Learning to Love How My Mind (and Body) Works

How discovering that I am autistic has changed the way I view myself and how I live in the world

This post is coming a lot later than I wanted it to because you know…life, and executive dysfunction, which it turns out is an autistic trait that explains why I completely lose motivation to do things at random times. I’m getting into the rhythm of my new job (which for legal/job security reasons I won’t name the company here, but it’s a grocery store that, at my location at least, treats its workers well and pays them well—and it’s not Whole Foods, I would never take Amazon’s blood money) and I also realized I needed this post to cook in my mind for a bit because this is something I am very much Still Processing and finding language to describe. I’ve spent a lot of time watching YouTube and Googling ¹ about autism in women/AFAB people and even autism in extroverted/ambiverted people, just doing tons of research, because I have this voice in my head that’s like, if you’re going to post this, you’re have to be sure, you don’t want to end up being wrong! But fuck that voice, fuck perfectionism, I’m going to post this in the messy, figuring it out stage in the hope that it will be helpful for folks who are in the same boat.

My mom says that when I was a baby, I didn’t like to be rocked or sung to. I only wanted the contact that was necessary. I didn’t talk until I was well into age 3 (although I could clearly understand language earlier, I just preferred grunting and pointing to communicate). As I got older, I still hated being in swings or other forms of movement, and whenever my mom put me in a dress or other clothes that I found itchy, I would cry (at least one such moment is caught on home video). In elementary school, I would have a different friend group every year, always feeling abandoned by the friends I had before. For much of elementary school, I also had a…I guess you’d call it a stutter but it was more like I was taking a breath as I spoke (like, the “ca-hat”), that lasted until middle school. Music, particularly Disney Channel musicals and stars, were my whole world, along with various book series like the Spiderwick Chronicles (the amount of times I pretended that outside my house, too, there were Brownies and Fairies and Goblins), The Secret Series², American Girl Doll (I had Molly), and Artemis Fowl. I was an avid reader but when people were talking, even softly, I could not pay attention, distracted by the sound (and the same is true today, ya girl needs complete silence for sleep and reading). I’ve always had challenges with my small motor skills (just watch me try to scoop ice cream, I still find it very difficult). When I was a teen, my mom read a book on sensory processing disorder (the latest edition of the book, The Out of Sync Child, now calls it sensory processing differences). After growing out of children’s toothpaste (Tom’s Strawberry), I quickly discovered I could not stand mint toothpaste, it felt too cold and intense. I use Tom’s Cinnamon (any other cinnamon toothpaste is also too intense).

Photo by Peter Burdon on Unsplash

These are just a few things/memories I’ve started to think about as I have explored the possibility that I am autistic. I don’t have a formal diagnosis and I don’t plan on seeking one (as an adult the only benefit would potentially be for a job, but I don’t think I necessarily need any accommodations either), but there is a part of me that has wondered since high school if I was autistic. My mom was really into reading Temple Grandin’s popular literature/memoirs on autism, because as a school nurse she interacted with many neurodivergent and/or disabled students³ and she told me about it. Together, we watched the movie that was made about her life, and there were so many things I could resonate with, and particularly one line would be on repeat in my head for years: she noticed that cows, like her, “balk at unexpected things.” That phrase perfectly described how I felt at unexpected stimuli—sounds, sudden visuals, etc. And although I don’t only think in picture like she does, I do have a very vivid imagination/inner life, and the way she lit up about science was the way I lit up about writing and God, and the way she got angry and overwhelmed at points…so much of it resonated. But I didn’t tell my mother that because I was still afraid of what that might mean.

In elementary school all the way through middle school, I had an IEP (individualized education program) for my speech impediment, and at the end of 8th grade, my stutter completely gone, I was given an assessment to fill out in order to see if I needed an IEP for anything else. And I lied/masked my way through it, because at the time I was very depressed and I so desperately wanted to be normal. I bet my autism (or at least my depression and anxiety) might have popped up on that assessment had I actually been honest.

