Oceans of Wisdom
Reflections from an Autistic Elder
Here’s how I think about being an Autistic elder, & what I want from a community of us. To explain
why, I will offer a metaphor.
First the rules of play: concepts aren’t things they’re tools to think with. Hold them loosely. Any theory is a map. It’s not the truth, it’s a framing that illuminates some things while obscuring others. No framing is ever complete. Think with it where it’s useful then set it aside & use another. The more perspectives we can see from, the more clearly we see.
So try this. Imagine that we as people are each a vantage point. A location from which we perceive the waves of sensory & other input that flow past & through us. As babies we are born open to all of it, uniquely vulnerable & responsive to everything in our environment. In normal maturation we clothe our senses with the familiarities & social scripts of our culture, forming a stable identity from which we can understand & comfortably engage with the world around us.
And what if for some of us it doesn’t happen like this. For some of us the sensory protections that moderate our perceptions do not develop & we remain ‘unclothed’ & vulnerable to all the sensory & emotional currents we encounter*. Being unable to filter as others do we are processing huge amounts of data, all the time. We find ways to cope with the avalanche.
We become social theorists, recognising patterns & devising frames in which to file all this data & make sense of it. The social scripts that appear so obvious to others are hard for us to decipher, so the ideas that others adopt so effortlessly to make sense their environments – which make no sense when tested against the volumes of data we are holding – continually mystify us.
Even when we understand them, when we try them on they don’t fit. Scripts about things like gender roles, & hierarchy, seem silly & ethically questionable & we do not accept them. We spend enormous energy trying to clothe ourselves with ideas & habits to avoid attracting attention to our struggles.
*Note: This framing is like that described by neuroscience in terms of atypical patterns of synaptic pruning: we are born with many connections between different parts of our brains & with maturation these reduce in number, so that a stimulus to any given area produces a response that is adaptive & functional, rather than one that is overwhelming. For Autistic kids this pruning happens to a lesser extent & more slowly. Any stimulus sets off a cascade of neural firing in our brains, generating a vast amount of information for us to process, all the time. While blaming ourselves for not being able to cope with things others find easy. It is exhausting.
So by the time we’re adults, most folk have social & cultural identities that enable them to fit readily into a world that is designed around the sensory, perceptual & information processing styles of people like them. For those of us who perceive & process differently, by the time we are adults we are burned out & exhausted.
Having tried on lots of available cultural scripts to make sense of our experience – which may include diagnoses devised by people who have no idea what our experience is like, based on behaviours observed by ‘experts’ who were trained to see themselves as unbiased observers & regard their concepts as things, rather than as the situated explanatory stories they are – & having tried & failed to function in the world in the way others think we should be able to, by the time we are elders we have accumulated huge amounts of trauma. Shame & self-loathing are our normal. Many of us live long lifetimes before we encounter ways of thinking that allow us to be kind to ourselves.
I know every person’s experience is different & there are many ways of understanding what being Autistic is, but this experience of chronic overwhelm is what being Autistic is like, for me. How Autism is understood as a clinical diagnosis & in societies more broadly has changed significantly over past decades & will continue to do so, but for now, it’s among people who identify as Autistic that I find my peers in this experience of difference.
So, what if our task as Autistic folk is this: to find ways to think about our experience – whatever that may be- that enable us to show ourselves kindness. To recognise that our sensory & information processing styles are different from many people’s & allow ourselves accommodations for our comfort. To create conceptual clothing & sensory protections that are suitable to our own, particular, unique configuration of sensory & information processing profiles. To live in the world as ourselves.
And what if, while we live in a world where diagnoses can function as hate speech & most therapeutic professionals have been trained to see us as broken, our best resource in developing the tools we need is each other? We can learn about the ideas & strategies that others have found useful, to help us find framings & practices that work for us. All the while respecting each other’s ways of making sense of ourselves, because we know that concepts are not things they are #ToolsToThinkWith, & can listen to each other with kindness while holding our concepts loosely.
We as elders have so much to offer. I really believe that everyone sees something that no one else does. And that power relations are seen most clearly from below. With the huge amount of data we’re processing all the time & our facility with pattern recognition, having observed the world from an outsider’s perspective for all our long lives we hold oceans of wisdom.
In recognising our trauma & learning to hold it kindly, finding others whose experience is like our own is the most healing thing there is. To learn from each other we need safe spaces were we can communicate Autistically. Where we can take time to process the wealth of information being offered & listen deeply & with empathy before offering a response. Where we have space to info dump about our experience & enthusiasms & be listened to by people who want to hear us. To recognise each other’s trauma & the damage we carry, & offer kindness in response. I want to find spaces like this.
About the Author
Meg Carter (she/her) is a sociologist & recovering academic living on Wurundjeri country.
These are her cats.
The beautiful images are from the book Cats in Hats by Rojiman & Umatan on Instagram.
Meg, I so love this representation of exactly how I feel as a fellow late-diagnosed autistic. We do indeed have oceans of hard-earned wisdom to share from our hyper-connected brains and our many and varied trauma-scars.