Dancing With Myself
On unmasking, Autistic embodiment, and no longer fearing the YES within ourselves.
I remember this moment in the very early days of the pandemic (remember when we were all watching Tiger King and thought this whole thing would be over in a few weeks? we were so young and innocent then) when I asked my boyfriend, who was once an art major and still has a ton of art supplies kicking around, if he had any colored pencils I could borrow. This would’ve been just a couple of months after I broke my ankle; I wasn’t walking yet, I was at loose ends and bored and I thought maybe fucking around with some art supplies would help divert me and cheer me up.
Soon my lap was filled with a rainbow of Prismacolor pencils, and mere moments later I was putting the pencils in rainbow order, as seen in the picture above. Doing so filled me with an intense, private joy: a deep feeling of satisfaction and pleasure, a combination of the feeling of a puzzle piece clicking into place and the feeling of wonder when you see the first bluebonnets of the season through the car window. I don’t have a name for this feeling, except to say that it feels like a YES inside of me, and that I began this ritual of putting pencils in rainbow order each time I took out my art supplies to put color on the page.
It’s not that it was necessary to put the pencils in order before I could begin to draw; it’s more that the feeling of putting the pencils in rainbow order was so compelling and satisfying that I began an art practice mostly so that I could mess with my art supplies and put them in order.
This was in fact one of the first clues that I am Autistic: reading in this post that an Autistic person may “like to organize things into patterns / sequences (ie colour, size, shape etc - may line up stuffed animals according to species, material, colour) may also collect things and organize them in particular ways.” When I read that, I thought about the deep pleasure & satisfaction I get from putting my art supplies and my East Fork mugs in rainbow order and thought, Uh-oh.
This is an essay about Autistic embodiment, and any such essay is necessarily going to be about the barriers to Autistic embodiment. We cannot talk about unmasking and learning to move in and express ourselves through our bodies in a way that feels authentic–that is, that feels authentically Autistic–without talking about all the ways that our authentic Autistic embodiment has been judged, shamed, ridiculed, and therefore suppressed.
I also want to say this: unmasking Autism is its own process, with its own specific challenges. However, in the hellscape of white supremacist, ableist, trans- and fatphobic late-stage patriarchal capitalism, we all face deep barriers to embodiment. We have all, as Audre Lorde wrote in her landmark essay The Uses of The Erotic, “been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings.” While I write this as a 44-year old cis woman learning to reclaim her own authentically Autistic embodiment, I am writing this for all of us, because not only do we pretty much all need witness and support in “bringing our lives into accordance with our needs, our knowledge, our desires,” but also because whenever any of us get to reclaim the yes within ourselves, we all get a little bit more free.
“We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings. For the demands of our released expectations lead us inevitably into actions which will help bring our lives into accordance with our needs, our knowledge, our desires. And the fear of our deepest cravings keeps them suspect, keeps us docile and loyal and obedient, and leads us to settle for or accept many facets of our oppression as women.1”
-Audre Lorde, “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power”
But I’m getting ahead of myself. The moment with the rainbow pencils is only about Autistic embodiment in retrospect. At the time, it was about finding joy and contentment in the midst of rapid, dramatic change, chaos, fear, and uncertainty. At the time, it was about wheeling myself and my art supplies with my knee scooter out to the back porch, sitting under the mama red oak tree, lining up all my supplies in rainbow order (of course), and joining my friend
on Insta live where we drew mandalas and I slowly learned to craft an art practice for the first time in my adult life.The pandemic created a container where new adaptations, new ways of being were necessary. It truly was the worst of times and the best of times: I wish it were easier to completely overhaul one’s life without being forced to by tragic and overwhelming circumstances, and yet I also know that it’s often necessary for unsustainable ways of being to be snatched from our grip before we can find our way to something truer.
In September of 2020 (and not one moment too soon for this polyamorous family with two young boys doing distance learning living in a 1,000 sq.ft. house) we finished converting half of our garage into my own live/work space. Looking back, I can see that this space–200 sq.ft of pale pink walls, windows, plants, and soft furnishings–has been the protective cocoon that sheltered me as began to unravel decades-old layers of tension and armoring, and slowly began to come home to myself.
