Autism and Letting Go
Autism and Letting Go
I remember the first therapist I ever went to, who sent me home with the job to let something that was weighing on me go — I could choose what. I came back the next week, utterly baffled as to what this meant.
“What does it mean to let something go?” I asked.
“Well, what things have you let go of before?” she asked.
I stared at her. “I don’t think I’ve ever done that before. I don’t think I know what it means.”
And then my therapist began to understand what a difficult case I was.
She suggested that I think of a memory in the past as a piece of paper. I needed to crumple up that memory and throw it away and then — stop thinking about it.
I tried to do this. I really tried. I think I might have found two or three small things that I could crumple up like a piece of paper and let go. But truly, one of the realities of living in an autistic brain that collects random facts and files them away is that letting things go feels terribly wrong. It feels like lying, and lying is the worst possible thing to an autist. Pretending that something is true when it isn’t — that’s worse than immoral. It’s, well, untrue.
Yes, I’m capable of lying. In extreme situations if you convince me that it is necessary to help someone do something very important. Surprise birthday parties, for instance, I will try to conceal information about. It’s easier if I don’t have to say a lie outright, and just have to obfuscate or not tell information. And in the rare instance where I am fully committed to the lie as important, I can lie very, very well. Mostly because everyone who knows me knows who bad I am at lying, so they never suspect that I am lying. But I hate it. I hate it so much.
I have always had a very good memory. I retain lines of stories and poems from years ago. I remember details from my childhood home at age two, when my younger sister was born. I remember wearing diapers and my older sister trying to talk me into potty training. Not all autists have good memories, however. I know several who seem to have no memories at all before they were adults. I suspect that after that, though, they still have the problem with letting go of memories that I do. It feels like destroying a part of myself, like self-harm.
I’m not sure anymore that I think the project of letting go is the right way for me to deal with an accumulation of grief anyway. I’m not going to tell anyone else what to do, but this is one of those cases where I would argue that autistic people have a different way of existing in the world and it is equally valid and it works for us, so you don’t need to talk us out of it and into being more neurotypical.
Maybe in the end what is important for me to do is hold memories more loosely or to reinterpret them. Those are things that are easier for me to do and make more sense. Of course, maybe this is really what the therapist meant in the first place, not for me to actually try to erase a memory out of my brain. But I’m very literal and somehow the crumpling up meant that to me.