Spectral Analysis

[CW’s for suicidal ideation, mental illness, bullying & trauma]

Autism is a spectrum because it isn’t black and white; it’s every color you can imagine. There are infinite possibilities that come with being autistic. You can’t just toss it all in one bucket, or worse, divvy it up into different baskets like fruit.

But there’s another spectrum that collides with it in matching colors as well as clashing ones — the spectrum of trauma.

Trauma is another dangerous demon that comes in infinite forms, colors, sizes, volumes, states of being. Physical, emotional, sexual, mental. It’s a commonly held tenet of the human condition that trauma is Bad. It causes Pain. It gives people to Suffer. There are those, like martyr parents and money-grubbing BCBAs, who would say the same thing about autism — but we know better than that now, don’t we? We know we don’t “Suffer” from being autistic; we Suffer from other people’s prejudice and ableism.

Which is where the autism spectrum and the trauma spectrum most commonly collide. If you created a Venn diagram of mistreatment of autism and trauma triggers, it probably wouldn’t be a plain circle, but it might more closely resemble McBryde-Thomas cartography.

Enough can never be said about the emotional trauma that can arise from being bullied and harassed by almost every sentient being you come into contact with, not in the least when it comes from family members the same as from peers and schoolteachers. Some say it’s almost impossible to tell where autistic trauma ends and mental illness begins — now that’s one Venn diagram that really is just a plain circle. Do we need to discuss the stigma attached to mental illness, along with the stigma attached to autism because it’s too often misconstrued as a mental illness? Well… yes, we do need to discuss it more, but that’s for another post. For these purposes I’m going to say that autistic trauma commonly presents as mental illness because that’s what it causes, and many are the stories of autistic people coping with PTSD because of all the mistreatment they’ve endured.

Now I want to share with you a bushy little tale about what rejection sensitivity can do to a girl. Some of my friends over on AutiComm hold that rejection-sensitive dysphoria is really just complex PTSD in Groucho glasses and a fedora, but the point is the effect that it has on a person’s well-being.

When I first joined Twitter, I wanted to share some thoughts and theories about what it was like to live as an autistic adult. Mostly positive, but I was unprepared for Twitter culture, especially in disability circles. It seemed as though the more I tried to be positive about the autistic experience, the more I was spurned by the “popular kids” of autistic Twitter — just like I had been in school, sitting alone in the cafeteria with all the popular girls gathered around in their cliquey little circles whispering and giggling to each other while casting furtive glances at me. I felt like the worst rejection came down from the people on Twitter I really admired. But if I only knew…

After about a year, I connected with a couple of neurotypical allies and wrote a blog post that one of them proceeded to share on her website. That’s when I learned the extent of the dichotomy between parents and autistic adults — not to mention some of the distressing infighting that goes on among us.

Well, to make a short story long, those of you who have braved the treacherous swamplands of Twitter probably know some of the more “popular kids.” I didn’t. Never interacted with most of them, only ever saw them in follow suggestions. Then a friend recommended a thread woven by one of them, a prominent disability rights activist, which is when I discovered that I was blocked. Still not cognizant of Twitter etiquette, such as it is, I viewed that DRA’s profile from another account to try to figure out what I’d ever done that warranted a block.

Yeah, that… was poor judgment. I encountered another thread, which was one massive subtweet. The DRA claimed not to remember who had outed their self as a “bridge builder” with NT allies, but they repeated a whole pawful of terms I had used to describe my willingness to connect with *any* allies. They eviscerated me without mercy, using verbiage like “security risk” and “you chose” and “I don’t have to justify to you” — and 8,000 of their admirers were in the front row for it. The attack came within days of being the target of another hefty subtweet from someone I really admired, who considered my takes problematic; and during that same period, one of those little “mass-follow” lists popped up and I added a few names to it, only for one of them to protest being added to a list of people they hated, whereupon it swiftly degenerated into a block-down-tweet-out. It was too much at once, and I felt full crushing grinding responsibility for it, like I’d earned the hatred and contempt of everyone who used the ActuallyAutistic hashtag. It knocked me right over on my tail. I tweeted goodbye, lay in bed, cried hysterically for I don’t know how long, reached over to grab a bottle of sedative and get myself out of everyone’s fur once and for all…

But that was when I saw a notification, a message from a teenage girl I befriended through another blog post I’d written for a different site. Okay. I still make a difference in someone’s world. Maybe it’s a reason to keep going.

However, I was at a loss to determine clearly why that esteemed DRA’s cruelty cut as deeply as it did, until I first heard the term “rejection-sensitive dysphoria” and found out a) that it’s one of the redder spots on the trauma spectrum, and b) how closely tied it is to neurodivergence. I shudder to think that anyone else experiences RSD the same way I do, and reacts similarly. I think I had the reaction I had because I always experience it when I get kicked around by someone I thought was a friend, or a family member, or anyone else with whom I should be feeling kinship or affection. Or, in this case, people who should have been allies but instead made a conscious choice to lash out and break my spirit.

That’s one thing I’ll never understand about autistic advocacy and activism; why do we do this to each other? We’re all so tired as fuck of all this trauma being wrought on us by the rest of the world, do we really need to drag it into our own circles? Or do these rivalries mainly exist on mainstream social media like Twitter and Facebook?

Both of which I’ve quit because I’m so sick of the strategy of “attack and dogpile” instead of “educate and correct” to let someone know when they’re saying or doing something harmful and they honestly don’t realize it. That’s where the trauma spectrum turns its purplest, when pre-existing trauma ripens into a massive bruise because a person is so distressed at coming under friendly fire.

That incident with the DRA was a wrap on my fourth life. After a couple more episodes on Twitter and one on AutiComm, I’m down to two. So I decided to get off that hellsite (Twitter) while the getting was good. And it’s because I fear that other people have similar RSD episodes that I think it’s important to curtail it, by examining how and why it can surface, and imparting that knowledge to our neurosibs so they don’t trigger it unawares. Not that there’s any hope of getting your typical Twitter user to understand that, but… in addition to that knowledge, it’s also important to stop being so damn adversarial and try to work with each other on what’s important, which is gaining acceptance and being appreciated.

Many people say “RSD is the worst” or “RSD is unbearable sometimes.” Add to the list of epithets: RSD is a silent, insidious killer. I hope no one here knows anyone else who’s likely to trip on an RSD wire and take a fatal plunge into suicidal ideation.

The trauma spectrum is just about as extensive as the autism spectrum, but the way I see it, its colors tend to be a lot darker, reflecting the darker moods of traumatized people. Autism can be a lot brighter, and autistic people need an even break to discover just how bright they can be.