MONSTERS IN MY MIND: Story notes, part 35 and 36

35. An Operatic Tour of New Jersey, With Raptors

The Apocalypse begins when Diego sings Count Almaviva in “The Barber of Seville” in Dover, New Jersey. He doesn’t notice anything wrong until after the curtain call, when he steps out of the Baker Theater onto West Blackwell Street, struggling to balance the three bouquets of roses in his arms, and walks into a horde of running, screaming people, pursued by a Tyrannosaurus.

I wrote most of this story in a single day in the spring of 2013. I loved the concept so much that, once I had enough to write the title down, the rest of the draft just flowed. (Which is not to say it didn’t need edits – it very much did!)

I can’t take credit for the idea. Someone on Twitter – I no longer remember who – wrote that they were tired of zombie apocalypses and wanted a velociraptor apocalypse. I wrote one. (With paleontologically accurate velociraptors – small, feathered, etc. And a lot of other dinosaurs to boot.) The protagonist is an opera singer who, following the apocalypse, sets out to sing in every opera house that he can.

The protagonist of “An Operatic Tour of New Jersey, With Raptors” is named Diego – and his unfortunately deceased fiancé, Juan – after the Peruvian bel canto tenor Juan Diego Flórez.

It was published in AE: The Canadian Science Fiction Review in August 2013, though I don’t think it’s back up on their refurbished site yet. I have, on one occasion, read this story to a live audience and actually sung the sung bits. It was fun.

Song Pairing: Given how a variety of songs from The Barber of Seville pop up all over this story, the obvious song choice is “Largo al Factotum” – sung here by Flórez’s castmate at the Met, Peter Mattei.

36. Under the Clear Bright Waters

She dove into this water expecting to die, after all. She never expected  someone was waiting for her underneath.

“Under the Clear Bright Waters” is the only work of outright erotica I’ve ever published. (There’s also “The Giantess’s Dream,” but that’s poetry, and the boundaries with poetry are more fluid.) It’s a lesbian story with a very mild BDSM element, set in ancient Greece, loosely inspired by the myth of Hylas and the water nymphs.

This story was written because of a writing group I used to be part of, along with A. Merc Rustad, Krista D. Ball, and others. Like many close-knit writing groups, we began to fantasize about the idea of publishing our own little anthology. Except that the group contained people who wrote in several very different genres – SFF, romance/erotica, litfic, and other things. We decided that the best compromise between all of these genres was an anthology of fantasy erotic romance, themed around Fae.

Because of struggles in people’s personal lives, disputes within the group, and the other factors that typically hamper such projects, the anthology was never made. But “Under the Clear Bright Waters” was, and now it’s in Monsters In My Mind for your reading pleasure.

Song Pairing: I’m probably just trolling myself at this point, but “Under the Clear Bright Waters” makes reference to an ancient Greek theory in which all bodies of water were connected through a series of underground caverns. So its companion music is now John Williams’ “Passage Through the Planet Core“, from a movie with a very different planet full of underground seas. The soft and mysterious watery atmosphere fits with the story’s tone, I think.

MONSTERS IN MY MIND is available for purchase on AmazonKobo, Indigo,  Barnes and Noble, and in Autonomous Press’s Shopify store.

Cool stories I read in January and February

Iona Sharma, “Refugee; or, a nine-item representative inventory of a better world.” (Strange Horizons, January 8.) I don’t think I’ve ever seen a utopia before that so cleverly acknowledged the sacrifices that would be needed to build one – or wove acknowledgement and thanks for those sacrifices right into the characters’ daily lives.

Stephen Graham Jones, “Why I Write.” (Stymie, January 13.) This is not spec fic, but it’s just MFing brilliant. For a while, some of my friends were playing “tag yourself” with this essay. Feel free to tag yourself in comments. I’m 50% “I write because I lost all my action figures long ago” and 50% “I don’t write because I want to live forever. I write because I want to live now.”

Brandon O’Brien, “The Metaphysics of a Wine, In Theory And Practice” (Arsenika, Issue 2, February.) What I love most about this is the juxtaposition of an academic voice (complete with citations!) and the more immediate, urgent, colloquial voice of someone who is actually experiencing the transcendence that the academic tries to describe.

Alex E. Harrow, “A Witch’s Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies.” (Apex, Issue 105, February.) OMG. THIS STORY. MY FEELS. This is delightful and heartbreaking. It may be a somewhat idealized (or overly binary) depiction of librarians, but it’s an amazing depiction of the help and escape that books offer people, especially the most vulnerable people among us.

MONSTERS IN MY MIND: Story notes, part 34 and 35

34. Finding Shadow

Back then we built a smaller dome than sky,
and like shamefaced crayon-smudged children
we colored ’til it shone.

This is one of the first two poems I ever wrote for publication. I wrote them both with Stone Telling’s Queer issue in mind, having very little idea what I was doing but a lot of gumption. I’m still very fond of the sensory descriptions in this one. It’s a poem about two men using some light bondage to help deal with the sensory overload induced by their SFnal setting.

Stone Telling didn’t want it (though they said nice things about both poems), but Eye to the Telescope’s LGBT issue did, so “Finding Shadow” shimmied on over there, and then to Monsters In My Mind.

I just realized that this poem has the same number as Rule 34, which is very funny to me.

48. A Toast to the Hero Upon Her Defeat of the Wyrm of L’Incertain

Hail! Her corded arms, her shining mail,
the panther swiftness of her flashing hand!

“A Toast to the Hero” is “Finding Shadow”‘s companion poem, although they ended up in different places in the collection. Where “Finding Shadow” tells an intimate story of a few moments, “A Toast to the Hero” is an attempt to be as brash and loopy and celebratory and queer-in-several-different-ways-at-once as possible. It’s also the story of a hero who beat a dragon, thanks to some help from her three polyamorous partners of varying genders.

The declamatory, “hail!” structure was in part inspired by Alex Dally MacFarlane’s “Sung Around Alsar-Scented Fires,” which is probably a much better poem than this one.

“A Toast to the Hero” had a winding road to publication, and eventually found a home in Liquid Imagination.

Fun fact: its original working title was even longer.

MONSTERS IN MY MIND is available for purchase on AmazonKobo, Indigo,  Barnes and Noble, and in Autonomous Press’s Shopify store.

Speculative Fiction To Read on the Disability Day of Mourning

(TW: This post talks about filicide and about the devaluation of disabled lives.)

Today, March 1, is the Disability Day of Mourning. People will be holding vigils across the US and other countries to remember disabled people who were killed by their families.

I’ve been quiet on previous Days of Mourning. I care, but I don’t always know what to say. My family never tried to kill me, of course – which is not to say that I’m not sensitive about the value of my life.

Cases of filicide sometimes make the news – they seem to especially get news coverage when they involve disabled children and white, American mothers with a martyr complex – but they are more common than you might realize if you only see those highly publicized cases. On the Disability Day of Mourning website you can see that ten disabled people, all adults, died from filicide in the first month and a half of this year alone.

In the US, measures are being taken to dismantle programs like Medicaid and the ADA which have previously protected disabled lives (among others). It seems that valuing our lives is not in vogue among the powerful.

I wasn’t sure what else to say. I’m not good at the kind of essay where I powerfully insists to you that disabled people DO deserve to live. I doubt that anyone who doesn’t already understand that message, on some level, is reading this blog. And in any case, other bloggers will write it better.

I am a fiction reviewer, though, and I suppose I can bring that skill to bear for this purpose.

Media shapes the stories that we tell ourselves about real life – often without us realizing. So media has a role to play in reminding us that disabled lives are worth living. Often the media doesn’t do this job; sometimes it does the reverse. I rarely see media brazen enough to suggest that we should kill disabled people, unless they are terminally ill and asking for death. (I can think of one published SFF short story I read that did kind of do this. I won’t link to it here.) But more often I see media fail by accepting our preventable deaths with a sad shrug. With a sort of, “Well, of course that’s how it is,” and an immediate return to the concerns of our able-bodied heroes who never think about the dead disabled person again. I see this kind of fail far more often, including in popular blockbuster movies, like Rogue One or Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.

Here are some stories that do better.

(This is a list focused on autism because autism is… kind of my wheelhouse, but please do post your own recommendations, for any disability, in the comments!)

Corinne Duyvis’s book On the Edge of Gone is about an autistic girl trying to prove that she is worth saving in an apocalypse – and eventually realizing that her whole mindset of having to prove it is wrong.

Rose Lemberg’s novelette “Geometries of Belonging” celebrates an autistic teenager’s ability to defy their violent parents, refuse non-consensual medical treatment, and survive. Tina Gower’s “Twelve Seconds” also centers the autistic protagonist’s ability to choose in this way. Meda Kahn’s short story “Difference of Opinion” is about a non-speaking autistic woman’s struggle to survive in a society that is seriously considering killing her.

Finally, Bogi Takács’s Iwunen Interstellar Investigations, and other stories in the Eren universe, imagine a thriving autistic society far in the future, where nobody’s right to exist as a disabled person is questioned. C.S. Friedman’s This Alien Shore also imagines a powerful and inclusive planet full of non-neurotypical people, generations after the original Earth tried to eradicate them.

If you’d like to support telling stories about disabled lives in ways that value those lives, perhaps consider supporting these authors today – especially Duyvis, Lemberg, Kahn, and Takács, who are autistic themselves.

MONSTERS IN MY MIND: Story notes, part 32 and 33

32. The Pyromancer

But scars grow only
in healing,
and shackles have keys.

I came up with “The Pyromancer” on the same day as “Turning to Stone”; my family was on a day-trip to see the Fourth of July fireworks in Alexandria Bay, New York. They were an auspicious pair, both landing (after revision) in the best possible markets for them: “Turning to Stone” in Stone Telling, and “The Pyromancer” in Goblin Fruit. (You can read it, still in Goblin Fruit, here.)

Yes, the day-trip did involve boats. There is something about groups of small lights in darkness that is immensely meaningful to me – whether they are stars, or city lights, or candles at an Easter vigil, or the bioluminescence of sea creatures, or a scene like this one.

“The Pyromancer” is a much more hopeful, joyful poem than its sibling. (I was also trying to lightly subvert certain tropes in which Magic Always Has to Have a Price.)

33. The Mermaid at Sea World

Children like woodpeckers hammer the glass
and men leer.

This one wasn’t inspired by a real-life event (one hopes). Actually, I don’t remember where it came from, although I know that the lights one sometimes sees in aquariums – refracted through the rippling surface, and then reflected in their odd patterns on the blue-white underwater walls – are another visual that has fascinated me.

“The Mermaid at Sea World” was the cover poem of its issue of Niteblade, and it was reprinted in Imaginarium 4: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing.

MONSTERS IN MY MIND is available for purchase on AmazonKobo, Indigo,  Barnes and Noble, and in Autonomous Press’s Shopify store.

