THERESEDOTNET
VERSION:2.0
Dumbest girl alive.
i think i might be autistic. heavy emphasis on the might, because aside from a few go-rounds on the raads-r and and a series of suspicious anecdotes, i have no hard data or official diagnosis. it seems more likely than not, in any case, and it would account for much in my life that i have been unable to make sense of until now.
in high school, i would try to make it a point to say hello to people i knew in the hall as a part of some long-standing effort to be more sociable. i was liked by others well enough, and most were kind enough to oblige me with a reply, though i'm sure it was mildly annoying to call back among the crowded halls. a strange trend emerged, however, subtle but persistent: some would respond in the pitched-up, drawn-out tone reserved only for children or the mentally handicapped (you know the one), turning a simple "hello" into a grand statement of barely-hidden condescension. i would lie awake at night, wondering what exactly was meant by this tone of voice. surely they know that i'm normal, i thought to myself, surely they can see that i'm not like the kids who need to be corralled into the SPED room. we're in the same class of people, you and i, cut from the same neurotypical cloth.
i never did figure out exactly why they responded that way, and i'm far enough removed from the experience that i can lock the memory away with all the other mild social horrors of high school. to tell the truth, i didn't think about it all that much until i took the raads-r on a whim a few months back. i expected a slightly above-average score, some median number that would tell me "you're kind of weird, but mostly normal." the site returned a score of 136, which is, in fact, the mean--for autistic participants.
i've been more than a little haunted by that number in the intervening months, perhaps ascribing too much power to a mildly controversial self-diagnostic. for whatever it's worth, though, none of my friends were all that surprised when i told them. my roommate, who took the test because she saw the same tiktok, scored somewhere in the 80s, and her boyfriend, the most normal man i have ever met, scored a 42. about as incontrovertable as evidence gets, i think.
i'd love nothing more than to receive an official diagnosis from a licensed professional, but the current state of affairs makes such a decision seem inadvisable. human shitstain rfk, jr. is touting plans to both concretely identify the "cause" of autism and create a registry to track autistic americans. my own shithole state recently passed a bill that would allow autistic oklahomans to self-identify through a discreet marker on their IDs. as an already too-visible transfemme, collecting actionable data for the state regarding my neurodivergence seems like a Bad Idea, to put it mildly.
even if i could comfortably get myself a diagnosis, i'm not sure how much, if at all, it would really help beyond calming my nerves. i told my dad, who i am almsot certain is also on the spectrum, that he ought to get tested, but he waved it off. (it's worth noting that he has apparently been told many times by those around him that he might be autistic, which is very funny to me.) when i asked him why he was so averse, he told me that it wouldn't, couldn't, even, change much for him at this stage in his life. i was suprised at his dismissal, but i'm beginning to think that there might be a kernel of wisdom in his position. what would concretely change for me, aside from gaining a document to point at when i find myself hopelessly unable to communicate with others?
there is also the outside chance, of course, that i am autistic and asocial, that the qualities that make it difficult for me to be a Normal Human Being are in fact intrinsic to my own moral character. maybe i'm a bad person, a bad friend who just so happens to fall somewhere on the spectrum. a diagnosis might only allow me to deflect genuine self-criticism, keeping me safe in the knowledge that i was just Born This Way.
at the end of the day, there's no way of knowing. i'm equally unsure of my status as a bad person or an autistic one, and i fear that i'll only make the situation worse by dwelling on either possibility. all i know is that i haven't felt very much like a human being lately. maybe i just need to try harder, to say hello to everyone i see in the halls. maybe one day i will wake up and find myself perfectly integrated into the human race, free from any fear of being "other," loving and loved in return.
i realized recently that i hate texting with a deep, boundless passion. i think it is an ontologically evil form of communication, and should only be used as a stopgap for the most mundane needs. it is too immediate, too demanding of our time--it makes no room for anything but the present moment. maybe i'm being dramatic, but i think the sooner we as a society realize this, the better off we will be in the long term.
