(Disclaimer: I am not a medical professional and this is for entertainment purposes only)

So I recently learned that I am autistic and hyper mobile. Hyper mobile means that my joints are more flexible than average. Autism and hyper mobility are commonly comorbid. Another factor that can affect people with autism is that autistic people miss social cues. So that can include watching how other people walk, sit, stand etc., and missing some of the details of these processes.

Anyways, when I was watching Downton Abbey, I was really impressed by how long the actresses sit up straight on the edges of their seats for. Here’s one example:

This isn’t the best example. The best example is when everyone is sitting in the living room, having a long conversation, sitting on the edges of their seats with their backs ramrod straight.

I would watch this and think, “If I had to do that I would be in so much pain!”

And you would think that I would know how to sit up straight because I’ve been in dance classes my whole life. I remember when I was five, we would all sit in a circle with our legs straight out in front of us and the teachers would show us to sit up straight instead of slouching back into a c-shaped spine.

But recently, after several months in physical therapy, I have come to understand that what I have always thought of as sitting up straight is incorrect. Here is a picture of what felt like sitting up straight to me (apologies for the sneeze face. It was the best screenshot I could pull out of the video I made about this. I’m not actually sneezing, just mid sentence).

And here is a picture of what sitting up straight actually looks like:

In the first way, I arch my back too far forward because I thought that whatever is the direct opposite of slouching must be sitting up straight.

In the second picture, I’m imagining pulling muscles inside of the middle of my lower torso toward the floor. I’m imagining pulling my sits bones away from my shoulders and creating as much space between the top and bottom of my torso as I can.

I’m the first version, it hurts, and rightly so because it is doing damage to my spine.

In the second, version, it feels like work, but it feels good, like I have muscles to hold onto and like I’m building strength.

Today I had some time to sew by myself, then we went to the gym and I was able to use the cable machines by myself. It felt so good.

Anyways, when we got home, I noticed that when I was in the kitchen I saw things differently, for instance, there was a disposable steel wool in the sink and I threw it away. There was an empty milk jug on the counterfrom earlier today and I thought that if I rinsed it out now it wouldn’t be smelly yet, so I did. Then I noticed that Howie’s 360 cup of milk was on the table and had had milk in it today. If I rinsed it out now it wouldn’t have stinky cheese milk in it yet. Then I saw two paper cups on the table that could be quickly thrown away.

Whereas, all of this had been really bothering me this morning and some of it for the last few days, it had all felt like this overwhelming blur that I couldn’t penetrate.

After having the sensory break of sewing and working out, I could see and do all of these little things in the kitchen. My brain was different.

I wish I had the bandwidth to clean this mirror so that I could post pictures of myself, but it’s in a backlog of so many tasks.

One of the symptoms of autism is actually not being able to automatically sort daily tasks by importance.

Anyways, I liked this cozy outfit today. I liked the warmth of the colors and the unassuming, but cheery, nature of it.

Another symptom of autism is stepwise processing instead of intuitive processing in general. I have this plan to post outfit pictures once I get this mirror cleaned and secure these two sliding closet doors together so that my kids can’t get one of them dirty again.

What I’ve been trying to ask myself in situations like these is, “What is the zero-step way to accomplish this goal?”

So, what is the zero step way to take outfit pictures of myself?

Maybe ask Clark to take a picture. Even though he’s 4, it would probably be better than this one. I can also ask Colton to take a picture, but when we’re together it’s because we’re feeding the kids or getting them in the car or getting them ready for bed.

I can use my gooseneck phone holder to take a picture. I can use the camera shutter on my Apple Watch. The gooseneck “tripod” is currently clamped to one of my closet shelves so that I can make videos in my closet. It’s a pain to unscrew and rescrew the clamp. I can try leaving it in the closet, opening the closet door, and standing against that wall.

I do wish I had a process that I could do while checking my outfit in the mirror though.

Task prioritization, unprecedented social interactions, and sensory overload/underload, is basically all being a SAHM is.

Just now I was talking to my mother in law about how I struggle to play with my 4 year old at all because even if I set a timer for how long I’ll play with him something like the following scenario will happen:

He’ll be playing with Legos and have this idea of building two warriors, and a battle arena and then having a play fight with me. But with his ND brain, he has infinite improvements to add to his creations. So when the timer ends, he hasn’t finished building and he says, “No! You can’t leave! We never fought!”

So I give him two more minutes, but the cycle just keeps repeating.

So I was telling my MIL about this and she goes, “So tell him that you can fight with him during your next playtime block with him, after you finish whatever your next designated task is.”

And just.

It’s so simple.

But this is an example of how I can’t spur of the moment come up with a new script to handle a difficult social situation. And that includes social interactions with my kids.

Difficult social interactions with my 4 year old happen all day every day. So I’m in a vicious cycle of losing the executive functioning I need to reason with him effectively.

Do you stay up late at night wondering whether or not you’re autistic? Maybe an official autism assessment isn’t in your future, so you’re left with self diagnosis, but the self diagnosis process never ends and you always have imposter syndrome.

I have since been diagnosed by a psychologist, but let me tell you how I came to peace with my self diagnosis journey.

There are several excerpts I’m going to read to you from the following two books:

Almost all of the quotes are from Unmasking Autism by Devon Price, PhD

And then one of the quotes is from But You Don’t Look Autistic at All by Bianca Toeps

All of these quotes explain the central unifying brain chemistry of autism.

All Autistic people are going to have really different interests and personalities and might seem more or less stereotypically autistic, but these quotes explain what is common between all autistic people.

This first one is about the brain structures of autism:

“Autistic brains have unique connection patterns that deviate from what is normally observed in neurotypical people. When infants are born, their brains are typically hyperconnected; much of human development is a process of slowly pruning unhelpful connections and becoming more efficient at responding to one’s environment, based on life experience and learning. In Autistic brains, however, researchers have found that some regions remain hyperconnected throughout the life span, whereas other regions may be underconnected (relatively speaking).

So this is basically saying that there are millions of little daily thought processes that allistic people have on autopilot for the sake of efficiency, that our brains think through as if it’s the first time we’ve encountered the problem every time it comes up.

For example, an allistic person might have an internal algorithm for how to decide if a piece of clothing needs to go in the dirty laundry or can be put back in the drawer. This algorithm is so intuitive and efficient that they don’t even realize they use it. It’s a routine they go through on autopilot.

While a given autistic person, on the other hand, will have to step through a complicated decision making process every time they need to decide where a piece of laundry goes, as if they are a child learning how to put away clothes for the first time and being told all the factors that can go into whether something can be worn again or needs to go into the wash. Then they need to make a new decision based on all those factors and how this piece of clothing measures up to those factors. And they do this for every single piece of clothing every day.

Another classic example is deciding whether or not to throw away a nice box that an item came in, or keep it just in case it could be useful.

Back to the quote:

It is difficult to sum up these connectivity patterns because, as neurobiologists at the Weizmann Institute of Science have found, every Autistic brain exhibits a different connectivity pattern. Our brain wiring appears to actually be more diverse than the wiring of neurotypical brains, which researchers believe have a consistent pruning pattern.

So this means that there is a body of intuitive brain processes which allistic people all share in common with each other, including how to behave socially. While autistic people miss out on some portion of those intuitive brain processes.

And it says that autistic people differ more from each other than allistic people differ from each other. This explains why one autistic person will be in hell at a theme park, while another autistic person will seek out theme parks like they are the air they need to breathe.

This also means that for every specific example I or the book authors give, there will be autistic people who experience the opposite.

For example, in the laundry example I gave above, there will be autistic people for whom laundry is a hyper-intuitive process and who may be even better at sorting laundry than allistic people. However, there will still be other things that come intuitively to allistic people that don’t come intuitively to them.

Moving on to the next quote. This is further information about the brain structures inside all autistic brains

“Autistic people have differences in the development of their anterior cingulate cortex, a part of the brain that helps regulate attention, decision making, impulse control, and emotional processing. Throughout our brains, Autistic people have delayed and reduced development of Von Economo neurons (or VENs), brain cells that help with rapid, intuitive processing of complex situations.

Price

I definitely don’t have rapid and intuitive processing of complex situations. I have deliberate, stepwise processing of complex situations. In college, I couldn’t follow verbal lectures. I have to be able to read something at my own pace and then diagram it out in order to understand it. I see this pop up in my daily life when people give me instructions for what they think is a simple process and I have a million questions about the details.

Similarly, Autistic brains differ from allistic brains in how excitable our neurons are. To put it in very simple terms, our neurons activate easily, and don’t discriminate as readily between a ‘nuisance variable’ that our brains might wish to ignore (for example, a dripping faucet in another room) and a crucial piece of data that deserves a ton of our attention (for example, a loved one beginning to quietly cry in the other room). This means we can both be easily distracted by a small stimulus and miss a large meaningful one.

Keeping up a house with kids has been incredibly difficult because if something catches my attention, like a shelf that is messy in the front room and I’ve realized a better place where I can move it to, it consumes all of my mental energy and drives me crazy every time I see it. Meanwhile, the last meal sitting on the dining room table needs to be cleared and I can hardly notice.

I loooove having time on Sunday mornings before Clark wakes up.

The biggest thing that’s happened recently is that I read a few books that changed my life.

• Non Violent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-129JLTjkQ
• Simplicity Parenting by Kim John Payne and Lisa M. Ross https://www.amazon.com/dp/B002LLRDS8/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 (I read the free sample on kindle and it was enough to totally change the way I thought about my schedule as a working mom of a toddler)
• No Bad Kids by Janet Lansbury https://www.janetlansbury.com/2010/04/no-bad-kids-toddler-discipline-without-shame-9-guidelines/

You’ve got to go read or listen to these books yourself!

They all advocate peaceful approaches to life.

Have you ever head crunchy parents say something about how they are raising their children for peace? I’ve seen this and I think, “I really hope that works.” But I am also a little bit confused as to what they are actually doing differently. Because I know that baby wearing, breastfeeding on demand and co sleeping, etc. don’t make someone peaceful. I was raised with all of those things and I have been picking fights with my husband and even throwing tantrums when things don’t go my way. I easily get frustrated with people who don’t do things the way I think they should be done. I sometimes get frustrated with Clark, and I’ve never hurt him or shouted at him, but I have shouted in anger around him about something else and made him scared.

Anyways, these books and others like them contain the ways of peaceful parenting and peaceful living in general, that I was looking for.

I should also say that this book journey started with the book The Continuum Concept, which is an anthropologists study of a stone age tribe in the Amazon who have a completely peaceful society where everyone is happy in their daily work, even hard manual labor, and children are all cheerfully cooperative. This book opened my eyes to what is possible, but it doesn’t have practical guidelines for how to achieve such a life in our current society.

These other books and others like them are the answer to how to bridge the gap between hectic modern life and the life the Yequena tribe live.

A few key takeaways:

From Non Violent Communication

Here are some quotes from the book

“The language of ‘wrongness,’ ‘should’, and ‘have to’ is perfectly suited for this purpose: the more people are trained to think in terms of moralistic judgments that imply wrongness and badness, the more they are being trained to look outside themselves—to outside authorities—for the definition of what constitutes right, wrong, good, and bad. When we are in contact with our feelings and needs, we humans no longer make good slaves and underlings”

“I earnestly believe, however, that an important form of self-compassion is to make choices motivated purely by our desire to contribute to life rather than out of fear, guilt, shame, duty, or obligation.”

“For example, if we find ourselves reacting reproachfully to something we did (“Look, you just messed up again!”), we can quickly stop and ask ourselves, “What unmet need of mine is being expressed through this moralistic judgment?” When we do connect to the need—and there may be several layers of needs—we will notice a remarkable shift in our bodies. Instead of the shame, guilt, or depression we likely feel when criticizing ourselves for having “messed up again,” we will experience any number of other feelings. Whether it’s sadness, frustration, disappointment, fear, grief, or some other feeling, we have been endowed by nature with these feelings for a purpose: they mobilize us to pursue and fulfill what we need or value. The impact of these feelings on our spirit and bodies is substantially different from the disconnection that is brought on by guilt, shame, and depression.”

From Simplicity Parenting

The author is this child psychologist who worked with refugee children who had ptsd and then the author noticed the same symptoms in middle class children in western countries. So basically the idea is that the stresses of modern parental life stress kids out majorly and that it doesn’t have to be that way. I haven’t read the whole book yet, but it advocates establishing rhythms to our days and weeks that children can predict, explaining to children ahead of time when things aren’t going to be the ordinary way. And in general massively simplifying our lives, or at least protecting our children from the complexity of our adult lives.

A way that I applied the feeling I got from this book is just spending way more time with Clark, including time outside, without my phone. I used to think, “Ok, I’ll take you outside but I’ll bring an audiobook so I won’t be bored out of my mind.” What I’ve realized is that my boredom being outside with him stems from a feeling that I always have to be doing something, that I’m always running out of time and that there is always some better way to make the hours in my day more efficient in order to acheive all of the great things I’m always dreaming of and missing out on.

One thing the author brings up is that when we dreamed of having a family we had dreams of things like walks through the park, reading books snuggled up in bed, splashing in puddles, and making cookies together. These, or things like them, are all things all of us can do together with our children today. Our “goals” and our business get in the way of our simple dreams of happy family life.

And I will tell you that since I started slowing down and time-boxing time with Clark without phone or other multitasking, I have started waking up looking forward to the day! Let me explain: just last week I thought, and I’ve had this thought many times before, “Another week, more drudgery: wake, work, clean the house, sleep, repeat. What’s the point of it all.” And then I always have a thought like, “If I could only squeaze in 10 minutes to do something fun like a little online shopping, then I would have at least one thing to look forward to.”

Last week I noticed that I was excited for calm, deliciously empty time spent with Clark walking around outside, noticing that he wanted to touch a high up tree branch or pick up a 5 lb rock, or walk over bumpy rocks while holding my hand.

I don’t know people, it’s crazy how this simple thing has changed things in such an unexpected way. It reminds me of another book I read recently read called Goodbye Things, where the author talks about how miserable he was with his job and his apartment in Tokyo. Where he had collected a bunch of games and photography equipment, etc., etc. He always wished he had a wife. He had a similar rhythm to mine of wake, work, sleep, repeat, with nothing to look forward to.
Then when he went minimalist and got rid of most of his stuff, he realized that he was very happy to walk through the park, eat, make food, and just live in general the life he was living right then. He also started making more friends and spending more time on those relationships.

When I read this I was very intrigued, but I am just now beginning to see the same thing happens.

I don’t know people, I almost want to ban my phone and online shopping. But I want to get all the Montessori and Waldorf toys that exist, is all 😀 That’s all I covet in this world. Is that so bad?

No Bad Kids, Janet Lansbury

You should (there’s that word) read the blog, https://www.janetlansbury.com/2010/04/no-bad-kids-toddler-discipline-without-shame-9-guidelines/. And the book. And she also has a podcast if you search her name, Janet Lansbury. But overall my biggest take away is that when kids are acting out they need help, not punitive action. Help usually comes in the form of blocking their inappropriate behavior, a listening ear for their feelings, guidance toward rest and food, and doses of delicious one on one time.

And now my baby is awake.