24.more_autistic
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[00:00:00] Hey sibling. Welcome to the Unmasking Unschool podcast. I'm your host, Louisa Shaeri. AKA solar flare. We are all solar flares. Defying the gravity of group think, beaming frequencies that disrupt the airwaves. And in this podcast, I share perspectives and reframes from the solar system. A liberatory framework for creative autistic folks who are seeking another way to see, know, and be yourself.

[00:00:30] You are not here to fit in. And the radical re-imagining of how to honor all of who you're here to be begins within, Hey, sibling, how is it going? Am I becoming more autistic? More autistic in inverted commas? What we really mean is having more, obviously, autistic traits or patterns of abilities or more obvious, uh, disabled status in something that you're trying to do or your day-to-day life, or just in the way that you're expressing yourself is.

[00:01:08] Less masked or less, uh, what might fall under the fiction of normal. And it's not a bad thing. Right? It might be a confusing thing though, to you or to other people or like, why can I not do the things I used to be able to do? And it can be part of the picture also, after. Self-identifying or gaining the status of autism at a specific time in life.

[00:01:38] And that being such a huge revelation that it opens the door to past traumas and parts of yourself and is a lot to process. So for some of you, it's also a new thing to see yourself as disabled. Others of you, it's like, no, it's just one more added label on the list. Uh, or it's not a new thing. It's not a new way.

[00:02:10] A lens through which to see yourself is not a new status, a political identity. For me, the idea of thinking of myself through the lens of disability was new. And even though for a short while when I was younger, like primary school age. I was therefore hard of hearing for a while, but it was, my hearing came back when we cut out animal milks, and during that time I never was exposed to sign language or deaf culture.

[00:02:47] Or disability culture or any of that. One day I want to learn sign language. I think it would be a form of communication that would feel really good. But I also think we, it would be ideal if we all learned, uh, sign language and reduced many of the barriers that are faced by deaf and hard of hearing people.

[00:03:08] But I did learn to lip read a bit. I learned to read people's faces and I think it also. Uh, increased the visual sensitivity and the visual emphasis of how I think. But anyway, I've, before thinking of myself as autistic or neurodivergent, I'd never consider myself through the lens of disability or really even thought too much about what it means as an identity, as a political status, as a consciousness that comes.

[00:03:44] With a certain type of loss in status, in worthiness, in perceived value, and as a result of ableism, tah Lewis has, uh, developed along with other people. Um, my favorite definition of ableism. Uh, so I'm gonna read it to you. Ableism, a system of assigning value to people's bodies and minds based on societally constructed ideas of normalcy, productivity, desirability, intelligence, excellence, and fitness.

[00:04:21] These constructed ideas are deeply rooted in eugenics, anti-blackness, misogyny, colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism. This systemic oppression that leads to people and society determining people's value based on their culture, age, language, appearance, religion, birth or living place, health wellness in Inver and or their ability to satisfactorily produce and reproduce, excel in inverted commas and behave in inverted commas.

[00:04:53] You do not have to be disabled to experience ableism. So that's a working definition by Tah Lewis. Updated January, 2022, available on their blog developed in community with disabled black slash negatively racialized folks, especially. Uh, and there's a tag to social media account called not three fifth, so I'm gonna link to that in the show notes.

[00:05:18] But for me, this idea of of being autistic, being disabled, confronted me with all of the learned ableism and prejudice that I had unwittingly absorbed. And it that it allowed me to see myself as separate from and above. Those who were disabled in some way, and this wasn't, uh, a position or a set of beliefs that I was consciously aware of, or that if you, if you'd asked me, I would've said that.

[00:05:49] That's how I thought. But the process of me identifying myself through disability as a status, as a, as a lens on who I was, as an identity showed me that on some level I did. Because of how I then felt about myself and how those feelings of having less value, having less worthiness, having a kind of drop in status and value, um, was playing out in the way that I felt.

[00:06:23] And so I had to work through that in order to come to realize that it's not a source of shame. It's not something that makes you less than. And in fact, it gives you the lived experience on an, uh, a lens and a set of insights on the structures and social systems that we move through that is essential for transforming them.

[00:06:49] So disability consciousness is a transformative consciousness. The writing by Disabled and Crip activists by Sick and chronically ill people. Especially those who are multiply marginalized, who can see the way these intersecting interlocking systems of meaning and disadvantage play out and are therefore the best teachers of the solutions.

