Despite Everything, I Don't Hate April

The month of April has always held a special place in my heart. Spring is fresh in the air, it's still early in the year but not too much so, and the weather is pretty cooperative in the not-too-hot-but-not-too-cold way. But it's most likely due to the fact that it's my birth month, as I was born on the eighth. In fact, April holds a lot of birthdays of people I love - one of my closest friends' birthday is four days before mine, my father's is towards the end of the month, and my late grandmother's was six days after mine. It's always been a month of celebration in my life, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

But since becoming more involved in the autism world, I see people who don't like April as much as I have. That's because April has somehow been deigned "Autism Awareness Month" and with it comes a lot of feelings on how it's handled. But in spite of all the issues that come with the concept of "autism awareness", I honestly can't bring myself to hate April because of it.

I know that looks like a controversial statement from an autistic person. Just hear me out.

Help Me - I'm Becoming an Autistic Adult!

Come May, it'll be a year since I graduated from USC with my Masters of Social Work. A full year since I left the confines of school and was thrown headfirst into the wider world to fend for myself. Now as I have mentioned before, I got pretty lucky as far of my transition post-grad school into working life in a pretty inclusive environment with some helpful strategies to ease my new responsibilities of bill paying, budgeting, and schedule management, among other things. And all of this wasn't just sprung upon me unexpectedly upon graduation - my parents spent years teaching me various life skills such as cooking, health care, and managing my money (which I was horrible at until I realized my pay check was gonna cover my rent and other bills previously paid for by my parents). I had also been living on my own for the past four years and thus had to work out how to care for myself outside parental supervision and care. And I knew how to work out bus routes from college before getting my driver's license at age 23. So I guess I was more prepared to adjust to adulthood than I previously thought I was.

But many autistic people aren't so prepared for that adjustment. In fact, becoming an autistic adult is fraught with challenges. And that's largely because autistic people face a world that is not built for nor ready to accept their needs and wants.

Autism Does Speak, But Who Exactly Is Talking?

I'm relatively new to the autism world. Having only recently begun to accept my diagnosis, I can't claim a long history of sharing my autistic life story let alone advocating for myself on a large scale. And sharing my diagnosis with people is still somewhat tough for me - I don't know whether or not they'll A) believe me, B) not believe me, or C) judge me harshly for it. I'm playing a brave but dangerous game in disclosing my autism because I don't know what the outcome will be. And if there's anything I fear most in the world, it's uncertainty.

I should feel like this is a baseless fear. Life has taught me that when I tell someone I'm autistic, they tend to take me at my word. I'm not entirely sure why this is - is it because I come off just quirky enough for someone to think something's up with me? Is it because I've developed enough language skills to pinpoint my condition? Am I perpetually surrounded by liberally-minded people? Or is it because I've come up with a basic script for explaining my autism:

"I'm autistic. This basically means I have trouble socializing, looking people in the eye, and can be an overall socially awkward penguin."

Whatever it may be, it's seemed to work out well for me. My entire family knows and has been supportive of me and my efforts. My friends are all eager to learn from me about autism and show complete understanding. And most remarkably, I've gotten opportunities at work because of my open disclosure of my diagnosis - I write for my workplace's blog, participate in community meetings around laws and services affecting autistic people, and have recently joined and publicly presented on behalf of my local regional center's Board of Directors. To say I've gotten extremely lucky is an understatement - I've largely been met with nothing but support for being autistic. And I'm forever grateful that people in my day-to-day life presume that I know what I'm talking about when I talk about autism.

So why is this generally not the case in public conversation about autism?

Neurotribes Made Me Emotional, And That's A Good Thing

I may be autistic, but I'll be the first to say there's a lot I don't know about autism. My recent forays into learning about autism and the wider autism community have shown me that there's a ton of things that explain a lot about myself (my quirky habits, my abhorrence of change, my ability to get emotionally overwhelmed) and how much I have yet to know about autism as a whole. The more I explore on the Internet, in books, and in relating to other autistic people, the more I get invested in the subject.

So when a friend told me she attended a TED Talk conference where one of the speakers talked about autism, I was beyond intrigued. For months I waited impatiently for the talk to make its way online and when it was finally uploaded, I found something incredibly unique - someone who looked into how autism was "discovered" and how it came to be perceived.

Watching this got me intrigued. There's plenty of accounts and blogs detailing about what it's like to be autistic,  what it's like to parent an autistic kid, and the many scientific studies into what autism actually is, but not really much of a history of autism. I probably mentioned here before how I'm a history aficionado so of course this quickly became a favorite video. And when I found out this presenter, science reporter Steve Silberman, was coming out with a book on autism's history, I pre-ordered it as fast as I could. In a world where autism is discussed in either cold clinical terms or overwhelming emotional rhetoric, this posed an alternative view I desperately wanted to see - an objective look at autism by examining its historical roots.

There's No One "Right" Brain in Neurodiversity

Growing up autistic in a non-autistic world often meant feeling perpetually alone. Once I knew I was different, I felt separate from everyone else and nothing would ever make me like anyone else.  I felt no one would ever understand me, much less help me shed my shitty self-esteem. If no one else was like me, how could anyone "get" me? And no matter what I was ever told by anyone, I felt that being autistic was akin to being lesser. Being autistic meant being more trouble to everyone else. And worst of all, being autistic was wrong.

In other words, I really, really wish I knew about neurodiversity a lot sooner than I did.

The Hesitant Anglophile, or How England Helped Me Come Into My Own

I don't think it's a stretch to say Americans have longstanding obsession with the United Kingdom. It probably comes from the fact that the US was one of their former colonies and the first to fight them for independence, but we've never truly separated ourselves from the UK. Our histories are intrinsically entwined and we've always been dependent on establishing some kind of alliance together, for better and for worse. And if Hollywood trends are anything to go by, the next generation of popular actors and shows are coming exclusively from the British Isles. America has British fever, and it's probably never going to go away.

I cannot claim to be exempt from this rule, as the title of this post suggests. Ever since I was a child I have attempted to perfect the golden standards of the British accent. (Last time I checked, someone told me I sounded more Australian than English.) I watched Monty Python and Eddie Izzard on repeat throughout my teen years. I have an unhealthy obsession with British television from Doctor Who to Luther to My Mad Fat Diary. Many of my favorite actors, singers, and bands are British (including my celebrity crush, who I'd rather not name here). I've always been fascinated with British history as the sort of real trendsetters of Europe - particularly the Tudor era where Henry VIII and his descendants pretty much began modern England with petty marriage politics and paranoia. Many of my favorite plays come from England, from Shakespeare to George Bernard Shaw. I can't escape it - I will forever be fascinated with the United Kingdom.

The key world here is "fascinated". Whenever I hear someone say they're an Anglophile, I generally find that they think the sun shines out of the UK's ass. And if life has taught me anything, the grass is always greener on the other side. I recognize the United Kingdom has some serious issues - I don't understand how anything gets done in their parliamentary system, there's major class divisions affecting their current political and cultural landscapes for the worse, and they gave us Fifty Shades of Grey. No place is perfect, just as no one can be perfect themselves.

That all being said, I still adore the United Kingdom. And the reason why is that life has given me two major opportunities to love the nation - a theater partnership with a British theater school and a semester aboard in undergrad. And those experiences have truly helped me come into my own.

A Spectrum of Highs and Lows in College: Accommodation, Education, and Socialization in Undergrad

I left my previous post about my college career in a second start to school. The first six months of undergraduate education was spent on medical leave pending adjustment to the academic and general living rigors of higher education. It was not how I wanted to spend the majority of my freshman year, but it was what it was. It forced me to re-evaluate what I wanted and what I wanted was confidence to prove I could handle college. So I returned to northern California with a steely determination to make it through upper academia far from familial support and create the best undergraduate experience possible.

How did I do? Pretty damn well considering that previous hiccup.

A Spectrum of Highs and Lows in College, The Rocky Start

I recently participated in a University of California study about autistic people who went to college and/or graduate school. In that study, I was asked about where I went, what my living situation was, my social life, and the best and hardest parts of my years in higher academia. Prior to then, I had looked back on my undergraduate years with a fondness and nostalgia of time well-spent. But when forced to be completely honest with a stranger, I realized it had been far more difficult and trying than I had thought it to be.