But in my mind, after watching Temple Grandin, I silently put on the autistic label, but didn’t actually do any further research or attempt to hear more stories from autistic people. It was just a way for me to try to make sense of my social anxiety and the overwhelm I felt about high school/college workload. I viewed it as “I have so many difficulties with x, y, and z, so I must have this.”

During my semester abroad in Paris in 2018, overwhelmed with balancing school and exploring the city and finding friends, I had panic attacks almost daily during the first month. I could barely write my essays because I put so much pressure on myself for everything I wrote to be perfect⁴. Even though I got better as I started to see a psychologist for the first time (my program offered free psychological referral services and visits!!!) and learned better coping strategies and time management, I still felt that there was something deeply wrong with me. When I told my sister I thought I was autistic, she said that I didn’t have a formal diagnosis so I shouldn’t be using that term loosely (and in this particular case I think she was right to say that, because I hadn’t done any research or deep reflection to back up this belief, or even listened to autistic peoples’ stories). So I let the label go—I had a lot more things to deal with re: identity anyway, since it was in Paris that I realized I wasn’t evangelical anymore, and I was also a baby gay figuring out how and when to come out to people.

And then, earlier this year, my sister sent me a link about Bachelor franchise star Demi Burnett announcing her autism diagnosis (she shared this because we both are Bach fans and love our problematic fave queer icon Demi). It surprised me, because she seemed so enthusiastic and sociable and her special interests (according to how she appears as edited on the show) seemed to be starting drama and fashion/makeup. It got me thinking.

My family is pretty sure my brother is on the spectrum (or has ADD/ADHD, or both), because he fits the typical attributes for an upper middle class white boy with autism (since that group is where most of autism research has been centered on, historically): his special interests are “nerd media” (manga, anime, video games, cartoons), he is a man of few words (but of deep love + emotion he feels internally), he had some difficulties in high school in being motivated in certain classes, and he cannot eat hot dogs or sausages or ground beef, and other foods, based on their texture. But me? I fit some of those traits (given my brother and Tumblr’s influence, nerd media was a special interest when I was a teen), but not others. I couldn’t really see myself in many autistic people based on the ones that I knew and the ones I saw in media (fictional or real life people).

And then DL Mayfield started her newsletter God is My Special Interest, and suddenly I (and possibly hundreds of other people, particularly women or people socialized as women) went down a rabbit hole of memory exploration, emotional processing, and thoughtful reflection about whether I might be autistic. The way DL describes her experiences resonated so deeply with my own adolescence and my experience of the present, and how she describes autism at its core being a nervous system disorder, with all the other traits developing from that, from coping with that…it makes sense why I often feel so overwhelmed.

And now, I not only see the challenges I’ve faced because of my neurodivergence, but also my strengths. God is my special interest (to quote DL Mayfield, I am “obsessed with God and the ethics of neighborliness”), and that motivates the vast majority of what I do in my life—no longer out of a desire to be good/pure/holy enough like I did in high school, but out of love for myself, for God, and for my neighbors. I serve in my church in as many ways as I can, still knowing what my limits are, and thankfully so far the progressive churches I’ve been part of have been understanding when I take on more than I can actually handle (tried to start a Young Adults group at my church in VA on top of being on the worship team and helping out with youth ministry, and it turned out that all the other twenty and thirty somethings were also too busy to do anything anyway!). I love the way my mind works; I love that I can spot religious imagery or a Bible reference in a literary text from a mile away when no one else notices it (most of the essays I wrote in my lit classes were connected to analyzing religious imagery/themes, no wonder I’m going to seminary now lol!). I love the way my passions/special interests compel me towards action and creativity, I love the joy I feel when I nerd out about theology on my podcast and with my queer Christian friends. I see how neurodivergence and autism in particular are gifts to the Body of Christ, and how it was my neurodivergence that led me out of evangelicalism and led me to discover my authentic self (even though it is also paradoxically what kept me hanging onto evangelicalism in the first place).

I wish I could tell my 15 year old self struggling to fit in in youth group that my body was actually trying to tell me something when I was always a little uncomfortable and awkward, always looking around for other people to talk to when I felt like I couldn’t contribute to the conversation: she (my body) knew that the church’s teachings were wrong, and that the social culture created by that theology was wrong. I felt like I didn’t have a voice, and I put on the Good Christian Girl as a mask. My church gave me rules and structure and purpose and a sense that as long as I stuck to those things, I would belong.

But when writing became one of my interests and I realized I wanted to pursue writing as a career, I started to find my voice, because through writing I could have time to reflect and figure out what I wanted to say and articulate how I felt. In 2016, the first string of questions that would become my faith deconstruction were tied to the fact that I did not understand that the church which taught me about Jesus and love and humility and grace was wholeheartedly supporting a man who exhibited none of those things. It was not logical; it did not fit into the rules I was given. And neither did my lived experience of the day after the election: wracked by grief over the death of a relative that night, wracked with confusion about why my roommate voted for Trump, and facing the cognitive dissonance that I believed that God caused this bad thing to happen for the perfection of my faith, but that God was also loving.

Breaking my indoctrination was hard because I just wanted everything to stay the same, I wanted God to get rid of my doubt so I could continue being the good Christian girl, but thank God my questions and fixation on exploring theology won out and I let myself research what the Bible says about homosexuality and women in ministry and the creation of the world for hours. I found progressive Christian authors and when I read Jesus Feminist by Sarah Bessey I could not put it down. I found other weird people in the spiritual wilderness, including DL Mayfield and Rachel Held Evans and Austin Channing Brown and Kevin Garcia. I took 16 credits worth of religious studies courses in undergrad, all taught by an amazing professor who terrified me at first (because she as a super progressive Lutheran broke all of my rules, using feminine pronouns for God and pointing out that there are two creation narratives in the book of Genesis that happen in different orders), but ended up becoming a dear friend who was overjoyed when I came out. My obsession with God that kept me clinging to the familiarity and black-and-white of the church I grew up in helped me grow and expand my theology and find new community where I could bring my full self and still belong.

As I have become more in touch with my mind, body, and soul after leaving the church I grew up in, I think this has made my sensory sensitivities both more apparent yet also easier to deal with. If I feel that my body is telling me something is wrong/off, I listen and figure out the source of why I feel that way (when I was relapsing into depression during my first year of college, I was in denial about it for months before admitting it to myself, likely because I literally did not have the tools to do that emotional processing). The realization that I am autistic makes my panic attacks make a lot more sense (I mean, some of them could probably be categorized as autistic meltdowns). During my service year in Seattle in 2020, we arrived right as there were clouds of smoke all across the city. When I went outside, the sensation of me breathing in the smoky air caused a panic attack. At my work placement, I would sometimes have panic attacks when I did not feel that the directions I was given were clear enough, when I was unsure exactly what I needed to do, when I had to chat with someone on the phone (ya girl had scripts for phone calls and Zoom calls). I can have more compassion for myself by understanding why I can react to certain situations so strongly.

I also think another beautiful thing happening in this process of exploring my autistic traits is that I am learning how to better navigate my difficulties and in doing so live more authentically, which is especially helpful as I have started a new job. When I went into my job interview for where I now work, I thought to myself, “I’m just going to be me.” I didn’t want to put the pressure on to not mask at all, cause that would be overwhelming and the work of unmasking is not done overnight, but I just had this mindset that I would not try to be someone I wasn’t. That meant I did look people in the eyes while they were speaking *to* me, asking questions etc. but when I answered, I generally didn’t make eye contact. It just feels more natural for me to speak when I am looking around at other things, I guess. And that wasn’t a problem for them. As an ambivert/almost extrovert (because autistic people can be those things!! It’s about where you get your energy from, not how capable your social skills/awareness are), talking to customers at the register isn’t hard for me, but whenever I get taken off training and am on the register on my own, bagging, scanning, and doing banter at the same time, I think I will find it to be overwhelming (thankfully that is not what I’ll do for 8 hours, most of the time I’ll be stocking shelves), but since I know this, I can think about ways to better calm myself and make the experience less frazzling. I also know that I am very sensitive to cold, so putting on a hoodie/sweater and wearing gloves when I’m in the back-room freezer is a must (and I’ve been told it’s totally fine to take breaks if I need to be in there for a longer period of time). A whole lot of the folks where I work are also ND (mostly ADD/ADHD, but one mentioned there are a few folks on the spectrum who work there), so that makes discussing any issues that arise much less daunting.

