8:06am June 30, 2014

Why learning definitions of words doesn’t always help me.

I just wrote about this in another thread, but I want to make it a post of its own for the tags. Because I can’t be the only person who has this problem.

I am autistic and hyperlexic. My hyperlexia is the classical kind, which includes the following traits:

Reading from an extremely early age.
Increased ability to “decode” words compared to other readers the same age. This means to take a written word, and turn it into the sounds for a spoken word.
Severe language comprehension problems, including comprehending what I have read.
Ability to use words which outstrips the ability to understand words.
Heavy use of echolalia while learning language.
Higher expressive vocabulary than receptive vocabulary. Meaning I can use more words, in context, appropriately, than I am able to understand if I am reading or hearing those words, in context, appropriately.
Some dyslexic traits, despite the fact that hyperlexia and dyslexia are words that sound on the surface like opposites.

This goes along quite well with my variant of autism, to the point where I don’t think you can separate out the hyperlexia from the autism. Many people believe that hyperlexia means skills and comes with no deficits. There are hyperlexic people where this seems to be true – they are early readers and they excel at all things reading and language-related, but especially reading-related. That is a different type of hyperlexia than the one I have, but it’s still hyperlexia. But the type of hyperlexia I have is pretty classic for hyperlexia, and has been described for as long as hyperlexia has been described. So “hyperlexia” is definitely not just a word for “good with language”, it can come with severe language delays in certain areas, in fact. It all depends on what type of hyperlexia I have.

I have talked in another post about a number of words, many of them pieces of academic jargon, that create problems for me. When I read them, it feels as if a miniature explosion goes off in my head. The word becomes a blank space at the epicenter, tied to nothing, meaning nothing. Every time my brain tries to access the meaning of the word, it gets another “error message” in the form of an explosion. The explosions cause me physical pain, and each explosion (which happens each time I try to read the word) creates cognitive dysfunction that can take minutes or even hours to go away fully.

I want to give you an example of how this works, because it confuses people. People think if they give me the definition of the word often enough, then it will help me. It doesn’t. And I want to show you why.

“Intersectionality” is the perfect word for me to do this with. Because it has every single component that, in most people’s minds, should make it a word I regularly understand and spontaneously use. But it’s not.

First, I understand the basic definition. It runs something like this: Intersectionality is about what happens when multiple oppressions and privileges coincide in one place. The term was coined by women of color in order to describe their experiences as women of color instead of women + people of color. Intersectionality is not a mathematical thing that you can add up. It is a lived experience that involves the fusion of all these experiences of oppression (and, sometimes, privilege as well) into something more than the sum of their parts.

Maybe I haven’t used the best wording there, but you can tell that I have an intellectual understanding of the word and its meaning. I could write a long essay on the topic of intersectionality, and people would be none the wiser.

Second, I have a gut-based understanding of intersectionality. I have had this understanding since long before I heard there was a word for it. I live multiple oppressions. I know what it means to be genderless and developmentally disabled and queer and poor and raised-female and fat and white and with a mixed-class upbringing, and all the details I’m leaving out. I know intimately how all those things combine. How they work against me, how they work for me, how they combine, how they become more than just the individual pieces added together. These are things that will always be there for me and I have always understood without needing a word for it.

So everything seems alright, doesn’t it?

I have the ability to literally read the word intersectionality. I may not be able to speak it out loud most of the time, because of a speech disability. But I know exactly how it would sound, out loud.

I have the intellectual definition of the word intersectionality, and I can even repeat it on a good day.

I have a much deeper, gut-based definition of the word intersectionality, a connection to direct experiences of the world that I’ve had since long before I knew there was a word to tie it all together.

I understand the role of intersectionality in social movements where people are legitimately afraid that only one kind of oppression is being considered at a time, and people with multiple oppressions, and multiple oppressions and privileges, are not being dealt with fairly at all. Or dealt with at all for that matter. It’s as if we don’t exist. This is why there’s a huge push, especially by the women of color who originally invented the term, to have things like feminism acknowledge intersectionality in a major way if it’s to be taken seriously.

I understand all these things, so why is intersectionality a problem word for me?

Because it is.

Because of what happens when I read it.

See, all those separate parts, for me? They’re separate. For many autistic people, our knowledge of the world is not to be found all in one place. It’s as if the knowledge is being stored on five different computers, all of which have different file formats, among other things. And our brains are supposed to somehow instantaneously load up all the files, in all those different formats, combine them into one file, and read them at once. This in a type of brain known for its difficulty with multitasking.

So what happens is that when I read the word intersectionality, my brain tries to come up with the meaning of the word so that I can understand the way the word was used in whatever sentence it was in. It almost doesn’t matter whether it’s looking for the intellectual dictionary meaning, or the intuitive gut-level meaning, it’s looking for a meaning, any meaning. The problem is it can’t find any. File not found. Error. The file is in there, but the brain can’t find it.

So my brain starts frantically scanning around for any files and definitions that could at least give it a clue. It comes up blank. The time pressure begins to catch up with it – brains work fast, so all of this is happening in a fraction of an instant, everything I’ve just described – and it creates pain. Excruciating pain. And it creates this weird feeling of blankness. Like every time my eyes pass over the word, there’s a big hole in my brain, and pain where the hole is, where the word should have been.

Over time, more slowly, I may come to an understanding, but by then it’s too late to undo the damage. There is always damage. The pain itself is much like nerve pain – unbelievably intense, almost electric. Except I can’t localize it, I can’t tell you where on my body it is, it seems to originate from inside my brain. But it’s no less painful for that. Meanwhile, it’s messing up my ability to think and reason properly, and that can last for much longer than the pain does. The pain lasts for a short time after each time I view the word, and is associated with a feeling of total blankness, which seems to be how my brain feels when it’s searching for something and comes up with nothing. The cognitive problems can last for hours.

And this is with just one of those words that does this to me. And this is with one of the better ones: One of the ones where I have an intellectual definition, and a gut-level definition, and the ability to use the word appropriately, and a perfect ability to ‘decode’ (read) the word. That’s actually the reason I chose it: To show why none of those things are enough to get rid of the problem. If, for whatever reason, my brain is unable to make rapid connections between a word and its definitions, then it doesn’t matter how often I hear a definition, or how much I have it committed to memory. The problem is that I can’t bring up the definition on the fly while reading the word. And if I can’t do that, then it causes blankness and explosions and lasting cognitive dysfunction.

I can’t explain why some words affect me like that, but I know that I’m not alone among autistic people in having this problem. I once talked to Jane Meyerding, an autistic writer, about words she described as “slippery” – her mind just slid right off them and wouldn’t hold onto any definition of them no matter how she tried. I’ve described these as words that bite my brain. And I’ve talked to a lot of other people who have specific words, or sets of words, that affect them this way. Also, believe it or not, some words that affect me this way are words or terms that I’ve coined, myself. Which makes no sense at all, but then I really don’t know what goes into making some words okay and others bite my brain like this.

But this is why telling me the definitions of words like heteronormativity isn’t going to make them stop biting my brain. On the off chance that the definition doesn’t just slide right off my brain (which it usually does – these words tend to be as slippery as Jane describes them), it’s still not going to be somewhere where I can recall it when I read the word. And if I can’t do that kind of recall, then the word is going to bite my brain no matter what else I know about it in theory.