Music has always been a core feature in my life–I recognize it now as both my biggest stim and my my biggest special interest–but I realized that I listened to music mostly when I was driving and, due to the lockdown and my injury, I wasn’t driving anywhere anymore, which meant that I was hardly listening to any music. Just like in the Billy Idol song this essay is titled after, with “the record selection and the mirror’s reflection,” in my rainbow witch cottage that is basically a college dorm room on a adult’s budget, I systematically built practices around music that made me feel like I was dancing with my authentic self.
There wasn’t much actual dancing–my still-healing ankle didn’t allow for much movement, and tbh I am still very unsure when it comes to dancing. I did buy a rose gold bluetooth microphone to do solo karaoke with. (10/10 highly recommend.) Over time, I created a set of practices and rituals that I called my magic space.
It goes like this: in the early evening, I like to set up my small drip coffee pot for the morning, and generally kind of straighten up my space–what KC Davis calls “closing duties.” At this time I also take a cannabis tincture and choose a soundtrack for the evening–this is a very instinctive process, and I rotate between a fairly narrow selection of playlists, because repetition and predictability (as opposed to novelty) is what gets me off the most when it comes to music. At this point most often I’ll draw a candlelit bath where I will smoke, sing, scroll, drink ice water (the only time I reliably drink water–I love the contrast of temperatures. After the bath I may either move to my mat and do some yin yoga, and/or sit at my desk and fuck around with stickers and stamps in one of my many journals.
Only recently have I started to think of my evening rituals this way, but what I now realize is that the combination of music and cannabis is what allows me to unmask and to engage in what I now know is stimming. There is a lot of singing and drumming on any and all surfaces. There is a lot of writing song lyrics in my journals like I did in my school planners as a teen. It feels wild and free and just so much fucking fun. I call this my magic space because this is also when my connection to Spirit is the strongest, when my channel is most open, and these evening ritual moments are when I receive the most information when it comes to my writing, my work, my business. It’s a hella fertile, creative space.
As I deepened my connection to these rituals, a clear and deep feeling arose: This is who I really am. The way I’m feeling, right now–this is my true authentic self. When I am banging out drum parts to Pearl Jam and Smashing Pumpkins songs on my desk, a mess of art supplies all around me, my journals open to catch all of the insights, lightning strikes, and rainbows popping off in my brain, I am truly, fully, finally myself.
I remember feeling sad that I mostly only felt this way when I was alone; slowly, gingerly, I began to intentionally bring other people–my boyfriend, mostly–into this magic space with me. I would wonder–I still do–how do I bring more of this true self into the rest of my life? What’s getting in the way of me living out this embodiment every day?
The connecting thread through all of these practices–as well as the connecting thread through this essay–was this feeling of deep pleasure & satisfaction, this inner yes that let me know I was touching into something that was authentically mine, that both reflected and amplified some deep, fundamental truth about my own embodiment.
The predominant feelings I experience during these practices, which are alive and well to this day and only getting wilder, weirder, and witchier, are ones of Autistic joy, sensory euphoria, this deep yes-ness of rainbow puzzles pieces snapping into place, and relief. The profound, bone-deep relief of finally feeling fully like myself. It’s a similar feeling to taking one’s bra off at the end of the day, of removing something restrictive and constraining and finally being able to let one’s flesh spill out and relax in a way that feels natural. It’s like a deep exhale, a settling into something soft and welcoming. A coming home.
In her2 essay “Somatics and Autistic Embodiment,”3 Nick Walker writes:
“So when people say I don’t seem like other autistics, what they usually mean is that I don’t have the pulled-inward quality or the overwhelming anxiety, nor the awkward rigidity that come from deeply ingrained inner tensions–tensions established as defenses against constant overstimulation and abuse, and as a means of repressing any stimming or other characteristically autistic movements that might attract further abuse. But none of these things–the pulling inward, the anxiety, the rigidity and tension–are innate traits of autism; what they are is symptoms of trauma.”