Truth be told, being autistic and in college is incredibly tough. But if there's anything I learned, it's not impossible and can have some real benefits. So as my overall career in academia comes to a close, let me describe my college life over a series of posts.



While it doesn't seem like there's an upside to learning you're autistic long after your diagnosis, not knowing meant that I never believed I couldn't have a fairly "normal" life. I didn't think that there wasn't anything I couldn't do if I put my mind to it. And a "normal" life meant that I could go to college, specifically a four-year university program, right out of high school. And being someone who took to academia well, it didn't seem like an unrealistic goal.

I prepared myself as best as I could for what I thought was to come. I took honors and AP classes and applied myself as best as I could. I threw myself into extracurriculars like marching band, orchestra, theater, and my temple's youth group and actually had fun with them. I challenged myself to apply to as many schools as I thought I was qualified for. And while I got more rejections than I would've liked, I ended up getting into four schools.



I was excited for college. I was eager to engage in higher learning and live away from my parents. I had chosen to go to school in northern California - seven hundred miles away from home - and felt that the change of scenery would help me become independent. And I was optimistic that I would have a full social life beyond the confines of high school, especially since I got into a special honors program for my mandated college writing class and would be living among others in that same program.



Needless to say, it was much harder than I thought it'd be. Especially in the first year.

Music is My Boyfriend, My Girlfriend, and Autistically Powerful

I have almost 13,000 songs in my iTunes library.

You read that right. 13,000 songs.

You're probably wondering who the hell could listen to that much music in one lifetime. Well, I can. Or at least I can listen to my playlist of favorite songs over and over again. That playlist has over 2,000 songs and grows by the day. Put it on shuffle and I could always hear something different over five and a half days and not get bored. I constantly search for the newest and most interesting stuff and make playlists upon playlists of my findings. It pumps me up when I need encouragement and calms me down in times of trouble. And from the Walkman to the gift from the gods known as the iPod, I've never gone anywhere my music to listen to.

It's common for autistic people to have an incredible amount of passion in their favorite subjects to the point of developing expertise in them. This is known as having a "special interest", leading to autistic people being called "little professors". Like all things considering autism, it isn't universal across the spectrum but I've seen it more than enough times to understand how people come to that conclusion. I've got a plethora of these "special interests", and while I wouldn't call myself a genius in any of them I certainly keep up with them a bit more than your average bear.

But music isn't what I'd call a special interest of mine. I'm not a musician, although I have played piano and clarinet in the past. Music just helps me understand life and the world as we know it.

For Autism Acceptance Month, I'm Learning to Self-Accept My Autism

Each year, the month of April is "reserved" for autism. It's often used to raise awareness (autism exists - congratulations, awareness has now been achieved!) but I see a growing movement for people to accept autism as it is, appropriately named Autism Acceptance Month. There's more information on it here, but I like the idea of autism acceptance. It's a positive way to show people what autism is from the autistic perspective, thus perpetuating love, respect, and a real understanding for autism as a whole. In a world full of misinformation about mental health and disabilities, I welcome Autism Acceptance Month with open arms. We need to hear and value autistic people's own stories as a legitimate source of what autism is like beyond brain neurology and blue lightbulbs.

So it's with that in mind that I talk about my personal process of autism acceptance. Or as I call it, how I'm accepting being autistic.

Autistic Girls Are Apparently An Anomaly

When I was diagnosed at the age of two, the doctors seemed to be unusually taken with me. I presented a unique case for them - I tested incredibly high on the IQ test administered to me and most importantly was (and still am) female. In 1990, it was largely assumed autism was exclusively present in boys who bordered on or were mentally retarded. I can only assume this was the reason they wanted to hospitalize me for a month for further study - smart autistic girls apparently are a rarity.

For the record, my mother refused to let them do that. I cannot be more grateful for that decision -  I already begun to bond with my mother and would have missed her.

In fact, it's still considered a rarity. Boys and men are four times more likely to receive an autism diagnoses than their female counterparts. It just seems to be easier to notice when a boy is antisocial and withdrawn with specialized interests than when a girl is. Whether that's due to neurological differences or general societal expectation, it's created the image of autism looking like a little white boy.