For the Birds: 15 fragments (an essay)
Autism / masking / sincerity & confidence / entrepreneurship / and (not) knowing thine self.
Thanks for being here. The Neurodivergent Writers Club starts next Tuesday, September 17th, at 4pm Pacific!
Join us for 9 weeks of gathering, writing, and honing in on the intersection of our word-work and our divergent selves in a small, tender group space. Sliding scale options available!
P.S. Happy Friday the 13th <3
1.
Last week, I launched a new small project. Maybe you read about it?
Ya’ll: I HATE THAT WORD, LAUNCH. I hate “coach,” “coaching,” and especially “life coach.” (Life is at once too big and too vague to be someone’s speciality.)
But because I am a trauma-informed over-thinker with C-PTSD, I worry about naming things out loud that I hate, especially in the faux-permanent sphere of digital language. I worry about alienating people; I worry about causing harm. Some of this is quite reasonable.
But some of it isn’t. I have shimmied myself right out of three+ decades worth of genuine opinions by being permanently focused on not causing harm, the main result being that I nearly embalmed myself.
2.
I am a mentor, facilitator and—yes—a coach.
Some days, I have easy, good-feeling thoughts about all this: I want to be successful in what I do! I want to be successful with the handful of things I care about most; to maintain impact and efficacy (to “make something sturdy + reliable,” as the beautiful poet,
, recently said to me); and to harness every skill I have access to within every space I hold for another person.Other days? I begin to wonder why I care about being successful at these particular things, and whether I want to be what I am because it’s what I am, or because it’s how a person like me is supposed to be.
3.
Or because it’s how a person who isn’t like me is supposed to be, and I’ve not given those italics enough attention.
4.
My experience of being an Autistic, highly sensitive person involves a mostly baseline state of immense porousness. I am influenced by everything. Everything gets in. I can’t “help it.” It’s my skin, my genetic temperament, my unique wiring. (It’s why I can’t be on instagram.) The world is comprised of people, places, and things, all of which are comprised themselves of multifaceted data. (The data from social media is very confusing / I don’t contain the software that translates lack of sincerity.) I am a direct-data-processing kind of machine.
Another thing I hate: Computer metaphors! Why do we have to call a good idea a “download” now?
But the language of mechanized processing is undeniably useful when trying to talk about the strange, deeply valuable, still-misunderstood experience of being Autistic.
For example, I used to describe myself as anti-social.
Now, I understand that my social battery is just a very, very different kind of battery than the kind that makes a neurotypical person run.
5.
In the last few weeks, I’ve had two people, in two different contexts, say the same thing to me.
In both conversations, I’d expressed something true; shortly thereafter, and without their prompting, I explained myself.
You know what I mean: I quickly attempted to account for the way my previously stated words might be misconstrued. I wanted to reassure each person that, despite the possibility of misunderstanding, I’d meant well.
I am persistently afraid of not being understood, of coming off as crass, of crossing a boundary I did not even understand I was approaching.
Is this trauma? A by-product of C-PTSD? Well, of course.
Is it Autism? Yeah, it’s that, too. The perma-intensity of my brain, the ongoing analysis, the background hum of processing and examination that is never not happening inside my head, as I assess every facet of every social interaction I experience every single day of my life except for, I don’t know, that one recent day where I did mushrooms.
Both people responded to my nervous, open-hearted exposition with almost the same sentiment:
You don’t need to explain yourself, Sarah!
I know you are compassionate and authentic.
Don’t worry about the bad faith readers!
You’ll never offend me. Because I know you.
6.
If I’m understanding correctly, they were talking about a primary person—a Me—beneath each word or action or momentary expression of my personhood.
Is there a primary person beneath each momentary expression of personhood?
Claudia Rankine: “One of the reasons I work in book-length projects, instead of individual poems, is because I don’t trust the authenticity of any given moment by itself.”
Or maybe they were just talking about unconditional love.
7.
What about entrepreneur Sarah? Self-employed Sarah? Sarah trying to run a business and—Confession Alert!—obtain new clients / make a little more money than she currently makes / close out each day with some semblance of success?
What about Sarah who dreams of sharing her words widely and used to say she’d never turn the paywall on?
What about Sarah: naive enough to believe she can preserve her weird authenticities, darker qualities, and voracious desire to be away from other humans 75% of the time while **CUE COACH-SPEAK** playing full out! and building a full client roster! and, yes, being in service to others, of course of course, but also getting paid!
What about Sarah who vomits in her mouth a little every time she sees an ad geared toward badass feminist women who want to build a 6-figure business or have their first $10K month and also wouldn’t be mad if either of those statements happened to be true about her own valuable work?
What about Sarah, whose growing confidence—steadily, it does grow—looks and feels and moves like a very different animal than the confidence she sees culturally reflected back to her most days?
Every Shark Tank Shark: “Why should I give you [x amount of money]?! How do I know I’ll earn my investment back??”
Every Shark Tank Contestant: “Because I believe in this product!!!!!!”
Because I have worked so, so hard.
Because I want this.
Me!
8.
A few more questions:
How do people know what they want?
How do people decide what they deserve?
How do people dream big without alienating their mundane selves from the whole orchestrated fantasy?
Some days, I think I’m too earnest to be self-employed.
9.
In her essay, “Second Selves,” published in The Paris Review back in May, Elisa Gabbert writes, in a small aside that has very little to do with the main topic, this:
I don’t believe in free will.
Why do some people get published in The Paris Review and some people don’t?
No, I promise you: These questions are coming from the most sincere place in my body.
I was inspired for weeks after reading her essay, a piece of writing at once personal and deeply-researched: about self, and memory, and notebooks, and writer’s notebooks in particular. It is an intellectual feat, and I shared it accordingly with a few clients and friends.
Then, I spent two belated days in a deep, weird depression.
I was not depressed about not being published in The Paris Review.
I was depressed about the idea that some people get to know things clearly and definitively about themselves, that they can pull static, true things from the rolodex of their brain on command. I pictured some buffoon approaching Gabbert on the street and asking for her hot take on free will. Don’t buy it, she could say, without even slowing her stride.
As if knowing, for some people, is a place they live in, not a process they must constantly re-process.
“What are you reading right now, Sarah?” “How are you feeling today, Sarah?” “Sarah, what did you do this morning?”
Me: Uhhhhhhhhhhh.
I need a lot of time to answer simple questions about myself.
That, or hella masking.
10.
True things:
I am Autistic.
I think knowing, for me, is a process, not a place.
I have to recreate it every single time. (It’s part of why I’m “good” at writing, the ur-process of all human processes.)
I have to cancel plans as often as I am able to keep them.
Due to the reality of having intense emotions that I struggle to regulate, and the way such struggles tend to manifest, a lot of my cancellations happen last minute.
My current fantasy: To cancel, bail, fail, and turn away from situations as-needed, and then to sit with the sharp feeling that I am an unsuccessful flake who does not try hard enough and will never make $10,000 within a 31-day span of time and just…look at myself, deliberately.
To look at myself, in that moment, like a painting being painted. To watch what’s happening, how texture accumulates one brushstroke at a time. To look with the care of an unhurried gaze.
11.
Sometimes, I worry that I am the bad faith reader. Not of writing; of the world. In therapy last Tuesday, while talking about my 25-year-old fear of The Other Shoe dropping, I accidentally told my therapist that a part of me is “stewarding” my hyper-vigilance.
My therapist wanted to hear more.
“No, no,” I said, “I don’t know why I used that word. That’s not what I meant.”
My therapist wanted to know what word I meant.
I couldn’t tell her.
Then I started crying.
I meant it! I meant the word, “stewarding.”
She, this young part of me, is so perpetually afraid of the other shoe, so frozen in time, that she is practically in love with her enemies. They’re all she thinks about—what might go wrong, who might betray her. What “person beneath”?!? she demands. There is no “person beneath” individual actions. The benefit of the doubt is for suckers, etc.
If you’re familiar with parts work & IFS, you already know what comes next:
This is all her attempt at being good. Good and successful and taken care of and beloved, to build the safe thing herself with her own child muscles.
To keep two good parents in the same room, loving each other without secret, neither one perpetuating harm.
12.
When I did mushrooms earlier this month, I had a brief interlude during my 6-hour journey where I sat up, flung the eye mask off my face, and shout-laughed to my facilitator, OH MY GOD, WHAT THE FUCK IS MONEY?! From the neck up, I’d always known it was a construct, a kind of normalized metaphor with constant, jarring real-world consequences—some have too much; some don’t have enough; does anyone anywhere feel right about it?
But suddenly, I knew it in my body. MONEY IS A FUCKING JOKE, I yelled with such sincerity that, recollecting it now, I sail past every impulse to cringe or eye-roll and instead find myself in awe.
Remind me to tell Mo about this joke, I begged my facilitator. He’ll think this is hilarious!
Therapy looks many different ways.
13.
It’s Wednesday morning as I write this. There’s a young Mayfly currently living on our front porch. I spotted him yesterday, cozied up on one of the two tiny, fairy-winged skeletons we leave up year-round, hanging against the bright blue of our house.
This morning, during a brief pause in writing, I stepped outside to check on him and was shocked: His head wasn’t there anymore! Just a pale body, frozen on the lower skeleton, in the same position he’d been in the day before.
Only now, headless.
Except then, I saw him: Imperceptibly bigger, he’d molted, and then relocated to the upper fairy-winged skeleton.
This means he’s at the life cycle stage known as, “dun.” In the Mayfly world, egg becomes nymph becomes dun, or “sub-imago” (!!) before eventually becoming a “spinner,” i.e. a full grown adult or “imago” (!!!).
“Dun,” a strange word I’d never heard before, also means, “a dull grayish-brown color,” and is most likely related to the Germanic word for dusk.
It also refers to “mak[ing] persistent demands on (someone), especially for payment of a debt.”
14.
I will probably never be a 7-figure coach, a Mark Cuban investee, a dun. I am simply not demanding enough—not of myself, and not of this terrifying, corrupt, beautiful world. I don’t know enough about myself or what I believe in to be Shark Tank-confident. I’m just now hitting the life cycle stage where I stop assuming other people are always thinking the worst of me.
And though I’m a good coach, a strong teacher, and a skillful holder of space, I am a terrible businesswoman. I molt too sporadically. I doubt too often. I am headless too much of the time.
And the rest of the time: What body?
15.
Gilles Deleuze: “Life is not personal.”
Angel Haze: “Money and more money is the only shit I’m after.”
Fully grown Mayflies live, and I quote, “a day or so.”1
Is this what it feels like to be an adult?
Crying and staring into the terrible eyes of Jeff Bezos, a few of us experiencing things that every person should experience and most of us won’t?
Is this what it feels like to be a successful adult?
Alice Notley: “Poetics! As if how people say poetry should be written is of any consequence at all or any importance. Critics create value. We don’t need any value, we need poetry.”
We don’t need any value. Well, what do we need?
We need to measure our accomplishments with the eyes of a bug: Good, fleeting things, yes, there they are. And then, they’re gone.
To get to them in the first place, you must wade through images, ideals and illusions, and eventually (momentarily) reach something real, the italicized stuff.
Maybe you get to stay there for a day or so.
Just you and a handful of similar bugs (poets), giving each other the momentary benefit of the doubt.
From the National Wildlife Federation website.
It always feels like such an honor to be invited in, to read your words. There’s so much here that I understand, deeply, and there’s also so much I don’t understand; but it doesn’t leave me feeling inadequate or not smart enough or like I’m missing something. Instead, it feels poetic and special that I get to experience your thoughts and ideas that are real even if I can’t grasp them quite yet. And maybe that’s the point, because I got the message, I felt it, and I am happy that I re-read a few lines but didn’t try to dissect every bit and piece and instead just let myself be with it.
Many strange words to say: thank you for sharing your writing (including all of the questions and contradictions) with us.
I love the way your essay soars and skims and skips from topic to topic in a free fall of free association but how I can follow the thread of the associations because, well, adhd brains do that way. There's something really deeply satisfying about reading writing that works this way, surprising and illuminating at every turn and yet also somehow with an undercurrent of deep inevitability, even in the apparent contradictions. Some part of me saying: of course she went there, I can see in retrospect how these things all fit together, though I never could have anticipated that leap. Kind of linguistic parkour.