own conclusions rather than accepting everything at face value.

Most formal discussions on autism barely go past the surface, and while I don't have time for that today, I plan to talk about issues like double empathy, functioning labels, identity first language, and a variety of other topics... just not today. If you're curious about these things, the internet is a great resource until I get around to it. For now, though, I'll summarize: my brain is a bag full of cats who don't always share their process with the world, and not everyone is a cat person. Some people think black cats are bad luck, but if you wade through the rumors, you'll find that black cats are actually pretty sweet, so don't listen to everything you hear about them.