[00:07:15] They have been essential to my own unlearning, my own reeducation of selfhood, and I think an essential component of any liberatory process. And I'm saying all of this because this question of becoming more autistic with age or after a late diagnosis or, uh, just in any period of your life or even in the day to day, having a, a variation in your levels of skills, abilities and style of expression.

[00:07:48] Um, I wanted to do an episode to normalize that and to. Make room for that to be the case. Right. And for it not to be something that concerns you, uh, and, uh, as a problem necessarily. And to, yeah, to give you some ways to think about it that have helped me and that have, I've collected up over the years and.

[00:08:21] That might be reasons why you might be experiencing a loss of certain skills or abilities or an inability to mask or maintain personas or facades, an inability to run the same internal programming or to do certain tasks or manage the day-to-day. That you can other times do quite easily. And most of what I'm talking about is temporary, right?

[00:08:49] It's a temporary variation, but I wanted to talk about reasons why it might happen. So, and side note, the term autistic regression has been used a lot and. I wanna just flag that up as something to intentionally not use because it comes from this developmental lens, this idea that you are, or that autistic children are developmentally delayed or on this, uh, incorrectly.

[00:09:21] Moving on this timeline of expected milestones, which don't honor the ways that you maybe need to learn differently and go through a different process of learning. Here's the points I want to make, uh, as a, an overarching sense of why this might happen, and then we'll dive into those in a bit more detail.

[00:09:44] So number one is that we process, we learn, we make sense of through singularities, right through deep dives, immersion, and really going, uh, into something in a very focused. Uh, enthusiastic, um, singular way where it becomes at everything and, and in order to process it in ways that mean that we can find the connections, we can find the patterns, we can find the.

[00:10:16] Um, the energetic, uh, meaning making our hyperconnected brains need to create these webs of hyperconnected meanings, and so singularity helps. And so that's one ingredient. Another ingredient is we are just more exposed to mental health stressors, and this is not a, an inbuilt trait necessarily. This is a.

[00:10:43] Societal, uh, situation or context or condition, right? And that will increase or decrease depending on your various other privileges. But all of that can make it, um, can just make it mean that some of what your, what is happening in your abilities or skills varying. Is just because of the external environment and what you are currently dealing with, a lot of symptoms of trauma and mental health issues and PTSD get wrapped up in the classical understandings of autism.

[00:11:23] That can make it seem like, uh, that those are just traits and then that places the, the problems, the external environmental problems. In your body as just like, oh no, that's just how you react when actually you are in high stress. So that can also make it seem like you're becoming more autistic, or it can include a loss or reduction in skills.

[00:11:49] And then the third thing is kind of the, uh, a combination of the two, but it's worth mentioning on its own, which is that if you have some big experience in your life that you are processing. That is gonna be using up a big amount of your cognitive bandwidth, right? Your nervous system, uh, fuse, and your ability to then process the day-to-day sensory stuff or the day-to-day management of of life, right?

[00:12:20] So it can seem like you are having more of an overreaction to the sensory or you are more sensitive and you are therefore doing all of the things that. That you do in reaction to that. Or maybe there's like an increase in overload or meltdowns or the things that are you retrieving yourself and needing to do things that help you come back to cellular peace.

[00:12:51] But, um, sometimes those don't seem connected, right? You can seem like. You are reacting to the immediate moment, but actually the thing that's making that immediate moment hard to process is the fact that there's this bigger, uh, thing going on in the background. So that can be, so let's dive into more detail.

[00:13:12] So that could be something that is big on an emotional level. So, um, some relationship change or grief or some shift in. Who you live with, it could be some kind of sensorial or, or the, the structure of your life change, which is requiring you, it's requiring, uh, an adjustment, right? We take longer to adjust to change and changes that other people experience, we experience in more detail.

[00:13:46] And so there's more details to move through. So big emotional things, big life structure or living conditions. Changes can also be hormonal changes if you are newly on tea or if you are menopausal or it's the time of the month or any other hormonal changes. There's also adjusting to new medication.

[00:14:13] There's also reaching. A new stage in your life. There's new relationships, there's new levels of visibility. There's, there's things that maybe in, in increase a sense of risk to your physical or emotional or financial security and safety. There's also adapting to maybe there's something that you are learning for the first time, a new skill, a new environment.

[00:14:41] There's also things like just burning out and being in the recovery and all of the unknowns involved in that. Like when will I feel better? When will I, uh, have energy again? What will I do to make money? How is this all gonna work? Uh, all of the unknowns can also. Um, take up big space in your processing bandwidth, and that goes for any big unknowns.

[00:15:12] Even like those that aren't so huge like that, like imagine you're starting a new job in two weeks. In those two weeks there's this pre-processing, uh, thing that can happen, which is needing to just not do anything and be in a way on pause. And it's almost like your brain is. Holding space for what's about to happen and for all of the unknowns.

[00:15:38] And there's this big question mark on your subconscious that it's reserving space to answer. So processing bandwidth, um, and all of this can yeah, contribute to your ability to just do the day to day or do the skills that you normally do. Um, another thing, another element or influence. On this, is that possibly some of the things that you do that seem like you could do them really well, were actually skills that were precariously held.

[00:16:13] So maybe it's things that, uh, yeah, you can manage them and do them when you don't have big things on your back burner that you're processing. But when you've got a reduction in energy. Or maybe you're someone who has a chronic illness that varies and it's different on the day to day. Then some of those abilities, those skills that are require more of you, even if they seem so-called basic, they're the first ones to go, right?

[00:16:49] They just get dropped. Your spoons are being allocated elsewhere. Or it might be that you've never fully established a skill as a habit. That no longer, no longer requires a kind of conscious overriding of impulses to keep doing it. So when your bandwidth is loaded and your prefrontal cortex is tired, or you've used up a lot of decision making power, then uh, those skills that other times seem easy become harder.

[00:17:25] Another thing that, uh, is an idea that I've picked up over the years is that for us, because we are these deep dive learners, that learning new skills requires dropping of old ones temporarily. It's like we need all of our body and our whole self and our whole everything to learn and be in the immersive experience of the new one.

[00:17:49] And so old ones, uh, have to be dropped. For temporarily. Let me know if that resonates. And then the same is true with the sensory. Sometimes because we are sensory thinkers, then the mental scaffolding attached to an ability can also be sensory. And so let's say you move house or you have a different place that you are working or.

[00:18:18] Some kind of sensory change happens. That means that those mental scaffolding that is attached to the sensory suddenly disappears, like this can happen. If you go to a different country and everything looks and smells and feel, and everything's just different, then some of those sensory anchors, those touch points are gone, and so the skill is harder.

[00:18:43] Or it's harder to retrieve thought or knowledge that is attached to those sensory, uh, aspects of your environment. Another part of this is if your identity, uh, and especially after a late, uh, late diagnosis or self-identifying if your previous identity was linked to certain skills and abilities and you don't yet know who you are becoming.

[00:19:12] And you are in the middle of an internal reconfiguration of your sense of self and your boundaries and your relationship with who you are. And so this recognition that you don't have to, uh, be something that you're not, and you don't have to compensate, and you don't have to, um, do all of those things in order to maintain your validity.

[00:19:42] Uh, can mean that you just no longer have the energy. Your body just withholds energy for those things, and it's like, I can no longer live in that. And so you lose some of the skills and abilities that were linked to that past identity and have to re uh, configure your relationship with doing those things In terms of who you're becoming.

[00:20:09] One of my first relationships, we went on a trip to London and he was like, we were moving around the, the London Underground. Uh, going from different trains and between stations and having to look at the, the map, right, and look at like, oh, which platform do we need to be on? And I would, was trying to do it with the minimal amount of stoppage, and he was like, why are you rushing?

[00:20:38] And I couldn't explain, but it was this feeling that I had to process this overloading environment very, very fast, as if there was some trick or advantage to doing so that came from. How I habitually responded to any overloading environment, which was to feel like I'm always in catch up. So I was applying that logic to moving around this overloading environment by thinking I needed to be really super fast and not give myself enough time to process.

[00:21:12] So it was a very strange thing to notice about myself. Now it's the opposite. I'm like, cool, it's time to slow down, process. Take it in. What am I doing? Another element of this can be that if this is a new thing, right? If you are looking yourself through this new lens of am I autistic, what does this mean for me?

[00:21:37] And you're reading a lot about different autistic traits, or you're watching a lot of social media videos, or you're learning a lot on the internet and you are in that deep dive and that research and. What you are picking up, you are having these glimmers of self recognition. What can happen is that because these are permission and invitation to parts of you that you'd squashed and suppressed, and that unconsciously you un disallowed or exiled out of your sense of self, the process of reintegrating them and seeing yourself in that way.

