The Woes of Slight Autism

On Emmett Rensin’s ‘The Complications’ and Life on the Spectrum

Willem de Koonig, Two Figures in a Landscape, 1967, Oil on canvas

During my senior year of high school, a friend of mine — let’s call her “Mary” — told me that she liked a guy, “Jack,” in our class. I didn’t think much of it. People have crushes on each other, they catch feelings, sometimes the feelings are mutual, and sometimes they’re not. I shifted the conversation away from her confession toward asking her what grade she got on the biochem test. She claimed that she forgot.

Later in the day, I went to tennis practice, where I started making small talk with one of my teammates. He mentioned he just found out that his ex was going out with Jack.

“Oh wow. Mary just told me that she’s really into Jack,” I commented without thinking much of it.

Soon enough, word got around to Mary that Jack found out she liked him and I got a text from Mary.

“R u fking kidding me?? y tf would you tell my secret??!”

I was confused. She never said that her crush on Jack was a secret. “Sry. I didn’t know you wanted that to stay private.” As it slowly dawned on me that she was really mad, I texted her once more. “Really I’m sorry. Didn’t mean to.”

The next week, she started acting differently around me. I kept replaying the situation over and over in my head, and for the life of me, I couldn’t manage to put together why she was being like this. Could it be that her mood was thrown off because she was worried about an ailing family member? Perhaps she was on her period and would return to acting like her normal self soon. I also considered that she might just be stressed about her college applications.

But things only got stranger after that week. When I reached out about hanging out, she’d either ignore my texts or reply with short, unconvincing excuses like, “cant. family thing.” When I saw her in the hallways, she’d give me a quick, fake “Hey!” and then continue on her way. After graduation, she blocked my number and my socials.

Not until years later did it occur to me that when someone tells you they’re into someone, it’s implied that you aren’t supposed to tell anyone else. That to do so is taken as a major breach of confidence.

This pattern of saying or doing something socially unacceptable to someone, being confused about their distancing themselves from me or cutting me off completely, then years later realizing that what I did was not “normal” and feeling painfully embarrassed — and ashamed — has become all too familiar to me.

Sometimes it’s a mere social faux pas. Other times, I’ve done things that are straight-up disrespectful.

I first learned about Asperger’s syndrome while reading The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. I pitied the main character for all the social blunders his neurological condition brought upon him, but I also couldn’t help but find them mildly hilarious. Over time, I’d met people on the lower-functioning end of the spectrum, including people who were non-verbal, as well as highly articulate, savant-ish Aspergians who hadn’t the slightest idea of how to navigate informal conversations.

It didn’t occur to me until much later that I might have some traits in common with them. It didn’t occur to me until even later that part of the reason I said and did dumb things to people might not be because I’m just a little weird, or maybe a bit of an asshole, but because I fell somewhere on the spectrum.

Earnestly desiring to absolve myself of my shame, I asked my psychiatrist — the same one who had diagnosed me with a mild form of psychosis and put me on Risperdal — if he could also diagnose me with autism. Being ideologically opposed to his fellow psychiatrists who hand out diagnoses like they’re candy, he looked at me quizzically.

“Why do you think you’re autistic?”

“Because I don’t understand social cues.”

“It could just be that you’re an introvert . . . .”

“No, but I also remember little details of memories from my early childhood. And know a lot about really random topics. And have really bad insomnia. And I hate overhead fluorescent lighting.”

Figuring I had been spending too much time on WebMD (or Tumblr), he indulged me, offering that perhaps I “might have some tendencies that people on the spectrum have,” but that he didn’t see the point in giving me an official diagnosis other than as some kind of emotional consolation. “I think the solution — whether you actually have autism or not — is to continue doing CBT to sort out your social anxieties. You know, to learn how to change the things you can and accept the things you can’t.”

Boo. A reasonable solution, but not the one I wanted. I briefly considered going shopping for another psychiatrist, one that would give me the golden stamp I could flaunt around as my get-out-of-jail-free card, my perpetual victim pass, my entry ticket into the Oppression Olympics, absolution for my countless social sins.

Ultimately, I decided that my psychiatrist’s concession that I “might have some tendencies that people on the spectrum have” — compounded with my family members and close friends who have used “OMG, you’re so autistic!” as a playful insult whenever I do or say spergy things — as grounds to start telling people that I’m on the spectrum, in the hope that perhaps they’d be more patient with my quirks and less likely to judge me or to cut me off as a friend.

