Things ain’t been easy

Been a while

I fell off on posting new content. It has been a little over two months and in that time I’ve struggled to settle into a new jog amidst the continuing “mid-life crisis”. The mid-life crisis is the one where you struggle to accept your gender, biological sex, sexual orientation, neurotype, and history of psychosis, right? Well, here we are.

As I was saying, I started a new job. The work schedule kinda sucks and I’ve not found my way to a balanced routine, leaving little energy for my creative pursuits—but that is the topic for a different paragraph. I’m finally settling into being a public librarian. Lord, knows it has been ajob full of surprises.

I took time away from art. Not planned. I lost the drive last winter and only began to find my way back a few weeks ago. I’ve been having a really hard time understanding why. This evening, I think I have a pretty good idea.

One of the things that feel a lot less “Blockbuster” in my recent life crisis has been the acceptance that I am autistic. While I’ve known for sure for a while and was diagnosed with a predecessor to ASD when I was a little kid, it only really began to feel real in the past month. There is a process that happens after a revelation like that. You slowly discover your entire life story needs to be internally rewritten. I thought, “I already rode out the re-contextualization that I’m a transgender lesbian,” and “I’ve known and accepted that I have ADHD for decades,” how much could this really rewrite anything?

Boy howdy… Well… You don’t know what you don’t know, as the saying goes.

Needless to say, a lot of things make a lot more sense after putting all the pieces together. The most startling realization to myself has been the role autism has played in my life-long struggle with self-perception and self-expression. People frequently ask kids how they are feeling. I learned from a very young age that “I don’t know” was an unacceptable answer to any question and that that response merited punishment. Alexithymia is very common in people with ASD. I literally didn’t know how I was feeling, but felt like I couldn’t say so. My parents thought I just couldn’t express myself well and started describing me as having poor self-confidence.

Masking is something neuro-, gender, & sexually diverse/queer people are all overly familiar with. We learn to cover up our differences in order to be more acceptable in polite society, to varying degrees of success. It turns out, I have an exceptionally high IQ, which I’ve leveraged my entire life to adapting and bolstering my various masks. I would tell people how I was feeling based on an analysis of acceptable answers, answers that would get the least amount of negative feedback, and answers that seemed contextually correct.

Now, it isn’t that I don’t have emotions, it is just that many of them are pretty heavily blunted and I have a disconnect when it comes to actually identifying what they are in a way that isn’t just an intellectual analysis.

So, I guess this is how I come out publicly as an Autistic Transgender Masc Lesbian working as a Public Librarian. To finish the Republican boogieman bingo: I’m also an apostate who practices witchcraft, I unironically support all ongoing communist political projects, and I hope my openness encourages those younger than me to embrace any nascent queerness they have within them. I think that covers all my bases.

Back to the art:

I was struggling to figure out what hang-ups had fallen into place that were keeping me from continuing my art. Well, when you start to realize you’ve lived your entire life behind a mountain of masks, you start to dissect them. If you stick with it long enough you can even begin to drop some of them. That is what happened here.

What happens when you realize that every time someone asked you how you felt, you ran a complex analysis of the situation to provide an answer rather than actually expressing your feelings, then you begin to tear down that part of the mask you are wearing? What if you are an artist pursuing Abstract Expressionism? Suddenly all expression feels like a lie. All your past work feels like a facade. You want to begin creating work that really reflects your feelings, but a lifetime of training and conditioning needs to be overcome. Then comes the question, “if every once of these things were really masks I wore, who am I really?”

Conclusion

In 2001, shortly after the towers fell, I was in my sophmore high school art class. The “bell assignment” was supposed to be a softball question. The question was simply “How are you feeling about the events of the recent past?” I loved and respected art and made a point to never lie or pretend in that class. That question broke me. I answered honestly, and it was the only F I ever received in an art class.

In some ways nothing has changed. I still see me in my art work. I eventually found my way back to seeing my photography as more than surface level work. And I am still doing the same kind of work after fighting my way through this period.

In other ways… well. Nothing is the same. I still see my past work as reflecting me, but I can’t make any of that work again. I am not the cisgender, heterosexual, all-american eagle scout I thought I was when I made that work.

What is important to me now is that the work I create is authentically mine. I’m finding that that means I’m making a lot less of it. That is often disheartening, but understandable. It is also the only choice I have.