Preface

I have been collecting personal anecdotes about childhood misadventures, usually as tied to an injury, ever since I was just a child. Reading about them is fun in its own right, and I wrote this book largely to be enjoyed solely as their archive. I’m hoping that these tales will lend you sympathetic squirminess.

And you might well stop right there at that “story” level, but I can’t. It’s impossible for me to gather so much of anything without resolving categories and patterns (which I am now told is one of my autism things), and writing it all down helps me to let it go (and fall asleep). When taken all together, these stories suggest that one’s approach to personal relationships matures somewhat systematically with (forebrain) development in risk-taking behavior. What you learn from these early explorations can influence how well you get along with other people as you get older.

So, what you learn as a kid from your dangerous interactions with things can affect the risks that you take in your relationships with people as you get older.

Yes, I could be wrong. But how would I know?

That’s where you come in; this book solicits your opinions just in case I’ve gone trippingly bweeeeZORP. If that’s the case, then with your help my descent into madness might at least be modestly graceful.

That said, it’s not likely that I’m making up all of this insight out of whole cloth. Aside from plenty of personal experience in being the kid who was stubbornly bent on auxiliary self-obliteration, I’ve spent my life ankle-deep (upside-down) in the study and application of form-meaning systems (typical and diverse, human and not), most recently: Cognitive Science and Linguistics (doctorate); Communication Disorders and Sciences (additional master’s); a few years as a Chief Research Scientist for natural language processing projects; and nearly two decades as a Speech-Language Pathologist and Assistive Technology Specialist for a K-21 Life Skills education program. I’m not sure what that makes me, exactly, but it is surely something more along the lines of “an expert in the field” than “a cake.”

Well, probably, anyway. You see, the thing is...

(The material that follows can get dense, and many of you will be happier skipping straight to the Story Part.)

First of all, my cognition is not what you might call “normal” (unless you were in a contrary mood). I have worked my whole life on strategies to compensate for my strangeness, while at the same time my family (and many friends and associates) were dealing with their own variations on this relational challenge. In recent years, the literature has come to identify such efforts as camouflage or masking, which I largely refuse to do anymore. Compelling perceptibility and rightful presence are on the menu now, as is empathic education.

As I became a special educator, my increasing experience with autism spectrum disorders supported a feeling of belonging somewhere on the edge of that fringe. You might be familiar with Kanner’s autism, or Asperger’s Syndrome, but you’re not going to find research on “Trace’s Divergence” (beyond this book, of course, or the CLYR, Ymaginary Studios, and SureWould websites). There are just too few people to form a viable representative sample; that is to say, start with the set of natural-born thesaurus proofreaders in the world, then whittle your way down with the distinguishing characteristics described below, and see how many people you have left. (Then email both of us.)

Subsequently, in comparing autism and the psychosis spectrum (a dozen years later), I finally came across a significant fit: I am (also) some sort of “creative” schizotype. A discussion of such reality shifting is going to require a separate book (with the working title, “Lingering Suspicion: The Care and Feeding of Your Healthy Psychotic”).

 [Note: I was medically diagnosed as Autistic in November of 2023, almost a decade after publishing the book.]

Second of all, it turns out that I am a Highly Sensitive Person or “HSP.” No one who knows me was surprised by that little discovery.

Third of all, while those two aspects can add up to an unusual sensitivity to imagistic patterns in these sorts of noisy data (or other random[-ish] stimuli), I tend to be fairly specific about the kind of thing that I accept as likely; in other words, I am not pareidolic or apophenic, and I don’t have to worry unusually much about Shermer’s “patternicity” and “agenticity.” Respectively, then:

a) while I might see a picture of St. Albert’s face in a cross-section of a fiveleaf yam, I don’t automatically assume that Albert personally bothered with that little bit of self-promotion;

b) while I can accept that humans have had an effect over time on Earth’s environment (and we need to do something to fix that), I feel no unexamined craving to gluttonously swallow the entire “global warming” pill buffet unexamined;

c) while twice in sixty years I have heard a very brief voice in my head that purely felt to be from an Outside Source, I can neither definitionally nor categorically verify it... nor would it seem appropriate to me to get all “bottom up” (or “bottoms up”) about these events; and

d) my life is so thoroughly fraught with wild coincidence as to make that of Dickens look positively tame.

