Last Quarter: Autism versus modernity

Hello. It's Friday, and I am riding the high of creation. Any time I step, look, or listen outside, hundreds of beings are emerging, opening, climbing, singing, feeding, drinking, collecting, sharing. While the course of my own body's fertile processes has not aligned perfectly with my ritual cosmology, in a way this month still feels wonderful for going through day to day rhythms with a new life visibly and tangibly swelling inside me.

I am awash in my senses, more than ever before, and this attunement takes on special significance when considering how I am autistic. It is also not positive in all respects. To be hypersensitive can mean relishing my sensuous experience and behaving with heightened compassion — heightened relationality — to other beings, but it can also mean growing easily overwhelmed and needing to isolate myself from those beings. Being physically outdoors and engaged with the more-than-human world may psychospiritually invigorate me in principle, but in practice there can be a host of somatic interferences that can detract from the benefit. Getting dirt on my hands feels intolerable; so does sweating in heat or humidity, exposing my bare skin to a strong breeze, or engaging with the mental onslaught of "things to watch out for" like ticks, mosquitoes, or whether a certain plant is an invasive threat or likely to give me a rash. It felt even worse when I was younger and my asthmatic lungs left me dragging at the back of the line on every single classroom nature walk.

These challenges are not utterly unique to autistic people, nor does every single autistic person struggle with them, though even the asthma has a surprising rate of coincidence. However, because autism is becoming more frequently diagnosed year by year, and because a lot of people across the political spectrum still see those percentages and assume it must correlate with something about modern life, I spend a lot of time anxiously questioning whether some of those people — generally those who are, like me, "crunchy," ecocentric, anticapitalist, and tech-skeptical — would regard my autism as a weakness that speaks to this era's sheltered disconnect from anything that is not industrially manufactured. After all, doesn't our society in encourage all its members to regard everything that is not human as a danger in need of control, and doesn't that same society encourage solipsistic thinking even about our fellow humans, relying at all levels on a model of atomization, specialization, inability to cooperate? And as we all hear, autistic people lack empathy, so hell, isn't this entire question that of the chicken and the egg? Did modernity invent autism, or did autism invent modernity?

I don't actually share this thought pattern. I just understand why somebody would — and at the same time, my experience of autism conflicts massively with all that, just as autistic people lack empathy is itself a clinical myth. I personally find my autism puts me at odds with a great deal of modern convention, at least going by the traits that apparently qualify me as autistic. And I meet autistic (or probably autistic) peers who seem very, very comfortable amidst modernity, and I meet others who are even worse suited for it than I am.

The fact of the matter is that although autism diagnoses are on the rise, the global population still has no actual idea of what does cause autism, what the "primary" symptoms really are, at which symptom thresholds autism becomes "debilitating," how to treat those symptoms, and whether those symptoms even should be treated. It is a bizarre gestalt effect where we can all agree that it exists but even among autistic people ourselves this is sometimes as far as we get. In fact, despite being autistic myself, I still use the word somewhat grudgingly because I think it's a very vague approximation of something that's real but incredibly poorly understood, and thus I'm well aware that some people who hear I'm autistic could assume I face challenges that I honestly don't, and other people who hear I'm autistic could think I should be proud about every aspect of it when I'm really not (I'm just not ashamed either). I find my autism both disabling and empowering depending on the context. I do not think it should ever be cured. I also do not like to avoid confronting the ways in which my autism inhibits my engagement with a pre-modern or countermodern lifestyle. And I do not like when ecology-minded individuals in the "wellness world" fall prey to eugenicist thinking about autism as a disease of modernity that should be eliminated. I feel as if I've never found anyone else who can articulate what I want to articulate today, so I'm going to finally try.

As a disclaimer, of course, I am not an autism researcher, and I have my own experience of autism that does not necessarily translate to others' experiences. Thus I can't pretend that my reflections here are fully applicable to all manifestations of autism. From my subjective position, I will try my best to speculate on universalized possibilities, but I should emphasize that it's speculation and that if someone found a way to effectively contradict me I probably shouldn't be shocked.

