The Self And Neurodivergence And The Other Self

The politics of maybe being someone else

Image credit: roseoftimothywoods, CC

“I cannot be a fatigued subject when I am lively enough to write or think about it. And when I am a fatigued subject, I cannot outline my subjectivity for you,” Jonathan Sterne writes in Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment. Sterne wants to describe his own consciousness of fatigue; he wants to examine, for himself and for the reader, what fatigue feels like from the inside. But to do so is impossible. When he is fatigued, he is too fatigued to speak about fatigue. When he is not fatigued, he is not a fatigued subject—and as he writes, “my recollection of fatigue is hazy” which functions “as a kind of self-preservation”.

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For Sterne, the experience of fatigue is characterized by an inability to describe fatigue; impairment, or disability, tends to make the subject dis-cohere. Disability, as an identity, structures experience; it makes sense of a way of being a subject in the world and of a way of being treated and subjected in the world. “I have fatigue” explains certain actions and symptoms (like being so tired he’s unable to clean the cat vomit off himself before falling asleep, in Sterne’s case); it connects one to certain communities and discussions (“I have no spoons”); it creates a certain kind of relationship to work or capitalism (fatigue has been defined, Sterne says, as exhaustion caused by something other than work, which interferes with work.)

But in addition, or over to the side of, explaining, connecting, and creating, fatigue obfuscates, disconnects, undoes. Fatigue makes it impossible to catch the threads of one’s own experience; it leaves you drifting away from your own sense of yourself and from your own ability to recognize yourself, in sleep or in waking or in the relationship between the two.

The dis-identity that Sterne sees in fatigue is also applicable, in somewhat different ways, to other forms of disability—for instance to his experience with his own paralyzed vocal chord and vocal disability. It also functions in his book as a critique of the idea of a unified subject and identity in general, as a default and as an aspiration. “I think therefore I am” for many people, much of the time, might be better understood as “I don’t think, exactly, and therefore am not, quite” or even as “I am not, altogether, and therefore think sporadically.” Who we are, when examined closely—or when we realize we cannot examine it closely—starts to come apart in ways which call into question social, cultural, and political demands for consistently unified subjects.

I don’t experience fatigue and I don’t have paralyzed vocal chords. I have self-identified (or disidentified?) as neurodivergent for the past couple of years, though, and Sterne’s book got me thinking about how autism, as an identity, both makes my past more coherent but also (or because it?) estranges me from myself in unsettling ways. I thought I’d explore those connections and disconnections a little, for some personal reasons, some political, and some that maybe I can’t articulate.

Stim vs. self

Autism manifests in a range of ways, but one common experience of or sign of autism is stimming—repetitive, semi-involuntary behaviors, like tics. I’ve had stimming behaviors for most of my life, though they’ve mostly been low-key enough that they weren’t identified as such, by others or by me.

Now that I’ve realized I’m neurodivergent, though, those stims are legible as stims, and especially legible in the moments where they were identified—not necessarily as signs of autism, but as signs of unpleasant annoying or mockable difference.

As one example, I used to be especially fond of ballpoint click pens, which I would click incessantly in middle school and high school. I remember being early to a social studies class one day and the teacher looking over, making a clicking motion with his hand, and shaking his head at me—more in sorrow than in anger, I think. Or, as another instance, in college I picked up a stim where I would rub my chin with my index finger—often enough and vigorously enough that I put some strain on my finger and rubbed my chin raw. There was at least one instance where a sort of friend who was also sort of an asshole imitated my chin-rubbing in front of a roomful of acquaintances. (No one laughed or reacted, and, with a certain sheepishness, he stopped.)

There are other behaviors besides stimming that can maybe be fit into a retrospective autistic self—behaviors like hyperfocus. My mom says that when I was very little, I used to watch television with such intensity I wouldn’t blink, which freaked her out. I also remember one time in college where I was eating in the dining hall with friends and someone accidentally knocked a chair over right beside me. It sounded like a bomb had gone off; everyone jumped—except me. I just finished my sentence. A woman who was a friendly acquaintance looked at me with more wonder and interest than ever before or after and said, “Wow, that was super cool. You didn’t even flinch.”

Obviously, I’d prefer to be super cool than to have people mock my stims, given a choice. But either way, it’s hard not to feel like these various interlocutors weren’t exactly reacting to me—or at least, they were reacting to a me who isn’t me. Most people wouldn’t necessarily feel like you’re defined, even tangentially, by the reflex action when the doctor taps your knee, or by a sneeze. Are you the things your self does when your self isn’t really at the wheel?

Sterne feels like he can’t write about the experience of fatigue while feeling fatigue because he’s physically not capable of writing through fatirue. In contrast, I feel like I can’t write about the experience of neurodivergence because the person who’s writing and the person who’s stimming aren’t exactly the same. “I click the pen therefore I write” is referring to two different people.

All the autistic people

There are other characteristics of autism that aren’t involuntary behaviors but are more like personality traits or tendencies. The most stereotypical of these are special interests—autistic people often have particular topics that they become focused on and research intently. When I was growing up, for example, I was obsessed with baseball statistics and baseball history, though I was mostly uninterested in actually watching baseball games.

Currently I’m in a bit of an obsession spiral where I’ve convinced myself that I need to finish a book every day. As a result I’ve read 436 books so far this year—a lot of them pretty short volumes of poetry, but also some monsters like Henry James’ The Golden Bowl, James Jones’ From Here to Eternity, Delany’s Dhalgren, and Robin DG Kelley’s massive Thelonious Monk biography. (I know how many because I keep a list, obviously.)

Notice that in the last paragraph I said that I had “convinced myself that I need to finish a book a day.” Reading a shit ton of books feels more conscious and considered than rubbing your chin or not jumping when a chair falls. But there’s still something involuntary about it—a feeling that the me that decided that these are the rules and the me following the rules are conjoined but not identical. And the perception of a self that is disciplined or subordinate to another self is only reified by an autistic identity, which calls into being a condition or syndrome which is regulating or creating the me who has to do all that reading.

Autism isn’t just multiple people in one self; it’s also a self that is (like most selves) created by multiple people. I already talked about how my autistic behaviors are most visible in my memory when other people pointed them out (for good or ill.) But autistic experience is also often defined by relationships with other people.

Neurodivergent people are often bullied. I certainly was—especially in elementary school, though people sometimes still react to me online with a hostility that seems both disproportionate and familiar. Neurodivergent individuals are also supposed to have difficulty navigating relationships (thus Love on the Spectrum)—and that was me too. I didn’t date or have a girlfriend until my (also neurodivergent) wife insisted that we were going to go out; I was 27.

These experiences are in some ways the most opaque aspects of neurodivergence. Stimming is a behavior contained in me, as the neurodivergent person. But bullying, or failing to date in a timely manner, is not just about me. It’s like autism went out and tapped some other third grader on the shoulder and said, “Hey, get your friends together and jump that kid.” People reacted to something in me that I didn’t know about, but which they recognized as vulnerable, as off-putting, or (in the case of people who told me they knew I was neurodivergent before I came out, to them or myself), just as familiar.

Who is this self who was visible to others but not to me? If other people know more about you than you know about yourself, does that mean they are more you than you are? And what is the mechanism by which you reveal yourself, or collaborate unintentionally with others in creating this neurodivergent life story for which you never had the script?

Neurodivergence in the mirror

One way to think about identity (and dis-identity) is through Lacan’s mirror stage. The mirror stage, for Lacan, is the moment when the child recognizes its reflection in the mirror—the instant when it sees itself as a coherent person.

This event [the child seeing itself in the mirror] can take place…from the age of six months, and its repetition has often made me reflect upon the startling spectacle of the infant in front of the mirror. Unable as yet to walk, or even to stand up, and held tightly as he is by some support human or artificial…he nevertheless overcomes, in a flutter of jubilant activity, the obstructions of his support, and, fixing his attitude in a slightly leaning-forward position, in order to hold it in his gaze, brings back an instantaneous aspect of the image. [translation by Alan Sheridan]

Some pop commentary treats the mirror stage as…well, a stage, a developmental milestone. The child recognizes his true self, which makes him “jubilant.” Recognizing himself as himself, the child knows himself—as I might come to know myself by recognizing I’m autistic.

But Lacan’s original, opaque prose is a good bit more ambiguous than this cheerful narrative of progress. He says that the infant, when he looks in a mirror, “anticipates in a mirage the maturation of his power.” That is, the child sees not who he is, but who he imagines himself becoming.

More, the moment of recognition for Lacan fuses the ego “with the statue in which man projects himself, with the phantoms that dominate him, or with the automaton in which, in an ambiguous relation, the world of his own making tends to find completion.”

What that means (maybe) is that the child looking in the mirror creates a false self—a statue, a phantom, an automaton. The mirror stage is not the moment when the child where it recognizes its true identity; instead, it’s a metaphor for the process, untethered from sequence or time, whereby the self invents a future self, complete with past, present future, and a story of joyfully discovering the self.

Lacan might say, then, (if you could understand him), that my self-estrangement from autism is an aspect of, or a mirror of, the self-estrangement inherent in any image of identity or self. The narrative of self-discovery is always a retroactive effort to create a coherent self from tics, absences, habits, other people’s reactions. The experience of autism is the experience of not experiencing autism, because the jubilantly constructed self isn’t there.

Different brains for everyone

I hope it’s clear that I’m not saying that neurodivergence doesn’t exist. On the contrary, what I’m saying is that the experience of neurodivergence, at least for me, is a very real experience of incoherence, and that that experience calls into question the coherence of abled and neurotypical experience.

It’s not just neurodivergent people, after all, who act in ways that don’t necessarily make sense to themselves, or who have selves defined by the way others treat them. Everyone puts their mirror image together and then has to explain to themselves (or carefully not explain to themselves) why sometimes, from some angles, it doesn’t exactly look like them.

Finding out you’re neurodivergent can be comforting or empowering or jubilant because it explains you; it tells you why you are the way you are. Neurodivergence can also be helpful, though, because it doesn’t explain you. It’s in part a way of discovering (in a mirror?) that people are often inexplicable, not least to themselves.

Organizing around identity for autistic people, for disabled people, and for others is an important way to address discrimination, to demand accommodations, to find community, to find oneself. But I think the experience of neurodivergence also suggests that one thing we need to organize for is the right to not be trapped or systematized into the identity even of our self. Giving people the space to be themselves sometimes means giving them the leeway to be someone else—showing up cranky, showing up in need of different accommodations, showing up unable to eat the food that was your favorite last week, or sometimes not showing up at all. Neurodivergent, from this perspective, doesn’t just mean neurologically different from the typical. It means neurologically different from oneself. Which maybe woudn’t have to be different from everyone else if we were willing to let people, sometimes, be otherwise.

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