Autistic Book Party, Episode 43: Leia: Princess of Alderaan

Note: This review contains minor spoilers for “The Last Jedi,” though I’ve tried to keep all references to the movie’s events vague.

Today’s Book: “Leia: Princess of Alderaan,” a Star Wars tie-in novel by Claudia Gray.

The Plot: A teenage Princess Leia learns that her parents are a part of the Rebel Alliance – and, against their wishes, joins them.

Autistic Character(s): Amilyn Holdo, a girl Leia’s age who joins her on some of her adventures.

Ever since seeing “The Force Awakens,” I have been on a bit of a Star Wars kick. It’s not a thing I’ve mentioned in public much, but it’s been a thing. When I asked for Star Wars books for Christmas, I was expecting them to be escapist fun and to let me spend a little more time in the galaxy far, far away with my favorite characters. I wasn’t expecting to need to make an Autistic Book Party episode about it.

But “Leia: Princess of Alderaan” portrays a younger version of Amilyn Holdo, a sympathetic character from The Last Jedi, as very clearly non-neurotypical.

(Yes, we are talking about Vice-Admiral Amilyn Holdo, played by Laura Dern, although obviously, she doesn’t have that rank in this book. I’ve been told that other viewers noticed something non-neurotypical-looking about her in the film itself, but that went right over my head, so the book was a surprise.)

Amilyn Holdo in “Leia: Princess of Alderaan” has the following characteristics:

  • Atypical facial expressions, especially a habitually “glazed” look
  • Dresses and does her hair very eccentrically
  • Speaks in an “airy monotone”
  • Stares off into space
  • Cheerfully goes for the snacks at an important diplomatic function instead of networking or playing politics as the characters are supposed to
  • Has unusual interests at intense levels: for example, memorizing the astrological systems of various planets, in a universe where most people don’t believe in astrology
  • Has unusual emotional reactions, including being cheerful and enthusiastic about “mortal peril”
  • Is quite clever, and often figures things out before the other characters do, but is also too “guileless” to know important unspoken things, like why you shouldn’t say critical things about the Empire in the Empire’s apprentice legislature sessions
  • Habitually has communication difficulties, sometimes to do with being literal, but more often to do with using some odd metaphor or allusion that she thinks makes her thoughts perfectly clear, while everyone else scratches their head and wonders what she is talking about. This includes times when she is talking about one of the things that she’s figured out before everyone else – but nobody realizes she’s figured it out until later, often after she’s put the plan that she thought she explained into action. Towards the end of the book, Leia reflects that she is learning to “speak Amilyn” and is doing a better job than before of figuring out what Holdo means when she talks.

Holdo is from a planet called Gatalenta which has some strange cultural traditions, including using aerial acrobatics to meditate. While one might initially chalk up some of Holdo’s strangeness to being from Gatalenta, it is eventually revealed that her choice of clothing and other habits are very atypical for that planet, and that she doesn’t fit in there, either.

It’s not one hundred percent clear that Holdo’s neurotype is autistic; sometimes she veers into more generic, Luna Lovegood-esque kookiness. But she is definitely not neurotypical, and when you list her traits like I just did, they resemble autism – particularly the “female”* presentation of autism – more than any other condition I’m aware of.

(*In scare quotes because people with this presentation can have varying genders, but that is largely irrelevant to this post.)

Holdo is a sympathetic character with a lot to offer. Her cleverness, resourcefulness, and enthusiasm come in handy on many occasions. Two instances stand out to me, because they are helpful things of types that I very rarely get to see autistic characters doing. First, Holdo is a source of emotional support for Leia – helping her process her feelings about her family and the Rebellion by teaching her Gatalentan meditation techniques. Second, although Holdo is sometimes guileless about social dangers, she is sometimes able to solve them in her own way. In a wonderful scene toward the end, Leia and Holdo return from a dangerous mission and are intercepted by an Imperial officer who is suspicious about where they came from. Holdo uses her knowledge of astrology to come up with a plausible alibi, but she also socially misdirects the officer in a very striking way – deliberately staring into space, looking even more glazed than usual, and beginning to monologue enthusiastically about the astrological aspects of her travels until the officer gets embarrassed and waves her on through.

Other characters, including Leia, are also able to help Holdo when she needs it – bailing her out when she veers close to saying dangerous things in the apprentice legislature; being patient and learning to figure out her way of speaking, instead of demanding that she change it; giving her a space to talk out her own problems, such as her urge to rebel from Gatalentan culture. Leia and Holdo’s friendship – and, likely, the friendships between Holdo and other characters – is mutual and genuine.

The older Holdo in The Last Jedi is not as visibly weird as the younger one in this novel. In my opinion, this isn’t an inconsistency; it’s a change that could very plausibly have happened as the teenage Holdo got older and learned more skills, including the skills of military command.

Holdo being autistic also casts a very interesting new light on her actions in The Last Jedi. It’s not a light that I’m going to talk about here at any length; to do that, I’d need to re-watch the movie with the book in mind and give it its own, separate review. But it’s worth noting that the older Vice-Admiral Holdo’s conflict with Poe Dameron revolves, in large part, around her ability (or inability, or refusal) to explain her plans for the Resistance in a way that Poe will accept. If she has a pre-existing communication disability – even one that she’s worked on, over the years – then this adds a significant new layer to that conflict.