Thesis: autism is neither a modern condition nor immune to effects of modernity

Before I go any further, I will insist that everyone who is unfamiliar with the monotropic theory of autism please read about it. It does not explain where autism materially comes from, but it's the best idea I've ever found for how the most commonly agreed upon autism symptoms can appear together across such wildly divergent areas of neurological function. And because this is already going to be a long post, I would rather not lay out the monotropic theory from first principles. Instead, I'm going to take for granted the ultra-nutshell version: that autistic people experience and interact with the world through a distinctive neurological framework that makes it notably difficult for us to process multiple forms of stimuli or perform multiple tasks together, and this difficulty can exhibit itself as a) failure to ignore things that we want or ought to to, b) overcorrecting by ignoring too much, c) struggling to rapidly change focus or activity, d) intensely experiencing the stimuli that do come through, e) intensely pursuing the tasks that do hold our focus, and f) completely forgetting about what's lost our focus.

All of this is equally applicable to sensory functions, motor functions, executive functions, communication functions, and social/empathic functions. Autism is not the only neurological or psychological state that carries any of these features, but when most or all of these features appear together and affect most or all of those functions, then we can probably call it autism. It may be heavily related to other forms of neurodivergence, but the monotropic theory of autism especially helps to distinguish it from ADHD, just as the dopamine theory of ADHD helps to distinguish it from autism.[1]

So in my opinion, this is the "how" of autism. But it is not the "why." This is where the role of modernity can start to be considered — and it should be considered, but I would like to assert that modernity does not explain why autism emerged as a condition, nor does it explain why autism diagnoses have lately increased. Instead, I suspect that modernity affects how autism presents and also exploits autistic people in a uniquely profound way. I've developed this suspicion from reviewing my own autism symptoms and reflecting on how they could ostensibly present (or not) if I had been born in a much earlier time; to engage in such reflection demands an integration of as much folklore, anthropology, history, and other social studies as I can possibly recall, and to distill that integration right here will not be easy so I preemptively apologize for skipping over some things by mistake.

But I'm going to lay out my thought process as clearly and simply as I can. And I hope that you'll be able to follow my reasoning all the way to an acknowledgment that at its core, autism seems to carry the latent potential of a massive decolonial animist force, while it also has become hypercolonized along several lines that will keep We The Autistic in chains until we can all name them and remove them.

Symptomatic examination

So as for how my autism presents, here I hope is a concise-ish but exhaustive catalogue, broken into the five functional areas I mentioned earlier, which to my knowledge are areas used by at least a plurality of autistic people and/or relatively progressive autism researchers. What you will see in this list is of course frequently stereotypical autistic experience, but it does deviate in some key ways and I also may not describe it in the terms you might be familiar with.

Sensory symptoms

• A low pain threshold for high frequency sounds and a low startle threshold for many abrupt sounds, all of which makes some alarm systems, tones of voice, or background noises become completely unbearable in a short amount of time
• A lesser but significant intolerance for totally silent or even quiet environments — anything where I can only listen to my own internal sounds, electrical hums, etc. — such that I seriously benefit from constant ambient music or "natural" rhythms like birdsong, insect noise, flowing/falling water, etc.
• Such a pronounced hyperfocus on music that the louder it is, the better, making places like nightclubs into incredible sound baths
• An overly strong sense of smell, which makes bad odors unbearable and mystery odors anxiety-inducing — this has gotten worse with age
• An overly strong sense of taste, which has always made me a picky eater[2] — this has gotten better with age
• Being highly responsive to light levels, such that I really need bright light to have energy and focus, but also if I'm agitated then I will fare much better in a darker, dimmer space, especially if any light sources have aesthetically pleasing colors
• An overly strong sense of tactile contact, which I can masochistically enjoy or otherwise sensuously indulge in, but which makes having my skin "coated" or "dusted" in something usually feel abysmally distracting, and makes even minor nonconsensual touch very off-putting — this comes with a strong preference for firm, strong touch over light, feathery touch
• Hyperawareness around sensations inside my body, along with a tendency to somatically manifest stress
• Propensity for motion sickness
• Registering minor sources of trauma on a stronger level than some other people would

