If there’s one thing my autistic brain has taught me, it is to care. To care so irrevocably, unconditionally, deeply and intensely, that you lose yourself completely in your own belief and experience of whatever it may be that you care about. Many might suggest that to invest yourself in something that way would be unhealthy. And to be fair, I am inclined to agree.
I lose myself in caring more than the average Homo Sapiens (or so I’m assuming). I simply can’t do casual interest: either I care to an unhealthy extent, or I don’t give a damn at all (okay, maybe that’s an exaggeration, but you get my point). I think I know what you’re thinking: ‘that’s how autistic brains work right? Obsessive, compulsive.’ Well… not really.
The struggle of an autistic brain is in the way it processes information, filters it, the way the information travels through the brain, chaotically, frantically, to then be stored in unusual places and amounts. The autistic brain gets messy and any person living there inevitably feels overwhelmed, making it extremely difficult to make sense of his/herself, let alone of the world around him/her. And the biggest problem: there is no out. You can’t escape your brain. In fact, survival of your person is heavily reliant on you working with that nervy mess up there.
Well sh*t.
The only way for an autistic person to engage in a healthy relationship with his/her brain, and use this brain to help him/her survive, is to care about something to an obsessive extent. To focus on the light on the horizon. Caring is finding a silver lining through the mess that is you, your brain, your body, being alive even. Without it, we get lost inside our own selves. Over the course of my none too long life, my brain has shaped and reshaped itself to survive inside its own mess. So if we’re talking cause and effect, obsessiveness is not in the origins of my autism: it’s an inevitable result. Most other autistic brains I know of adopt this strategy of survival inside itself as well.
That is not to say that this works only for those on the autistic spectrum: we all need something important in our lives to stay sane. Something to stand for, something for which we overcome the challenges we are inevitably faced with in life. That said, usually what matters to us doesn’t make sense in that way. I don’t care about weight lifting because it challenges me to overcome my physical limits. Quite the opposite: I overcome my physical limits because I am so invested in weight lifting that I unknowingly end up more resilient in my day to day life.
The key to life is to care. To be as obsessed with something as you can be, to the point where it takes you places you never even knew you were capable of going.
In defending, exploring, experiencing, chasing what and who we care about, we find ourselves facing the things inside ourselves that keep us from doing so. Thoughts, ideas, beliefs, emotions, physical obstacles, mental obstacles are inevitably challenged in our hunt for what truly matters. The things we obsess over show us our limits, teach us about ourselves, and help us venture beyond our familiar spaces.
Under the safe umbrella of what feels like home, we grow through the perils of a world that, sadly, hurts, and will undoubtedly continue to for a long, long time.
But yes, I am inclined to agree that losing yourself in something that way is unhealthy. My obsessions have also brought me to the edge of life and death far more times than I am proud of. But, to be honest, I feel lucky more than anything. Because, to the very least, it tells me that I have cared about something.
And how could you be more lucky than to have found a home somewhere in a crazy world such as this one?
Artemis.
Artemis. 