“Guys, I have something to share with you,” I said to a group of friends over dinner. They looked at me with great discomfort, running through the possible options in their minds: that I was entering a monastery . . . got someone pregnant . . . would start transitioning.

“I found out that I’m autistic.”

They glanced awkwardly at each other in silence until one of them broke it: “Hold on, is this a self-diagnosis, or did your doctor tell you this?” she asked, as if she wanted to see the receipts, the scientific proof. “I know people who are really autistic . . . and I just don’t think that’s you. You know, a lot of people who falsely claim the label end up trivializing the real suffering that people go through.”

“So you’re gonna gaslight me right now? That’s your response?” She backed down.

I kept this performance up briefly — coming out to several more friends and family members — until I came to my senses and realized that my psychiatrist was right. Whether I merit the label or not is inconsequential to me. The point is to identify what I can and can’t do about my quirks, and to figure out a way to live with them.

Sorry to disappoint with such an anticlimactic, and rational, ending. I wish I could tell you that I kept this act up longer and became one of those insufferable people who parade their questionable diagnosis around to excuse their immature behavior. But, in part out of exhaustion from being judged and repeatedly pushed away by people, I couldn’t help but go the normie route.

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In his memoir, The Complications, about his struggles with mental health, Emmett Rensin distinguishes between those who are “mad” and those who are “mentally ill.” “Where the mad are terrifying, disorganized, crippled and degenerating,” he writes, “the mentally ill are just having a hard time . . . . These new mentally ill are not like the mad. They are not lunatics, psychos, or crazy.”

The mental instability of those who are not totally mad sometimes stems from very real issues in their psyche that are passed down genetically. Sometimes it’s a response to the insanity of living in a late-phase capitalist, disenchanted society. For others, it’s an attempt to climb the ladder of social mobility in environments that value victim status. But ultimately, Rensin makes clear a major difference between someone who is a bit off and someone — like himself — who hears imaginary radio static while walking down the street, who thinks that his roommates have planted secret security cameras to spy on him, and who has attempted to murder people using his mind. And that to equate mental illness with madness is a disservice to the latter — not because it trivializes their suffering, or because it’s a bad-faith attempt to one-up them in the Oppression Olympics — but because it fosters unrealistic expectations that mad people can reign in their insanity.

Rensin cites several celebrities who — in the attempt to “fight stigma” against mental illness and prove that “we’re just like you!” — have opened up about their struggles with depression and bipolar disorder. But what of the bipolar person, Rensin asks, whose insanity drives him to stab people on the subway? Is he really “just like us”? When bipolar celebrities like Pete Davidson chastise other bipolar celebrities like Kanye West, exclaiming that “Being mentally ill is not an excuse to act like a jackass,” Davidson implies that Kanye is capable of choosing to simply not be a jackass. If only all bipolar people could simply choose to be as magnanimous as Davidson and not channel their instability into saying hurtful, hateful things.

When I was institutionalized and medicated for my breakdown, I asked the doctors for a blood test to check if my obsessive thoughts were based in reality or a “chemical imbalance” in my brain. I wanted to know whether there were grounds for my paranoia, or if it was all a figment of my unstable imagination. The reality, inconveniently for me, lies somewhere in an ambiguous gray area.

In retrospect, I now understand that many of the ideas and fears that fueled my paranoia were fairly legitimate, but that the way they manifested themselves and disrupted my capacity to think and behave coherently was dysfunctional. Now, whether the chemical imbalance fueling the disruption of my rational capacities was the result of a condition I was born with, or the result of the very real concerns overwhelming my brain, throwing it out of whack, remains an open mystery.

Unlike Rensin, I am not “mad.” My episode was not one of many, but a glitch in my relatively stable — albeit not-quite-stable — mental functioning. Nor was the episode the result of a psychosomatic, self-induced condition that I inflicted upon myself to absolve myself of guilt or claim victim status.

It could be due in part to the fact that I grew up as a coddled, poorly socialized, (half-) only child in a well-to-do, sheltered suburb. It could be that my family members and teachers gaslit me when I asked existential questions about the nature of God and truth and good and evil, and about the meaninglessness of the narrative that “you should aim to get good grades and SAT scores so you can get into a good college so you can get a good job so you can live a nice life so you can . . . die?” They’d tell me that we can never find answers to those questions, and that all that matters in life is to “be yourself” and “try to make the world a better place.” Or perhaps the fact that I have relatives with a history of manic depression, panic and anxiety disorders, and actual paranoid schizophrenia has something to do with it. Maybe I’m just an introvert. Most likely, it’s a mix of all of the above.

When it occurred to me that I might also be autistic, I wanted my psychiatrist — once again — to conduct some kind of test to prove that I was born this way. I wanted to be excused from having to do the hard work of learning how to act normally and behave myself, to develop better social skills and reign in my socially unacceptable tendencies. I wanted a label, a narrative, a hammer of sorts, to hold over people’s heads whenever they feel inclined to distance themselves from me for “doing too much.”

When my doctor put me on Risperdal, he told me that the meds wouldn’t erase the very real questions and concerns that plagued me, but that they would help me think through them with a clearer mind. He told me the same thing after he weaned me off the Risperdal and continued CBT with me during our sessions. He also told me that in order to avoid another breakdown, I had to make use of certain tools to keep my mind stable: exercise and a healthy diet, cultivating serious friendships and spending time with people, praying, and avoiding doomscrolling on Tumblr.

Rensin acknowledges how hard it is to grant even the severely mad complete absolution when they commit heinous acts. That while law-and-order-style legislation ungenerously overestimates mad people’s ability to use free will, he has a hard time getting on board with the “compassionate” activist crowd who would let them run off scot-free after committing acts of grave violence. The gray area that the moral culpability of the mad occupies, he concludes, is complex, lending neither total absolution nor culpability and varying on a person-to-person basis.

While I am not responsible for having mildly psychotic tendencies, at a certain point I had to accept that I am responsible for doing everything in my power to do something about them — and when my power proved limited, to accept it with humility and patience, while still aspiring to address that at some point in time. Acknowledging the bits of black or white within the gray areas became a crucial step in my path to maturity. I’ve found that I’ve had to do the same with my “autism.” Through CBT, exposure therapy, and just acquiring more social skills over time, I’ve learned how to overcome — and when I can’t do that, to turn the volume down on — certain sperg-adjacent tendencies.

Doing so is easier said than done. Some skills I’ve acquired have become second nature; it doesn’t take that much energy to exercise them. But using certain other skills, like making small talk at parties where I don’t know anyone, or turning off impulses to do stuff like talk to myself aloud in public, or recite random factoids about pop music charts and church history and quotes by people ranging from Camille Paglia and Dorothy Day to Jean Baudrillard and Christopher Lasch to people who don’t really give a damn — is exhausting as hell.

Perhaps to complain about this exhaustion — about having to “put in the work” — is a sign of my being a lazy, entitled, narcissist. Maybe I was actually born with some neurological issues. Or maybe I’m just realizing that growing up and becoming an adult is hard work — and that I’m too much of a whiny nepo baby to deal with it. Again, I’m faced with a gray area — one which requires me to both continue looking for spaces where I can take responsibility and mature, as well as to cut myself a little slack and remind myself that some of my issues are not completely under my control. To put it in the words of fellow spergy trad cath Thomas Aquinas, I need to strive to both identify the places where my “ignorance” is “vincible” and to accept the “mitigating factors” that block my intellect and free will.

As I’ve come to find, this balancing act is impossible to navigate in isolation. But when accompanied by actual friends, it becomes a bit more tenable.

For this reason, there will always be a part of me that envies people who are completely normal or, alternatively, unquestionably autistic. Normies don’t have to worry about seeming weird. And though they are not fully accepted in the normie realm, those who are obviously autistic — whose quirks people are more inclined to look past since they clearly “can’t help it” — are at least treated as objects of pity and sympathy. Those who are not autistic enough to get a pass for being weird, obnoxious, inappropriate, offensive, or too much are held at arm’s length, if not completely written off, which few — except for the more humanitarian-inclined — feel bad for doing.

Perhaps the greatest thing I’ve learned through all of this is to appreciate the real ones who dare to stick around, who aren’t afraid to call me out on my shit but are also patient and know when I need them to let me sperg (or shizo) out for a moment. Friends like these are hard to find, even for those who are hyperneurotypical (if those people even exist anymore). Contrary to the musings of overly online self-diagnosed autists — both in their victim-pilled and bootstrapping-pilled forms — the drama of sorting out our moral responsibility is best sorted out when shared with others.

Stephen G. Adubato is an associate editor at Compact Magazine, a professor of philosophy, and the curator of the Cracks in Postmodernity blog, podcast, and magazine. Follow him on X @stephengadubato.