On the Spectrumvision Because It's Cool
Get ready for decorative neurodivergent K-Drama summertime fun!
For most of the past two months I:
Wheelbarrowed out-of-town guests all over my fair desert during what D. calls “Camp I Don’t Wanna.”
Crawled out-of-town to the Florida Keys to see family and dramatically roll my eyes at the now family-and-redneck-friendly drag shows.
Age-appropriately landed in the the Southern Arizona mountains to bird-as-a-verb with D.
Played catchup with carefully curated doctors’ appointments-one for each body part and organ.
Did loads of “dump all the shit in there together no matter what color, fabric or care instructions” laundry.
Ruminated.
Believe me, when your days are spent trying to force-feed your city to people who have never been there, force-feed yourself someone else’s city, look for the holy grail of birds when they changed its name (Elegant Trogron to Coppery-Tailed Trogon? Was Shitty-Looking Trogon taken?), guessing what illness people have in the waiting room by how they dress, and stuffing $19 pina colada-stained clothing in the washer with nervous-boarding-dog bedding, there’s barely any time for everyday rumination.
By “everyday rumination” I mean my old standbys like:
Why is my right underarm itching after applying my Suave antiperspirant but not my left?
Why did the hair on my legs and underarms migrate to my upper lip and chin?
Why am I the only person in the world who has the gift of knowing whether or not a woman is pregnant by reading her dryer lint?
Now that my days are more halcyon, I’ve turned my attention to how the hell I’m going to spend the next five months in my beloved blast furnace—aka, the desert.
OK, it’s only really hot from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., which is why anyone with the sense of Walmart’s generic Ritz (i.e. Great Value Baked Buttery Round Crackers) gets up before dawn, finishes walking R. before the sun moves to “stun”, does sensitive-stomach dog/sensitive human laundry in a mixed load, fills the crockpot with a can of Cannellini beans and anything in the fridge that doesn’t have mold, blood, scars or age spots and intensely scrutinizes her long-term to-do list consisting of endless non-virtual sticky notes plastered over a Google Calendar screen.
Then drives to Dollar-Fifty Tree, Walmart, Trader Joe’s and Costco before the blazing steering wheel can char fingers into nubs, comes home, does tai chi followed by meditation while questioning whether I’m doing either correctly, jacks around watching reels of my preferred Capuchin influencer, Gaitlyn Rae, attempts to take a siesta by lying on the bed while tweaker-like twitching and thinking about when the stock market is going to tank, spend early evening watching my summer TV shows until it’s cool enough to hang out in the backyard while getting strafed by bats, and caps the night off with more bedtime twitching and multiple nocturnal pees until morning.
Speaking of tweaker-like twitching: Years ago, when I went to a county mental health clinic, I noticed people getting acupuncture in their ears and was told it helped addicts get thorough withdrawal symptoms. I did some research, found Auricular acupuncture was also used for depression and anxiety, and my doc agreed to let me try it. So after my ears were temporary pierced, I was led into a small room with low lighting, Muzak, chairs and couches, and told to wait for a half hour. There were seven others in the room—all overly skinny, three with arm tracks. The seating wasn’t comfortable and the room was claustrophobic, so I moved around a lot and made a few nervous attempted-funny comments about things like how the decor looked like “farmhouse industrial.” During that time, people were coming in and out. After about 15 minutes, the acupuncturist opened the door and told me to follow her. Once we were outside the room, she said, “I’m sorry, but you can’t get treatment here. Our patients were complaining that you were disruptive.” In other words, I was so hyper, even the fucking meth heads couldn’t handle me!
Back to summer survival. Since I’ll be stuck inside a lot, I’ve already picked my favorite hot weather watch on the spectrum: Extraordinary Attorney Woo, a Korean drama (K-Drama) about a high-functioning autistic attorney who happens to be a savant and is weird, blunt and socially awkward. She would be diagnosed with Asperger’s, but damn it, they changed the term to “Autism Spectrum Disorder 1” because its namesake, Austrian neurologist Hans Asperger, was inconveniently a Nazi-lovin’ guy.
I first watched Woo with my sister during my recent visit. She loves neurodivergent shows like the genre prototype Columbo (who loved scratching his head and going off on tangents to distract his suspect) Monk (the genius detective with OCD) and Love on the Spectrum, where autistic paramours get it on in that zany neurodiverg way.
Woo is played by non-autistic actress Park Eun-bin, which would cause a riot in the US, because here you have to really be whatever it is you’re playing, because god forbid, you should actually act. Dustin Hoffman isn’t autistic, yet in Rain Man he played an autistic man who needed to be institutionalized. But that was back when you could do that kind of thing and no one cared. But, then again, he never went as far as what Robert Downey’s character in Tropic Thunder pointed out as “full retard.” Instead, Hoffman played what used to be called an idiot savant, someone severely impaired in some areas, but with a genius-level gift for art, music, math—or lawyering, like Woo!
