Smells Like Autistic Spirit

Infinity symbol sometimes used by autistic people. Image taken from Brainwave.

Autism. I have it.

That’s no secret. I don’t pretend otherwise. That’s just the way it is. And on some level, I like to feel special, because if all of us were the same on any level, it’d be a pretty boring world. It is hard to quantify why I like being one of the special ones. It’s complicated.

Recently I was on a Discord server. That’s pretty common for me, given that I spend hours there a day, certainly more time than I should. But I mentioned that I adored geography, because I genuinely do. That’s one of my bona fide “special interests” to no small degree. 

Seconds later, the server owner responded to me with the words “I smell autism.” And look, there are plenty of autistic people on Discord, particularly in the servers I happen to make myself part of. Half of my online friends have it, at least. I realize that “autistic” has become a highly offensive slur some terminally online people use on 4chan and whatnot, but I want to say that this quote felt pretty flattering.

After I confirmed that the server owner “smelled” correctly, the owner replied that he knew it. 

There are the stereotypes, of course, that autistic people love talking about certain topics. The classic one is trains, whether that be the mechanics of how locomotives work or rail schedules in general. And there are lots of other special interests autistic people have, and I’m not even saying that every person who’s just deeply fascinated by a certain thing is on the autism spectrum. That’s not true at all.

But I’ll share an anecdote from my own life, because I might as well.

When I was about ten years old, I remember seeing the word “autism” on a medical form about myself. Yes, even though I’d been attending speech and occupational therapy since age 2 or so, I wasn’t quite sure why, nor am I sure exactly what I thought. I guess I just figured that every child went to these forms of therapy. 

In any case, I remember freaking out about the word on the form, and my parents had to assure me that it was okay. My brain just worked differently from most other peoples’. I was different, but not deficient. I know this now to be the case, but I didn’t understand it quite as well as a kid.

Come to think of it, there were a few moments as a child when I probably should have put two and two together and thought maybe I’m different from most people.

I’ll provide you with an example. I live in Greater Boston, where there are a surprising number of museums given that it’s an American city, a country that’s supposedly a cultural wasteland. (I’m not even saying I totally disagree with that claim, but it’s not terribly relevant here.) One such museum is the Museum of Science, which is located by the Charles River. 

As a child, I visited the museum quite a few times with some combination of my parents and siblings. There was one particular exhibit that I was drawn to.

Alamy stock image of the “Archimedean Excogitation” sculpture.

It was an audiokinetic marvel officially called Archimedean Excogitation, but that me and my family just referred to as the “ball sculpture.” This sculpture stands more than two stories high and contains a veritable maze of ramps, gears, drums, and chimes that a plethora of billiard balls navigate in perpetuity. A switch will send one ball to the left, the next to the right, and so on. 

Even now, not having been there in person for several years, I can still hear the sound of the billiard balls sliding down that xylophone ramp. I still hear the gears turning. And I can still feel the excitement now - I can induce that childlike wonder in myself even at my current age, even when nothing auditory is happening besides my fingers dancing around on the keyboard.

You can probably guess where I’m going with this: I was obsessed with that thing. I would stand in front of it for at least twenty minutes, and for that period of time, the rest of the world didn’t matter. My “interoception”, a fancy word describing one’s awareness of one’s bodily sensations indicating that you’re hungry or hot or whatever, was likely impaired significantly. I didn’t care what was happening in the outside world as long as I could stare at the exhibit and watch those billiard balls make their way to their destinations, then back to the same ramp so that they can keep going around and around in that circle game. It never ended, and I never wanted to walk away.

My school had field trips once or twice to the Museum of Science, and on both occasions I was allowed extra time in front of Archimedean Excogitation. And I now have a better idea of why I was so entranced by the ball sculpture. The term “sensory heaven” might be almost cliché at this point, but it literally was one of the closest things I’ve had to a spiritual experience.

