10:31pm October 6, 2014

How many of you…

…feel like you spent your first (insert number here) of years in a fog?

I remember being twelve and feeling like my first eleven years were in a fog. Especially the years from five to eleven. Before five, it was something even more than a fog, different, totally different than anything that I can translate.

These years are not cutoff points, they are fuzzy boundaries between states of consciousness, developmental phases maybe, that exist for autistic people but not so much for nonautistic people.

Then I spent my teenage years in a different kind of fog. More like a murk, underwater, drowning. Swamp water.

And only past nineteen do things start to clear, and become clearer and clearer, not just replacing one fog or murk for another.

I think it went like it went for Anne Corwin:

I discovered that I liked writing better than speaking (for communicative purposes) sometime in my teens, I think – I started randomly trying to journal my thoughts, and was very surprised to discover how much more able I was to put my thoughts into words on paper and on the screen. In some ways I think I really started becoming able to express my own thoughts accurately only after a period of writing regularly – it was sort of like a little light started in my brain and gradually became brighter as I got more and more of a sense of what bits of language went with which internal events and ideas.

This is one area in which I can definitely relate to even some non-verbal autistics – that is, while most of this happened “behind the scenes” for me as opposed to where it would be obvious to others, I can understand what Sue Rubin (a non-verbal autistic woman around my age) means when she says that when she began to type, her mind “began to wake up”.

That really started happening for me in my late teens and early twenties, and ever since then it’s felt less and less like there’s a constant fog or murky swamp water all around me. But I wonder, is the fog or murky swamp water effect common for autistic people, or just me?

The last time I tried to really have a conversation with someone about it, he was one of those assholes who called himself a friend in order to bully me better. And when I started mentioning fog (both in terms of “my life was in a fog before” and in terms of visual snow from migraines) he would get this “knowing” tone to his voice and say “You do know that when they talk about fog in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, they’re talking about shock treatment, right?” Which, no i didn’t know, but it doesn’t really matter because I wasn’t getting my fog from a book, I was getting it from real life. So strange how whenever I got something from real life, people would act like I picked it up from a book, but all the myriad things i picked up from books they saw as genuine and honest and spontaneous communication.

Oh well.

Anyway.

Fog.

Murk.

Anyone?

TL;DR: I feel like I spent parts of my life in a constant fog or murk of some kind, sometimes like a fog, sometimes like being underneath swampy water. This only began clearing up in late adolescence/early adulthood. And like a good friend of mine, it started clearing up when we began being able to attach words consistently to our thoughts through writing, and learned how to communicate consistently rather than haphazardly by accident. She quoted a woman with much more severe communication and cognitive problems than we had, who nonetheless went through a similar process when learning to type. I’m wondering if this is familiar to anyone else.

Notes: