I was having cocktails in Soho House Dean St, explaining to a friend how seal bites could result in lost limbs (well, digits) because their saliva contains a highly-toxic pathogen - probably a mycoplasma - which causes tissues including bone marrow to become extremely swollen to the point of requiring amputation when I realised - in one of those slow-motion out of body experiences, that if my life were a film, I would be accused of exaggerating my autism for effect.
Many of you are new here, thanks to
featuring me. So hello, I’m Ellen. I’m autistic - diagnosed five years ago, autistic since birth. I’m a lesbian or a dyke if you want a noun, gay or queer if you prefer an adjective. I’m writing a book about LGBTQ+ equality and how we get there and when I’m not doing that, I can be foundEccentricities is where I come to be myself and where I invite others to bring themselves, too. This newsletter was originally called Reasons To Keep Going, a project I started writing in my teens when I was in the depths of depression and then had a close friend from school die by suicide. In the last year, I have lost three queer friends my age to suicide and while I’m spending most of my days fighting for a better world that might have treated them more compassionately, I’m also trying to live as much as possible as myself in their honour. It feels like the only thing I can do. They had no interest in shrinking themselves for the sake of conformity and neither do I; if I am too much, you are welcome to go find less.
I did not realise quite how different I am until I moved to a new place six months ago and was tasked with making new friends. As it turns out, facts about seal saliva are not how most adults make friends, though I have made more friends than you might think in this way, including Rebecca, who took the excellent seal picture featured and avoided the graphic design monstrosity that I devised as an alternative which involved not only a seal, but a pun and comic sans.
Being autistic is to be full of contradiction. I can hear electricity whirring and lights are sometimes painful, but my body doesn’t always tell me if I am hungry, tired or in pain. I cannot tell you what my therapist looks like and I cannot tell you the names of the people I spent years talking to. I can tell you about a Polish pianist living in Oxford who bequeathed his skull to be used in a Royal Shakespeare Company production of Hamlet, a skull eventually used as Yorick by David Tennant.
In the autistic community, we talk about ‘special interests’ which are intense, specific interests. It would be easy to think seals and Shakespeare are on my special interest list, but they are not. People do not believe me when I say that I memorise by osmosis, that I do not have to try to learn the things I know. I am a whale, drinking in microscopic krill - tiny, fleeting nuggets of information - before expelling all the excess water. I have never felt more seen than when watching BBC’s Sherlock and hearing that Sherlock - who notices everything and seemingly has an infinite capacity for memorisation - does not know that the Earth goes around the Sun. ‘I have to delete some things!’ he exclaims, in a later episode.
I am also blissfully unaware of social things - like other people’s facial expressions, or tone, or whether they are the slightest bit interested. People think I’m joking, but I am not. The barometer I have, the only gauge I have for getting socialising ‘right’ (whatever that means’ is when at work, at parties or in the pub someone I know will state that I’m autistic, as some sort of remedial sentence. It’s a caveat. Don’t mind her, she’s autistic. It’s only then that I start to panic that I did something wrong, was too much.
The one consolation I have is the fact that the thing that means I sometimes makes social faux-pas is what gives me an utter fearlessness when it comes to interacting with new people. It took me years to learn that people do not always mean what they say or say what they mean. I could never understand why people got cross with me for being direct until I realise they were obfuscating for the sake of feelings.
I sometimes wonder if society dislikes neurodivergent people because we can see bullshit for what it is and will say so. We find joy in our interests irrespective of whether they are considered normal, or age-appropriate, or good for us. We look at the world and take different things from it and understand that this means others take different things from it too. Autistic people get branded as lacking empathy, but I think most of us are hyper-empathetic whether we can communicate it or not.
I have had a lifetime of being bullied for being the way that I am. As soon as I was old enough to talk, kids started bullying me for being weird - everything from booting me from their friendship groups to chopping everything up I owned with scissors. It was only when I came out that the bullying shifted to my queerness and not my weirdness, a semantic difference. I suppose it could have made me bitter, or angry, but in truth, I suspect it made me kind.
I know what it is like to walk through the world and to be treated differently whilst having no idea what it is you are supposed to have done wrong. I make no assumptions and have no judgements unless you’re intentionally being a dickhead and even then. I understand in such a tangible way that everyone is bringing their own stuff to every interaction and that there are ways of experiencing the same situation that I will never understand.
I suspect that is what this place, is, really. Eccentricities is my little safe haven for the weirdos and the freaks and the people who just really love seal facts. The people who want to know that they’re going to be okay. So if that is you, welcome. Stay a while.
If you want to support me as a young queer autistic writer, you can: