Tag: neurodiversity

Life update (02/19/2025)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

Recently I found out about an intriguing Norwegian songwriter named Aurora Aksnes. Her general demeanour as well as clear stimming when performing live made me suspect she was autistic, which she apparently has confirmed herself. I’ve been reflecting on the autistic artists that end up floating to the top.

Apart from Aurora Aksnes, I know of other songwriters that have spoken about being autistic: Björk Guðmundsdóttir (I’ve never retained any of her songs, so I can’t link to anything in particular), Claire Elise Boucher (AKA Grimes, one of Elon Musk’s many exes, Musk himself being autistic), and Ladyhawke (I barely know anything about her, but that song is cool enough). I’ve suspected for many years that Joanna Newsom is also autistic.

To make it as an artist, you need luck, connections, a winning personality, and preferably an attractive physical form. Most autists are doomed when it comes to connections and winning personalities, to the extent that they eat into their luck. That leaves whatever remains of luck, as well as the attractive physical form. Given that men are more likely than women to elevate others professionally because they’re hot, that makes it far, far more likely than any autistic artist that makes it out of obscurity will be a woman that at her peak was very attractive, in some cases drop-dead gorgeous. That’s certainly the case for all those female songwriters mentioned. If I recall correctly, Joanna Newsom herself (I say herself because she may as well be a god as far as I’m concerned) didn’t intend to perform in public. She recorded her songs with a Fisher Price recorder, then passed her tapes to her friends. One of those friends went to a Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy concert and gave him the tape, which led to Newsom getting a recording contract with Drag City. It probably also led to Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy wanting to bang Newsom really, really bad (she wrote the song “Go Long” mainly about him). Anyway, I naturally connect more with autistic artists than with those who aren’t, which makes me regret that the vast majority of them are lingering in absolute obscurity.

About ten years ago, when I was working on my Serious Six, the novellas I sent around hoping to get published, I met regularly with a group of local autists, so I got to know like fifteen or twenty of them. I believe I met three autistic women in total, but there were some troubling commonalities: all the female autists were in relationships with neurotypical men who were, by the women’s own admission, very accommodating. All the autistic men save for two were single. The tales of those two, well, they’d make you want to be single. Their partners seemed to recriminate most aspects of their nature, and had them running on a treadmill to counter their shortcomings. Both of them seemed to be on edge and generally miserable all the time.

I also realized that there is a huge schism among autists: there are those whose peculiarities have been embraced and nurtured by their parents and close ones, then there are those whose natures have been repressed to pass for normal. I’m in the latter group. The autists in the first group are far happier, freer, and often obnoxious. Autists, of course, can be extremely obnoxious; I recall having been that way at different points of my life. Those of the repressed group not only are generally guarded and somber, but can deal with lots of self-hate and even trauma. Many of them don’t make it far in life, as in they step out of life at some point of the journey.

Of course there’s the general ignorance about autism, mainly thanks to the media. I recall the admin worker that many years ago had to assess my disability level asking me how come if autism is a developmental disorder, I still struggle with it as an adult. Who’s the retard here? Then there are those that believe autists to be math geniuses with perfect memories. In reality, autists are more likely than not to have tremendous issues with abstraction, and regarding math, many end up with some level of dyscalculia. Some idiots mention Rain man even today; Hoffman’s performance was based on a single guy who wasn’t even autistic: he was born without a corpus callosum.

Also, autism is caused by an atypical pruning of neural connections during development, which leads to idiosyncratic neurological processing. They proved that the differences between the neural activations between autists are larger than between those who aren’t autistic, nevermind how large those differences are between autists and those who aren’t autistic. That makes it hard to generalize about autists, although they are generally extremely sensitive (both emotionally and to sensory input), more likely to suffer from gut issues, also more likely to suffer from OCD and ADHD (I have the OCD comorbidity, which comes with intrusive thoughts and heightened obsessions). Also weird stuff like prosopagnosia, which I have, and consists on being unable to properly register a face. It’s so bad that I can’t tell if I ever saw again one of the girls I dated even though we lived close, because I wouldn’t have been able to recognize her on the street. When I worked as a technician and had to interact with nurses and doctors, it was common for me to enter a room, talk to someone, walk away to do something, and then realize I had no clue whom I had just talked to.

