On my 30th birthday

Therefore, do not worry, saying ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’ For it is the gentiles who seek all these things, and indeed your heavenly Father knows you need all these things. But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.

In the background, as I write this paragraph, I am playing Kevin Perjurer’s short film on the history of the Disney Channel theme song – it’s gotten sad. An artist is ruminating about the way that his legacy will be remembered, and, I have to stay, I struggle to sympathize.

I am not an artist. For my thirty years on this Earth, I have thought of myself as a learner. I have gone to university, spent days in libraries, watched hours and hours of YouTube documentaries, and read far, far too much Wikipedia. I love learning about the world – but, in everything I have done, despite all the love I have for the world, I have tried my hardest to avoid leaving a mark on it.

Whenever I create an account online, I always choose a different username – that way, if I post too much, nobody can follow me to another site. I have spent countless hours learning and then refusing to use system after system of pen and machine shorthand, just in order to avoid seeing my own thoughts when I write them. When I got married, I fantasized about being a helper in the most unfeminist sense of the word. I tried to follow my husband around, to follow his ambitions and his dreams, to be his secretary, to be his manager, to be his accountant. I failed, miserably, at every one of those jobs. Every blog I have ever made, save this one, has been comprised entirely of apologies for not posting more.

Artists are obsessed about their legacies. I am obsessed about my ability to be forgotten.

My (then) brother-in-law gave me Unmasking Autism by Dr. Devon Price for Christmas last year. Reading it taught me that impulses like the one I just described are pretty common among autistic adults. It also ruined my life. I don’t say this in a bad way; just in an honest one. I will say something different if my life ever becomes better than the comfortable haze I had before. For me, and, I suspect, for many other autistic people, though, expecting an improvement on comfortable haze is something of a risky proposition.

According to Dr. Price, many autistic people spend their entire childhood being punished for the innocuous ways in which their neurodivergence makes them different from others. This leads many of them to “mask”: to compensate for their neurological differences with conscious, intentional countermeasures. This behavior is praised by adults and peers, which creates a feedback loop: positive reinforcement for masking leads to more masking. Compensating for the way our brains are wired, though, inevitably takes so much conscious effort that it leads to autistic burnout – a kind of emotional breakdown characterized primarily by an inability to cope with the most basic demands of everyday life.

Thither I trace my intense desire to not be seen. Like most autistic kids, I was scolded for being too loud – for offering too many unsolicited opinions – for being too into the things I was into. I wonder whether I reacted to this by fetishizing the normal. For as long as I can remember, the sum of my ambitions were “leave home; have a job; survive.” Maybe I was exerting so much effort to seem normal that I unconsciously lowered my expectations of life. Other people could do the great stuff; I was having a hard time even imagining working 40 hours a week.

Caused by this, perhaps, I have had more than my share of autistic burnout. I quit my first and, to date, only permanent job after six months. I have been terrified of working ever since, which means that I spent the majority of my twenties ineffectually worrying about being unemployed. I haven’t really been able to figure out what, exactly, causes me such anxiety, but, as I understand it, I’m not alone. Lots of autistic people have trouble holding a job, even ones like me whom society would otherwise characterize as having low support needs.

Comforting as that is, though, the unfortunate thing is that generally, under capitalism, you need a job to live. Alone in this predicament or not, it is very hard for me to believe that I will not die very, very soon – the average life expectancy of an autistic person is about 36, after all.

My solution, thus far, has been to mooch off romantic partners, who are generally, I find, surprisingly amenable to subsidizing my food and housing costs once I explain the situation my brain puts me in. (They would insist that it’s self-hating to call it “mooching”, but at this point I find any other language intellectually dishonest.) Unfortunately, though, my long-term romantic relationship, which I imagined to be secure, has recently fallen through, which has made me begin to worry that I am indeed such a basket case that any future relationship will inevitably meet the same fate.

I fear, then, that I may be left with no choice other than to create.

It sounds nonsensical, right? This idea that I should be doing something less practical instead of more, that I should be forced by to do this thing that other people love – indeed, are desperate, to do. It feels selfish of me to spend my time writing like this – writing glorified diary entries that I post in public just to be able to call them “exercises.”

And yet, so many of the glorious and wonderful autistic people that I know are thriving in this world of sin and death are thriving, not because they have worked their hardest to fit in and to assimilate to whatever capitalism tells them that they need to do, but because they are creating something that only they can create. I would like to believe that the world will always have a place for that. Maybe imitating them is the path forward. Maybe is all I can say – but I sure as hell don’t have anything else to go off of, at this point, so maybe will have to do.

The thesis – the very difficult, heart-wrenching thesis – of Dr. Price’s book is that, no matter what you do in life, you will never not be autistic. You have to be yourself. And what is art but the act of putting bits of yourself out into the world? What better possible way can there be to practice the act of being?

I will therefore resolve: as I enter into my thirty-first year, I will do my best to be myself in the world. I will do my best to create something other people can see, to leave a mark that shows I was here. Frankly, I doubt that it will be enough to keep me alive. I have struggled my entire life with finding food and shelter, and now the conclusion that I have come to, inexplicably inexorable, is that I need to worry instead about making a legacy? What kind of nonsense is this?

Be gentle with me, my friends. I am new, and I am vulnerable. I am stepping into this wonderful world, for the first time. I will make mistakes; I will say stupid things; I will be cringe as all hell. But maybe, if I learn to be myself, I can learn to be at all – or, if I can’t, I can at least leave something behind.

So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.