Ok so I’m back? I dunno, the fact that I never gave up this blog maybe means I was eventually come back to it. I still have “blogger” on my business bio so there: validation. I deleted a lot of posts. Some of it was whiny, some was incomprehensible. I might take down the poems because I would like to release them as a book. And there is a lot of content I never posted in the first place. Most of that will likely stay hidden. If it wasn’t worth it at the time, do I really expect it’s improved with aging? I am also playing with my writer website. Right now this feeds there, and I’d like to think I’ll start posting more book news here among my other rumblings. We’ll see how that goes. I was 5 minutes from starting a Substack but oh, how I do not wish to start over again. I don’t have the hustle to turn a Substack into a great paying venture (at least not yet) so I’ll just burble away here for now. This is a year of pruning my orchard, of getting rid of dead wood i.e. poorly performing components of my system. Yeah there’s a system. It’s not great but it’s there. Maybe this time I’ll stick to it.
My sixth post of the year and might be my last ever on this blog. I don’t have the time, motivation, or audience to make it worth keeping up, and an abandoned blog seems worse than one that ceases to exist. This won’t be the first site I’ve deleted. This is my content and I don’t want it laying around, training AI without me granting permission.
WordPress is a very good backbone for websites and not much of a vibe otherwise. The whole Meta suite is an exhausting grind (even Threads, which I loved for six months.) X is a toxic wasteland, the other platforms (Bluesky, Mastodon) too convoluted. Social media in general is not the paradise we deserve.
In celebration of Autism Awareness Month, I’d like to make you aware that I have autism.
Just a little. What we used to call Asperger’s Syndrome but don’t anymore because Asperger was a nasty little fascist and his aim was to determine which autistic people were socially valuable and which were, you know, expendable.
So fuck that. Thanks to a host of diagnostic tools* I am now confident in saying I have autism.
The kind where you can still have relationships and conversations but it comes at a high cost, demanding more of your cognitive capacity than neurotypical people expend on the same activities. The kind you figure out you have when you’re in your forties and are worn out from decades of trying to do what everyone else does, and failing. The kind that seems really trendy now, as if it’s a fun way to cook eggs or tie your shoes that we learned in a TikTok. What’s really happened is that the criteria for autism has been revised, and now represents a broader and more accurate picture of how it presents.
I don’t want to say ‘syndrome’ or ‘disorder’. That sort of language is itself part of the problem. I am not a bad or broken person, not incapable and in need of repair. I am simply differently endowed, and for the most part lacking context in society, which tends to flatten difference in the name of general harmony.
Ant the truth is, the real truth, the reason I’m writing this blog, is not because I feel a deep-seated need to reach out to you, this small group of strangers who will read these words, but because I put the word ‘blogger’ in my fucking author bio, and it’s been so long since I posted that it feels like a lie.
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*please do not come at me re self-diagnosis, the available tools are the same as what they use in clinics.
Poetry is concealed truth. Poems are true, but they are best when that truth sidles into your understanding without you needing to directly perceive it. When they leave feelings and questions that linger in your mind and in whatever it is we call a soul. Writing poetry has helped me say things about myself that I don’t know how to say, which is why I rarely give context for my poetry. A good poem tells its own story, but sometimes we must defy convention.
After laughing way too hard at too many autism memes, I did a self-assessment.
Well shit….
This hit so much harder than finding out I have ADHD (and before you call me out for self-diagnosis, know that this is a questionnaire that clinicians use.) I haven’t felt grief like this in decades, as if someone died. That someone is the old me.
I am shaking as I write this. My understanding of myself has been radically altered. That’s why all my books are full of desperate, rootless young men dying to be seen, be accepted, be useful. Human behavior has always been opaque to me. I spend inordinate amounts of time thinking about what people think of me. If I can be of service to them, they’ll want to keep me around.
As a consequence I am superb at masking. At shielding myself behind a radical aesthetic that is itself a hyper-fixation, giving the world a curated version of myself. My aesthetic is a form of service, for one of my aims is to be the most interesting thing someone sees that day. But I’m not fully out to everyone close to me, so I am always consciously performing. Why not come out? Because honesty is terrifying.
I need to know that I can be wholly myself with the people I trust. To know this, I have to trust that when I show up as myself they will accept me as I am. To find safety I have to plunge into the abyss. Again.
But I’m tired. Tired of not saying these things, tired of faking it. Sometimes no matter how hard you fake it, you never will make it. But maybe you’re trying to make the wrong thing. Maybe you can just be yourself.
