Y is home from college for the rest of the summer and tells me he wants a job. So I tell him my server has 25 years of posts on it and I lost some, so I need him to go on the Wayback Machine and find them.
“What did you lose?”
“My hypertexts.”
“What?”
“Hypertexts are stories that deconstruct patriarchal tropes of self-discovery and I’m famous for writing them.”
“If you were really famous, you’d have a much longer Wikipedia page.” Read more
John Gallagher wrote his dissertation about how people with a large following online relate to comments from their audience. Over many years he interviewed people who were top Redditors, top Amazon reviewers, and he interviewed Heather and me. Read more
This is a picture of indomitable me: Look at the Cartier watch. I bought it with the stock sale from my first startup. It felt like money was falling from the sky, so ten grand for a watch was nothing. We walked through Central Park every day to get to the top nursery school for autistic kids in NYC. I got him the best speech therapist, the best occupational therapist, and I was networking to find out what was next. Read more
I’m going to stop being so transactional. This means that I’m not going to be as pissy as usual when your comments don’t come as frequently as they used to.
Well. Hold on. Right now I spend half my time reading science journals and I can’t help pausing when I see a paper about social media (you’d be surprised how many people get tenure looking at Instagram nonstop to conclude we shouldn’t look at Instagram nonstop). I read a paper that says that you can tell how good an influencer is, not by how many followers they have, but by how many comments they have. Read more
The first time I heard about vaginal rejuvenation surgery was at a brunch when I was in my late 30s. I love brunch because it feels Jewish. After I typed this I googled it to make sure I wasn’t crazy. And it turns out that while there is no causation, there is correlation: the more Jews there are in location in the US, the more brunches there are. Read more
My Autism Workshop runs Dec. 3, 4, 5, 6 from 8-9pm Eastern. The cost is $150 now and $195 after Thanksgiving weekend. You should join.
People say to me, “Why does it matter if I have autism or not?” The answer is you can transform your life by using what we know about autism to your benefit.
Experience the intellectual jolt of an autistic group. We have a love/hate relationship with groups; We hate forced participation but we love watching and listening. When we learn about autism on our own, by reading, we engage in selective learning and we miss a lot. However in a group, we are great at seeing what other people need to learn, so we see better for ourselves as well.
Spend less energy trying to appear normal. My whole life I knew I was different and I kept trying to figure out how things work and why people do what they do. I remember sitting at the top of the stairs as a child studying the adults just like that girl from the Norman Rockwell painting. I memorized body language, workplace rules, dating rules, and diet rules, all the rules I could find. Now we have a word for this process: Camouflaging. It’s exhausting to camouflage, but scientists can tell us how to be the most successful at camouflaging using the least amount of energy.
Leverage your erratic behavior instead of being upset about it. A lot of my self-knowledge comes from close calls. Like, I get by at work by doing nothing for days and then I accomplish ten times more than anyone else in a single day. I deal with social situations by refusing to leave my apartment. Then if I must socialize I’ve saved up enough energy to be fascinating all evening long. But I have to not let anyone spend too much time with me or they’d see how difficult I am.
Find your true personality type by overlaying your autistic strengths. Autism shifts our personality type preferences and our strengths. When we understand these shifts we can gain a more clear picture of our true type and what we have to offer.
Here are other questions people ask me:
Will you record the sessions?
Yes. If you can’t join live, you can watch the recordings in your own time.
What if I don’t think I am autistic?
People who don’t think they are autistic will fit in great in this workshop, because every autistic person once thought they were not autistic. In fact, they spent most of their life not even knowing the word. You’ve read this far. You’re at least very autism-curious. Sign up now.
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.
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.
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
I’ve stopped saying yes to interviews because I piss people off. Or I scare them. I’m not sure I can tell the difference. If someone hangs up in the middle I know they hate me, but if someone doesn’t hang up in the middle but also doesn’t use the interview, I think, maybe they liked talking with me but they’re saving the interview for a really special time. In ten years.
I broke my vow of silence to be a guest on a podcast with Meghan and Sarah. They have a cool-girl vibe that victimized me the first 50 years of my life. But I think my time has come.
Also, I read that women are supposed to make a lot of friends in their 20s in order to learn about social norms. And then women cull their friends to just a few special ones in their 30s so they can focus on family. So women are set for family and friends in their middle age.
I am pretty sure I’m still at the first part: learn about social norms. But I’m definitely making progress because Meghan and Sarah posted the interview! Here it is, hooray.