5:54pm July 28, 2014

on Simon and River Tam, autism, abuse, and alternate universes

I just realised that July’s nearly over already and I haven’t contributed anything to disabilityfest yet. So in lieu of any ability to create graphics or fanart or fic, I started writing a list of my autistic headcanons (as I’ve seen a few other people do), but when I got to ‘Simon and River Tam’ I realised all I really want to do is babble about them, because holy hell I have a lot of Thoughts.

So, here’s a bunch of rambly emotional meta about the Tam siblings, and why I think headcanoning both of them as autistic is particularly interesting.

Disclaimer: emphasis on ‘headcanon’. I recognise that neither of them are canonically (unambiguously) autistic. River is canonically neurodiverse (hence I think it’s okay to include her in disabilityfest, so hopefully this headcanon-y post is acceptable?), but her most obviously neuroatypical traits and behaviour are clearly stated to be a result of the abuse and medical experimentation she experienced. I am absolutely not saying that those trauma-related traits/behaviours/mental illnesses = autism. Obviously abuse did not make her autistic. I’m saying that I headcanon her as autistic regardless, and I want to talk about how her abuse and subsequent ‘extra’ neurodiversity relates to that.

[Warning for references to: the abuse and medicalised violence experienced by River in canon; real-word abuse of autistic people, particularly autistic children and especially in educational or medical contexts, including mentions of my own childhood abuse; sexism and the erasure of young autistic girls; dehumanisation of autistic people; PTSD and other assorted mental illnesses as a result of trauma. Also: one ableist slur quoted from canon; sarcastic use of functioning labels and other ableist language; and swearing.]

Read More

River really reminds me of me as a teenager.

My autistic brother and I are in a weird position though – it’s sort of like a weird inverse version of this.

He’s the one who’s more successful by most people’s standards. He has a job, he takes care of himself, he doesn’t get any extra assistance with life really. Nothing that nonautistic people don’t get as well, I mean.

I’m the one with the huge list of chronic illnesses and mental health issues and physical disabilities and PTSD and all that stuff.

People call him high functioning or Asperger’s, people tend to call me low functioning even though I don’t like the term.

And so there’s a reflection of what you describe, there, between yourself and your sibling, and River and Simon.

And yet I also think I’m probably happier than he is, I think I know myself better than he knows himself, I think I’m more grounded in something incredibly solid about the world, than he is. There was a long period of time when I was the “damaged one”, but eventually that stopped being who I was. And now I feel like every day I am becoming the person I was meant to be, and that person was never meant to be a “the-world success story” as Donna Williams puts it. That was who other people expected me to become based on false ideas about giftedness, among other things. That was a possible future that everyone believed in but me. But that was never going to be it. That was never going to be me. That was never supposed to be me. And I don’t feel robbed of it, because who I am now, is exactly, exactly who I’m supposed to be. And if I hadn’t “failed at life” in most people’s terms, I wouldn’t know who I was, I wouldn’t have the ability to connect to the layers of reality that sustain me, I wouldn’t have everything that is important to me now.

And that’s where it all becomes weird and inverted.

Because on the surface, my brother and I are much like you describe.

But underneath, there’s something very different going on. And I think that could happen for River too. I don’t think her only future is to be a ‘damaged person’ for the rest of her life. I don’t think that being Simon would have been good for her. I don’t think what happened to her was good, but it happened, and now she is who she is, and I honestly don’t think she would’ve ever become a “the-world success story” even if it hadn’t happened. I don’t think Simon’s life is for her. I think she has another life to lead, and the longer she is away from the sources of her problems, the closer she can get to that other life. And that life may prove to be more rich and rewarding for her than Simon’s was for him, for all anyone knows. She’s clearly very 'sensing’ in a way Simon is not, and that can come with a lot of difficulties, but it can also come with a lot of rewards, it’s a double-edged sword.

Anyway… I can see a life like my life now as one of her possible futures, and while most people would look at my life and see nothing all that good or interesting or rewarding about it, they don’t live my life, so they don’t know. But I think a life similar to mine is what someone like her would get as a possible future among the better-case scenarios. There are of course a lot of scenarios that are much worse, and you can’t know which one will happen until it’s happening. I certainly never expected to be who I am now, I never expected all these disconnected elements of who I am to connect into something solid and whole and beautiful, but that’s in the process of happening, and it’s amazing. I would not trade my life for a the-world success story if you paid me millions of dollars. My life is my life, and the most important part of that is that I’m becoming who I’m supposed to be. Which is something that is open to everyone.