most of the texts i send to my friends these days revolve around one or two shared interests--a spotify link to a remix of a song we both like, a headline teasing a filmmaker's new work. months will go by between these messages, and the interactions that result from them could hardly be called conversations. we exchange a few messages of excitement, and the the silence resumes until something of interest comes across our screens again.
one of my friends, a good friend who i love very much, has become the friend i only text about sally rooney. as i was reading through her book beautiful world, where are you, i would send him pictures of my favourite passages, and we'd gush a little over the beauty of her prose. (she is, for the record, highly inventive and formally innovative in a way few authors are, even if her thematic development is a little stagnant at times.) one of the few criticisms he levied at her work was that her use of emails as a mode of communication between characters was severely outdated, and didn't reflect the way that young people actually communicated with each other. a fair critique, although it is possible that irish millenials really do email each other that much. in any event, i responded with some equivalent of "fuck that", and asked him for his email address.
over the past few months, we've developed the kind of correspondence that i used to dream about, the kind you only find in 19th century romantic novels. as someone who struggles with both face-to-face conversations and any form of instant text message, the epistolary form has been the saving grace of my connection with the human race--it allows me to revel in language's expressive capabilities, to be affectionate and depressed and ecstatic in long form. (an underrated perk of writing letters to your friends is that you get to say things like "i love you" without any embarrassment.) it allows me to take my time in crafting some meaningful account of my life, and my friend is gracious enough to do the same in his messages to me.
whenever one of his letters reaches my inbox, my day is made, and i feel immense joy at reading about his life, even when he's doing less than stellar. sometimes in my excitement i draft a reply immediately upon reading it, saddling him with the mundane details of my existence. most of the emails i send him are about my persistent loneliness: an abortive crush on a co-worker, insecurities about my mildly autistic way of communicating. i'm sure he must tire of hearing about these things, but he's never anything less than graceful.
though such a correspondence helps to dull the loneliness somewhat, there inevitably comes a time when i have to wait for his reply. i feel loneliest in these waiting periods, and i wonder whether i have any real, abiding connections to the world around me. i swipe through bumble, i open up my messages app to find no one has replied to my texts quite yet. in the minute after i sat down to write this, a bell tone rang from my computer, and a red dot nestled itself above my email tab. it's not a subscription or a tuition bill, thank god. i feel bad writing this self-indulgent nonsense instead of writing him back, but i think i'm going to sit with this one for a minute.
my arthritis is flaring up again. most of the time i manage just fine, but the cold has seeped into my bones and split them open at the nerves. at work, i try not to grimace with every step i take, with little success. my coworker carries me through closing, and when i try to apologize for not being much help, she brushes it off with humiliating grace. i try not to overstate it, because i hate being dramatic, i hate being a burden, i hate being the sometimes-cripple who won't shut up about it. i don't mention it at all if i can help it. i just forgot it could get this bad.
i was diagnosed with psoriatic arthritis when i was 22. at the time, i was frightened and angry--my nascent fear of death and decay grew at an alarming rate as i tried to wrap my mind around a corporeal degeneration i thought lay years ahead of me. i scorned the god i half-believed in, adamant that i was too young to deal with this. job's cries became my own, giving voice to an internal drama working its way across my body. no whirlwind came for me, and i learned to put such thoughts out of my mind.
i don't begrudge my younger self for reacting so dramatically, but i wish i had learned the rules of pain a little sooner. what the book of job does not account for in its bodily theodicy is the fact that pain is, in most permutations, fairly mundane. it resides within the body, not outside of it, and its materiality is complicated as a result. it is largely invisible, and communicating it to others is a tightrope act of linguistic intensity. sympathy might be offered, deadlines might be extended, but the scope of aid that can be offered is ultimately limited. at a certain point, you get all the help you're going to, and it's time to go back to work.
as i write this, i feel my forearms creaking, beginning to buckle under minimal amounts of strain. later today, when i hoist the ice bucket over the bev station or sweep the crumbs off of the floor, i'll probably wish i had spent this time resting, steeling myself against the ache i knew was coming. this hasn't helped much, anyway--pain is just pain, and no amount of writing or philosophizing will diminish it or transform it into something beautiful. still, i would rather write about pain than writhe in it, letting the ache consume my every waking moment. at least i wrote something. at least i tried.
do you ever feel insane? like, totally-off-your-rocker, need-to-be-put-in-a-facility, incapable-of-basic-human-interaction insane? does this insanity reside inside you like a sickness you can't get over, infecting your every thought, every movement, until it's all you can do not to tear your skin off to find its source?
i don't ask this merely as a rhetorical way of making my neuroses your problem, though i do tend toward such dramatic gestures more often than not. my problems are my own, and i can't write my way out of the labyrinth they lay in my mind. i'm just trying to get a pulse, and i'm wondering if yours ever feels quite this erratic.
so i feel insane, and maybe you do, too. what gives? what is the point of infection for an illness such as this? what salve could ease the itch it causes?
i think the affliction is both more pervasive and invisible than it might initially seem. the issue at hand is not one of maintaining constant self-care, or finding the right outlets for emotional excess. that's all well and good--important, even--but the issue is at once exponentially greater and infinitesimally smaller: it's the question of how to move through the world, one that does not feel built for people such as you and i.
feeling different or unaccounted for is not a particularly novel experience, though our diary entries from when we were 12 might suggest otherwise. to be human is to be utterly unique, and to be unique is, in some sense, to be alone, solitary and painfully discrete. humanity, in its great collective wisdom, has developed a foolproof workaround for this issue, however--with the gift of language, we gained the ability to create categories, neat little boxes into which we can collect distinct qualities and distinguish them from each other with particular linguistic utterances. points of commonality and difference are efficiently established, and we can feel comfortable in the boxes that have been provided for us. they provide convenient rules of existence, points of reference by which we can easily navigate interaction with others depending on our degrees of proximity to them. simply put, these boxes allow for streamlined, socially sanctioned ways of moving through the world.
again, this isn't an especially novel idea--i'm sure any trained sociologist could tell you as much in a more succinct manner--but it points towards the nebulous, intangible anxiety that i feel now. what i'm really interested in is what exactly happens when these boxes begin to break down, and the disorientation that occurs as a consequence.
in her landmark book queer phenomenology, sara ahmed writes that "bodies as well as objects take shape through being orientated toward each other, as an orientation that may be experienced as the co-habitation or sharing of space."1 phenomenological orientations, she argues, dictate our direction in life, broadly speaking, as our "bodies tend toward some objects more than others," acquiring new directions in the process.2 the queer body, then, is necessarily disoriented, as it radically diverges from normative orientations and charts new pathways through its experience of the world.
when ahmed writes about disorientation in this way, one can't help but feel excited, as it intimates an infinite horizon of possibility for queer experience. that isn't to say that her vision of queer phenomenology is all sunshine and roses--she is frank about the difficulties of such a process, and the often less-than-ideal realities of being queer in a world such as ours. still, there's a radical optimism in her work that's almost infectious.
almost--for this particular queer body, it's difficult to even be pragmatic, much less optimistic. there's no doubt that the pains of phenomenological disorientation have allowed for great joys to blossom in my life. my assent to my latent bisexuality at the age of 19 disoriented me, to be sure, but it allowed me to re-orient myself as a trans-gender, trans-sexual body, acquiring new directions that i wouldn't have been able to take otherwise--the expansion of my sexual orientation(s) dislodged me from the comfortable position of heteronormativity, allowing me to inhabit my body, my self, more truthfully.
the problem is that the disorientation never fully subsided. as a particularly clocky transsexual, this experience of disorientation is a near-constant fixture of my experience in the world. though my femininity is an inherent, immutable fact of my being, its external reality is almost entirely dependent on the disposition of whoever is looking. this manifests in a myriad of mundane ways: misgendering, overcorrection, exclusion, errant inclusion, insensitive questions, overconfident assertions--the list goes on. i am Schrodinger's Tranny, at once both man and woman, trans and cis, gay and straight, human and inhuman and sub-human and super-human.
this super(im)position of multiple states upon my singular body continuously disorients me in space-time, preventing me from finding any solid footing as i try to make my way through the world. i am constantly dislodged from myself, unmoored from my own experience of the world. to be sure, this would be at least partially ameliorated by passing just a little bit more, but i think even the most successfully passing transsexuals might tell you something similar. the ultimate effect of this quantum-phenomenological projection is one of near-total dematerialization, an obliteration of the body as it is fractured into a multiplicity of irreconcilable perceptions. "i'm not queer," william lee says in a dream, "i'm disembodied."3
it's no wonder, then, that i so often feel insane--i am constantly at odds with the world around me, unable to find a point from which i can move forward. every move is lateral at best, as i do what i can to dodge the psychic blasts beaming in from every direction. i'd like very much not to feel this way anymore. don't you?
ahmed asserts that "queer does not reside in a body or an object, and is dependent on the mutuality of support," and she is right to say so.4 i'm thankful to have a handful of queer friends who i can depend on, friends in whose company i am nothing more and nothing less than myself. they are the reason i keep going at all--if i didn't have them in my corner, i'm sure this insanity would have eaten me alive. for now, it'll have to be enough for us to stave off the rot together, one day at a time.
1. Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 54.↩
2. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 58.↩
3. Queer, directed by Luca Guadagnino. (A24, 2024).↩
4. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 170.↩
tomorrow, i'll be 24 years old. the thought has caused me some great anxiety, and i've been at a loss to explain why. it's not, i don't think, the fear of getting older, though that's certainly mixed in there somewhere. i'm conscious of the fact that, though i'm getting older, i am still young, with much time ahead of me. it's the time behind me that i fret the most about.
i've found in recent years that i am a very slow person. i don't mean "slow" in the perjorative sense; rather, i am slow in the way that i move through the world. i am slow to respond, slow to understand; above all, i am slow to change. when i was 19, i watched sally potter's adaptation of orlando in a film class, and felt my eggshell cracking. though i came out as bisexual months before, and non-binary a year later, it would be three more years before i was miserable enough to admit that my body was insufficient for the task of externalizing my inner self.
this dynamic has permeated most every aspect of my life, with varying degrees of consequence. it took me five years to finish college, four to get over my first real relationship. i've been reading the brothers karamazov for over a month, and i've barely cracked 250 pages. i've accepted this as a more or less immutable quality about myself, but it doesn't change the fact that the person i am now is who i wish i could've been at 21.
years ago, at a party without an occasion, i was talking with a friend. i was asking him about the things that he was working on (he is a very talented fiction writer, a gift which i envy greatly), and he indulged me in summaries and pitches of his short stories and hopeful novels. telling me about one of his favourite writers, one who he hoped to emulate, he said, "i'm young enough to dream about what i'll be when i grow up." drunk and filled with love for humankind, i was so struck by what he said that i stopped listening as intently as i should have; later, as i lay on his couch, head spinning, i frantically typed it into my notes app, hoping to stave off forgetfulness.
over the years, i've opened up that note many a time, trying to mold it into a suitable lyric. a month ago, i finally managed to write it into a song, a cheesy, hannah diamond-esque pop tune that borrows much more from my idols than it innovates. i gave myself until my birthday to finish the final mix. i'm still not satisfied with how it sounds, and i've moved the deadline to valentine's day. if i ever finish it, i'll let you know.
i've been so preoccupied with the final product that i managed to forget what exactly moved me about my friend's beautiful, offhand words. i am trying to believe them now, repeating them like a mantra: i'm young enough to dream about what i'll become, i'm young enough to dream, i'm still young enough...