In other words, I am (artist camouflaging as) scientist enough to have good use for proof-based arguments, and mystic enough to enjoy the benefits of faith-based explorations beyond those limits. I have played with the strengths and weaknesses of both types of systems deeply enough not to place bets on their thumb war, and prefer the emergent approach favored by their offspring. I tend to call that plausibility, one of my favorite aspects of which is coherence, but I expect that it might take several many decades for languages to catch up to where it’s easy to talk about.

In the meantime, we’re screwed.

Fourth of all, for well over thirty years of my life I was enormously sleep deprived, with interruptions occurring on a pretty consistent average of nearly eighty times per hour. I experienced fugue states, sleepwalking (of a type that included lucid conversation), and an inability to stay awake in class. Tests in my teens and twenties showed that I was spending almost all of my day down around 7 Hz (as opposed to a more typical 14-40). What confounds me is that no one managed to associate this syndrome with my sleep impairment until I was living in Canada, when a doctor told me (rather archly) that my ability to fall asleep under any circumstances was not a talent of which to be proud (“...you idiot,” he added for emphasis). In short: my first month on a CPAP profoundly rewrote my way of being in the world.

Fifth of all, there are some prominent variations in the way that some people develop their personal internal language, and they often have little notion that others don’t share their individual mode of “self-talk feeling” with others. Some think in music, for example, and can spontaneously compose a melody as easily as if someone else were simply describing their day. (Some are seemingly born to this language, some learn it, and others emerge into it.) Still others appeal to symbolic systems that are much more similar to math, olfactory matrices, tie-dyed lava-lampisms, propositions, flow charts, choreography, and so on. My own is almost entirely verbal with a strong auditory quality (but not like actual voices in my head), fanned out in networked arguments with the audible equivalent of megapaisleys of curlicued clausal subordination. That often makes it difficult for me to figure out how little I need to say (and will make more sense closer to the end of the book, after we’ve talked about symbolic systems).

Sixth of all, I am Empathic (both cognitively and affectively), which blends with being a HSP. For decades, I kept setting identification as Autistic well to the side (albeit not entirely out of the picture) because empathy was held to be anathematic to that way of being in the world; however, recent research demonstrates that this is not the case: autism and empathy can readily co-exist.

Seventh of all, and finally (finally), Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria suddenly (at age 60) made itself known to me as a thing (provoking in turn my strong suspicions about the existence of Acceptance Sensitive Euphoria). But RSD has only hit the journals in the last few years (and ASE only appears in my not-a-damnéd-blog), so what viable chance have I had to know about this before now? (Approximately, none at all.) So I wonder what else is going to hit the research in coming days that would have been very helpful for me to have known about many decades ago.

Which brings us to the third purpose for writing this all down: I would like you to learn more about people like me, and what we have to do about ourselves to get along well with people like you. That might be helpful for everyone all around.

Which finally brings us to what this book is not for.

I did not write this book as self-help advice for other individuals who are trying to figure out how to navigate among folks whose cognition is less intensely divergent. I have no easy, global, transferable solutions. I only have some observations about the problem, some descriptions of the compensatory strategies that are helpful for me in specific, and occasionally a small bag of peanut M&Ms (that are likely to be gone by the time you find me anyway, so just never-you-mind about them). So if anything that I happen to say helps you out, great, but that’s just a matter of luck rather than purpose.

That said, for those few of you for whom this material strikes a resonant chord, you might at least feel a bit less alone in regard to your individual version of this sort of Relational Being.

And don’t take what I have to say too seriously. Just enjoy yourself. If you’re not having fun reading this material, then for goodness’ sake put the book down.

Endnotes