On the subject of executive dysfunction and organization, I have always thought of myself as an organized person with an attention to detail, but this is because I have been given tools to do so, and in moments where I don’t use them things get messy real fast. I have a huge OneNote document with to-do lists, shopping lists, fall schedule planning (a homework tab will be added when I start classes), a list of all the Substack posts I want to write through December (most of them are mining my collection of poetry and offering some commentary on them, so those posts will be easier to write up and won’t be delayed—I promise I’ll be in your inbox on Sunday!), my overall goals for the year, and a big tab for all things memoir (outline, important journal excerpts, research, advice from my undergrad thesis advisor, and a list of beta readers who have not responded for months, lol!). I need to put things in my Google calendar or I will forget about them. I need to balance out things I do in a day or I will get overwhelmed (phone conversations with people I do not know, calls to doctors/insurance/etc., or other “adulting” things, need to be kept to a minimum) and end up binge-watching YouTube or scrolling through Buzzfeed to calm down. I like to have things planned out and do not like when those plans change. Being more aware of all of this will allow me to figure out ways to be productive without hitting burnout.

Of course, I still have some questions: can I really be autistic if I’m an ambivert—almost an extrovert, honestly—if I love socializing and meeting new people and hearing their stories? Can I be autistic if, so far, most tests I’ve taken online have put me higher than the neurotypical average but lower than the autistic threshold score? Part of me wants a definitive answer to these questions, but I think formal diagnosis is not feasible or logical for me right now while I’m already busy and tight on money in grad school. But regardless, in the autistic community, I feel like I’ve started to find fellow misfits, and misfits are my people. My understanding of myself has become more compassionate. And hearing from the stories of autistic people also compels me to think about how to make the church more accessible and inclusive for all, not just on the side of sexuality/gender but also disability/neurodivergence, and other intersecting identities.

Has neurodivergence/the stories of neurodivergent people changed the way you think about your faith/the church (whether you are neurodivergent or not)? Share in the comments below, along with any other thoughts that arose in you while you read this.

1. Yay hyperfixation! Also there are tons of women on YouTube talking about late-diagnosis, it’s great! Yo Samdy Sam, Paige Layle, Jenni Chapman, and The Thought Spot are good examples. Also there are several Ted Talks I found that address late-diagnosed autism in women/those socialized as women.

2. By Pseudonymous Bosch, AKA Raphael Simon, this quirky book series (quoting Wikipedia because I am terrible at summarizing things) “centers on three middle school children, Cass, Max-Ernest, and Yo-Yoji, and their adventures as members of the Terces Society ('Terces' is 'Secret' spelled backwards), a group that seeks to prevent a mysterious Secret from being discovered by the villainous organization of alchemists, the Midnight Sun.” Each book also has one of the five senses as its focus. In the first book, there is a character with synesthesia, and reading about it sparked an intense interest in it (I now recognize it as one of my more quirky special interests, and I looked up more fiction books (because a straight scientific text would have been boring to me then) on the subject at the library, like Ultraviolet by RJ Anderson and A Mango Shaped Space by Wendy Mass. I had one friend in youth group who had synesthesia, and when I found out I got really excited and asked her lots of questions. For my AP Psych final presentation with a a couple other students, I convinced them to do it on synesthesia and we interviewed said friend from youth group.

3. I understand that Temple Grandin is a controversial figure in the autistic community, and she has been critiqued for supporting scientists discovering a way to prevent “severe/low functioning” autism, which is eugenics, though on her FAQ page she has clarified what she means—she doesn’t support trying to get rid of the genes, though she does advocate for early intervention in order to increase chance of verbal skills and reduce “symptom severity”. Her work in the past may have been important in leading the way for autism awareness and also for the humane treatment of livestock, but the point of me mentioning her, as you will see, is not to endorse her work, but to show that she was the first autistic person I could see myself in.

4. See my previous post where I explain the root of that perfectionism! Religious indoctrination.