I saw a tweet a few weeks ago; reflective, I thought, of a broad cultural attitude towards autistic people, and particularly towards online autism culture:
Autism is a thing that exists. Anyone who has met profoundly disabled non-verbal kids doesn’t doubt it. But in popular-culture ‘autism’ is a laundry list of essentially normal, albeit quirky and obsessional, behaviours that do not, in of itself, indicate disorder/disability.
There is a desire to distinguish between high- and low-functioning forms of autism, to dig up Herr Asperger and sweep away his Nazi regalia. But it’s not clear to me how that actually helps anyone, and it bears discomfiting resemblance to a tendency to draw a hard line between productive and unproductive disability. The distinction between weird-nerd autism and no-capacity-to-consent autism is remarkably similar to that between go-for-a-walk depression and the confiscate-your-shoelaces kind.
But look: I am much too important to be getting pressed about tweets. I am now a successful person. I am an award-winning novelist; a transatlantic double award-winning novelist. I have achieved more since transitioning than I did before. I have on my shelf a big glass Lambda Literary Award, the kind of cornered lump you could beat someone to death with, engraved with my name.
I don’t write about autism – I just write about oddballs terminally bewildered by their surroundings and hope you get the message. I’ve spoken before about how central the idea of running away is to Wild Geese, and I guess now I’m confronted by the fact that I am Soula, I am successful as Soula, and yet still I am not fixed. The temptation again is to run away – to dismiss writing as yet another thing I have mostly failed at, because I’m never as good as I think I should be.
Writing an award-winning novel is hard, yet here I am, struggling with so many easier things. A spiky skill profile, it is called, where supposedly simple tasks prove challenging. I’ve quit jobs more than once because I couldn’t handle day-to-day responsibilities. In reflection, I can see how this has produced a profound anxiety in me: I cannot predict how I will handle a given situation, so it becomes easier to avoid anything and everything. It is difficult to build upwards, because I am only ever one false move away from piercing my foot on a spike.
And I’ve learned that repetition does not necessarily foster confidence. Doing something once doesn’t mean that I will be able to do it again. Things don’t necessarily get easier: you learn, but you are not transformed by learning. When I was diagnosed with autism a few years ago, I took a professionally administered IQ test on which I scored so highly that I may personally have discredited the concept of IQ. I get intensely frustrated with myself, tired of piloting myself like a wheelbarrow which at any moment may have a square wheel or no wheel at all.
It is easy to underestimate yourself in that context: an aspect of Wild Geese which breaks my heart a little is the way I seemed to be writing narrowly within myself out of a sense of fear, a belief that I had no right to consider the world outside. An internal conflict can be a kind of entertainment; it can be something you sit inside and watch, like a television programme.
There is a cycle: of boredom, exertion, frustration, retreat, then solitude, which has dominated my life, and manifests in lots of ways, including disordered eating. I wouldn’t describe myself as a sad person but I am generally on edge. It is only in my thirties that I have really acknowledged what it means to live with a permanent sense of uncertainty, how what has manifested as a mistrust of others is really a mistrust of myself. I am constantly working to manage my inability to figure out my own limitations, forever lost on a map of myself.
But then: the funny thing about writing is that it is both exertion and retreat. It is quieter than working behind a bar, but louder than, say, data entry. Maybe the contradictions are the thing.
I am accustomed to being misunderstood. Has that made transitioning easier? Probably. There is a well-documented link between autism and transness – one theory is that trans people already fail to fit in, and so have less to lose socially from coming out as trans. Now, I’m an author, and happily, people expect authors to be strange.
Sometimes I look at photos of myself now at literary events – the unruly shoulder-length hair, the slightly palsied face, the weight I’ve put back on – and decide I resemble a child’s hurried drawing of a person, big looping lines and none of the tidy shadows of a real human being. I feel blatant but also absent, like a dubious special effect added in post-production.
I started writing fiction at the age of 29 – an unusually late age, given most start at school or university, even if they don’t publish until later. Haruki Murakami was the same age when he began, but he had spent his twenties running a jazz bar, while I spent mine running myself into the ground.
There is a certain bitterness inherent to feeling like you chose a vocation out of a process of elimination. I would have liked to have done something louder, something less solitary, something happening in real time. (Unfortunately, I lack the co-ordination for most sports, but hope springs eternal!) It might be fair to say that writing is the medium by which I am misconstrued the least, but that is all it is. I enjoy it, but I do wish for more. I always feel like I am not doing enough, squandering myself with each passing day.
I sort of imagine that when I turn 40 I will have to pack literature in and move on to something else. Hopefully by then I will have figured out what.
Soula Emmanuel 