Accidental Neurodiversity Training

There have been a few different editions of this post.  I can honestly say sometimes this has been because I have lacked clue. I tried to label this, and I really have no idea how to do that anymore.  What I thought it was is not the thing that it was. Or, at least, it’s not a label I should have really tried to give this experience.  That said, this experience is a joint experience that is repeatable not just with me but other people who have been in this situation and I would now call this my introduction to neurodiversity at the very least.

This post is about a person who was and is pretty special to me, and now I’ve known him for about half of his life.  He’s a very good sport so he originally let me post about this on Facebook.  Here is the story, without any weird labels.

When I was 18, I met a geek guy online. He was cute. He had the most amazing eyes I ever saw. I guess they run in his family and he has this cousin with the same eyes but she was not nice, and you know what they say about eyes. In other words, pretty sure this guy's eyes are amazing because his heart is too. They are most definitely my favorite. I can say that without being creepy because I am not creepy about this person. He and I have gone our separate ways and until this week we hadn't even talked in three years. This week we did start talking again but I was going to make this post regardless.

Yeah. This is that post. The one that I kept not posting because people were all, "Why is she extra weird? And is she racist? Is she even an activist?" (Haha. Let's not try that one again. )

I am not shortening this. Because it is the story of a very large chunk of my life. Anyone here is reading this privileged to see this being shared. Period. Do what you need to do to make this accessible to yourself, or skip it.

I also have permission from the subject. He is a nice guy. He is gentle and quiet. He is not a zoo exhibit. Please be respectful of him. If you are an Aut, he is similar to you, he is also like me. I am neurodiverse enough that I have had a bunch of Autistic people in separate contexts 9 years apart ask me if I am Autistic or not, I go back and forth on whether I am allowed to take this label, though, because it has been used to hurt me and I don’t like to appropriate. Sometimes I take the label and other times I feel strange doing so. As you can see, however, I do take some things as identity bits, and that is unfolding.

As far as my Safe Person (a safe person but my self-identified Safe Person), he seems pretty neurodiverse.  When I knew him on a closer level, I did not label him. We didn't and don't talk in labels. We are people who basically stumbled across something.

When I met G, who I've affectionately called G because words are big and Gabriel for some reason (really beautiful though it was) shorted out my typing brain a bit, he was 15. His parents were having issues. His dad was weird, and stuff said about him made me really uncomfortable. I just wanted to support this geek kid. And I did, for 3 years. Thing about that is, you do that for a person younger than you and they remember it. When you get into some unhappy stuff later on, they will come and ask you how they can help you.

*sensory break*

If that happens, you just let it. You don't think about how 5 years later you won't call him G. You'll call him Gabe. Other people can call him Gabe and it is just whatever. But when YOU call him Gabe it means you aren't calling him G anymore, it means you are annoyed at him, it means things are tense at home. But you know, in the grand scheme of things, I guess I've known G for a very long time now, and the little blip in there where I was Gabe-ing him to piss him off? Eh, five minutes or so, compared to all the other stuff.

The other stuff like him standing up to The Evil One, also known as my abusive parent. Helping me have a backup person and a reason to remember I had a Safe Person and relocating to Boston was safer for me than anywhere she was. "Tell my mother whatever the hell you want to tell her," he said, freshly 18 and one BADASS Philly motherfucker.

Then of course, a year into Boston The Extravaganza, the shine has worn off. I can't watch football here. I can't do a lot of things here, and my mom ruins my first birthday here by showing up reeking of alcohol that morning (around 8:30 AM). Ya know. Whatever. But not whatever, cause I am kinda off my game after that, too. Doesn't matter. Hell pretty much happens, I won't recount it for those who were there. There's G though. Gently saving my life. There are no other words for it.

But then I do keep mentioning this neurodiverse thing a lot too. Right? G. just does what he does. No big words. Lots of empty-ish silences actually, and I would love them if I was not in a total anxiety meltdown constantly. I gotta explain. I gotta make it make all the sense. I gotta geek about it. I gotta just talk about it a lot.

G gets kinda confused and shit and is all like YOU DON'T MAKE SENSE. WHAT YOU ARE SAYING JUST DOESN'T MAKE SENSE.

Those are really big words for him. I didn’t think in terms of neurodiversity or not--and it could just be something else, but whatever it is makes G think in ways I’ve never encountered before or since. I never really thought about it until a few weeks ago, even though I lived with him for five years.  We just did what we did. We got through it.

So okay, that was lots and lots of G saves the world. And that was a lot of what people saw.