Another time I should have realized I was autistic was early in elementary school. I remember that in each of my classes, there was an assistant teacher in the room who seemed friendlier with me than with the other students. Or at least, she spent more time with me than with the other students. At the time, I didn’t realize exactly why this was.

But I’ll share a story from this anyway. When I was in transitional kindergarten, which would have been when I was 5 years old or so, the assistant teacher (who I now know was a special education aide) wrote a picture book about me that depicted me and my friends at the time. Sadly, I can’t say I remember the other children shown in the book, and I only have vague memories of the woman who wrote it. However, I still have the book itself in the bedroom of my childhood home.

The book follows me and my fellow TKers as we took part in age-appropriate adventures such as sledding in the abundant New England snow of twenty years ago. Interestingly enough, in that story I’m depicted as being afraid of heights, which isn’t really the case anymore. Nor is it still the case that children can frequently go sledding in my state, as sad as that is. Some things change, but some stay the same.

I remember that at one point, I was depicted swinging my legs beneath the breakfast table while eating, and I didn’t think much of it at the time. After all, that’s just what I did. Had I been old enough to understand my condition, I would have realized that lots of people on the autism spectrum engage in repetitive actions, referred to as “stimming.” Given the context of that scene, I would have been excited to play with my fellow TKer in the attic, so the stimming makes even more sense when you put it together.

It’s also mentioned that I loved to swing, and spent much of recess doing that. Really, I’ve always loved such motions. There was a rocking chair in the corner of my fifth-grade classroom, and I hogged it like nobody’s business, reading a book while using my legs to swing the chair back and forth. I also couldn’t sit still during “morning meeting” on the rug; I’d often curl up in a ball and, again, rock a few inches back and forth. But even with all that motion, I was always the worst in my class at anything involving lots of coordination - case in point, being told to stand on one foot for thirty seconds and requiring many attempts to succeed.

This desire for motion has followed me into my twenties. I still love hammocks and swing gently back and forth, though not with the reckless abandon that many fearless children have. And, though this activity is far from synonymous, I tried paragliding as an adult and found it to be a wonderful sensory experience that defies clean categorization. It helped, of course, to be harnessed to a professional whom I could communicate with, and to know what to expect.

The third and final moment I’ll bring up, which, again, wasn’t exactly a particular moment, is related to the aforementioned topic of special interests.

Again, special interests. A lot of us have them. A lot of us are very proud of them. But mine have evolved considerably during my lifetime so far.

As one example, it was around the time that I first saw the medical form mentioning autism that I became very fascinated by diseases. These included those maladies that had largely been wiped out as of circa 2010 (including those that are sadly making a resurgence such as measles - vaccines truly are a victim of their own success). But then there are plenty of diseases we still have today, and I remember asking my mother if I’d ever had anything serious. That’s when I learned I had viral meningitis when I was less than two months old, sending me down another rabbit hole.

In all fairness, I think part of the reason I found it intriguing is because ever since I was born, I have never had to spend more than a few hours in a hospital. At least, that’s what I believed until I asked my mother that question. The point is, I have no memory of the illness, and even now I only know the sanitized version. I’ll only ever know the sanitized version of what viral meningitis is like unless the disease comes back for round two. If so, I take comfort in the knowledge that my immune system will likely be better prepared the second time.

Anyway, I wanted to know everything about the disease that had made me so sick when I was so small. And from what I’ve read, it’s not pretty. Supposedly I would have screamed myself raw from the agony and my eyelids would be so irritated they’d need to darken the room. I would have been dosed to the gills to various extremely powerful antibiotics, possibly tearing my stomach to shreds. And supposedly, according to a semi-funny part of this story my mother later shared with me, the headaches would have persisted for several weeks after I was healthy enough to no longer be hospitalized. 

