If autism means genius why do I stay in bed?

I kept this picture to remind myself that when I don’t want to get out of bed and I do anyway, I’m glad I did. The picture doesn’t inspire me, so I’m putting it here to remind us all that tricks for self-discipline that work for most people do not work for people with autism.

Luckily there are lots of ways we can make our lives easier, we just need to use different methods. Therefore: my 7-week workshop about autism! Each week, I’ll summarize research on the topic then we’ll discuss how to apply it in our own lives. In between meetings we’ll continue those discussions on a private forum, where I’ll be available to answer questions and share stories.

I know I’m getting serious about this because I have slides for each session, which I’ve never done in the past. I’m not saying that I’m going to be perfectly organized – I know my limits. But at least if you can’t make it to one of the sessions, you can watch it on video.

This is the plan for what we’ll cover:

Week 1

Autism testing is a Ponzi scheme.  Schools don’t teach how to test a woman for autism so test yourself instead of going to a self-described testing expert. Scientists have created tests for autistic women to test themselves in order to sidestep the red tape of testing experts. And once you see the sidestepping process, you’ll be an unstoppable resource for friends and family.

How to get test results that matter. The autism test is unactionable – that is, there’s nothing to do with the results. Schools don’t even accept autism as a reason to give extra help. So you need to learn practical testing like how to ace an IEP, and how to talk to psychiatrists to get medicine.

Week 2

Autistic inertia is real. The autistic brain has a self-control malfunction; during early development our excessive IQ took over where our self-control would have been. Really! This means we need new solutions to succeed when a situation requires executive function, self-management, or sensory overload.

How to get out of bed. Behavioral therapy is a non-starter for us. But learning to recognize why we’re tired helps a lot. You know how the Inuit have a lot of words for snow? Autistic women have a lot of words for tired. Because we can have excitement for one thing and no energy for other things. At the same time. That’s autistic tired. And we can work around that. Even from bed.

Week 3

Epigenetic autism is the troublemaker. Having an autistic brain comes with lots of perks, and it’s fun to be smart. What makes autism truly difficult is families have been hiding it for generations. Seeing the impact our parents’ autism had on our childhood allows us to separate autistic trauma from simply having an autistic brain. Autism can flourish when autistic trauma ends.

How to make a big difference fast. We’re the first generation to have information to trace epigenetic autism, and we’re the first generation who can pass down autism in a careful way. But we have to start now, and scientists are scared to talk to us about this. So we have to talk to each other. We can change autism from being a risk factor for childhood trauma to being a family treasure.

Week 4

Camouflaging works at home not at work.  Masking is ubiquitous among autistic women. But costs of camouflaging are high, and the research about how unsuccessful we are at camouflaging is surprising. So camouflaging in most places only serves to keep people from helping us, but camouflaging inside the home is essential for everyone’s emotionally stability.

How to tell what gives you away. Autistic women who are camouflaging still have rhythms and tics that are small enough that we don’t notice. But they’re large enough that at six weeks old, a scientists can tell if a baby has an autistic mother. Learning when and where to camouflage decreases stress levels measurably for not only us but the people around us.

Week 5

Female friendship has a timeline, we’re not on it. In elementary school a friend acts as a our social skills guide. In high school we have a hard time knowing who are real friends because we don’t understand reciprocity. In our 20s and 30s we fall so far behind in the ways people form friendships that by our 40s we’re in sync with only each other.

How to tell who’s a real friend. There’s a friendship scale that scientists use to measure connection. Most autistic women are so far off that scale with friendships that it almost doesn’t apply. But we can learn why the scale matters and adjust to it. And there’s a ripple effect; changing one friendship changes them all.

Week 6

Finding a theory of mind. This is a label for how much we can tell what other people know. It’s a deficit we have, but the nature of the deficit is that we don’t know we have it. So it’s one of the most difficult parts of autism to understand. But one of the biggest opportunities.

How to stop wishing people would change. Most conflict in autistic relationships comes down to theory of mind. Once we get that arguments are about blind spots, we become much more accepting of the people we love; they’re not being difficult/selfish/stupid. They just don’t see. And this is true for us, sometimes, as well. Understanding autism means living a kinder life with it.

Week 7

Autism means gifted. Labels like synesthesia, dyslexia, dysgraphia, and hyperlexia connote gifted ways of seeing, thinking and hearing. Traits like unique personal memory and perfect ear for dialogue make us built for memoir. We see see questions and answers that others don’t because we see patterns everywhere, and we see far outside social norms.

How to make sure you’re leveraging your gifts. Many of us have been using our gifts all along, but in hiding, so we never see our genius. When we understand our autistic identity we can best use our autistic gift. We can be more forgiving of ourselves by understanding we have inconsistent energy that comes in bursts. — because we are autistic geniuses even when we can’t get out of bed.

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First class is March 15. Sign up now.

The sessions will be every Wednesday for seven weeks at either 2pm or 8pm Eastern (you pick). The forum will be active the whole seven weeks.

The cost is $195.

There are recordings of the sessions in case you have to miss any. But hopefully you won’t; I’m looking forward to getting to know everyone better.

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Open letter to Boston University’s business school students

I was walking my dog in the Boston Common today, near the Embrace. A controversial sculpture is a great place to train an Australian Shepherd because people approach from all angles in the park with intention. Then people slow down and meander, directionless, trying to understand which way to look at the sculpture. Herding dogs do not respect this behavior.

So I work on teaching her to leave people alone when they are not behaving like a proper herd of cattle. I am a sloppy, inattentive dog trainer, so it’s good for me to train in an area where the stakes high if I don’t pay attention. I make my dog look me in the eye before every treat, I make her sit when someone walks close to her, I give her small treats even though my instinct is to give bigger treats because I would devote a bigger part of my brain to a task if someone were giving me bigger treats.

Two students came up to me with clipboards and said, “Do you have a moment to talk to us?” This is not unusual. If you live in expensive, liberal cities — Park Slope, Santa Monica, Boston — nonprofits hire students to ask people for money. And the kids always approach older women walking alone because the kids assume everyone else is too busy to stop. So I make a practice of telling the kids to fuck off in order to challenge their assumptions about age and gender.

But the students said, “We’re from Boston University’s business school,” so I couldn’t resist asking what they wanted to talk about. They said, “We’re doing market research for a new restaurant idea in Boston.”

I said, “I can talk with you if you can put up with me teaching my dog to not bark at you while we talk.” The dog barked at them.

They said, “The restaurant would serve only soups. Would you be interested in that type of restaurant?”

I said, “You should do a case study about Souplantation. It was a restaurant in California that catered to people with eating disorders and it went bankrupt.”

They said, “Okay. Goodbye.”

What the hell? I wasn’t done! First of all, Boston University’s business school should have an entrance exam where someone tells the prospective student that Souplantation went out of business because their client base was people with eating disorders. And if the prospective student does not ask, “Why is that?” then the student is rejected.

But I have so much more to say about a soup-only restaurant. People who make a meal out of soup are filling up on water: eating disorder (and autistic). And if they drag their friends there, the place has to have bread, and the bread has to be amazing and varied so friends come back, and then core customers gorge on bread and use soup to throw it up.

But I digress.

Let’s say there is someone who does not know about eating disorder culture and they are standing in front of a soup-only restaurant. There is soup on most menus because every culture has their own soup. There is matzah ball soup, turtle soup and gazpacho, and really, who wants to go to a single restaurant that is making all of those? It’s like going to Canal street to buy Luis Vuitton and Chanel and Supreme at the same $10 booth. Also, because there is soup on every menu, you can do a price-point study and discover that NO ONE MAKES MONEY ON SOUP.

When my kid was little, he once ordered a supersalad. The waitress said, “Huh?” It turned out that he had heard “soup or salad” so often that he thought it was one thing you got as a little extra. And that’s how everyone thinks of soup in a restaurant — as a little extra freebie. And restaurants offer a cup because most people don’t want a bowl because it’s slow to eat and Americans like to shovel in food and Boston is where you go for American food. That’s why the number-one thing served in a bowl in Boston is clam chowder: the most possible calories per spoonful.

The best way to do market research for a soup business is to make a pop-up UberEats business and see if you make money. There is no overhead, you can do different soups every day, and you can market test faster via an app where people are actually buying than walking around Boston Common where people are only guessing what they might buy. People don’t like to do quick accurate market research because they don’t want to find out their idea sucks.

Good market research happens all the time because its life observation. While I was talking with the students, I was having a really difficult time with my dog. And I decided to talk to them instead of pay attention to my dog. And I cut my training session short to go home and write this letter to them. If they had asked me, what I would have told them is Boston needs more dog training services. There are literally none. There are not even waitlists. Everyone got pandemic puppies. None of the dogs are trained by trainers. There’s a huge backlog and most of the trainers live outside of the city because why wouldn’t they?

My dream trainer would come to my apartment once a day, pick up the dog and maybe as a bonus the trainer would have a soup of the day.

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What happens if you ditch talk therapy and focus on behavior? (And Happy Mardi Gras!)

I’m in New Orleans on the floor of my hotel room while Z sleeps. He sleeps in the middle of the day so we can go out at night. The first night we saw jazz bands at 2am. Accidentally. They were so loud underneath our window that we went outside to find a band on every corner playing for tips. Read more

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