Thoughts

May 10 2025

“The biggest mistake I made was believing that if I cast a beautiful net I’d catch only beautiful things.”

I hear sad stories from autistic people every day. They make me sad, too. They’re about loneliness. Will I ever have a friend? Will I ever be in a relationship? And their counterparts…the angry ones. I don’t need anyone. I’ll never be in a relationship. Fuck it. I’m better off.

That landscape was once familiar to me.

(And this is me putting up my hand to tell a story, not offer advice.)

Like a lot of autistic people, I spent my childhood isolated. More than isolated…alienated. Metaphysically alone. Something apart from reality.

But in high school, I met someone.

He was everything I wasn’t: charismatic, socially adept, functional. But he liked me. He called me. He made plans. He used the word we. I’d never heard that from someone my own age. By then, I’d learned to confine myself to adults, people I could track better. But he cracked something open in me. Peers were dangerous. But somehow, he wasn’t. He became, quite literally, my Demian (I’d just finished Hesse’s novel when we met).

Of course, I did the mimic thing. I wasn’t sexually attracted to this person, but from the outside, you might have mistaken it for that; for limerence. In no time, I picked up his speech patterns, his gestures, the way he scratched his face, his deodorant, tone, even how he cleared his throat. And for the first time, it worked. I had a friend. A real one. And if you’re beginning to picture me as Tom Ripley and him Dickie Greenleaf, you’re not far off the mark. It was like that in some ways.

We did everything together…martial arts, schoolwork, debate club, squash. We talked endlessly. About Nietzsche, Pink Floyd, absent fathers, girls, uni. We came up with brilliant social satire. We made prank calls. Our time together was painless…a completely novel experience for me. Here was a human being whose presence I wasn’t just surviving, but functioning within. Being with him was a social scenario, of course, there was still performance, but somehow it didn’t cost me. I could be around him without having to enter environments that wrecked me, without feigning interest in things that bored me to tears. It was seamless. It was euphoric.

He didn’t tolerate dissent. Opinions that diverged from his were dismissed instantly (first with a bit of condescension and, failing that, silence…he withheld his attention). And I didn’t fight that. That didn’t even occur to me. Why the hell would I fight it? I was intelligent and well-read, but I’d never really had a worldview of my own. I was a steak burnt on one side, raw on the other. And I had as deep a longing for acceptance as anyone (though I never would have admitted it).

His worldview was cynical. I was more than happy to adopt it. Misanthropy is an easy fit when you experience life as a young autistic person, maybe.

In 1^st-year uni, we became roommates. Of course we did. I was now part of a unit, and I would do anything to preserve it.

That included writing his papers. It started as “help,” but turned into me pulling all-nighters after closing shifts at the bar, writing his assignments while he slept. One of the costs of “we.” His education was paid for by his mother and step-father. I was bartending my way through (you can imagine what kind of sensory environment that was). This didn’t make me resent him, but my schedule began to preclude the sort of time we’d spent together before.

Looking back, I see the dynamic clearly. He collected two types of people: peers and followers. I was the latter. All of us Followers were quirky, a bit “off,” grateful to be included. He didn’t like us socializing without him. That wasn’t explicitly said. It didn’t have to be. When we crossed invisible lines, he’d pull away. Host parties with his real friends (in our apartment). I’d retreat to my room, but that in itself wasn’t upsetting. I’d spent my entire life up to that point retreating happily to my room.

He’d return to me…for a favor, a table at the bar, a paper. It felt like the sun shining on me again. I was seen. Then it would vanish. This repeated for a year or so.

By the time I was both bartending and working security to make ends meet, things had cracked wide open. I’d close the bar, then run across the street, not exactly sober, change into my mall cop uniform, perform coherence for the handoff, then find a dark cubicle and sleep it off on the floor. I stopped going to class. I didn’t drop any courses that year…I simply stopped going. Lecture halls with 200+ students. TAs who seemed more interested in personalities than academic substance. If ever there were a place designed to weed someone like me out, this was it.

I became less useful to him. I wasn’t impressive anymore. I was an embarrassment. A ghost in the apartment. I stopped cleaning. Those weren’t my spaces anymore. They were public. It felt like a fraternity. I was done performing (not by choice…I seemed to have lost the script), and he was done with me.

This wasn’t a one-off. I can see it now in my romantic relationships, as well. That pattern: power imbalance (even now, I feel silly saying things like that), adoration, usefulness followed by discard—was everywhere in my intimate relationships. Sometimes it was sexual, sometimes intellectual. Sometimes both, or another thing entirely. The common thread: I was always trying to earn proximity. The deal was always the same. Stay interesting. Stay tolerable. Stay needed. And I did. I got quite good at it.

Until I started slipping myself in.

Because my mask was never just a mask. It was a door. A door into another person (or job, or any situation that went against my nature, but from which I needed something). A painfully crafted door that, once gone through, I wanted to forget about. Whatever particular mask I’d created to get there would come off, sometimes by choice, but often by necessity. Once through that door, I wanted to be there…not my creation, but me. And the dynamic would fall apart.

Each had their own expiry date, but like every person in my life, my partners became disillusioned with me. The intelligent, composed, confident version of me they fell for started to glitch. I was too quiet. Too focused on something that wasn’t them. Too uninterested in sex. Too tired. Too there. What happened was simple, in hindsight: I showed up. And they couldn’t do that. They couldn’t do me. They didn’t know what the hell to do with that thing, that thing that was me…they hadn’t really met it. It was a third party.

When things came to a head, I could justify almost anything. Not because I was cruel, not because I hated these people, but because I was so fucking full of pain. I felt everything. I’d spent my whole life deferring my pain for others’ comfort. So when push came to shove in these relationships, I protected myself. This meant collateral damage. I was no longer the only one getting hurt.

Increasingly, with each iteration of this pattern, I became aware that the beginning of a new relationship was really just another countdown toward collapse. And when the timer went off, I found the collapse to be bigger than the last. The stakes were higher. Not just student, but adult. Not just adult, husband. Not just husband, father. Business owner. Teacher. Now, when the mask failed, emotional fallout was the least of my problems. It was economic, relational, existential.

My life has been a production, only I was never on stage…it was always a mask up there. So long as its performance held, that mask was celebrated. As for me, I took my bows under the stage, never seen. And in collapse, too, it was the mask they grieved. I was never there.

But I didn’t know that. Their version of the story, the version of my collapse as seen through their eyes, was the only one I knew. In that story, I wasn’t misunderstood, I was manipulative. Selfish. Broken. And I joined that narrative. I added my voice to it. Self-deprecation became part of my persona. I internalized it so deeply that I forgot I was trying to survive.

My longest stretch of semi-successful performance was my second marriage. The domestic script: a wife, two boys, a house, a business. I played the part, probably quite “well,” given what I know now to be my neurological limits…but terribly by the standard my mask had set. I was disappearing. I drank. I used whatever substances I had to. I was gone for long stretches, even when I was there. The house was always full of people, so I spent my time in the field or in the barn, caring for my plants and animals.

Even so, there were outbursts—micro-meltdowns (and some not so micro). Moments where I still tried to surface. Those moments looked like assholery: I don’t want to go to Costco. I don’t want to meet your friends. I don’t want to compromise with DDT-spraying neighbors. I don’t want to be at your parents’ house surrounded by noise and incomprehensible expectations and lights and TVs and children and phone notifications and a mosaic of smells. I don’t want to go. I don’t hate anyone. I just can’t fucking do it.

Those weren’t preferences. They were survival signals. But no one heard them, least of all me.

I no longer craft doors to places of collapse. I no longer wear masks to gain entry to places I have no business being in. If I bow now, it’s me bowing, and if I collapse, it’s me collapsing.

But unsurprisingly, since unmasking, there haven’t been any bows to take. I no longer do the domestic thing. I can’t. The truths I used to whisper I know now are boundaries. Hard ones. Non-negotiable. They protect my nervous system and what little sense of self I have left. Maybe something else, too. I don’t know.

