For the Birds: Obvious Animals (a flash essay about Autism)

swift letters for busy people - #5. Plus an oracular bird prompt!

You’re here! I’m glad. This one’s short.

(My celebratory discount is active all throughout Autism Acceptance Month! Sign-up by April 30th to support the ongoing creation of this newsletter *and* snag a discount on writing prompts, The Resiliency Circle, & creative nourishment galore.)

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Photo by Alice Domalik, via the Cornell Lab: All About Birds

From the Cornell Lab of Ornithology:

“The Spotted Towhee is a large, striking sparrow of sun-baked thickets of the West...Their warm rufous flanks match the dry leaves they spend their time hopping around in. The birds can be hard to see in the leaf litter, so your best chance for an unobstructed look at this handsome bird may be in the spring, when males climb into the shrub tops to sing their buzzy songs.”

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For some time now, my twice-a-week therapy sessions have been a rollercoaster of deep inquisition, trauma-informed excavation, and aggressively thorough engagement with diagnostics both traditional and current, as my therapist and I generate questions that guide us through the murky, life-changing space that immediately follows diagnosis.

With her guidance, I’ve been accumulating a ton of self-knowledge, but I’m doing so after 36 years of identifying as a not-Autistic person, plus one authentic but very short season of identifying, much more truthfully, as Autistic.

This means that the self-knowing is consistently punctured by self-doubt, my weird internal processes of double and triple checking every feeling, and a still-present fear of co-opting something that doesn’t “really” belong to me.

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And then, every so often, a crystal clear moment. Like this one:

My therapist and I broach the topic of animals, and I begin to cry.

I cry and talk about not eating meat.

I cry and talk about the BBC show, Planet Earth.

I cry and talk about lost dog posters, wildfires, raccoons on the side of the road.

I cry and talk about all the worms on the asphalt and what happens when the cars drive over them?

I cry and talk about the mice, and the bats, and the bees.

All of them.

There is nothing to double check.

There is no ambiguity.

I slide the dial all the way to the right on this one: strongly agree. Is there a farther option, please?

In this and other moments—moments I cherish; moments where I feel no need to investigate my own reality—the knowing comes from the inside out, not the top down. I am Autistic. It’s just there. It’s just this. Me.

My Autism is in my relationship with animals, but it is elsewhere, too.

I am learning to recognize the obviousnesses that have been there all along, like teaching myself to tell a towhee from a robin.

It’s not easy. Am I looking at burnt orange, or rufous?

Am I looking at a trauma response, or a masked Autistic need trying to breach the surface of my life?

Things can exist—things can be real—before you know how to see them.

I’m not interested in classification for classification’s sake. I’m interested in seeing what’s there. What’s true.

I am starting first with the innermost stuff (the heart).

Then, I’m working my way outward (behavior, relationships; the eyes, the spots, the feathers; the hopping & rummaging).

I might hear her before I see her, buzzing an old song.

But when I do finally see her, I will know.

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Bird Oracle

A two-part prompt experiment

Friends, if you’ve been with me for some time now, you know I like to write bird & bug oracles.

Today, I want to experiment with a slightly different version. (We’re bending and stretching the muscles we started using in last Monday’s prompt!)