I’ve been with my spouse for almost three decades and I’m still convinced he’s going to decide one day that I’m too damn much for him and leave me. Like, calm down. But expressing this to him seems physically impossible. When I’m emotional, I can’t speak. I can write (I say as I’m crying into my keyboard) which sort of makes sense because speech and writing are controlled by different parts of the brain. Autism impacts the speech centre. If I want to say difficult things to my husband, I have to write them down and read them off a script.
So be it. If that’s what it takes. There’s no shame in it. We make life more difficult than it needs to be. If you think life is unkind, start being kinder to yourself. If you keep falling short of your target, move the target closer. If you don’t know what to do, try writing a poem.
Try. You are stardust. You have galaxies of time embedded in your every cell, meteorites in your veins. Become what you are. You are infinite.
Modern authorship is a make-your-own-rules kind of game. Self-published, mainstream, hybrid, neither (ask me about subscriptions to The All-Hearts Cabaret) and it’s up to you, the author, to decide how you want to play it.
Me, I’m doing my freaking best under the weight of my neurodivergent, gender-baffled self-awareness. I want to be/do/know/have/eat/encompass everything that exists, and this is a real problem when it comes time to make decisions.
And yet…
On Tuesday I visited one of the very nice nurse practitioners at my doctor’s clinic. No knock to the NP, y’all are keeping Western Medicine functioning, but this poor child doesn’t know me from a hole in the ground. So she went ahead and prescribed me medication that I (and many of you) expect will make me want to unalive myself.
Baby…I don’t do speed.
I just don’t. That class of drugs is Bad For Me. And when the popular literature tells me that no one knows *why* this particular drug works,? No. Just no. I’m not that messed up, TBH. I *like* my neurodivergence for the most part. It’s fun to have this many ideas. Maybe I could do better at keeping appointments and finding my keys, but the last time I tried this class of meds was a nightmare. I made a vast number of bad choices, while totally ignoring the work I needed to do, and ended up sobbing under my desk more days than not.
So…fuck you.
Fuck this.
Please, please don’t take my experiences as advice. You do you, as we say, and decide for yourself. Me? I’m going to just learn how to be this shambolic, well-intended, heartfelt and whole and every now and then problematic neurospicy genderqueer who gives no f’s for ordinary people’s comfort because I’m having too much fun.
I’ve been writing The Fixer as a highly personal blog, and sometimes the personal is horrifying. Poetry is a good medium for saying what is almost impossible to say. Sparse, so targeted, able to express what is unsayable in any other way.
Consider this your content warning for a dirty word and a reference to a violent act. Things have been intense in my world lately, with a lot of big wins but also some really messed up stuff. This is some of that messed up.
I’ve always thought of myself as unable to resist temptation. As being too desperate for dopamine to not eat the cookie, not buy the gift. I always eat the cookie. But I don’t always buy the gift.
And I realized my problem isn’t with reward systems, it’s with gamifying food.
Consumer capitalism has a terrible relationship with food. It’s used as lure, camouflage, dumping ground, flag to wave, and whip to beat ourselves with. It’s a popular brand of mayonnaise declaring over a 90s grunge pastiche soundtrack that it “will not tone it down.” It’s a food that has never once in its existence contained fat declaring in block letters on the label that it’s “fat-free.” It’s thinking almond milk is virtuous without considering the operations of the almond farming industry (not pretty, if you ask a bee in California.)
Dieticians and specialists in early childhood will both tell you that using food to reward or punish children makes food a battleground and plants in them the seeds of lifelong eating disorders. So why would I do that to myself? If I eat a cookie, it’s not because I have “allowed” myself a “reward” of a “bad” food that I would ordinarily resist. It’s because I wanted a cookie, and I happened to have some. I might treat myself to a more expensive meal for a special occasion, but I don’t like tying food to performance benchmarks. I’m not a seal, bopping a ball with my nose to get a fish. I’m a person with an oven and a working knowledge of baked goods, and sometimes having a cookie is the only thing that makes me want to do my job. Let snacks be snacks, I say.
Gifts, though…I resisted building a Lego set for almost a week until I’d hit a word count goal. The unopened box sat on my desk for days, taunting me a little, but more inviting me to reach my goal.
I now have this nice reminder on my desk that I can get what I want if I stick to it. That cookie, or cake, or 700 calorie whipped cream and coffee thing? Long gone.
But don’t let me stop or shame you. Everyone is wired differently. I don’t want to attach moral significance to snacks. Excuse me, I’m going to go eat a cookie.
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