Noticing the deep yes feeling of putting the pencils in rainbow order, picking up that thread and following it through to creating these practices of deep relief and unraveling, and coming back to these practices and to this relief over and over again is what I believe set the stage for my diagnosis to land as an answer to prayer. Having gotten to know myself in the deep yes within me is what made the distance from “Wtf am I Autistic???” to “Aww yeah I’m Autistic let’s fucking goooooo!!” relatively short.
The point is this: when I discovered that I was, in fact, Autistic, and that I’d been masking my whole life, I also realized that, in all those moments of magic, alone in my room at night with the weed and the music and the baths and the journals, I had been meeting my true, unmasked self.
“Being autistic is neither inherently traumatic nor incompatible with thriving… Like most humans. we’re born with the capacity to thrive if our needs are properly met–and one of those needs is being accepted as autistic people with autistic styles of embodiment… We can only thrive to the extent that we’re free to live and move autistically.”
-Nick Walker
Finding out I’m Autistic was like being handed a set of instructions of how to set up my life and care for myself, along with the explicit permission to center my own care and accommodation as the main focus of my life. It started with pencils in rainbow order; it progressed into dancing with myself in my room with weed & music & journals; and now, I am in the phase of exploration and experimentation of bringing the yes, the dance of my autistic self into as many aspects of my life as possible. I want the relief of finally being my whole, authentic, embodied Autistic self to permeate every aspect of my life.
You have permission to build a soft life, a slow life, a spacious life.
You have permission to build a life full of music & magic.
You have permission to move and create and grow at your own pace.
You have permission to ask for accommodations to a point where it almost feels obscene.
You have permission to prioritize Autistic joy, queer joy, and sensory euphoria.
You have permission to grieve the witness you didn’t get, the needs that weren’t met, the futile efforts of trying to fit in a neurotypical mold as a neurodivergent person.
You have permission to center your own needs and accommodations after 44 years of burning yourself out trying to make life easier for everyone, at your own detriment.
You have permission to recover the dance of your Autistic self.
For once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of.
-Audre Lorde
In Uses Of The Erotic, Lorde writes, “For once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of.” There’s a quality here of you can’t squeeze the toothpaste back into the tube: once I’d tasted true, genuine Autistic embodiment, I naturally began to seek that joy in other areas of my life, in other moments of my day.
Lorde also writes, “The need for sharing deep feeling is a human need.” It’s not enough for me to know that this is the dance of my authentic, Autistic self–I need to share it, too. And it’s not enough for me to share my own authentic, embodied joy–I need you to share yours as well. We all do. We all need models of liberated embodiment. We all need to see and feel each other in our joy, in the dance of our authentic self. This joy, this dance, as much as rage and outrage, is what will fuel, is fueling, the revolution.
As I’m wrapping up this piece, the lyrics to Florence + The Machine’s Free echo in my head, and it seems fitting to end with music.
‘Cause I hear the music, I feel the beat
And for a moment, when I’m dancing, I am free
I am free
May you find the beat that lets you reclaim the dance of your own inner YES, and may you find the courage and support to build your life around this YES, and may you share your deep embodied YES in a way that allows us all to get a little more free.
Lorde wrote this paper in 1978; I like to think that, if she were writing today, she would use language that includes multiple genders who face gender-based oppression.
In an earlier version of this essay I incorrectly gendered Nick, whose pronouns are she/her. Thanks to the reader who corrected me.
Diverse Bodies, Diverse Practices: Toward An Inclusive Somatics, edited by Don Hanlon Johnson, North Atlantic Books, 2018.
Such a generous and beautiful piece of writing. Thank you.
This is so beautiful Fanny! I'm loving reading this part of your journey as I support and love my own poly, queer neurodivergent partners and family.
Small point for you: Nick Walker's pronouns are she/her.
Thank you for your writing and authenticity!