Uninspired. Disconnected. Weary. And wanting only to feel at home in my body, in the town where I’d built a life for the decade leading up to the pandemic. But my body is unfamiliar, its shape now slack and sunken. I find it hard to believe I had an Olympian trainer just four years ago. The town is foreign too, many of my friends having moved onward and upward — away from what we once shared and whatever it was that bonded us together in the first place.
I don’t know where or what home is anymore. I sit in my apartment waiting for a number to be called. My turn to order thin-sliced Boar’s Head and breakfast sausage at the butcher counter. Sylvia meows a motherly meow, saying she loves me but for God’s sake pull it together. I move from sofa to desk to bed to desk to dining room table, trying to work on something but finding myself distracted by the creaks and echoes in the building and the mysterious chugging that some appliance downstairs emits with an unholy vengeance. I’ve struggled to keep house since being near death and hopeless in late 2021. The final bags of laundry from that era sit by the front door — reminders that I’m still not out of the woods.
My mother was a housekeeper. A cleaning lady. A domestic servant. For years I was ashamed to admit this to people. Instead I just said she was a housewife, discounting the backbreaking work she did for several local families and writing it off altogether because of how I thought it made me look in the eyes of Yale classmates whose parents were the heads of multinational corporations and royalty in far-off lands.
What I wouldn’t do to trade the shame I feel for lying about my roots for the shame I felt back then. Though today I’m proud to say my mother was a housekeeper and my father a truck driver, the shame remains as I’ve forgotten how to make a home myself, lost what it means to nurture a space into a place where I feel peace and quiet from the chaotic world outside and inside my mind.
AM I WORTH IT?
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THE SPECTRUM
I’d like to think that this writing is profound, that it touches on the human condition to relate and reveal the deepest crevasses of my heart. I hope I communicate how I see the world in a way that resonates with others, despite my take on life and its attendant matters being somewhat unconventional. I want my writing to connect rather than set me apart. I hope to never offend but only offer an earnest, honest perspective. So with that, let’s talk about what it means to be “on the spectrum.”
Citizens of the Feral Fringe are a wiley cast of characters — loners, orphans, wayward, untethered, thinking, feeling, surviving. They run the gamut of everything you’d expect to find in a Wild West town — every one of them essential. Many are out of time, walking anachronisms that beg a different way of viewing and existing in the world. I consider quite a few to be philosophers, those knowledge-seeking souls who are often surprised that they have something critical and vital to offer society.
In my day to day, especially since the pandemic, I encounter many neurodivergent folks who are among the wisest people I know. Philosophy as a study and practice is a “love of wisdom.” In a broad sense, philosophy is something we undertake to understand fundamental truths about ourselves, the world around us, and our relationships to the world and to each other. However aware or unaware of the process, many people who are actual philosophers would be hard-pressed to label themselves as such. We think of Plato, Socrates, Dante, Kant, Proust, and, yes — even Ayn Rand. But all kinds of modern-day figures qualify as philosophers as well. Doug Coupland, Sarah Silverman, Alain de Botton, Homer Simpson, Britney Spears, you get the idea.
Is today’s pop culture tomorrow’s ancient mysticism? This is a question we ponder at my culture consultancy Cathedral Projects. One day in the distant future, someone will discover a damaged, barely discernible copy of Britney’s Blackout album buried in the wreckage of humanity’s past. This will be that civilization’s equivalent of our Dead Sea Scrolls.
Taking the long view, we can apply the study of philosophy to enhance our problem-solving capabilities through projects that have the potential to span generations. We must deeply analyze concepts, definitions, arguments, and problems to increase our capacity to organize information, deal with questions of value, and understand what is essential. The neurodivergent friends I’ve made along the way are highly capable in these areas. I’d go so far as to say that we’re all a little bit neurodivergent — made so as we adapt to digital input, globalization, climate change, and technology as a whole.
A neurodivergent person exists in constant evaluation of their place in the universe because science and society say that their experience and worldview are “atypical” to those of a normal person.
Ram Dass recently and inadvertently declared autism as natural enlightenment. Indeed, it does seem as though secrets of the universe and the keys to understanding our evolution as humans are held within the brilliant minds of the autistic and neurodivergent, which highlight differences in social preferences and ways of learning, communicating, and perceiving our environments.
Neurodiversity offers enhanced capabilities, including pattern recognition, analytical thinking, deep focus, enhanced memory, heightened sensory awareness, creativity, and visual processing skills. Neurodivergent people help us look at the world from unique and beautiful perspectives.
Being green ain’t easy, but it is the way to go. It’s what keeps us curious, wearing life like a loose garment as we move through new experiences with wide-eyed optimism for the best possible outcomes. While the promise of money and success often drives our behavior, a more noble and challenging pursuit is maintaining a child-like wonder that can free us from being slaves to capitalism or drones perpetuating the status quo. Living green, thinking green, making green. To remind myself of these things, here’s a mantra to improve relationships with money, Earth, and mind:
I make intentional choices about spending time and money.
My net worth does not determine my self-worth.
I am committed to learning about myself and my place in the world.
I am in control of where I direct my intention and focus.
I am capable of being an independent thinker and earner.
“What if air were really water, and water really air?” the twenty-something pondered as he sought to understand another perspective than his own. He is one of the reasons I’ve been thinking so deeply about neurodivergence and what it means for humanity’s future and survival. We sat for a long time together recently, talking radically and truthfully about our existence on this planet and about how unaware people are that they live in ignorance, almost finger-snapping to the realization — the lament really — that “ignorance is bliss.” What a sad and corrupted substitute for truly living (despite the pain that self-awareness can bring), we thought. Yes, to be aware of and to embrace the not knowing is what makes things awe-some, keeping wonder at the magnificence and mystery of it all burning deep inside our souls. But to not even know that you don’t know? “Yikes smh,” the kiddo texted the other day.
Chip’s comment about water and about the perception of outer-space as a vacuum really resonated. We all come from the abyss, protected and nurtured by the fluid of our mother’s womb until we’re ready to come ashore onto dry land. Thinking of this, I start to weep. The taste of metal and blood and a terrible thirst fill my mouth as tears fill my eyes and fall from the sky.