I wish I could find a psychiatrist who would just let me tell them my entire life story before getting into “the work”. My life story IS exceptional and in defiance of all neuronormativity, I am, too.
But in context, so too may say all humanity. The unique experiences far outweigh the shared ones.
I believe, feel, and think that my story can be helpful to others. I just don’t have the brain to write it all.
So I guess what I really want is for some psychiatrist to make me a case study and tell the world about how amazing the neurodivergent are and can be, because how much higher might I have flown but for the circumstances, situations, and harm of this exceptionally neuronormative culture, society, and world?
And I am nobody.
There are millions who won’t be privileged like this and for whom such a dream would, itself, be the epitome of entitled privilege.
Many a child has known worse than I did and no one will ever hear their names.
Many a family gets dissolved in territorial onslaughts that are mostly background noise to those of us arguing high ideals and playing with rhetoric online.
I have privilege enough to be able to tell my story and in it, remind everyone of all of this and then some.
I posted this in a favorite discord’s #resources chat so it is explicit that I am down for anything and everything to help humans overall; but this is my specific dream, because I’m looking for resources too. More human than financial, but let’s just say I won’t turn down help.
… extending this here, on the blog, because I wanna.
I have tried offering myself to autism study and brain science study (non-invasive) for nearly 20 years. Now that we are entering the new dark age (I need to write about this!), this is probably my last broadcast seeking someone ‘out there’ who can help me make this into a reality.
Clearly I can write. But I do not have the related skill-sets to get a readable book into print. I want a collaboration. I want to blend all of a psychiatric therapist’s education, frameworks, modalities, and theorems as can be aligned to the telling/documentation/validation of facts so that the path of my life is known and its extremities, witnessed.
Not because “I matter” (though I do, in fact, matter).
Not because “I must mean something” (I already do in more ways than I care to now list).
Because my life is an example of a pattern and path that millions live in entirely different contexts and ways all over this world and absolutely none of them are being seen as who and what they are – emergent evolution at scale, worldwide. This is what genetics, epigenetics, neuroscience, and neuroanatomy are all saying. “Unique Neurotype”, “Unique Phenotype”, and demonstrative of unique neural wiring patterns and a continuum of downstream differences that are, in fact, genomic emergence or mutation or evolution. We just don’t really know yet. It could be all three. But it’s real, and it’s been with us far longer than it seems most want to acknowledge/admit. Still more support as an evolutionary process.
I believe that being neurodivergent delivered survival to me, this autistic human who did not know she was so until 2013, until formal validation found in early 2023. I have been spottily employed most of my life. I did not know I was an exception to the general rule about autism and employment. I did not know that I was an exception to the medical rule that AFAB humans could not be autistic. I did not know what a family was, a friend, or even a home. Hit the ‘about’ page for the 75k summary.
Somehow, here I sit, clocking 60 like the OG I am. I’m falling apart a la steaming pile of some car, rudely ruined on a hairpin curve. Just can’t corner like I used to, or bounce. All my dexterity is above the brows these days.
I find that the SSA will not accept I am disabled, nor issue me support, because I retain the ability to string together words and thus, remain somehow employable.
While in reality, since 2017, I have worked exactly six months with a company so completely back-asswards and discriminatory toward me as an openly autistic human that I quit at the half-year mark in utter burnout and exhaustion. I did file that EEOC complaint. They refused to act stating (paraphrasing) that because I didn’t steal corporate emails and documents, they’d never be able to get them as the company would probably destroy them. Which is likely accurate, for all it chaps my hide.
I have submitted over 5,000 resumes since 2017. I am usually insta-rejected or ghosted because the ATS systems do not want to hire openly autistic, disabled, remote workers who do not travel, even if they have over thirty years of experience across the beginnings of technology unto this day.
Who is current on tech as a hobby.
Who was doing analysis and building products before any of today’s disciplines had a name, and who brought that history current in her own framework that dovetails with Scrum, Agile, and KanBan to run most backlogs up to 45% faster, remove rework, and decrease S1 and UX reports by over 60% in every role worked from 1994 to 2017. Before that, she was a JCL Control Operator… IFYKY.
The problem is not me, I am able, ready, and willing to work.
The problem is that I am disabled and require significant accommodations that allow me to deliver to expectation (and frankly, I usually deliver beyond those, as former colleagues and frienemies alike will tell you).
I can deliver a story that takes us from the literal summer of love to present day and you will arrive psychologically right here, with me, right now, in this weekly stay room, typing this up as the sunlight streams in from the single window at left; outside, it is a beautiful cobalt blue sky and the pines between the hotel and the business park slowly lose their needles.
Waiting is not my choice, but my necessity. And yes, this is a return to old times and insecurity; I know them of old. It is not a happy reunion.
I wait for anyone in the world to put action to word so I can put word into action and we can both thrive.