In short, Amilyn Holdo in “Leia: Princess of Alderaan” is a well-rounded and respectfully portrayed autistic character. Not at all what I expected to find in a Star Wars book – but something I was delighted to discover.

The Verdict: Recommended

Ethics Statement: I have never interacted with Claudia Gray. I read her book because I got a copy for Christmas. All opinions expressed here are my own.

Many of my reviews are chosen by my Patreon backers. This one was not. Reviews chosen by my backers are still in the works. If these reviews are valuable to you, consider becoming a backer; for as little as $1, you can help choose the next autistic book.

For a list of past/future/possible Autistic Book Party books, click here.

Autism and Emotional Labour

This is a thing I’ve been thinking about for a while, and it’s going to be a Very Long Post.

I keep seeing discussions of emotional labour, and I keep seeing them not mention autism.

  • Sometimes they don’t mention disability at all.
  • Sometimes they mention disability on a list of marginalizations: “Women are expected to do emotional labour, and so are queer femmes, women of colour, disabled women, etc.” But they don’t really unpack that, except in terms of the amount.
  • Sometimes they mention disability in terms of spoons – as in, whether or not you have the spoons to do emotional labour today, or whether or not you have the spoons to reciprocate when someone does emotional labour for you.

So I want to talk in a more specific way about the relationship between autism and emotional labour. A lot of this will mean connecting some dots that have been talked about elsewhere, but that I haven’t seen put together in this particular way.

What is emotional labour?

Emotional labour is the mental and emotional work we do to maintain relationships with other people, whether that relationship is an intimate one, or simply coexisting with strangers in a public place.

A lot of people don’t realize that emotional labour is work. It takes time, effort, and spoons from the person doing it. Women and other marginalized groups are often expected to do more emotional labour than others, and that’s not fair.

If you’re nodding impatiently because this is super 101 and you knew it already, you can skip ahead to the next section. Otherwise, you might want to take a break to educate yourself.

This MetaFilter thread is often used as a good introduction to emotional labour. It’s also REALLY LONG, and can be a little overwhelming, so bear that in mind.

I also like this pair of articles, both of which start to describe how I think emotional labour SHOULD work, in a fair society:

A couple of things to remember here

Not everyone, or even every feminist, will agree with these things, but they’re central to how I think about emotional labour right now, and to the attitudes I am bringing into this post.

1: Emotional labour is not bad. We are not trying to eradicate emotional labour from society; it is the glue that holds society together! We are trying to handle it in a more ethical way, which might include things like “make sure it’s consensual” and “make sure everybody does their fair share.”

2: Emotional labour is not capitalist. An ethical attitude towards emotional labour is not capitalist. It’s not “fuck you, pay me” (although there are circumstances where you CAN pay people for it, and that’s okay!) It’s not, “you don’t deserve to be listened to, because you haven’t listened to X number of people today and your balance is overdrawn.” Keeping score too closely harms relationships. Ethical emotional labour practices are more about making sure that everybody is okay with what they’re doing and nobody is exploited. We do want reciprocity, but healthy reciprocity is often long-term and approximate, and sometimes disability or other factors make it difficult to achieve.

3: Emotional labour is a lot of things.

This is the thing that took me the longest to wrap my head around after reading the MetaFilter thread. People would make sweeping statements about what emotional labour was like, but they all seemed to be talking about different things.

For instance, the following things are all forms of emotional labour:

  • Being friendly to customers while working in customer service, even if you don’t feel like it.
  • Lending a listening ear to a friend.
  • Mentally keeping track of what needs to be done around the house and paying attention to the house’s current state, so that you can notice chores that need to be done without needing to be reminded.
  • Educating people about a topic (I am doing emotional labour by writing this post right now! 😀 )
  • Keeping in touch with people by checking in, sending Christmas cards, making dates to get together, and other forms of relationship organization.

These are five completely different things and there are MANY MORE!

We don’t call all of these things “emotional labour” because we believe that they are all the same thing. We call them emotional labour because we believe that they all are forms of mental work that are often not recognized as work, and that are often done by women and other marginalized groups because no one else will do them.

Because they all share this problem, they can be treated in similar ways.

So what does this have to do with autism?

If you read my short list of different kinds of emotional labour – or if you read the MetaFilter thread just now – then you probably have some idea of where this is going.

Autism makes many forms of emotional labour difficult!

Many of the complaints that NTs have about autistic people boil down to the fact that autistic people are not doing enough emotional labour for them. Whether it’s little things like not making the right facial expressions to put people at ease, or big and intimate things like not knowing how to express affection the right way in a relationship.

As autistic (or autistic-friendly) feminists, how can we ask for reciprocal emotional labour in a way that doesn’t toss autistic people to the curb?

The answer, I think, has a lot of parts. “Cut autistic people some slack” might be one part of the answer – but it can’t be the whole one.

I’m going to talk about forms of emotional labour that are more difficult for many autistic people, but also about forms that many of us are good at – and I’m also going to talk about special forms of emotional labour that are only ever asked of disabled people.

Then I’m going to talk about some ways we might fix some of this.

When Emotional Labour Is Hard

If you read the MetaFilter thread, you’ve probably already pictured this scenario. Let’s imagine an autistic man married to an NT woman. (Possibly a stereotype, but also the situation of many people IRL, including people I know, so let’s just run with it for now.)

The NT woman says, “My husband isn’t doing any emotional labour for me. He never knows what I’m thinking or feeling unless I tell him. If I tell him what to do, he’ll do it, but that doesn’t feel like enough. Just once, I want someone to notice I’ve had a bad day and know how to comfort me, without my having to say anything. When my husband doesn’t do that, I feel so invisible and lonely.”