That part of me, the thing I’m protecting, it feels like a boy. I know, classic mid-life crisis shit. But it doesn’t feel like regression. It feels like return. I’m autistic, but I’ve never been him. He was good. Kind. Curious. He believed he could change into what people needed. He tried. Very hard. It hurt. He hurt others. But he’s still here. And he wants simple things now. To be left alone—not in exile, maybe, but in peace. Not because he failed to perform, but because he no longer can. He almost certainly shouldn’t.

When I was six, or seven, or eight, at summer camp, I did something nice for a man who showed interest in me. He was a long-time family friend, a priest. He’d baptised me…I’m named after him. I found out later that that something nice was disgusting. That I had done something disgusting. Which made me disgusting. That’s still the way it is. I am disgusting to myself when I think of what happened. No level of cognitive understanding will change that.

There’s a pattern here: Be what they need. Make them feel good. And maybe they’ll let you stay.

Lovers? Mentors? Charismatic friends? Attentive priests? To me, as an autistic person, these experiences were variations on the same pattern, and I felt the same flavor of pain moving through each. A priest up to no good with a small boy? That has a label (and it should). That gets attention (and it should). But they don’t all turn heads, do they, these iterations of the same pattern? Some of them are open to interpretation. But I disappeared for all of them, equally. Over and over.

My father lived inside a pattern.

Old suits, a boiled egg, canned peaches, toast. He watched the 6 o’clock news from a single antique chair, surrounded by books and yellowed newspaper clippings. His glasses for juice had a permanent film. He bathed once a week and shaved every other day. He left his apartment only for groceries, the national archive, or the library. The rest was looped—his own quiet clockwork.

To others, it was stubbornness. Isolation. Severe mental decline and dysfunction. “Autism.” But I understand it now for what it was: a system.

He wasn’t fundamentally broken, but something had broken him. He had adapted to a world that doesn’t return signal.

Like any broken person you meet, he hadn’t always been like that. I have to believe that. I’ve seen a photo of him…he’s a boy, loose-limbed in shorts and a T-shirt, smiling. He met my mother when he was fifty. He was still semi-engaged with the world then, still trying. But by that time the retreat had already begun. He wasn’t born in that apartment. He was driven there. And though I don’t know the exact contours of that journey, I recognize the terrain. I’m walking it now.

I chew nicotine gum and drink alcohol. I take Modafinil. I’ve taken Adderall, Ritalin, and countless SSRIs. I’ve used cocaine. I was on Xanax for eight years. None of these were about pleasure. They were, and are, acts of regulation. Brakes and accelerators.

Accelerators simulate urgency in a world that feels diffuse. Brakes slow noise when everything’s firing at once. Xanax muted the background hum of incoherence for almost a decade. Modafinil sharpens my edges. Cocaine, when I used it, forced a kind of brutal presence. These aren’t / weren’t addictions. They are prosthetics, ways to stay inside a system that doesn’t return proportionate, timely, or coherent feedback.

This is what feedback-sensitive organisms do when their environments stop helping them regulate. They substitute. They override. They try to close the loop from inside.

When feedback breaks down, two kinds of compensation emerge.

The first is external. Behavior becomes untethered from signal. Patterns persist long after their purpose is gone. We see this in autistic people, in institutions, in cultures. I’ve come to think of these as orphaned loops, rituals that once stabilized behavior through feedback, now floating free in dead space. My father’s daily routines were orphaned loops. But so is the 9-to-5 grind. So is “growth” as an economic goal. So is nationalism. So is the performance of progress.

The second is internal. Organisms begin simulating feedback themselves. When urgency disappears, they accelerate. When signals are too loud, they suppress. Coffee. Benzos. Gambling. Cutting. Overwork. Shutdown. We call this coping, dysfunction, addiction—but it’s deeper than that. It’s loop substitution. The body doing what the world won’t.

And when even that fails, when no amount of input control can restore a functional loop, what follows is collapse. But collapse, too, is misnamed. We pathologize it. We assign it clinical labels. We say: disorder. Depression. Anxiety. Emotional dysregulation.

My partner and I are “autistic.” I punch walls, and scream, and debate. My partner cries and sleeps. Neither of us could tell you precisely why. A clinician hears this and thinks “alexithymia”—a failure to identify or describe emotions. But on a fundamental level, I know what I’m feeling and seeing. So does she. We’re not confused. We’re in contact with something for which this mode of life has no language. A form of grief that has no referent. A wave of coherence-loss so large, it has no fixed point of origin. The signal we are feeling isn’t personal. It’s structural.

I’m not “too much” and she isn’t numb. We’re saturated.

All of this can be formalized. There’s an equation I’ve been toying with…

Species Viability = (Perceptual Scope / Environmental Leverage) × Drive to Persist

It models the ability of a species to survive under the conditions it creates. Perceptual scope is the range across which it can detect, interpret, and act on the consequences of its behavior. Environmental leverage is the reach, speed, and scale of the tools it uses to alter its world. Drive to persist is what compels it to act in the first place.

When leverage exceeds perception, and the drive remains unmoderated, feedback breaks. The species acts, but cannot sense. It intervenes, but cannot adapt. It changes the world faster than it can feel the consequences. The loop fails.

This isn’t a human problem. It’s a life problem. And it’s already playing out.

Coral polyps bleach when oceans warm just a little too fast.
Songbirds lose their migratory bearings under artificial light and noise.
Elephants develop neurotic behaviors in zoos.
Whales sink to the bottom of their tanks and stop swimming.
Bees abandon hives.
Humans dissociate. Burn out. Stim. Snap. Withdraw. Regulate. Sedate.

Different species. Same failure mode. Wherever feedback sensitivity exists, collapse begins there first.

To capture this broader dynamic, I use this extrapolation of the first equation…

Life System Integrity = (Feedback Legibility / Environmental Leverage) × Sensitivity Index

Here, feedback legibility refers to how clearly and consistently a system returns meaningful signal. Environmental leverage is still the scale and reach of system-altering behaviors. Sensitivity index is the degree to which life within the system depends on timely, coherent feedback to maintain function.

If legibility drops while leverage rises, and the system is highly sensitive, it begins to fracture. The coral, the bee, the child, the whale, the autistic adult—they’re all reacting to the same condition. Not dysfunction. Overwhelm. They’re early warnings.

This isn’t metaphor. It’s measurement.

And it has precedent in our literature.

Frank Herbert understood this equation. In Dune, the Bene Gesserit are trying to breed a human who can bridge space and time—someone whose perceptual scope finally catches up with the species’ leverage. The Butlerian Jihad, the ban on thinking machines, is an act of restraint: a desperate attempt to slow down one side of the equation while the other catches up. Paul Atreides embodies what happens when perception scales, but drive remains unchecked. The consequences are catastrophic. They always are when feedback fails.

Tolkien understood it, too. Gandalf refuses the Ring because he knows that power without balance (leverage without proper perceptual scope) would corrupt him absolutely. The entire mythology of Middle Earth is built around this failure. Again and again, intelligence outpaces wisdom, and catastrophe follows. What we call evil in Tolkien’s world is often just an unregulated actuator, a drive to act, to build, to conquer, unmoored from consequence.

These aren’t fantasy concerns. They’re languages for what we’ve forgotten how to say.

Civilization maximizes leverage. It’s stretched its tools and systems far beyond what any species, including ours, was designed to perceive or manage. At the same time, our perceptual scope, though conceptually vast, remains behaviorally narrow. We still respond to immediate threats, short timelines, local consequences. And our drive to persist, to build, to continue, has not lessened. If anything, it’s become institutionalized. Programmatic. Unquestioned.

So the loop breaks.
Perception lags.
Noise replaces signal.
And the most sensitive systems fail first.

The rise in autism is not an epidemic. It’s a watermark. It’s DIAGNOSTIC INFLATION.
It tells us how high the tide of incoherence has risen.
It shows us where the system can no longer hold.

Those of us who can’t tolerate dead loops, who can’t ignore noise, who can’t lie to ourselves about contradiction, we fall first. Not because we are defective. But because we are trying to maintain coherence in a world that has stopped supporting it.

We are not the problem.
We are what life looks like when the loops begin to break.
We are the first to fall, but not the last.