Welcome to the Real World: Part 2
Embracing your identity and the superpower of self-acceptance in The Matrix!
After a very rough start to the year, I’m trying to get back to “normal programming,” in life, with this newsletter and writing in general. So please enjoy part two of my ode to The Matrix!
If the first half of The Matrix is concerned with Thomas Anderson’s search for the truth, the second half centres on Neo’s exploration his new reality, his battles with agents, rescue of Morpheus and how he comes to terms with his own identity. Even when he pierces the veil and sees the Matrix for what it really is, he remains in doubt about his own abilities and identity as ‘The One’ until the very end.
Welcome to AutCasts, a free bi-weeekly newsletter by writer, Aisling Walsh, exploring neurodivergence through cinema’s oddballs, misfits & rebels!
The Matrix is a 1999 sci-fi classic written and directed by The Wachowskis. Thomas Anderson - aka Neo - (Keanu Reeves) discovers he is living in a simulated reality created by machines who generate energy from millions of human bodies connected to the Matrix. In the ‘real world’ disconnected from the machines Neo, under the guidance of Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) and Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne), struggles to accept his identity as ‘The One’ and his destiny to end the war between humans and machines.
The truth will set you free?
What is the Matrix? Am I autistic? They seem like such simple questions. But to understand what the Matrix is, from inside and out, to understand my own complex experience of autism, is not something that can be answered in days, or weeks or even months. It will likely take years, maybe a sequel, a whole trilogy, another follow up, or even a prequel to find an answers. Those answers may only ever be partial. They might be hard to digest. You might not like what you discover. Morpheus promises Neo the truth, nothing more. But, as Gloria Steinem has said, “the truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off!”
It’s not safe to liberate minds from the Matrix after a certain age. The more years people spend attached to the mainframe the harder it is for them to accept the other, terribly grim, reality. Neo doubts what he perceives even as the façade of the Matrix begins to crumble around him and he resists Morpheus and Trinity’s initial attempts to free his mind.
Once Neo sees through the veil of the Matrix he is confronted with the grey, harsh edges of a true dystopia where his fragile body is in permanent, often imminent, danger. He must come to terms with the material limits of his flesh while pushing beyond the limits of his mind. He is barely acquainted with the real world when he returns to the familiar, but altered, world of his previous reality within the Matrix, travelling back and forth between the two with ever greater ease. Even as he learns to bend the Matrix to his will, he struggles to bridge the disjuncture between who he feels himself to be and the person Morpheus, Trinity and the Oracle believe him to be.
When it comes to neurodivergence, the longer you go without a diagnosis the harder it can be to figure out where and how you fit in the world you thought you knew, or how you feel about this new identity that remains so misunderstood and stigmatized. It can be even harder to know how and what to share with others. Families can retreat into denial, friends can be dismissive, colleagues can discriminate. After the first rush to share my news about this most wonderful discovery of mine, my new special interest, I mostly stopped talking about it with friends, stung by the attempts to relativise or reject my experience.
Even with a clinical diagnosis I have had many moments over the last two years where I’ve doubted whether I’m really autistic. This is just me, my imposter says, the same chaotic mess I have always been. How is it that so many of my ‘quirks’ are actually diagnosable traits that are shared with an estimated 7% of the human population? I lived in the neurotypical world for so long, never quite feeling like I fit, ignorant of the parallel world where all the qualities that marked me as different and weird would be accepted or even embraced. I have managed to let go of so much guilt and fear and found a new ease and freedom within myself that I had begun to believe was out of reach for me.
The one thing I never expected to encounter was a deep well of grief for the lonely and misunderstood girl desperate to be rescued from the reality that surrounded her. Grief for the years wasted chasing after people and things I felt I should want or need or desire, even when I was aware that I needed, or wanted or desired the opposite, or nothing at all. Grief for the relationships broken or lost along the way, or the ones I tried to save long after they had passed their sell-by date. Grief for the relationships I have, over the last two years, consciously decided to let go of. Long buried memories resurface on a daily basis to remind me of the struggle and the hurt caused to me and others by the ignorance of my own neurology. Sometimes there is no spoon and sometimes there are not enough spoons to deal with the emotional the fallout.
And yet, it is deeply satisfying and consistently intriguing in rereading my life through this new lens. I now see shapes and movement, where before I saw the world in indistinguishable streams of green code. With this new knowledge about myself I feel like I also straddle two worlds: my inner world in which I am fully, joyously, autistic and the outside world which I can chose to engage with, or not, on my own terms.
Morpheus and his crew of freed minds occupy a liminal space between the materiality of Zion and the virtuality of the Matrix. They do not fully belong with those born in Zion but can no longer be contained within the Matrix. They must create their own reality where they remain literally and figuratively connected to their past experiences, as they strive towards ending the war with the machines and the eventual liberation of all minds and bodies.
There is no gender…
The Matrix is widely recognised as an allegory for the trans experience, exploring the fluidity of our identities and self-perception, questioning the nature of accepted reality. Lily and Lana have, since coming out, confirmed the accuracy of this reading and pushed back against the appropriation of the red pill trope by men’s rights groups and the alt-right.
In reading and listening to trans people’s connections to The Matrix I couldn’t help but noticing just how their description of their reality before and after coming out, mirrored the before and after of discovering my autistic identity, my coming ‘Aut.’ Emily St. James captures some of these sentiments beautifully in an essay for Vox:
When you’re an egg [pre-transition], you’re safely closed off by your shell, unable to see the wider world. It’s kind of like being in a sensory deprivation tank. Everything is muffled, and the world is hazy and translucent through the walls. There is always some barrier between you and reality…
You might eventually find yourself breaking through the shell containing the hermetically sealed world you thought you lived in to some other reality entirely. That reality might reduce everything else in your life to rubble, but getting to experience it is worth the fallout.
I don’t want to argue for supplanting the trans reading of The Matrix with a neurodivergent read. Nor do I want to suggest that the trans and neurodivergent experiences are equivalent. Rather, I have begun to wonder about the commonalities between the pre-transition, pre-diagnosis experience. We come ‘out’ and ‘aut’ to a world in which both identities are misunderstood, marginalised and often feared, where conversion therapy and Applied Behavioural Therapy, both of which are forms of abuse, are often seen as ‘solutions’ or ‘cures’ to our very existence.
There is a significant overlap between queer communities and neurodivergent communities, with one study suggesting up to 70% of autistics identified as LGBTQIA+. A major study published in 2020 indicates that as many as 24% of autistic people are gender diverse (compared to less than 4% in the neurotypical population) and nearly 22% of trans people are neurodivergent (compared to the estimated 7% in the cis population).
I’ve never identified as anything but cis. But I’ve also never felt convinced by the kind of femininity expected of me as a cis woman and have usually failed whenever I tried to perform it. Many people in the neurodivergent community are sceptical of the gender binary as another arbitrary social norm built around a very flimsy logic and bad science. The terms Autigender and Neuroqueer have evolved to capture the way our divergent experiences of gender and sexuality can be inherent to, and inseparable from, our divergent neurology.
The Wachowski oeuvre, particularly The Matrix and Sense 8, speaks deeply to the intersection of the two, whether intentional or not. In the latter, Sensates are understood as a different species, complete with a distinct brain physiology that creates an intensified sensory and empathic experience of the world through the power of telepathic connections with others of their species. They are hunted down, institutionalised and murdered for the threat their difference poses to the world of Sapiens. If Sense 8 is a series which is overtly queer and overtly concerned with neurological divergence, albeit of a fictional species, a neurodivergent read of The Matrix does not feel so much of a stretch.
The only other movie that comes anyway close to capturing, for me, the sheer disorientation of living as an undiagnosed autistic person in a hostile world, designed and built to fit neurotypical criteria world is Alice in Wonderland (1951). There are explicit, references to Alice throughout The Matrix, beginning with Trinity’s instructions to Neo to follow the white rabbit: a tattoo that appears on the shoulder blade of a woman that shows up at Neo’s apartment. Morpheus invites Neo to see how far the rabbit hole goes. And Neo, after taking the red pill, is nearly consumed by the illusion of a cracked looking glass. The greatest difference is that Alice tumbles into a fantasy world where she is perpetually out of place, too big or too small, too loud or too quiet, for her environment. Neo, on the other hand, abandons the fantasy and tumbles reality which begins to make more sense to him than the Matrix ever did.
Alice eventually returns to the world that is real to her unscathed, convinced Wonderland was all a dream. Whereas The Matrix and Sense 8 invite us to let go of previously held certainties about gender, neurology, reality itself, and embrace the fluidity of identities and the possibilities of divergent lives.
Free your mind
Morpheus and crew search the Matrix looking for minds to free, the sceptical, doubting minds, the ones who cannot quite accept the programme, who know there is something wrong with the world as it is presented to them, the ones who do not quite fit in.
For many neurodivergent people the dynamic is reversed: no one is looking for us. In fact, many people would rather we remain hidden, masked or even institutionalised while high-profile scientists look for the cause of our neurology and, by implication, a “cure.”
The search for answers can be a true odyssey. It is easy to get lost in the maze of misdiagnoses, as you flail around trying to find the right information or getting someone to take you seriously. If or when you do secure a diagnosis, particularly as an adult, you are left in the air. It is up to us, largely, to find other minds who think like us, free ourselves from the veil pulled over us by neurotypical expectations and work our way back through the layers of masks to the truth of who we are.
Once you take the red pill there is no going back, but would you want to? Neo finds his true power once he embraces his identity, one he never asked for, but an identity which has, for better or worse, shaped his whole existence. There can be much relief, as well as hard work, and even heartache, in finally be able to embrace an identity that truly aligns with how you experience the world.
Autism is not a superpower but self-acceptance is kind of miraculous!
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To hear more about how The Matrix can be read from the trans experience I highly recommend these episodes from The Bechdel Cast and Feminist Frequency Radio.
In other news, I had my first ever opinion piece for Al Jazeera, unpacking global solidarity and Ireland’s complex post-colonial identity. You can check it out here!
I enjoyed this piece Aisling, particularly the paragraph on grief which begins: "The one thing I never expected to encounter was a deep well of grief for the lonely and misunderstood girl desperate to be rescued from the reality that surrounded her."
I always find so much resonance in your work, even when the subject matter doesn't directly align with my life experience. Thank you for sharing your work. It's great to have you back in my inbox :)