The autistic man says, “I don’t understand how to make my wife happy. She wants me to guess what she is feeling, but I can’t read her facial expressions or body language, so I can’t guess! Why can’t she just tell me what she wants? I always do whatever she asks of me, and it kills me that this isn’t enough.

Neither partner in this scenario is wrong. Both are suffering because of unmet needs. The NT woman needs to feel that her partner sees her and is paying attention to her. The autistic man needs instructions that he can understand.

(Note that I’ve assumed that both partners are acting in good faith. That is to say, I am assuming that neither partner is abusive or lying about their needs, that the autistic man does in fact follow verbal instructions, etc. I am assuming that the problem they are actually having matches the problem that they both describe. I know that this is not an assumption that can be made about every couple, but it’s an assumption that is true for some, and I’m not interested in talking about couples for whom it is not true.)

In a sense, both of these partners need emotional labour that their partner cannot do for them. Paying attention to a partner’s moods and needs, without being explicitly told, is emotional labour. So is communicating your needs to a partner in a way that they will understand. The autistic man can’t seem to do his share at all. The NT woman can do hers, in theory – but it may always be exhausting and upsetting for her, and her corresponding need may never be met.

Is there a way to solve this problem? Maybe. We’ll come back to it later in the post.

Types of emotional labour that are hard

Every autistic person is different, but here are some types of emotional labour that will be hard for many autistic people to do:

  • Noticing how people are feeling based on their facial expressions, body language, and other nonverbal cues. Some of us can learn this with time and practice; some of us cannot learn it at all. (And some of us are hyper-empathic, but might struggle with other skills, such as figuring out what an NT person actually wants you to do about their feelings.)
  • Noticing anything about what people expect us to do, if they haven’t explicitly said it to us.
  • Making small talk, being friendly, and otherwise putting people at ease.
  • Anything that involves initiating a social interaction – including all of those pesky “keep in touch” tasks that I listed above.
  • Many of us struggle with executive dysfunction, which means every task related to organization or life skills is a struggle – including keeping track of what housework needs to be done, or keeping track of anything much, really. Or remembering to do a thing that another person needs you to, even if you KNOW they need it.

But emotional labour isn’t just one thing. And there are some forms of emotional labour that many autistic people might be especially good at.

Types of emotional labour that might not be so hard

  • Remember when I said that educating people is emotional labour? Autistic people are GREAT at that. An autistic person who is hyperfocused on a social justice topic will educate you about it for DAYS.
  • Many autistic people are great listeners. Some are great listeners for other autistic people; some are great listeners for people of many neurotypes. Some of the best listeners I know are autistic, and I have to actively check myself to make sure I’m not leaning on their skills in a way that’s not consensual or reciprocal enough.
  • Those of us who have good executive function are often excellent organizers, and will be great at keeping track of schedules and to-do lists without reminders, especially if the schedule involves a strong routine.
  • Many autistic people are very rules-oriented, and will faithfully research and follow the rules of any situation that they’re in, even when most NTs wouldn’t bother.
  • Many autistic people have a strong need to be orderly and tidy, and will VERY quickly notice anything around the house that needs to be picked back up. (Having the executive function to do it correctly is another matter…)

Maybe the autistic man in our example is good at some kinds of emotional labour, and maybe he and his wife can use those strengths to negotiate. Maybe he can’t read faces, but is a great listener; maybe his wife can accept that she’ll need to tell him explicitly how she feels, if she knows that he’ll patiently listen to her talk about it for as long as she needs. Or maybe he can’t read faces, but can pay attention to the state of the house; maybe it will be easier for her to deal with having to tell him explicitly how she feels, if she knows that she won’t also have to remind him explicitly about every other little thing.

Depending on his specific strengths and weaknesses, the autistic man might also be able to create a workaround. Maybe he’s not good at reading faces, but he’s great at recognizing patterns, so he can learn over time that, when his wife sits a certain way or responds in a certain way to polite questions, it means she needs a certain kind of attention. Maybe she can, in return, be patient and provide feedback as he works on developing this skill over time.

All of this really depends on the people involved and their specific needs, and on some really personal stuff about where those needs come from. But before we do that, there’s one other thing that we need to remember.

Autistic people are actually doing emotional labour all the time

Any autistic person who “passes”, or tries to pass, is doing a ton of invisible emotional labour by definition. Even people who don’t pass usually do some of this labour so that they will bother people less.

Most of the material in social skills classes for autistic people is geared towards teaching us to do even more of this emotional labour in even more circumstances.

Stuff like the MetaFilter thread doesn’t mention this very much, because it’s written by allistic people.

But the following things are all ALSO forms of emotional labour:

  • Trying desparately to figure out people’s facial expressions, when reading faces doesn’t come naturally to you. (This and other items on the list are still emotional labour, even when they are unsuccessful. Building a bridge is still labour, even if the bridge falls down.)
  • Trying to figure out how to respond appropriately to a social situation, when actually you are baffled or just want to go away.
  • Trying REALLY HARD to organize your shit even though you have executive function problems.
  • Enduring sensory discomfort, like lights and noise and other people, so that you can do an important thing that unavoidably involves them (and everything does).
  • Suppressing types of stims that you know will bother people around you or otherwise draw unwanted attention.
  • Trying to figure out the appropriate way to say a potentially hurtful thing instead of just blurting it out.
  • Asking people explicitly how they are feeling or what they need, because you know it’s important and you know you won’t figure it out on your own. Working up your courage and asking even though you know some people are offended by being asked.
  • Asking for accommodations, especially in an environment that you’re not sure will take you seriously.
  • Working up the courage to do social interactions that you know will be exhausting but necessary.
  • Trying to figure out ways to do basic things like make friends or express your emotions safely, when the NT way of doing them makes no sense to you.
  • Dealing with the ableist things people do and say all day.
  • Dealing with anxiety, depression, trauma, OCD, and the MANY OTHER very common comorbid conditions of autism.

I could go on and on; there are many things that should be on a list like this.

Here is how I know that these things are emotional labour. They are work. They take time, effort, and spoons. They are important work – sometimes the situation that makes them necessary is unfair, but you can’t solve them by saying “well, if it takes so many spoons, just don’t do that thing anymore.” (I have deliberately left out several obvious items, like “making eye contact even when it’s painful and overwhelming and leaves you unable to process what the person is actually saying”, because I really DO think that autistic people shouldn’t do that thing anymore. 😛 )

And they’re work that NTs don’t recognize as work. Even when NTs explicitly teach us to do these things,  it’s hard for NTs to think about them as effortful. If an autistic person successfully does all of these things, it means they are doing a lot of work. But if an NT person sees an autistic person successfully doing all of these things, they all too often think, “Well, I guess that person isn’t very autistic anymore.” NTs expect us to do all this work, and they expect it not to cost anything – which is the exact thing that happens with emotional labour between women and men.

As you might have guessed, autistic people who are socialized female end up doing more of this emotional labour than autistic men. Sometimes this work is referred to as “masking” or “disguising” autistic traits. It leads to fewer girls than boys being diagnosed with autism. It also leads to autistic girls being measurably worse at many basic tasks – possibly because so much more of their attention is taken up by the emotional labour of trying not to bother NTs.

So if you are autistic, and your heart sinks when you read about emotional labour – if you think, “God, they’re saying I’m terrible and broken, because I know I can never do half of these things” – keep this in mind. Some types of emotional labour are hard because you’re impaired at them. But sometimes it’s hard because you’ve already been doing it all day – in ways that NT feminists may not ever understand.

Giving autistic people a break

So let’s return to our example with that autistic-NT couple. Depending on the people, it might help for the NT woman to explicitly recognize that her husband is having trouble with this because he is disabled. He’s not being lazy and he isn’t intentionally ignoring her. He literally can’t see the things that she needs him to see.

He can, in turn, recognize that the NT woman isn’t making ridiculous and impossible demands. She isn’t asking him to “magically read her mind.” She’s asking him to do a thing that she and her NT friends probably do for each other all the time. It just happens that it’s a thing he cannot do.

This may not fix everything, but it would foster a spirit of forgiveness and acceptance, and a non-judgmental curiosity about alternative solutions to the problem.

…But not too much of a break

At the same time as all this, we have to acknowledge that there are forms of emotional labour that you just can’t get out of.

Things like respecting people’s boundaries (including sexual boundaries). Things like dealing with frustration in non-violent ways. Things like choosing words carefully enough that you don’t end up verbally abusing people. If you want to not literally be a criminal, these things are NOT NEGOTIABLE. If you don’t currently have the skills for them, you have to commit yourself to learning. No excuses. No “but I’m disabled and it’s hard”. Yes, it may be hard, but you still have to do it.

In the long run, relationships – even with other autistic people! – won’t work out unless you learn a few other emotional labour skills, too. I don’t want to harp too much on these, because I feel like I’m still figuring them out myself. But if a friend or partner doesn’t feel respected and appreciated, they probably won’t stick around.

The emotional labour that you do to help and support your friends might not look the same as someone else’s. It might not look the way NTs say it should look. There might not be much to it, if you don’t have many spoons to do it with. But it’s gotta be there, in some form that works for both you and the friends in question. Or you won’t have friends. Not even other autistic friends. That’s the ugly truth.

This stuff can be really, genuinely hard for us, and I’m struggling with how to phrase it here. I know autistic people, maybe including myself, who beat themselves up way too much about this stuff. People who’ve already been told over and over that if they don’t do [whatever totally arbitrary thing NTs came up with that hurts them and is really hard], they’ll never be worthy of love. These people are probably reading the above paragraph and cringing. I’m sorry. You know who you are, and I don’t mean you. I’m just saying this part because I don’t want MRAs coming into my mentions, basically. For every one of us who agonizes over whether they’re doing enough for their friends, there’s someone else out there who’s going, “Fuck you, I’m autistic. I don’t have to do emotional labour.” And that’s not the correct response.

If that “fuck you” response sounds totally alien to you, if you’re one of the people who instinctively agonizes over this and are feeling a little triggered by this part of the article, then I also have this to say: Hi. I see you. Yes, this is fucking hard. I actually think that’s one of the worst things about autism and emotional labour. We grow up being told awful, abusive things about what we NEED TO DO in order to be ACCEPTABLE and RESPECT PEOPLE. And some of it is wrong, or even actively harmful to us – but other parts are things that we genuinely need to do if we’re going to be safe people. It can be triggery and feel horrible to even try to sort through these things as an adult, and figure out which ones are ableist bullshit, and which ones are real. And maybe it’s not a process that is ever over. But sorting through it is work that is necessary and good and brave. And thank you for reading this far.

Reciprocity

I mentioned, way up there somewhere, that score-keeping too closely is bad for relationships. This isn’t just my opinion, it is a documented finding in social psychology. People can play silly games keeping score around chores like housework – “Well, I cleaned the sink, and you didn’t INSTANTLY do an equivalent chore, so I am better than you and I win the game.” These games are really toxic and I don’t recommend them.

People can play silly games like this with emotional labour, too. We don’t need to play those games.

Instead of score-keeping, reciprocity in relationships needs to take a longer view. Both partners need to be able to trust that their needs will be met and that their partner won’t take advantage of their good will. Both will be doing work at times. Both will be resting, or receiving the other person’s labour, at times. Sometimes things will be harder for one of them, and the other will need to pick up the slack; sometimes, it may be the reverse.

Both partners also need to trust that their partner will honour their consent and ability to make choices about the labour that they do, and that their labour will be acknowledged and appreciated.

This stuff gets really tricky when one partner is disabled or in crisis in a way that makes it hard for them to reciprocate emotional labour. Maybe they can do a little, but the amount that they can do is much smaller than the amount that they need.

If we want our emotional labour economy not to be ableist, then we need not to leave these people behind.

Sometimes a patient friend can stick with you, if you’re in this situation. (You are not horrible or taking advantage of them. You are disabled, and they are choosing to do work to help you.) Sometimes they can’t. Sometimes friends will be able to stick with you in some ways, but will need to draw boundaries around others. Sometimes we as a society don’t really have a good solution for this kind of problem at all. It doesn’t mean anyone is evil – and it doesn’t mean anyone is undeserving.

If you are ever in this situation, it helps to keep in mind the other ethical principles of emotional labour. To thank the people who are helping you for their work, to ask after them or do something else small – even if it’s a tiny token compared to what they are doing for you – and to make sure that their consent to this labour is ongoing and unpressured.

Incompatibility

I have one more thing to say about this imaginary example we’ve been working through, with the autistic-NT couple.

Maybe, this couple ends up acknowledging that the autistic man’s face-blindness is not his fault. Maybe they’ve non-judgmentally talked through lots of possible solutions, and tried some, and nothing works. Either the autistic man can’t do it, or the NT woman can’t be happy with what he can do.

Maybe they just learn to live with the fact that there’s a need in their relationship that won’t be met. No relationship is perfect. Maybe they’re both happy enough with the rest of the relationship that they can accept this part, and live with it together without both blaming each other. That’s a valid choice. In a lot of autistic-NT relationships, it may be the best choice.

Or maybe this is a deal-breaker for both of them, and maybe they part ways.

If this happens, it doesn’t mean that the autistic man has Failed At Emotional Labour Forever. It also doesn’t mean that the NT woman has Failed At Disability Acceptance Forever.

What it means is that, like in so many other relationships, they had incompatible needs.

Emotional labour is a need. We need to feel that the people who love us are there for us. That need may look like different things to different people, but it’s a need that is real. Both the autistic man and the NT woman, in this scenario, deserve to have their needs met.

Sometimes, the solution to stuff like this is that the autistic man should date another autistic person – or, at least, a person who is comfortable with needing to explicitly verbalize things. (That person will still have emotional labour needs – everyone does, and I’m not cool with using autistic women as sops to throw to disgruntled autistic men – but maybe they will have different ones that are more possible for him to meet.) And the NT woman should date someone who is good at picking up on what she nonverbally communicates. I don’t want to segregate people by neurotype, but sometimes, when we form relationships with people who are more like us – people who don’t instinctively expect us to be something we’re not – our relationships improve.

Summing up

Emotional labour is important. It’s real work, it takes real spoons, and everyone needs to do their share.

Some types of emotional labour are harder for autistic people. Some aren’t. And many autistic people are already doing a lot of emotional labour just to survive in an NT world.

Doing your share of emotional labour around NTs is really hard. You might need to experiment to find ways of doing it that work for you. You might find that you are already doing more emotional labour than they are, but in ways that are invisible to them. You might not be able to do it at all. You might be incompatible with some people, because they want forms of emotional labour that you can’t do. It’s still worth looking at what you can do, and making sure that you are treating friends appropriately.

MONSTERS IN MY MIND: Story notes, parts 29 and 31

29. Nightmare I

the night becomes a game of not looking

This is what it says on the can – a poem about a nightmare. It’s meant to be the first in a series. Fortunately, the occasions on which I have a nightmare so weird and surreal that I need to write it down upon waking are quite rare, so I don’t know that the series will ever be finished. 😀

31. Blue Fever

She always worried that one day she would have nothing new to say about the single word, glass, no remaining way to satisfy the court’s morbid tastes. But that day had not yet come.

This was written for (and published in) Ryan North’s “This Is How You Die: Stories of the Inscrutable, Infallible, Inescapable Machine of Death”. The “Machine of Death” premise, for those who don’t know, is that there’s a sort of vending machine that can give you an accurate prediction of how you will die, but the prediction is always some really vague word (the ones in Blue Fever include “GLASS” and “GRAPES”, as well as the disease in the title).

I wondered how to write an original story about a Machine of Death given that there had already been a whole other anthology written about it. (I was a younger writer then.) The guidelines said to bring something into the story that you had a personal experience with. I picked singing; I used to be a semi-professional, classically trained soprano. And by “semi-professional” I mean “I made a couple hundred dollars a month singing lead in a church choir while I was an undergrad” but that TOTALLY COUNTS, right?

I ended up with a story about a decadent noble court in which singers are commissioned to sing about various people’s predicted deaths. It’s one of the few outright fantasy stories in “This Is How You Die” and I’m still very fond of it.

Song Pairing: You will have to use your imagination here. “Blue Fever” happens to have the partial lyrics of several deathsongs already contained inside it, and I couldn’t possibly choose a real-life song that will compare. 😀

MONSTERS IN MY MIND is available for purchase on AmazonKobo, Indigo,  Barnes and Noble, and in Autonomous Press’s Shopify store.

Autism News, 2018/01/27

More from Rose Lemberg’s “Writing While Autistic” series:

  • On autistic inertia
  • On giving oneself permission to write – and permission not to write  (This one hit me especially hard; in fact, I have been changing aspects of how I schedule my time because of it and the conversations that came out of it.)
  • On identity

Media and Reviews:

Posts about treatments (and “treatments”):

Pan-disability stuff:

Science:

MONSTERS IN MY MIND: Story notes, part 26 and 27

26. The Parable of the Supervillain

At four in the morning with the baby biting me,
I watched you call the President of Australia
from his velvet bed
and feed him to the army ants.

This poem appeared in Apex Magazine, in March 2014. Its inspiration was a moment I had with a then-close friend who was visiting me. I had a meltdown triggered by something, and yelled in awful ways – I very rarely yell during meltdowns, I’m usually more inclined to just freeze up and cry, but this one was really bad. Afterwards I was full of shame. I’ve had people who always yelled that way when I was growing up, I know how damaging it is, and I felt like a monster because I couldn’t stop myself. And my friend just came to me where I was sitting there crying and wordlessly put her arms around me.

I don’t want this post to turn into some kind of weird, “and therefore it’s okay to yell at people” apologia. Obviously, it’s not okay to yell, and it is damaging, and I’ve been actively working on training myself into alternate strategies so that I don’t damage the people on whom I rely for support. But in the moment, I was overwhelmed with gratitude for my friend’s forgiveness, and I decided to write about that feeling.

Back when I was more conventionally religious, the Parable of the Prodigal Son was a story that had immense meaning for me. It still kind of does. And you don’t have to know me all that well to know that I appreciate fabulous villains. Once those two elements were in place, with the emotional core to back them up, the rest of it was easy.

27. The Company of Heaven

She couldn’t say why the angels frightened her. They swelled with too much light, but so did the sun, and she didn’t cower away from that. Maybe it was the way they said her name. Like another thing that knew her. Another that wouldn’t leave her alone.

“The Company of Heaven” is an older piece that never quite found a home before MONSTERS IN MY MIND. It’s named after a little-known work by Benjamin Britten, which I chanced to see performed live back in, oh, it must have been 2010 or even earlier. I was struck by this particular part of the text, a quote from John Ruskin, which is spoken aloud during the sixth movement:

…suppose that over Ludgate Hill the sky had indeed suddenly become blue instead of black; and that a flight of twelve angels, ‘covered with silver wings, and their feathers with gold,’ had alighted on the cornice of the railroad bridge, as the doves alight on the cornices of St. Mark’s at Venice; and had invited the eager men of business below, in the centre of a city confessedly the most prosperous in the world, to join them for five minutes in singing the first five verses of such a psalm as the 103rd – ‘Bless the Lord, oh my soul, and all that is with me,’ (the opportunity now being given for the expression of their most hidden feelings) ‘all that is within me, bless his holy name, and forget not all His benefits.’ Do you not even thus, in mere suggestion, feel shocked at the thought, and as if my now reading the words were profane? And cannot you fancy that the sensation of the crowd at so violent and strange an interruption of traffic, might be somewhat akin to… the feeling attributed by Goethe to Mephistopheles at the song of the angels: ‘Discord I hear, and intolerable jingling?’

I knew immediately that I wanted to write about this scenario, about someone being directly confronted by Actual Angels – angels who didn’t appear to want anything of them, except that they consider joining in a song – and being completely unable to appreciate or accept the experience.

At first – being much more conventionally religious, back in 2010, than I am now – my view of what such a person would be like was very negative, and the story was going to be one of these unpleasant, self-critical, character study kinds of stories. But that version of the story never quite gelled, and I could never quite bring myself to write it down. Eventually I realized that Cassie, the story’s protagonist, needed to be much more sympathetic. She needed to have reasons for being uneasy around angels that parallelled my own – she is busy, yes, but she’s also queer and traumatized, acutely afraid of being called crazy, and suspicious that the social value systems that go along with believing in angels will also harm her in multiple ways. I needed to own those things as valid and relatable feelings, and write them accordingly. And I needed to give her, not a judgmental, downer ending, but a hopeful one.

So the story eventually happened that way, and was finished in 2012. It never sold, and I wonder if that’s due to the weird combination of both being queer and having heavy Christian overtones – who would buy that? I don’t know. I probably wouldn’t even buy that. It could also be that this is an earlier work, and maybe my craft just wasn’t quite there. But it’s a story I love, so I put it into MONSTERS IN MY MIND, and now you can read it, too.

By the way, all the words sung by the angels in this story are actual hymns, except for “Heaven is here, and the angels of heav’n,” which is from the Britten piece.

Song Pairing: Britten’s “The Company of Heaven” is difficult to track down in recorded form, but if you’d like to hear it for yourself, there appear to be several versions on YouTube.

MONSTERS IN MY MIND is available for purchase on AmazonKobo, Indigo,  Barnes and Noble, and in Autonomous Press’s Shopify store.