I’m in despair about writing a book for a publisher with whom I’ve a contract, and I want to tell you about it.
The Autism Dialogue Approach Handbook was originally proposed with 80,000 words. What was I thinking? A shorter version has been accepted and I’ve now got 35k down but I’m out of energy, with an extended deadline for the completed manuscript fast approaching. Family and friends are saying “just do it!”, and “you’re just bored, get up early and do two hours.” and “just treat it like a job.” and such like, except that is, for my mom, who the other day said, “Don’t do it. Life’s too short for doing anything we don’t want to do.” Thanks Mum, I agree. But my future income relies on getting this idea out on paperback, hardback and ebook formats, as promised in the contract.
This feeling of lethargy is on a level I’ve never known. A few weeks ago in Portugal I knew I had to do a bit of writing but it felt like there was a physical wall stopping me. In tears, I exclaimed, “Why the fuck should I have to write a book explaining to people how to communicate? They should already know!”
The next day however, I wrote for a few hours straight. And it felt good.
But again last week. My hyper-busy brain got the better of me and I was overloaded with thought, unable to process the sheer amount of information I was trying to filter. I went to bed quite depressed, pondering I was a failure, a broken, pretentious artist, with a stupidly impossible idea. The number of times I’ve reluctantly had to close my browser’s 30-40 tabs of inspiring and informative research pages, ready to be digested and regurgitated into my tome, is deeply worrying. Where has all that information gone? And why does more keep coming? The world is such an overwhelmingly fascinating place. But it’s all lost to me forever, and now I declare to you dear reader, I fear I won’t be able to bring my declaration to the world.
So I give up. I sit still and stare. I distract myself in the most elaborate ways possible. Imagine having an empty diary for three days, no excuses, just write. I’m ready with the snacks, the exercise plan and even a clear plan of what I have to write in my head…. until the time comes, the sense of being chained to the desk and the need to escape to even deeper countryside, walking or bike riding, I pretend I can improvise on the piano, or sink into the depths of meditation and endless spiritual youtube masters. I need to just sit and stare some more. To just think, to just be, and to stay still some more. Until…
In the stillness I connect with silent sadness, a melancholic frustration at the core of this damn book I ‘have to write’. These twitching fingers could do so many things! The book, the idea itself, is an art form, and it’s a very lonely birth. Maybe I’m traumatised that the midwife was perhaps a bit absent, that time I appeared all those years ago, well it was 1.30am on a Monday.
In essence, autism’s definition, when we talk about the thing, is of being less than a person, and maybe all the teaching, coaching, training, writing… all the sitting with the existential crappiest truth that somehow there are millions of people, just like me since a young kid, who have ‘trouble fitting in’ with the fucked-up, broken mainstream, and it all just gets the better of me. These so-called autistic people have become very, very aware of themselves and their positioning in relation..
'Autism' is a western idea, just over a century old, of a deficient and damaged self (autos); an evolving, morphing, dynamic social construction, against anything or anyone unusual, fragile and unique; desensitised to accepting the unknown, and nor can society know. Society and the majority power-over, doesn’t know it’s looking in the mirror, a split-off part of its collective personality; reducing, naming and categorising the fragments, and yet the mirror itself is already shattered. Is that true? And am I separate, and will this truth set me free?
Will I sit in stillness and wallow in despair at that unknown, or fight back, while those horrifying statistics and the pain of the world forever haunts me?
I know I have to face the unknown. I know I have to embrace the unknown. I know I have to write. I am writing now, and I’m coming round.
The Autism Dialogue Approach is a vain attempt for sure, but I’m not the only one who suggests we idiots don’t communicate properly, that we don’t truly listen, don’t ‘slow the pace and make some space’. To be still, not just for each other, but for ‘what will be’ when we slow, and still, and create this together. This. Without agenda and in stillness, the minds and the illusions of fragmentation dissolves, then hearts and minds are again together and we can ask,
‘What is the potential yet to arise in this moment?’
Dialogue is a radical, very practical approach, and has solitary applications too, but it’s a lonely game writing about anything, let alone dialogue and the myth of the person alone1.
But just like in a dialogue circle, solitary stillness and self-acceptance with no agenda, can dislodge negative feedback loops, and the result is clearer thinking, utterances of harmonious tones and refinement of action.
What implications has being still for making sense of this being human?
Biklen, D. (2005) Autism and the Myth of the Person Alone. NYU Press.