Autism: How It's Made

A Blog About Living the Good Life with the Dark Gift

While they asked, “Marc, what on earth happened—you could have won us the game!” I was thinking, If only someone had told me the rules! 
   .Marc Fleisher, Survival Strategies for People on the Autism Spectrum 

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The Dark Gift blog is for folks endowed with autism or who suspect they may be so endowed.

This series of articles pursue one goal: to help you understand how autism works in your brain (physically, mentally, and emotionally) and how you can live a peaceful, productive, fulfilling life with the dark gift. In particular, the blog will help you understand why we have such trouble connecting with other people and shares cutting-edge ideas on building your own satisfying community of deep connection.

This blog is part memoir of a life with the dark gift, part science of the mind, and all self-improvement for you.

The “autistic memoir” developed into a distinctive literary genre in the twenty-first century. (This blog will include many quotes from talented autistic authors.) Such biographies feature similar openings. A young narrator experiences unexpected challenges with socializing. Classmates seem drawn to activities that do not hold the same appeal for the narrator. Friends prove elusive. In fact, all manner of human fellowship proves tricky to navigate and sustain, though it’s not clear why. When you’re alone, all is smooth and calm. The moment a stranger trundles into the room however, the air itself seems to change into something abrasive and draining.

All this inexplicable friction leads to dark feelings of being misunderstood. Rejected. Disconnected. Isolated. The dawning realization that you are not like other people.

Though most autists share youthful experiences characterized by not fitting in, where our stories tend to diverge is right after that heady moment when we first learn the truth about why everyone thinks we’re weird:

Because we are autistic!

This epiphany of self-discovery can be a turning point in our lives, whether arriving in elementary school or retirement.

Before the diagnosis, all is gloom and confusion. Thereafter, a liberating sense of self-awareness blooms. Sometimes even a physical lightness, as if a sheaf of helium balloons draws you skywards. Sometimes one feels exoneration. This ugly, forlorn chunk of myself I never put a name to other than Broken I can now label Autism. I am not self-absorbed, I am not aloof. I am not a freak. There’s simply something happening in my brain.

In my late twenties I discovered that autism encoiled my cerebral lobes like a python. The revelation was a turning point for me. I had known for years something was wrong with me. I was different than my peers, that much was clear. I spent years trying to deduce what was going on. So in 1997 when I discovered the source of my chronic social disruption was an enigmatic madness labeled autism it wasn’t a colossal surprise. But it didn’t provide much relief, either.

I knew nothing of autism before my diagnosis. Nothing. I nursed the same vague caricature of autism many mental health professionals clung to throughout the 1990s: that autism was a crippling near-psychotic mental illness that struck scrawny white boys and made them hide in the corner drooling and banging their head. (One of the leading and wholly misguided theories of that era was that autism was a “masculinization of the brain.” Talk about marginalizing women with the dark gift!)

After my diagnosis, I studied the academic literature on autism. I consulted neuropsychologists and psychiatrists about my condition. Upon completing my survey of humanity’s state of knowledge regarding what psychiatry’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (Fourth Edition) referred to as “299.00, Autistic Disorder,” I concluded that science and medicine didn’t comprehend the condition. They were lost in the horseweed. They couldn’t offer the help I needed.

Investigators and clinicians were going about autism research the wrong way, is what I concluded. I thought their models were wrong. I thought their basic conception of autism was wrong. It sure didn’t match my own experience.

So I rejected the medical model of autism as mental illness. Instead, I embraced my condition. Not as an illness. As a gift. A dark gift.

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I decided to investigate autism on my own. I would try hard to figure out how my autism worked. If I did, maybe I could explain other people’s autism, too. I embarked on a three-decade odyssey of learning everything I could about the brain. I studied the neural architecture of our brain, I studied neural dynamics, I studied the wild and tricky math that governs human cognition. Like most folks cursed or blessed with the dark gift, I can devour massive quantities of knowledge like a machine and eventually I became a master of mathematical neuroscience.

I discovered that deep beneath the surface crust of autism, past our mental mantle down within the molten core of our autistic sentience throbs a wellspring of psychic power. Over the course of my life I learned how to tap this hidden power to rocket to the stars.

Before I could learn to fly, I had to reject the bulk of what society told me about my dark gift. This blog is predicated upon the conviction that almost everything you’ve heard about autism is probably wrong.

My subversive perspective arises out of a particular conception of the neural dynamics of autism. This perspective is called Dynamic Mind. We’ll need to learn key principles of Dynamic Mind to understand how autism is made in the brain. The Dynamic Mind perspective challenges traditional views of autism held by university professors and mental health scholars. Mainstream psychiatry claims:

Autism is a spectrum disorder.

Autism is a developmental disorder.

Autism is a theory of mind disorder.

Together, we will learn why these tantalizing claims are wrong.

Autism is a genetic condition.

That’s not exactly wrong. . .  but it’s not exactly right, either.

People with autism are neurodivergent. . . .

There’s one label adopted and promulgated by the autism community that troubles me more than the misbegotten and stultifying spectrum disorder. Make that two labels: neurodivergent and the flip side of the neurodivergent coin, neurotypical.

“Neurodivergent” and the passive-aggressive “neurotypical” are grave offenses against reason and morality. To understand why, we’ll need to learn a few basic things about how minds work. But the bottom line explanation is pretty simple:

It’s never a good idea to divide folks into us and them.

(That goes for male and female autism, too: we’re far more alike than you may think. It’s just that long ago academics messed things up badly and left us to dig ourselves out of their mountain of misconceptions. Including their misguided conviction that female autism doesn’t exist or if it does exist then it’s something different than male autism.) 

I’ll criticize ideas I believe harm autists more than help us—but this is not a blog devoted to knocking old things down. This is a blog of building new things up. Of sparking new dreams and revitalizing old ones. This blog is a bright red thread leading out of a dark maze. A journey of joy, love, and contact. For me, the most disheartening consequence of the blizzard of misinformation about autism is that for too long it obscured the great and wondrous blessings of autism. Such as:

There are mental states only autistic minds can access.

There are ways of learning only available to autistic minds.

There are ways of being only available to us, including distinctive emotions, insights, and lifestyles.

The Dark Gift makes the case that if you embrace your autism on your own terms, not the terms of the DSM or academic mindscience or even the terms of the autism community, you can experience astonishing emotional epiphanies. You can experience peace, even if your life feels tempestuous. Purpose, even if your life feels aimless. Fulfillment, even if very little you do seems to satisfy. Achievement, even if you feel you haven’t accomplished anything worthwhile.

For most of my life I never thought I’d get a happily-ever-after. My dark gift impairs my ability to read, write, speak, listen, pronounce words correctly, control the volume of my speech, sing, dance, draw, learn foreign languages, follow verbal instructions, understand class lectures, participate in business meetings, work in an office, respect authority, detect social cues, heed social norms, perceive the flow of time, remember my past, and do math. This has made it challenging to function in society.

I was booted from college five times. I’ve never been able to hold down a job involving an office or a boss. I slammed into static and confusion whenever I tried to connect with folks and apprehend what they feel, think, and intend. Other humans seemed enshrouded within dark burqas whose wavy black fabric obscured their movement and anatomy, reducing them to barest contours. I spent a lifetime working out how to lift those veils and revel in the incandescent minds so long obscured from my perception.

That is, after all, the Holy Grail for autistic hearts: bridging our yawning social chasm to unite in harmonious communion with another soul.

Converting these autistic opportunities for peace, fulfillment, and connection into your personal reality is neither easy nor inevitable. It requires effort. There’s no silver bullet for overcoming the darkness of the dark gift. If you want to unlock the wisdom, fellowship, and compassion incarcerated within your autistic brain, you must take a long-term view of the evolution of your autism.

This blog is predicated upon the conviction that autism should be understood as a lifespan dynamic. As a form of mental activity that (like all mental activity) can be shaped and guided over time toward a purposeful end. Over many years—decades, in my case—autism can generate new and stable neural dynamics that produce new and marvelous experiences for the autist. If you’re young, you’ve got your whole life ahead to refashion your dark gift to suit you. If you’ve been around the block, you may have less time ahead but more mental and emotional resources to draw upon to guide your evolution more efficiently and joyfully.

My experience of my dark gift today, in my fifties, is radically different from my experience in my thirties, which was radically different from my experience in my teens. I’m going to help you see the dark gift as a dynamic, shape-shifting entity, like a river that with practice and discipline you can redirect and channel to your own ends. We should all think of autism as a multi-decade project of directed development and self-renovation.

For a newborn autistic mind, the earliest years matter tremendously. Intervention with autistic toddlers is essential for the best long-term outcomes, the evidence persuasively shows. Fortunately, Western institutions of medicine and education have improved their ability to identify and support children endowed with the dark gift. But where society still falls woefully short is dealing with autfolk once we pass college age.

Autistic adults, especially adults who never got diagnosed as kids, usually tumble into a gaping societal hole. Western society loves its autistic children—but hasn’t figured out what to do with them once they’re grown-up and struggling.

This blog attempts to fill society’s adult autism crater, at least partially.

There’s a fairly simple reason the shrinks got us wrong for more than a century. Our autistic minds operate different than non-autistic minds. This is the single most important truth about autism. A truth fueling so much mutual confusion! So much misery! All because we think different.

And this is the disconnect.

All facets of our autistic experience are bound up in some form with the disconnect between autistic and non-autistic minds. The bulk of the misfortunes—and opportunities—associated with the dark gift arise because autistic and non-autistic folks think different.

The way leopard and cheetah think different.

They’re both felines. Both predators of the African savannah. But when leopard sees prey, she thinks about hiding then pouncing in a strong sudden strike. When cheetah sees prey, she thinks about stalking then chasing at superquick speed.

Leopard and cheetah have much in common and usually get along fine. But problems arise if leopard decides cheetah should pounce instead of sprint. Or worse, if cheetah goes along with leopard’s decree and starts lamenting her poor pouncing skills.

Cheetah got to run.

So far, the best our medical and scientific institutions offered those of us with autism are tricks and gimmicks. Nifty little techniques to help you get by. Simple practices so you don’t get swallowed whole by the world. And some tricks can be helpful, don’t get me wrong. But what we really want is true change. We don’t want a future where we’re constantly performing ad hoc stratagems to get through the day. We want a future where we are at home in the world. Where we can just be and our experience of being is peaceful and joyful and easy.

But reaching such a state of easy peace demands time and effort and failure. Autism extracts a heavy price from those of us stricken with the dark gift. But I tell you, pilgrim—if I’m going to pay a price that high, I’m going to make damn sure I get my money’s worth.

And I’ll show you how to get your money’s worth, too.

From here, you can start reading:

Autism Lessons: The Dark Gift Blog: An Overview

or

A Memoir of Autism: Memoir Part 1: Born Autistic: The Intruder