Motor symptoms

• Highly developed proprioception, sometimes to the point of impressive coordination, but other times to the point of "collision paranoia" or other avoidant behaviors around my personal space
• Subtle stereotypic movement stims like rocking a limb, stroking my hair — or semi-compulsive dancing when music is present, since my sense of rhythm is on par with a metronome
• Self-harming stims like skin picking or nail biting, although I managed to stop doing the latter about eleven years ago and it only emerges under specific circumstances

Executive symptoms

• Tracking and completing daily tasks in a highly systemized fashion, aggressively prioritizing them over unscheduled tasks regardless of how long they might take
• Becoming very tense if I have an outlying task for the day that I haven't been able to take care yet
• Becoming impatient if a task is taking longer than I wanted it to, but caring even more about doing it thoroughly and correctly, no matter what else I have to sacrifice
• Doing tasks I barely have energy or health for if I feel like they "have" to get done on a particular schedule
• Completely neglecting certain basic forms of self-care if they would interrupt what has my focus at the time
• Being totally unable to start a task if it would interrupt something else, if I don't feel as if this is the appointed time to do it, or if someone else has asked me to do it but given me very few precise instructions
• Having a negative (albeit usually internal) emotional response when asked to take on a new task that will require changing all my plans for the day or altering a typical workflow — and the higher the stakes for the task, or the more tedious and unjustified the task, the stronger my response
• Absolutely hating to arrive early or late for things, but also habitually doing so because of struggling to break myself out of a task beforehand or refusing to let myself do any tasks beforehand (just in case!)
• Excess stress around needing to reschedule something, whether because that means changing future plans to accommodate the one thing or because I have no idea what to do with myself during the time when I was expecting to be doing the thing
• Generally struggling to adapt to changes or make spontaneous plans

Communication symptoms

• Speech processing challenges, insofar as if I am not 100% paying attention to someone who is speaking or singing, I will absorb very, very little of what words are uttered — and even when I do pay full attention, I may over- or under-process nonverbal cues and infer the wrong implications, for which I feel obliged to compensate by asking many clarifying questions
• Speaking with a flat affect or lack of eye contact when too stressed to mask, sometimes extending to temporary muteness
• Communicating more comfortably in writing than in speech, especially about stressful topics
• Verbosity in any communication format, whether to "infodump" about something that excites me or to articulate my position on something in excruciating detail
• Learning to read while very young and then reading at a precocious (hyperlexic) level, with a frequent preference for nonfiction (especially in adulthood)

Social/empathic symptoms

• Risk of enthusiastically mirroring disingenuous affection — this has gotten much better with therapy
• Connecting unnecessarily fast with people who share similar interests
• Struggling deeply to connect with people whose interests bore me
• Difficulty maintaining emotional boundaries with people I want to be connected with (or people I think I'm "supposed" to be connected with) — also better with therapy
• Aggressively disconnecting from people I've come to mistrust
• Strongly sensing animacy of non-human and sometimes even non-living entities, to the point of feeling bodily distress when those entities come to harm but also enjoying time spent with them
• Similar propensity for attachment to fictional entities — although I've long avoided most fandom spaces because (in addition to other problems) there's no point in trying to form community with people whose attachment to characters in your favorite stories is to characters you perceive as the wrong characters, or for reasons you perceive as the wrong reasons, at least if they're going to be rabidly pedantic at you about all of it and you're only going to feel the same urge... and I just hate most commercial IPs
• Severe emotional response to perceived injustices, even just on other peoples' behalf — better with therapy in some of the most critical areas of life, but still very present if you know where to look

I also have various health conditions that are not formal signs or symptoms of autism itself, but that are known to overlap with autism. Key examples include my extensive array of allergies, my childhood asthma (which can still be activated under the right conditions), my mild IBS, and my generalized anxiety disorder. And I am kinky, which has understudied but considerable community overlap, as anyone who spends a lot of time in the kink scene will become very aware.

Critically, I must note that while taking all these written symptoms together or interacting heavily with me in person may make my autism very obvious, I am skilled at masking when I'm not under great stress. I even believe in the value of masking for not just pragmatic reasons. There are occasions where my sensory needs will conflict with somebody else's and there is greater justification for prioritizing their needs than for prioritizing mine; there are also occasions where how I really feel about a person or situation, whether positive or negative, would disadvantage me or other people if I revealed it in the moment. Sometimes these are unfortunate realities of surviving capitalism, but very often they're just realities of existing as a social species in relation with other beings.