Sometimes it looks like Park is trying too hard to act like what she thinks being autistic is, like when she puts her hands up like a baby and sways side by side when encountering a revolving door. I understand that’s a self-soothing motion, but you can almost see the actress thinking about it. Woo is absolutely gorgeous, but it annoys me that her autism is portrayed as merely a bother she can shake off with one of the cute whale images she fixates on, or a faux covering of her ears, rather than something that comes on like a motherfucking tsunami—which is how it can present itself in real life.
One of the things I’ve been thinking about during my nocturnal not-sleep “spaz” (yep, that classicly lovely 1960s term was one of my childhood nicknames) is how many people have become desperate to appear not normal. Yes, we all know there’s no such thing as totally normal, but the recent spate of shows about people on the spectrum, the annoying overuse of the word neurodivergent, and New York Times articles like “The Gift of Getting Weirder With Age” shows that people who were always firmly rooted into the mainstream now want to take us along for their twisted ride into faux fuckupedness.
I come complete with a long list of mental illness acronyms, some that were there when I popped out of the womb thanks to familial crazy, others that developed later. Some, like ADHD, hadn’t even been invented yet, others changed names midstream like manic depression/Bipolar/BD.
Mix in varying shades of PTSD, OCD, GAD, and a few other things I forgot and you can understand why I’m so pissed off at these wannabes.
I was the outcast, the weirdo, the one nobody picked for anything involving a group of kids, the one sent to the school shrink (who wanted me to take proto-Adderall at a very high dose), the one that always got in trouble, the pariah, the ostracized one. And because holding in anything—be it pee or pain—is not my strong suit, I lashed out in that wildly ineffective, awkward manner that made kids make fun of me even more.
As I got older, the manic risks I took like stealing my mom’s Matador station wagon and driving 120 miles an hour, the dangerous/creepy/abusive/addicted guys I fucked and/or lived with, the massive amount of unknown drugs I accepted from strangers, only served to make me more unstable. Although I don’t believe in revisionist history, and some of the hedonism was fun, I did it mostly to stop dealing with the critical shit that would help propel my life forward in any kind of functional way. And my depressive phases were so hopeless and numbing that even though I tried once, killing myself seemed like something I needed more postive energy to even attempt.
Carrying my acronym fanny pack was crippling, but it motivated me to develop the sense of humor that literally saved my life. Yes, many funny people have some mental aberration. Or are neurodivergent-what I call NeuroD because it sucks as much as SunnyD. I don’t wear the NeuroD label proudly; I don’t feel the need to define myself by it or show it off like a rescue dog at the park, but I was born into the club.
I can talk about this all I want because it’s my hardcore reality—not some made-for-social-media “I think I’m on the spectrum” or “my kid is neurospicy” shit. And hell, if I can’t talk about myself on Substack—one of the Four Pillars of The Golden Age of Narcissism (besides TikTok, Facebook and Instagram) —then where the fuck can I? Plus, if I don’t share here, then my close friends will have to listen to my Superman-like, DC-comic-worthy traumatic origin story all over again.
I feel like I did when Madonna first got into Kabbalah. She started calling herserlf Esther, observing the Sabbath, studying the Zohar (the Jewish book of mysticism) and wearing a red string for some dumbfuck reason her Jewguru gave her. Essentially, she got to enjoy the cool parts of Judaism without any of danger that involves being an actual Jew. You know, like death threats, bomb threats, vandalism, having to go through a metal detector before entering synagogue—the stuff that makes real Jews hide their identity and Star of David necklaces. I call the celeb version Jew Lite.
Same with Neuro Lite. People want to be cutely weird without going through the purgatory of being truly weird. They want the neurodivergent label just to be different without actually knowing the hellpit of suffering with that shit.
So you faux lunatics take your weighted blankets and grounding sheets and get the fuck off of my crazy lawn before I hit you with my acronym fanny pack!
In case you missed my last post:
Grocery Shopping Questions That Are Responsible For My Insomnia, The Guacamole Quotient, and Ticonderoga #2 Pencil Bread
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How can you be an involved wrink and keep me working in this literary sweatshop for free?
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I actually wish I knew was neurodivergent from the start. It would’ve made me feel less crazy or different or alone. I love how Attorney Woo talks about her autism and other people accept it. I’m also finding Love on the Spectrum fascinating and probably an incredibly relief for these folks because they don’t have to hide anything. They sit there and they actually discuss what kind of autism they have and understand when somebody says I hate the sound of munching popcorn and have to put their hands over their ears . It’s funny that the original show, Love on the spectrum Australia, seems more watchable than the American show. But then again. I tend to watch non-American shows mostly, including crime, dramas, Scando-Noir, etc. to find human interactions that are more real, complex, and don’t make me go insane about the level of boring and stupid we have become. The neurodivergent shows are the only place I can reliably find that kind of refreshing honesty and people who aren’t afraid to show they are human.
Boy did you just state the obvious with humor.? I loved this post. I grew up with ( use the right term) a neurodivergent mother. For most of my life my brother and I were loners. oh, yea, my dad was an orphan; so both parents were antisocial. I get your comments because I lived many of them.
So, thank you for bringing this subject light. keep em coming!😆