I got to thinking about autism in general because the protagonist of the novel I’m writing at the moment, The Scrap Colossus, is a female autist to whom I’ve assigned the authorship of the six novellas I wrote back in the day. But as I work on the notes, I’m having a hard time pretending that Elena, being an attractive woman, would have had that much issue getting those novellas published. Perhaps that’s bitterness talking through me. Since I was a child, I’ve felt cursed in that respect: no matter what I did, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get anybody to pay any attention to what mattered to me. It seems there’s no further point I wanted to make about that other than saying it.

Anyway, I’ve got a scene to finish, so bye.

Life update (12/10/2024)

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

I’ve worked as a computer technician for a hospital for about six years. A couple of weeks ago, though, the big boss at the office told me that until January 12, I would be programming instead. I’m a trained programmer, not that it necessarily means anything; some of the best programmers in the world are mostly self-taught, and I’ve certainly learned more on my own than from any course. In any case, working these past few weeks as a programmer for this public health organization has shown me that most of my issues with my job these last six years were due to me being ill-suited to my tasks.

I suppose I’ll have to mention again that I’m autistic, as in literally autistic. Atypical synaptic pruning resulting in idiosyncratic neurological pathways and all that. As permanent as Down Syndrome, but fancier. While many (perhaps most) autistics end up the groaning, hitting themselves kind (not that I don’t groan or hit myself at times), I can sustain a semblance of normalcy, with severe limitations relevant to this matter: I have a hard time handling change and interruptions, noise, bright lights, interaction with human beings, etc. I also have a, let’s put it this way, unstable interior world.

Computer technicians are the firefighters of the computer world: some days very little happens, and other days you’re putting out fires everywhere. The notion of heading to the office and spending seven hours dreading whatever unpredictable problem may come my way grinded on my nerves. Most of those tasks also involve dealing with users, which I fucking hate, as I dislike interacting with humans. Programming, though, is generally blissful: I know in advance what needs to be done, and I’m on my own, building the system so that a computer performs that task. I even do it for fun in my spare time, as you know already if you’ve followed my posts. I’d say I’m a pretty good programmer. In addition, with AI these days, you can do the job of a week in a day.

My issue with my current job has been, unsurprisingly, the human element. I attend meetings almost daily to figure out how to progress from our current point, and all those meetings have been a demonstration on how differently other people’s brains work compared to my autistic brain: for me, the topics jump wildly from one to another, based on logic I can’t grasp. When the conversation seems to be approaching something resembling concrete information, suddenly I have to process interjections or digressions. It’s like trying to keep your toes in contact with the sea floor while the waves keep pushing you around. From time to time I try to steer the conversation in ways I can comprehend, such as, “So, to produce this result, this and this data are relevant. Do I have that right?” I rarely need more than that information, so as far as I’m concerned, the meetings could be reduced to five minute affairs.

I’ve been called “serious” more times that I can count. I even had one random employee of the hospital, who watched me exit a network closet, say, “Ah, I know you, you’re that serious guy from the bus.” I didn’t recognize him, but I guess he takes the same bus to work. I’m a silly bastard, and my interests are generally as unserious as can be, but I guess I have one of those faces. In addition, I barely speak, and when I do, it’s because a point needs to be made. I’m not the person to rely on when you need emotional support, because if I pay attention at all, I probably won’t give a shit. Yes, this would make me a terrible partner and father, and you know what? I refrain from being either. If I had the body to get away with it, and could stand people a bit more, I would have probably been the hit-it-and-quit-it type. Not that it particularly matters, but my bus and train rides are a succession of, “Man, she looks good, really fills out those leggings. Cute face. Damn, that long hair is so shiny and soft. Check out that mommy type; I’d love to see her in some lingerie. I need to squeeze that ass.” Thankfully I spend most of the time looking down at my tablet.

Anyway, what I guess I wanted to say is that I’m doing much better than usual. When I wake up in the morning, I don’t think, as I constantly did, like Ignatius Reilly put it in Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces: “The day before me is fraught with God knows what horrors.” I read manga on the train (right now Hanazawa’s Boys on the Run; fantastic read), do some programming, attend a meeting or two, then head home to continue exploring of my range of kinks (did one about rescuing a girl from homelessness yesterday; real lovely). True self-exploration kind of deal. I’m also getting triple pay this month due to the holidays’ extra and unspent vacation time. So things could be far worse.

However, things haven’t gone well for people who are technically attached to me. My brother’s dog had to be put down, which caused him to kick a curb and break his big toe. Three or so weeks of medical leave. Just yesterday, my sister’s boyfriend got into a serious car accident and somehow got sent home despite having head trauma, his car having gotten totalled. My parents are old and progressively getting more unhinged. That sort of thing. I’m a detached sort of fellow so I can’t say I take any of it to heart too much. However, my two remaining cats are quite old, and whenever they die, it’s going to fucking devastate me as the previous deaths did; that’s mainly why I’ve decided to never own pets again. I just can’t take the heartbreak. On a fundamental level, I think it’s wrong to raise some creature that you know won’t outlast you; it’s like a perversion of the child-rearing instinct or something.

That’s all for today, it seems.

Life update (10/04/2024)

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Slice of life1 Comment

For no apparent reason, my brain regularly reminds me of events from my long-gone youth, such as my middle school and high school years. Mainly I remember people whom I haven’t seen in more than twenty years. There’s this girl who invited me to hang out in middle school; she was autistically awkward, and seemed interested in me for unknown reasons. Last I knew of her was her receiving, during an arts and crafts class, a nasty gash that bisected her forehead and left a terrible scar presumably for the rest of her life. I never saw her again after middle school, but I remember her sadly from time to time; after all, if I could have cared for her, maybe she would have become my friend. In 2021, I wrote a poem about her. I don’t remember her name, so I can’t google her. I assume she killed herself.

There’s also this guy I hung out with in high school. Name’s Urko, if I recall correctly. He invited me out a few times, but I only recall us sitting at a bench as he went on about PlayStation 2 games. I was a PC gamer through and through, and must have been heavily into Morrowind at the time. I doubt I ever said much to him. I didn’t really want to hang out with anyone, but I was in a period of my life, spurred on by my mother, in which I forced myself to behave like a “normal person,” and normal people were supposed to want to hang out with others, so that’s what I did. Also, life at home wasn’t good either, so I suppose I didn’t want to spent too much time there.

Last time I spoke to the guy, I was playing a basketball match in which that guy also participated. The guy ended up spraining his ankle, and was carried away. Later that week, he approached me and said something to the effect of, “I won’t hang out with you anymore. When I sprained my ankle, you didn’t even ask how I was doing. You don’t care at all, do you?” And he was right, I didn’t.

When I was a teenager, I had the terrible luck of meeting a malignant narcissist. I hung out with him and others for a year and a half or so, until I grew bored of the whole thing. Well, he didn’t accept the fact that life was pulling us in separate ways: from then on, until literally the year of his death in a car accident, the guy, for no apparent reason other than because “he doesn’t understand that friendship is the most important thing in the world,” he made it a life mission to poison every single social group I ended up in, which at that point was mainly the ones I was obligated to find myself in, as in school. He went out of his way (he didn’t attend classes in my city) to befriend people of my class, and even my brother. He approached my then girlfriend and started trying to get her to break up with me. He got really mad, to the extent that it disturbed a friend of his, when my girlfriend, bless her cheating heart, exposed him for having done stuff such as breaking into my email and hijacking my website. In his twenties, that bastard was rising in the ranks of the regional socialist party as a politician, and was the kind to exploit his power to hurt people as much as he could, while smiling to the face of those he was manipulating. When I saw his obituary in the paper, I burst out laughing. Served him right. Why not, here’s an article in Spanish about his death. David Martínez, who unfortunately shares a name with the protagonist of the Cyberpunk: Edgerunners series, was truly my nemesis: nobody has bothered to hinder my existence remotely to that extent since.