But of course, these beliefs of mine do not negate that masking exacts a psychic and physical toll; and my ability to seem "less autistic" does not mean I'm not frequently suffering on some level that the observer misses. At the same time, it also says something that I can mask, because not everybody can; and I also lack certain "severe" symptoms of autism that are among the hardest for neurotypical people to effectively interface with. I do not have pronounced challenges with coordination, intensely loud or violent stimming, or staying nonverbal 24/7.

Therefore I cannot pretend I have the worst quality of life for any autistic person, and my analysis of modernity as it affects autism will be very skewed toward how the effects work with my symptom pattern. I think it's very important to acknowledge that, because not all of my highly verbal, masking-capable peers do.

The folkloric or anthropological question

Before I can go further with the catalogue of my own symptoms, I now have to extend my gaze beyond my own navel; I can't analyze my autism under modernity without first contextualizing it as best I can. I have to now directly ask if there is any way to identify pre-modern autism, since the diagnosis itself is modern. Logically, if we can't point to a certifiably modern cause of autism, then there's at least a good chance that autism is older than modernity, but we can't be too sure of that chance unless we look back that far and find any recorded or oral memory of human characteristics that resemble the autistic umbrella well enough to probably be autism — and not something else.

Now, first of all I'll at least be so bold to say that we can't find one surely modern cause. Any genetic components to autism, which going by current research are at least fairly likely[3], could by their very nature have occurred for millennia of human evolution and maybe even occurred in non-human species[4]. And in terms of possible environmental factors, some options have yet to be discredited but are not necessarily modern (such as parental personalities[5], age, or health); other options are distinctly modern but clearly not sufficient to cause autism in everyone (such as prenatal air pollution exposure), otherwise even more people would be autistic and autism would never happen in modern communities that have excellent air quality; and other options have been modern but also demonstrably put forward for fraudulent political reasons with little to no hard evidence supporting them.[6]

Simultaneously, I also don't think we have so far uncovered any incontrovertible documentation of autism from a few hundred to a few thousand years ago, nor is it clear whether autism has total cultural transferability. We can read pre-20th century medical literature about autism symptoms, but these records are still mostly post-industrial. Of course, I do find something compelling in the ancient folklore of changeling children, with parallels beyond Europe; the changeling is a child who seems "normal," happy, and healthy, but gets stolen away in the night by fairies (or some other land spirit of choice) and replaced by a fairy imitation who is "odd," sullen, and prone to silence, tantrums, or various ailments. The whole thing does sound quite a lot like the classic clinical narrative of a child who is born with characteristics that do not concern parents or doctors, but who starts autistic symptom onset in their early developmental years. Because of how the changeling myth was historically used to at times justify horrific child abuse or abandonment, I sympathize with autistic peers who see a particular resonance in how many parents treat their autistic kids, and I think it makes sense to claim or reclaim the archetype of the changeling as a figure of autistic significance. However, all of that said, it's hard to prove that the changeling myth was crafted as a literal explanation for autism-like symptoms.

Some better guesses at pre-modern autism might arise in a review of medieval or Renaissance documents that refer to people who seem to have had eccentric habits, and children who seem to have needed special familial support or were feral children allegedly raised by wolves and the like. Unfortunately, though, there never seems to be complete enough information for anybody to fairly determine that a historical personage was autistic rather than just neurodivergent, mentally disabled, or mentally ill — imperfect phrases, but I don't have better ones — in some respect. And in a similar vein, most cultures that originally developed without so-called Western medicine will have their own languages' words for autism-like traits, but this does not mean that the cultural relevance would have been the same prior to the introduction of autism as a medical diagnosis.

Since this leaves me with the conundrum of neither having proof that autism is modern nor having proof that it existed before modern conditions (i.e. industrial-colonial capitalism), I find that the most appropriate way to proceed might be comparable to how students of queer/trans history rarely find historical examples of queerness or transness as we know it even if something like those things was evidently happening — or how anthropological surveys of queerness and transness across the globe show all kinds of variation in what counts as "deviant" sexuality or in how many genders exist and who can occupy them.