And to think…the pathogen responsible for crossing between my blood and my brain, the very unique brain that makes me who I am, would have caused little more than a cold in someone my current age. It was only such an ordeal because of my very young age at the time and the fact that my immature immune system couldn’t cope as well as that of an otherwise healthy adult. (According to some more medically-inclined people than myself, the heavy-duty antibiotics might also have been to protect me from secondary infection, important since a secondary infection would have been very dangerous for someone who’s already seriously ill.)

Now, at one time, I wondered if the meningitis was the reason I later became autistic. Maybe it had cooked my brain or whatever. Knowing what I know now, this is of course totally not true. It’s as much a fiction as the notion that vaccines cause autism, even if not nearly as dangerous. But it would have been an interesting “head canon” for my life.

These days I understand that my brain was already laced with autism by the time I got sick. It had been that way as soon as I’d been cut from my mother’s womb, and probably before that too. Indeed, it’s pretty fascinating how a soul, for lack of a better word, is matched with a body. None of us, whether you’re religious, superstitious, spiritual, or none of the above, has any idea how or why this cosmic lottery works. It just does.

Anyway, that was almost a quarter of a century ago. It’ll be twenty-five years later this summer. So why am I bringing it up now?

Well, combined with the other factors I’ve mentioned in this essay, it was a moment that should have raised a red flag. Or maybe it would have been a green flag because, again, I like feeling as though I’m different. This isn’t even unique to autistic people; the more cynical among us talk about how humans invented religion so that they could think they were unique. That God had chosen them as opposed to any other nation, or any other species. And for the record, I don’t normally love thinking about the veracity (or lack thereof) of any religious claims because it stresses me out. 

These days, I might not be as obsessed with diseases anymore. At a solid 200 pounds, I might be too big for your average swing set. And I haven’t been to the Museum of Science in several years. But that doesn’t negate any of the things I’ve already said.

A while back, my mother confided in me that she’d been told I might one day lose my diagnosis. In other words, it could eventually be determined that I no longer met the criteria by which I’d been labeled autistic. And honestly, that thought depresses me more than I can say.

Don’t get me wrong: If I could be more adaptable to when things don’t go my way, or I could have more social stamina and/or know how to hold an ideal conversation face-to-face with a friend or acquaintance, if that’s why I “lost my diagnosis”, then that’s one thing. In a perfect world, I could be a version of myself with all my good qualities and none of the bad. Leave aside the fact that we don’t live in a perfect world, as well as the notion that, arguably, we shouldn’t want to live in one.

Imagine if I received a lamp and could call a genie. This genie, rather than providing me with the standard three wishes, instead gave me a deal. (Maybe then it’d be a devil instead of a genie, but you get the point). The terms of this deal (whether with a genie or a devil) would be as follows:

Saclux, would you give up your passion and feeling special in exchange for not talking too fast and having no social difficulties?

I’ll admit that I would think about the real challenges I’ve experienced in life. Whether it’s being burned out socially within an hour of joining a party, or my mother constantly asking me to speak more slowly, or my difficulty talking about anything else besides my preferred special interests, I’m not going to deny that it’s not all a bed of roses. Indeed, there’s usually a thorn or two, and sometimes there’s a whole mattress worth of them.

But then, if I could overcome the impulsivity, I would consider the time I’ve spent gazing at a certain site called PlonkIt. I’d consider the time I’ve spent learning the difference between American and Canadian speed signs, or the way you tell Almaty and Aktobe apart based on the bus color, or admiring some of the world’s most unique styles of architecture. 

I’d consider the fact that obsessing over these variations makes me feel like a kid again. It’s the sort of sensation that “Disney adults” crave when they go ape-shit over the live action remakes of their favorite animated classics. And I’d remember the way that, according to my friends and family, my eyes light up when I’m talking about stop signs around the world. The way that they can hear the excitement in my voice. And the way that my evident exhilaration makes them, too, exhilarated. It’s said that emotions are contagious, after all, and people saying that are one hundred percent.

And I would tell that devil to pound sand.