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.

Those Overwhelming Feels of Being Autistic

If one of the biggest characteristics of being human is having many emotional states, there seems to be this weird idea that autistic people have an innate inability to understand or express emotions. This would in turn lead autistic people to become hard to connect to, let alone engage with other people. It's kinda like Spock from the original Star Trek series - a purely logical creature who has to constantly ask his crew-mates why human beings interact the ways that they do. Spock isn't a cold-hearted Vulcan with no regard to people's feelings, he just doesn't understand humanity and its workings on a fundamental level.

I find this to be a completely unfair  assumption. It assumes autistic people don't have feelings nor can express them, and that we're cold people at best if not downright heartless. Having trouble processing feelings and understanding others' emotional expressions doesn't make us cruel, unfeeling people that can't connect to others. It simply means that we need understanding as to how things are the way they are so we can bond better with others. No one on Star Trek shuns Spock for his lack of understanding emotions - they help him by answering his inquiries to the point where Spock is accepted and forms deep attachments to his crew, especially Captain Kirk.

And as for me personally? I'm not emotionless. If anything, my emotions have dictated my entire life.

Turning to Face the Change

I spent this New Years visiting one of my closest friends in San Francisco. It was a great five days (despite having a nasty stomach bug the day I arrived) and it felt good to see her, as the distance between us (her in San Fran and me in Los Angeles) makes that kind of engagement rare. And it was exactly what I wanted it to be - low key, relaxed, and just shooting the shit with a really good friend in one of my favorite cities on earth.

We talked a lot about our respective years during that week and it got me thinking a lot about transition. The two of us have spent the last few years in graduate school pursuing degrees designed to groom us for specific professions so a lot of our lives have revolved around school and all the elements that come with it. But with me graduating last year and her about to graduate this year, we have come to terms with that leaving school means no longer depending on certain beats to center our lives. After graduation, you have to make it on your own.

One of the most consistent things said about autistic people is that they're adverse to change. Any disruption to things or patterns we understand throws us into a tailspin of frustration and chaos, convention says. I can't claim to speak for every autistic person on the planet, but I'm kinda in the not-cool-with-change camp. Why should I be? I make an effort to keep things consistent in a way that works for me. I like having certain things I can count on. Any change to that throws me for a loop to a point where I have major trouble processing it.

But change is an inevitable part of life. To avoid change is futile. And I can attest to that as 2015 was the year of huge change that was hard to adjust to.

A Very Merry Autistic Holiday?

It's no secret that large gatherings of any level can be incredibly overwhelming for those on the autism spectrum. There's so much happening on both social and sensory levels that it gets stressful just thinking about it. There's the sheer amount of people in the immediate vicinity, the high expectation to talk to all of them in the right way, the preparation of the event in question, how to present yourself...it's all kinda much for anyone to handle. And if you're autistic, it's downright terrifying.

On top of being autistic, I have a ton of social anxiety. While it looks like I can increasingly handle myself well enough in group settings, I'm riddled with fear that I have no idea what I'm doing. Am I connecting with enough people? Am I engaged enough in the conversation? Am I hogging conversation too much? Am I maintaining the appropriate amount of eye contact? Nodding in the right places? Truly listening to people? All these things people take for granted requires a tremendous amount of thinking and planning, and it's so overwhelming just writing it gives me the shivers.

And what's a hallmark of the winter holiday season? Social gatherings, particularly holiday parties and family time. The two most stressful situations for almost anyone, let alone for someone who innately has trouble socializing to begin with.

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.