What they didn't see was that G was never given any labels because his family life was sort of screwy. Just trust me. I can say it with some authority, and that is all that needs to be said. First children, which G and I are, we get kinda screwed. Parenting is hard. If you are the first kid, things just fall by the wayside. But this was also more. The school system in Philly is full of shit. But still more too. I was kinda scared at G's house. But I knew I had to just, I mean, he'd be scared there too.

And G seemed confused. All the time. For example.

"What do you want to do, G?"

"I don't know."

"I bet you have some idea."

"I don't know."

At first it's really hard to tell if that's because of sort of scary family stuff or not.

You repeat yourself a lot though, just in case at first. Later it is because you love this person so much and the idea of it not penetrating hurts so badly. And that ends up being the thing that hurts too much four years later. When you still don't know. When you've had 5000 rounds of I don't know. You don't know if he knows. And it is okay. Sort of. There's clearly not anything you can do about it one way or another by now if he doesn't know.

*sensory break*

It's kind of screwy. People just see Big Tall Dude, He Does Things For Her, She Could Take Care of Herself Better, She Lets Him Do Stuff.

And yeah, it is, and it's codependent and crap, and you don't have words for it so all you can really do is make sure you are doing a lot of checkins on whether he is okay. The stuff he does, it needs to get done. And yeah, in 2003 you were able to do more, but five years later you're a bit cognitively f'd in the head so if the way to get through the day is help from G, and you check in with him a lot, to make sure he knows what he is doing and he is okay and if magically today he says more than "I don't know" you'd throw a party...that's just life because you love each other.

Or do you? You know? There is a lot that he "doesn't know." You know that he does because of his actions but you are a writer. It is a lil headbreaky.

He doesn't want to talk a lot. You don't want to talk a lot now either. So you just stop asking the questions. Even though it is something you should do, that you used to do, you get a lot of blank stares now and it feels different like he's really tired of it and stuff. Then maybe he's tired of you. And yeah, he gets sort of grumpier. He never used to turn his argh over I don't know out toward other people but he does now. You are a target and it sucks but you have other people to talk to and if he's tired of checkins is it really surprising?

So you just stop asking. Then you don't really know what to do. No one is talking. Until one final conversation. He says something. Then he is so totally confused. But so ARGH!!!!!!!!! He really doesn't say terrible things like this, just frustrated things. But this there are no take-backs for.

Still no idea if he meant it, that is not the point. The point is that was a deal-breaker for ME. We still lived in relative harmony for a whole year as roommates. He is still my Safe Person.

I stopped talking to him for 3 years. That was my idea. Also my idea was to go to him when I went into the Aut community and they knew I was just kinda screwy somehow. I met a bunch of people. Some of them were incredibly nice and some were in the middle and some were just kind of argh mean.  I’d encountered that before but I never went wholesale into the Autistic community very far before. The main thing they helped me figure out, though, were some of the labels for some of my issues that get swept under the rug by the CPers.  And that is great. Some were nice and some were not nice. And that helped me, too.  It helped me find words also for what had happened with me and G.

That's when I figured it out. That all those checkins and stuff, I am not even really sure still if G knew how much I did them, and how much the inevitable answer made me go argh. But that's when I realized that it all meant something, and it was a big something. Two crips who met not intending to meet another crip, who had similar brains, not perfectly aligned but complimentary, and the moment you know it is all worth it is when you can go back to this person and explain. There is no nervousness because G is your Safe Person. It doesn't matter if it takes him a few days to reply because you know you are gonna tell him something that will take a little bit for him to be okay with talking about. You know him. You just know him. And it doesn't matter what happens now. Out there in the big world of Boston is a Philly guy. Nobody coddled this kid for five minutes. He could rip apart a Southie motherfucker in about five seconds. And he chooses not to. He rides bikes like it is the most amazing thing in the world that bikes exist. He is an amazing cuddler. And he really wants to understand what the fuck happened to you to land you back in the hospital. To give you flashbacks. He wants to know where are you really and when will you be okay to talk more.

He is my Safe Person. The rest really does not matter. I would say that I learned a ton about neurodiversity, first from him, then from some of our roommates who were crippy, and now from the Autistic community.  I’m pretty grateful to them and also really, really protective of them, not because they need me to be some kind of savior but because I think knowing G and some of the other denizens of what I deemed Dot Gimp House helped me figure out a lot of things, like code switching for different kinds of people, which I am fairly good at, but also my own damn self.  I’ll always be grateful to the neurodiversity movement for that, when others have been significantly less inclusive, especially on the crip side.