My instinct is in essence that the diagnosis of autism, which is weirdly broad even if you take monotropism into account, becomes weirdly narrow even if you assume that modern Western medicine knows any of what it's examining here. What if, perhaps, a continuum of behaviors and experiences that now gets dubbed autism has always been with us, but it is also expressed differently these days than how it used to be?

I have nowhere near the amount of knowledge in this subject to marry myself to that hypothesis exclusively, but given how other studies have posed similar hypotheses about the cultural relativity of psychotic conditions, maybe that same kind of relativity applies for autism. And given how we have to assume some variability in natural anxiety levels for human beings throughout history but we also know that modern humans have very different things to be anxious about than millennia prior, some temporal relativity for autism could also apply.

(Mal)adaptation to modernity

I'm looking at my personal catalogue of autism symptoms again, and if I let my imagination run freely but methodically, a wealth of interesting comparisons arise in my mind. Each symptom feels as if it could have existed without modern conditions, but some symptoms likely would have meshed very well with modernity, resulting in a positive relationship to modernization but also some negative psychosociospiritual developments; conversely, other symptoms likely would not have meshed well with modernity, which would produce even more negative consequences for the individual.[7]

Sensory symptoms

I don't really need to outline these piecemeal again; I think it suffices to say that all of my sensitivities could have plausibly emerged in pre-modern conditions. Some of them could have provided an advantage for individual or group survival, whereas others — and sometimes the same ones — could also have been burdensome. For example, where hypersensitive taste is concerned I might have helped guard against food spoilage or ingesting toxic ingredients, and maybe also discerned when a certain food was at the height of its nutritional abundance; but of course if I ate too pickily I might just wind up starving myself in a society where a diverse selection of food was hypothetically available but very seasonally dependent and wouldn't always be preserved for weeks or months. I might be accused of ingratitude for the food I had access to, and on some level that might be right.

At the same time, maybe the hypersensitive taste wouldn't evolve into pickiness if I didn't have such artificially induced flexibility in what I could eat as I do today. When I really think of what I like to eat vs. what I don't, I can't speak for other autistic people's preferences but I feel as if my true priorities are that ingredients be fresh, strongly flavored, feature a variety of textures, and not be totally smothered in gooey or saucy substances. In my limited but real experience, when it comes to eating food that's come directly from "the wild" or has been minimally processed, then prepared and preserved with traditional methods, I usually have much less to wrinkle my nose at than when I'm trying to pick through a frozen TV dinner or order from a fast-casual menu that's drenched all its items with overly sweet or salty condiments and cheese so fake that it barely qualifies for the name. I'm not trying to venture that my autism naturally makes me an ancient foods purist — I get a sensory thrill from carbonated beverages, the idea of eating certain offal disgusts me completely[8], and I have the same processed sugar dependency as everyone else on a standard USian diet — but it does seem as though a high proportion of the food I skip over is limp produce from our planet's ludicrous supply chain, or it's something that only tastes like preservatives or has necessarily turned to bland mush. And a high proportion of what I seek out could have been prepared using very "primitive" techniques, regardless of whether or not a given meal actually was.

In any culture and any time, give me some fresh fruit, root vegetables, a bowl or bread with whole grain, and the flesh of an animal who lived fully outdoors and ate their own delicious, nutritious, unprocessed meals. I'm pretty good with that.

Motor symptoms

There's less to say here because of how these are my least pervasive symptoms even if the skin picking can really disfigure me a times. But overall, while I'm not under the impression that many societies have ever been kind or accommodating to people with "motor weirdness" of any flavor, I also find modern society is still remarkably cruel to such visible indicators of autism or other conditions, and I therefore fail to see how anyone with prominent motor symptoms is better off right here and right now.[9] Conversely, even if it could be proven that autism rates truly have risen in modernity, I do not think the way to address specific motor challenges is to just frame the matter to autistic children or their parents as, "[Air pollution/microplastics/familial health conditions fostered by a modern diet] has created this difficulty for you." These people also deserve systemic social support as a result, don't they? And hypothetical contributing factors like air pollution should be mitigated, but that should be for everyone's sake, not just to "eradicate autism."

Executive symptoms

Here is where things start to feel much more intriguing to me. On the surface, I'm sure it's tempting to declare that my autistic executive function reflects modernity because of how "that which must be done," e.g. work, takes precedence over seeing to physical needs like eating or drinking — or how I tether so many of my activities to written calendars and mechanistic clocks — or how I can get so cantankerously rigid about my activities that it gives me trouble adapting to the fluidity of the organic world.

But I think there are a couple things going on at once here. The commitment to that which must be done suggests to me that if I lived in an earlier or otherwise more earth-connected culture, I would be innately capable of following seasonal obligations, upholding valuable traditions, listening to the law of the land itself even when it demanded something physically grueling. When I know something must be done, I will do it. The modern interference probably lies in not usually being able to schedule things by the Sun or seasons as much as I really ought, and in having grown up with an artificial, capitalist "order" that belies the real order.

Thus I imagine that in the past my autism has thoughtlessly operated in lockstep with paradigms to which I would not have aspired. When I started to realize this a few years ago, I felt some remorse and embarrassment. Nevertheless, it also feels important to remember that the tyranny of capitalist timekeeping is not something that autistic people invented — no more than we invented capitalism itself. Instead I simply tell myself to follow the world's true schedule whenever I can, and I'm engaged in various practices to encourage flexibility, mutability, responsiveness to changes in my surroundings. Ritual is a powerful tool in this regard.

Communication symptoms

This is the next tricky area. I have never been anything if not a storyteller, and in other times and places I like to think I would still have been one, and a good one at that. If I did occupy such a role in a different community, I would almost certainly have received more support for it than I do in modernity. And because I speak with such deliberate consideration for the nuances of a topic, I like to think I would have once integrated well with a community that made decisions through long, thorough discussion, no matter how involving it became, because the point was not to choose quickly, and rather to choose rightly. In these ways, my verbosity would have once been a greater gift than it is now.

But I have definitely learned my verbal skills in what I've described before as an anthropologically low-context culture. One reason it takes so long for me to say anything is because I know that if I don't mention xyz, people will assume I'm not accounting for xyz. And to really make sure I catch everything, that makes it easier to use text, which I can construct while turning over every possible stone in my mind. If I lived in a high-context culture, which would necessarily be something other than modern Euro-colonial culture, would I still have so very many things to explicitly mention when I write or talk? How much would I feel compelled to write anything, since writing is less common or less important in high-context cultures?[10]

I don't have easy answers to those questions. However, I will also say that modern life has rarely rewarded the exact degree of verbosity that I prefer to use. Capitalist workplaces don't have time for nuance, and neither do capitalist politics. I find myself having the most rewarding, lengthy conversations with people who are as autistic as me, people who as eco-anarchistic as me, people who are as offline (or offline-aspiring) as me, and similar. Fuck trite soundbites; viva la meandering. And when I consider that aspect, I think the overlap maybe isn't so coincidental.

Nuance itself may be countermodern. Perhaps the question should not be whether my communication pattern is heavily modulated by the culture I was raised in — although indeed it probably is — and rather whether I, and people who share the autism spectrum with me, are inclined to notice and communicate about truths that occur to us regardless of whether the hegemony approves. And I think this is certainly the case, too. We may speak those truths in writing or out loud, with implicit or explicit context, depending on our culture; but we think unconventionally regardless, and if we're capable of any communication whatsoever then we're going to offer those thoughts without any investment in popularity. If I have to say absolutely nothing when everyone else thinks they have something figured out that they really don't, I go mad.

Social/empathic symptoms

And here's the very biggest one. But I think you can see where I'm going with this. Yes, I've had some deeply ingrained obstacles to entering good relation with other people; my autism can further the risk of them exploiting me, me smothering them, or me isolating and severing relations on purpose. Since modernity is characterized so much by toxic individualism and self-sufficiency, it makes all too much sense that I'm the child of someone who's clearly just as autistic as me, can't competently demonstrate affection to save his life, and has also spent that life as a dyed in the wool libertarian. And of course a software engineer. A lot of us on the spectrum love to think about systems, but it becomes very uncomfortable to think about the human element of those systems.

All the same, my social difficulties have never actually been about lacking empathy. They're often about having more empathy than I can even manage, and protecting myself from others' dangerous emotions by shutting our interactions down. Or I have more empathy about a category of beings than modern society typically extends any personhood to. I think my autism is the very thing that's made me an animist, and that's subconsciously inclined me toward animism for as long as I can call.

That's not very modern at all. But because I do live in a society that happens to propagandize atomization, I have to be careful not to cave to that.

Decolonial potential

Where this leaves me for now, and where I will end for tonight, is that autism needs to be decolonized, but this is not because autism itself operates as a colonizing mechanism. Far from it. What's happened instead that some form of autism existed before modernity, and that variety of autistic person perhaps had their own challenges, but once modernity set in we now find ourselves maladapted for it unless we lean on a few of our more exploitable traits and try to turn them to our advantage, even if that does not really make us happier or help us stop masking as often.

I think we need to lean more on the traits that can become decolonial tools, and we need to recognize and counteract the ways in which our unique minds have been deeply colonized. A lot of us are doing so. And more of us do so daily. But I'm not sure whether people who aren't autistic, who instead are on the outside looking in, have any clue what we're up to or what's really going on. I hope that by writing this piece, I can get some dialogue started around this in at least my immediate sphere.

[1] This is all I'm going to mention about ADHD for today, for several reasons. First, I categorically do not have ADHD. Second, as an outsider I suspect that ADHD intersects with, is punished by, and is imbued by modern life in a very distinct way from autism despite the diagnostic connection. And last... again, this post is already going to be quite long.

[2] I have taken part in one kind of "supertaster" test and I do qualify as one, but I'll note that the foods normally bothering supertasters usually do not bother me insofar as I find them a bit overwhelming but I'm enough of a masochist that I'll eat them anyway. I do avoid some that really are just too bitter, but my picky eating habits are much more about which ingredients taste good together vs. not, which textures produce a pleasant mouthfeel vs. make me gag, and problems of that nature. I would be a nightmare restaurant critic.

[3] Even though there is seemingly no single gene that would cause autism and no single inherited condition that's fully comorbid with autism.

[4] Some documented behaviors of animals held in captivity, such as favoring stereotypic movement, are very interesting in this regard, and I'll circle back to the implications later in the main piece.

[5] I'm not talking about the debunked "refrigerator mother" hypothesis in which autistic children happen because their mothers aren't affectionate; I'm talking about the possibility of autistic behaviors as learned personality traits that may be inherited without genetic components if someone's parents model those traits consistently enough.

[6] Enough has already been said elsewhere about the damage done by Andrew Wakefield. I will simply add that it comes to the new nonsense about acetaminophen, it feels like a willful, sordid attempt to deny pregnant people any kind of pharmaceutical pain relief, since we can't use safely NSAIDs, opioids, or practically any other kind of pill. Yes, I am angry.

[7] I realize that the very use of the word "individual" carries Euro-colonial capitalist baggage, but I don't have time or energy to unpack it here.

[8] Liver is fine when cooked properly, and heart is absolutely delicious, but tripe? Kidneys? Those are a hard pass unless you're putting them in a sausage. To be fair, sausage-making is also a fairly ancient art.

[9] Someone could argue that it used to be worse, since in their view all societies used to permit more wanton violence than today. I disagree with this because the violence has largely not improved; it has simply changed forms. If there has been any improvement, also, it has not happened because of our society thinking substantially better of highly visibly neurodivergent/disabled people; it has happened because of overall shifts in societal structure.

[10] I can't find the link I want right now, but I know that in at least a couple prior posts I've also turned over the problem of written language as a transformative psychotechnology that produces vastly different cognitive situations from oral-only communication systems.

Thank you for reading, and whether you have a different or complementary opinion to mine in this matter, I welcome feedback — particularly from autistic peers or from anyone who's found themselves grappling with related debates around their own manifestations of neurodiversity, mental disability, or mental illness (for lack of better terms on any such front). Next week, for paid subscribers only I'm going to offer a deep dive of sorts on the problems with various satanist organizations, from my own satanist perspective; but after that, I'm returning to tree lore, at last looking at one of my very favorite trees — the birch.