Abnormal People
An essay about autism and identity that was a very long time coming.
I’ve been trying to write this essay, or a version of it, for years. Getting it finished and out there feels oddly daring.
It’s out today in the Observer magazine: https://observer.co.uk/news/first-person/article/laurie-penny-autism
For me, writing has always been the first and best way of masking. I’ve spent my life learning to be legible. Breaking down the mangled grammar of my strangeness, remaking it more perfectly on the screen while in person, I stammer- unscripted, I mumble and stumble. I spill drinks and knock into tables and trip over hidden social codes. In prose I can summon a fluid sincerity that fails me in the flesh. And when I’ve done well enough, it’s almost managed to compensate for all the rest.
It’s felt very risky to publish this. Like giving the game away. There’s a lot more to say about it all, but I’m happy with this as a place to start.
Your sensitivity -- sorry, Laurie, I don't know what else to call it -- has drawn me to your writing for years. It's the nuance, the scrupulous effort to get the unsaid said, and said as well as possible, with all of the compassion and urgency required for it.
I'm mildly neurodivergent, only recently diagnosed, but also majorly bipolar. Almost all of my behavior therefore is adaptive because it must be. But there's a defiant core in there that holds the various shifting personae together, and I've never not been aware of it.
And in you that unassailable nexus seems to be the irrevocable fact that you care, and care enough to make it known, comprehensively articulated in a way that cannot be ignored.
Thanks for all of it.
Your anecdote about the angry teacher, and your response, is a perfect descriptive of being autistic in a world running on alien and incomprehensible rules. Since my own (unofficial, but peer-reviewed) self-diagnosis in my 60s,after a lifetime of masking that never, ever, quite worked, I've found how most of the people I've formed community with are autistic, ADHD, both… NT people may detect our divergent energies, with unhappy consequences, but we see (and hear) each other too. I understand my life, my self, better now; the horrors of my past are no less. but their shape makes sense and I no longer blame myself, my choices and actions meant that I survived. Now, I've discovered that I'm no longer alone.