[00:22:18] And seeing yourself as having those traits can mean that you make them the entire focus, uh, one at a time, uh, as you integrate them, so it can magnify your awareness and your embodiment of them. I remember in the beginning reading things like, um, autistic people take things too seriously. They can't, they respond to sarcasm or jokes as if it's serious.

[00:22:46] They are more gullible. And I remember for a couple of weeks really seeing that in myself all the time and constantly and wanting to allow myself to just be that and to to, and so, yeah, there was this magnification and this, uh, embodiment and this focus on it. As a way of then allowing that to be something that was part of how I was different.

[00:23:20] This is not the same as trying to look autistic to other people so that you can be believed or trying to find and be a lost self, or trying to show other people that you are autistic by performing autistic traits as you've seen other people do. Yeah, that's completely different. And all that is, is just constructing another mask.

[00:23:48] Another influence can be the fact that we learn on this kind of sensory, um, way, and that can mean especially if it's coupled with a weak sense of self. A weak ego can mean that our increased sensitivity to certain, uh, sensory influences like sound or the way other people move. Can be things that we absorb into our own sense of self or our own communication.

[00:24:19] So things like echo where you repeat, uh, things that you've heard can seem like meaningless repetition of things, right? But it's actually sensory sense making and it's existing in relationship to the sensory in ways that are. Not about like the way that speech is full of reference to things, but that sound is the thing itself.

[00:24:48] This is like music concrete and treating sound for the sound that it is. And Echo Praxia is, is the same thing, but with movement. So picking up other people's mannerisms and movements and so you are. Your the way that you are being. If you are spending more time with people who do move differently or are more autistic, then you may be just picking that up.

[00:25:18] So if that is something that you experience and you are spending more time with autistic or neuro divergent people, then you may be absorbing them in that way as well. Um, another aspect of this is age and. The waning of the ability to do things that you already know don't work for you are a decrease in your patience and desire to fit in and fulfill other people's agenda.

[00:25:47] And so it's like giving less fucks and so it just two people around you can seem like you are becoming more autistic when really you are just. Becoming less guarded and less, uh, less using personas, less and less. So all of these things, and it's definitely not an exhaustive list. There's definitely other inferences.

[00:26:16] Let me know if you can think of some. Um, but all of these can make it seem like there's an inconsistency to who you are. Or that you are erratic or you are faking it, or you're being irresponsible or you're not being truthful in what is hard and none of that is the case, right? So I wanted to give permission for the ebb and flow of your ability as something that waxes and wanes, but also just acknowledge how this can make, communicating that what you do need and access needs.

[00:26:53] So much harder because they're not consistent and they're environment dependent, and they're also not just environment dependent, but dependent on what you are currently processing that may relate to big picture stuff that may relate to something that happened weeks ago or yesterday that may not be visible to the people around you.

[00:27:13] So communicating what you need as something that is. Changeable and not a fixed thing that is always the same, is a really essential part of this. One of the siblings in the program came to using my invitation to always know your intention, to know what you want and why in regards to access needs, and so.

[00:27:43] Talking to people around them in terms of this is why I want to set things up, or for us to do this in this way, but I want the how to be flexible. I want to be able to communicate when and if it changes and that. Communicating that why being a really effective way to bring them on board. So let me know, what resonated.

[00:28:07] Have you experienced becoming so-called more autistic? Have you experienced, uh, ups and downs in who you, how you express yourself in your abilities, in your skillsets? And, um, yeah, I would love to hear from you. That's it for today. Love you lots, and I'll talk to you next week. Bye.

[00:28:32] Thank you for listening to this week's Unmasking Unschool podcast. It means the world to meet that you and I. Are in orbit. You can join my mailing list and receive other resources and insights and stories for your journey of self becoming. And if you're ready to go deeper into this work and you're looking for support to implement it all and activate your future self, I wanna invite you to join my six month online unmasking unschool.

[00:28:59] It's called the Solar System Plus siblings. You're gonna unlearn the habits of self negating and hiding, create the worthiness, self clarity and self-belief. To then go and create culture shifts first in your relationship to yourself, and then riffing out into everything you do and beyond. Click the link in the show notes for all the info and I will see you insight.