The World Cup is in Boston, and I live in the middle of the city, so I spent two weeks surrounded by Scottish people. Boston has a literal law against happy hour and a nightlife notorious for being lame. So it made sense that the Scots, who go to bars the way we go to Starbucks, drank all the beer in the city. There were beer delivery trucks lining the streets to keep up. Read more
Quilts from Gees Bend
People email me their result from my personality test, and I can tell from the way they write the email that the test result is wrong. Finally, I realized that a huge percentage of the people who find their way to me are autistic, and autism breaks the Myers Briggs test. It’s like I accidentally ran a fifteen year study on autism and personality type. Read more
My oldest kid wrote this five years ago for the college application essay. It didn’t work for a college essay. But I was so glad to read it. If you haven’t read my first post on multiple personality disorder, you can read it here. I will answer any questions you have on this topic on Monday, Nov. 24 at 5pm Eastern. Zoom link forthcoming.
On my sixteenth birthday, my mother told me she has dissociative identity disorder. It means that she has multiple identities – alters – that’s what people with DID call them. She’s had it my whole life. DID only occurs when a person experiences such terrible trauma as a child that they create another person in order to hide from what is happening to them. Read more
photo by Joshua Sariñana
I have multiple personality disorder
I’ve actually known this since 2013 when a psychiatrist at Northwestern University told me.
At the time I told myself it’s a misdiagnosis and I have autism. I told myself mental health professionals are so stupid and they are always misdiagnosing everyone and I have to figure out everything myself. I spent the next decade figuring out everything about autism.
I figured out my whole family has autism. I put myself and my kids on medicine for ADHD. I turned my career into identifying autism and being frustrated that people didn’t believe me when I told them. They’d say, “How do you know?”
I’d be incredulous: “I’VE BEEN DOING THIS FOR YEARS. IT’S SO EASY FOR ME TO SEE!” Read more
Detail of The Rehearsal of the Ballet Onstage (1874) by Edgar Degas
Researchers studying autistic kids give secret autism tests to parents because it’s so easy to see that parents are autistic, but it’s such a huge pain to try to get the parents to understand. Think about it: no one benefits enough from telling you that you’re autistic that they are willing to try to convince you. But research becomes much more useful when we can label parents as autistic for studies even though parents would say it’s only their kid. Read more
Tiny Blowing a Bubble, Seattle 1983, by Mary Ellen Mark
Camouflaging is what women do to make sure no one thinks we’re weird. This means we end up camouflaging at work and being too exhausted to do it at home. But home is where we really need it, because the effect of camouflaging is to be more agreeable t0 other people. And the workplace doesn’t reward agreeableness.
We intuitively camouflage when dating; don’t do a bait-and-switch.
Once the kids were gone, I found myself choosing bras more carefully. I only have one real bra. The rest are running bras that squoosh. But I started wearing my real bra when Nino came over for dinner. We had not spent a whole dinner alone in 20 years. I wanted to look like someone he might like, so I put on makeup, but not enough for him to be able to tell that I put on makeup just for him.
It took about four dinners before it felt like before we had kids, when everything was fun if we did it together. When he met me I never wore bras – only bathing suit tops. So I quit the bra. And the makeup. Read more
When someone tells me their child is autistic, I always end up telling them that they are too. Because autism is a family condition. At the end of these conversations people ask: “Do you have a reading list you could send me?” So here is that list.
Reminder that tonight at 7pm – 9pm Eastern I’m hosting a free, live session to talk about autism. Here’s the link: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/82800295802?pwd=LfTfUHmWnqbbQdLJCbD9U8Wd7L571A.1
The platitudes about autism being a gift miss the more important point that pretty much every major movement, invention, and breakthrough has been from someone autistic. Here’s the science behind why that is true: Read more
Electronic Superhighway by Nam June Paik
In the 80s my teacher asked, “How did it happen that the Republican party ended slavery yet Black people are Democrats?” That was his introduction to the process of party realignment in the US. In the 1960s the Democrats supported Civil Rights and the party lines were redrawn. And the teacher told us we are due for another Read more
Detail of Pilot’s Notion Five, Red, Yellow Star by David Collins
I told a friend I keep not finishing things and he said, “Yeah, the last 10% of anything is the hardest.” A light bulb went off. Once I realized that this is a problem everyone has I could see the last 10% more clearly. And all day I’ve been finishing things.
For a long time I’ve been wanting to have a live session where we all talk about autism and this post is my last 10%. Now we have a date and time: Wed, Nov. 13, 7-9 pm ET. And we have a link. Here it is:
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/82800295802?pwd=LfTfUHmWnqbbQdLJCbD9U8Wd7L571A.1