So looking at my (autistic) brother and me, I can see the River/Simon parallels in some areas. Including the thing where I was supposedly more gifted than he was and supposedly good at everything and supposedly had this bright future (but was also the less “HF” of the two by most people’s standards) then ended up damaged and institutionalized and tortured (by which I mean torture the form of abuse, not tortured as in emotionally tortured, although that happened too I guess) and shit. And I can see a point in our past where everything you say about the parallels looked true.

But now there’s this weird inversion going on, where even though he’s the the-world success story, and I’m the one living on disability and needing intensive caregiving and stuff, I’m probably better-adjusted in many ways than he is, and better connected to some deep areas of reality. (Which he would laugh at, but we haven’t talked much since I was a confused and disoriented teenager.) And I see that potential for River and Simon in the future as well, despite how bad things look for her now. Because I can see that current of marona in her (that’s a word I made up for something that doesn’t translate well from sensing) that could sustain her and build her up into who she’s supposed to be, if all the right things were to happen, if she met the right people, if everything went the right way. And I don’t see Simon as being in touch with marona in the way she is, and I don’t see him as having much of the capacity for that.

I’m not trying to come off as saying that I’m better than my brother, by the way. My brother and I are very different people. We both have our strengths and weaknesses and we are who we are. We’re in many ways total opposites when it comes to autism (and I don’t mean functioning labels, I mean like every autistic trait that I have, he has the opposite version, and vice versa), yet we do have some things in common. And at any rate, I’m not trying to come off like it’s better to be someone like me than someone like him, it’s just that he’s never seemed to be as in touch with who he is, as I am in touch with who I am, now. I don’t see anyone as better than anyone else, everyone has connections to the deeper parts of reality, everyone has the person they are meant to be (and for each person that’s different), but not everyone is aware of themselves on that level, and I think that’s where he and I differ in many ways. And I see River as having more potential for that awareness, and more potential for the wholeness that comes from that awareness, than people give her credit for.

So I guess I see something like my life as a possible River Tam future, and a good River Tam future, no matter what anyone else thinks of my life. (I used to want to make a video telling autistic people that a future like mine is possible, because if I’d known that, I maybe wouldn’t have tried suicide so many times. And people said things like “you’re on welfare and in need of so much care, how can you possibly call that a good future for anyone, why would anyone want your life?” And I didn’t know how to tell them… when I was a teenager, I knew I would not grow up to be a the-world success story, and the only two options I was given was to either be a the-world success story, or to be institutionalized forever. To be severely disabled and not institutionalized and not miserable was not an option that I was told about until I encountered the autistic community. Being on welfare and being in need of care are trivial next to living in freedom, and anyone who doesn’t grasp that has probably never been threatened with lifelong institutionalization if they couldn’t measure up. Um… tangent over.)

I hope it was okay to add all of this. I find River to be so familiar from my youth, and your description of family stuff to be so familiar from years ago, and yet… the weird inversion thing happened, and my life is so different now than anything I could have ever dreamed at either point in time. So I have hope that hers could be too. She’ll never be who she would’ve been, but then again neither will any of us. She is who she is, and that’s still someone beautiful with a lot to offer the world, who still has some amazing possible futures that look nothing like what a nondisabled person would expect a “good” future to look like, but are still amazing.

And I have a suspicion (or a headcanon, anyway) that, like me, even without the abuse she went through, she’d never have been a the-world success story. That was a mirage in other people’s minds, not a reality. The things Simon says about her pre-abuse abilities are not unbiased or fully factual, they’re embellished by a lot of his own biases about the world. I think she would’ve run into trouble functioning in the NT world either way, eventually, and would’ve had to deal with that as best she could. And I suspect she would’ve run into the thing I ran into in adolescence, where her brain just went “nope not doing this stuff people expect anymore, gonna do what I’m good at, drop everything else, no matter how important the 'everything else’ is”. But that’s because I see a lot of myself and my friends in her, and… highly sensing people don’t tend to last as 'gifted’ in the way that other 'gifted’ people do, no matter how extremely 'gifted’ we’re initially described as.