It’s always been a struggle for me to care about human beings. Given that I didn’t have the instinct for it, for most of my youth I took it as an intellectual, deliberate pursuit. You cared about people when you made yourself care for them; that’s how I thought it worked for others. Whenever someone approached me, I felt anxious, guarded. As they spoke, in my mind I kept repeating, “Please, stop talking to me.” I couldn’t wait to return to solitude and to my turbulent relationship with my subconscious (who is a motocross legend, as well as the love of my life).

It’s not remotely your run-of-the-mill introversion, of course: I was diagnosed with high-functioning autism (so-called Asperger’s) in my mid-twenties. Due to the cause of autism, which seems to be a non-uniform pruning of neural connections during development, my neurological make-up is different to virtually everyone else, even other autistic people. I read somewhere that on those machines that test neural activity, autists are more different from each other than non-autistic people are from each other, let alone autistic people from non-autistic people. In practice, that means that the things that soothe non-autistic people very well may be terrifying for autistic people. The things that make most people feel good may be jarring or extremely annoying to autists. They are societies of one forced to coexist with foreigners.

I can’t even count how many times someone, I’m tempted to say “some moron,” has suggested to me to behave in this or that way, assuming that my brain worked like theirs and therefore I would experience the same results (that’s assuming that those people weren’t genuine morons and had a proper handle on the mechanisms of their brains). In truth, autists become acutely aware from early on that they’re different from everyone else, and a significant part of their lives consists on adapting to other people’s often bizarre behaviors and needs, that are only the norm because they’re the majority. Many people seem to believe that everyone feels as they feel, although I’m not shocked given how naive if not straight-up retarded most people are when it comes to organizing society.

Maybe because I’ve had my brain functions disrupted by a hemiplegic migraine and by severe stress lately, I’ve been thinking about that troublesome organ of ours. One of the writers I used to admire the most (even though I haven’t read anything of his since my early twenties), John Fowles, author of mainly The Collector and The Magus, suffered a stroke, and afterwards he never wrote fiction again. He said that the stroke had robbed him of his imagination, and he simply didn’t have the drive anymore. He had written because his brain was configured to work like that, for him to want to write in the first place.

Studies about people whose brain hemispheres were surgically separated to prevent severe epilepsy have pretty much proven that free will is an illusion (check, for example, this article on the subject). I’ve always suspected as much, so I don’t believe in my own delusions: I do things because I’m urged to do them. In my spare time, if I feel like writing, I do so. If I feel like producing music or programming, I do those instead. You could say that it’s a lack of discipline or something, because one may give up on a hard task and instead waste his time unproductively, but I’d say that the very “want” of doing something hard instead of wasting one’s time is the urge your brain forces you to follow. I’m just glad that I haven’t been pressured by my brain into killing people or doing similarly troublesome things that would land me in prison. On a regular basis, I do imagine many, many things that would land me in prison, though.

All these things also prove that you’re just your brain. If part of it dies, there’s no “soul” to correct the missing part. I’m fairly certain that ghosts exist, but I’m inclined to believe that they’re some sort of electromagnetic phenomena produced by the brain while it was alive (I’ve come across studies on the matter recently), phenomena that may be preserved in specific objects or locations because of subatomic entanglement. Why won’t those wave functions collapse, who knows. Anyway, there’s no “other place” after death, Abrahamic or not, that will justify all the pain and horribleness of life. And unless the universe itself is a simulation, that may very well be, we only consider reasons regarding its existence because its configuration has allowed us to exist, meaning that for all we know there are uncountable universes out there in which nobody can consider such matters.

Why did I write all this garbage? It’s 9:17 in the morning, I’m at work, and I have nothing else to do. Why did you bother reading it? That’s the real question, ain’t it.

EDIT: the AI-generated Google podcast Deep Dive has quickly become my favorite podcast (not that I listen to many podcasts these days). I’ve fed it this post, and it has come up with the following podcast: