Introducing: Our own little brunette outcast!
Welcome to AutCasts: a newsletter celebrating the life on the spectrum through cinema’s oddballs, rebels and misfits brought to you by our own little brunette outcast, me!
I’ve been movie obsessive my whole life, probably watching my favourite movies upwards of 20 or 30 times. I never get bored and often enjoy them more the 30th than the first time. Until recently, I thought this kind of comfort viewing was how everyone enjoyed their favourite movies and TV shows and then I was diagnosed with autism in December 2021. During the assessment process I learned this kind of repetitive behaviour is one of the indicators for autism and is a common trait in autistic people, with many of us preferring to return to old favourites rather than watching something new.
The diagnosis-identification-discoverary (there are no good words!) sparked a reassessment of my whole life. Over the last year I’ve been learning to understand my experiences, both joys and struggles, through a neurodivergent lens. Everything in my life has come under scrutiny, even the movies I love. I began rewatching some of my favourites again, sometimes for comfort but mostly to figure out what it was that drew me to these movies in particular. A pattern started to emerge: most, if not all of my favourite movies, spoke to some aspect of my autistic experience.
Whether it was Alice lost in a strange and hostile wonderland, Neo’s desperate search for answer to his alienation from the world around him, Matilda’s intolerance of schoolyard injustice, or the Dude’s refusal to fit in the square world, the clues were there all along. Until recently, however, I had neither the language nor understanding to realise what they were trying to tell me.
Information saturation…
The months following my diagnosis were marked by feelings of surprise, relief, validation and a furious curiosity which buoyed me up through the spring. I downloaded ALL the autistic memoirs, ALL the ‘understand your autism’ guide’s, read novels by autistic authors, followed #actuallyautistic people across all social media platforms and listened obsessively to the few non-stigmatising podcasts produced by #actuallyautistic people I could find.
In everything I read and listened to I saw myself and my own experiences reflected over and over and over again. It was as if someone had entered my brain and explained all the wonderful ways my mind and body work, as well as excavating all my deepest fears, insecurities and discomforts, most of which I had been working very hard to keep from myself and the rest of the world. Once the initial buzz wore off, and after the repeated sting of coming ‘aut’ to people who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, understand, the grief set in.
Eleven months later I feel like I’m still wading through a quagmire of mixed emotions: the thrill every time I uncover another piece of my own personal puzzle and grief for all the things I had been unable to understand about myself and my relationship with the world. I’ve begun to realise just how much I had denied my own feelings and experiences, gaslit myself, pretended I was OK when I had floundered for so long, in so many spaces and with so many people. I’ve carried enormous guilt and shame about all the ways I was failing to be a fitter, happier and more productive individual. The grief has been compounded by trauma and three decades of confusing and painful interactions with family, friends, colleagues and strangers I could rarely explain and which has resulted in many fractured or broken relationships.
The process of understanding myself feels like it’s only just beginning and, even with the grief, I would never go back. I feel as Neo might have when he accepted himself as ‘The One’: that I have finally stepped into my true self and found my true power, personally and creatively.
Autism is not a superpower, but self-knowledge and self-acceptance can be. My world is no longer made up of streams of incomprehensible codes, I’m beginning to see the shapes moving through the green.
Where are all the neurodivergent characters at?
Outside of neurodivergent communities few people talk about autistic joy, or even the advantages to being autistic, preferring instead to dwell on so called ‘deficits.’ Because an aversion to lies is just so pathological, right?
One of my joys since childhood has been film and and in rewatching my favourite movies I noticed how time and again I’m drawn to stories about outcasts. And so I one of the ways I have been rewriting the narrative of my life through a neurodivergent lens is to ask what is it about these outcasts and their struggles which connects with my own experience?
After months of playing around with these ideas (and trying, but failing, to find somewhere that might like to publish my autistic navel gazing) I decided to just give into the obsession and start this newsletter. I had no interest in writing about Rain Man or other supposed ‘autistic films’, because:
There are not that many of them, ergo, any attempt at a newsletter would soon peter out;
The problems with autistic representation in movies and TV have already been commented on widely in the autistic community;
I spent most of my life not knowing I was autistic and therefore did not actively seek out ‘autistic media’.
If I happened to stumble upon an ‘autistic movie’ or an ‘autistic character’ I rarely felt any connection to them because I’m nothing like Rain Man, Sheldon or the boy from Mercury Rising. In fact, I cannot stress enough how much I HATE maths! I did not see myself in ‘autistic films’ because most of those films were largely written, produced and acted by neurotypical people who, in many cases, continue to rely on reductive stereotypes and pathologizing research.
The movies I connected to throughout my life, the ones I plan to write about here, are not ostensibly about neurodivergence, nor neurodivergent characters, but they feel a lot more real to me than Rain Man or the Big Bang Theory. I’m not a fan of armchair diagnoses, and I cannot say whether any of my ‘OutCasts’ are actually ‘AutCasts’, all I can say is that some aspect of their story connected to some aspect of my autistic experience!
I’m late, I’m late, for a very important date
With a PhD thesis due in less than a year and a novel-in-(fits-and-starts)-progress, a newsletter is the last thing I should be thinking of.
But…
I told myself that if I reach my reading and writing goals for my thesis each week then I can allow myself some newsletter writing time instead of binge-(re)watching all seven seasons of Buffy or 15 seasons of ER.
And, it’s for the good of my mental health – no really! I know enough about how my ND brain works to know that I will only waste more time, and countless notebook pages, if I continue to fixate on this idea without doing anything about it. I also need some kind of distraction from the looming VERY SCARY DEADLINE.
Premiering on Thursdays
‘AutCasts’ is a weekly newsletter where movies are the vehicle for exploring life, family, school, work, relationships, love, sex and passions through a neurodivergent lens.
In between screen rants I’ll share guides to many of the autistic content and resources on the web and in print I’ve enjoyed or found most helpful. Wading through the mountains of pathologizing and stigmatising literature and resources to uncovering #ActuallyAutistic content was no easy task. AutCasts will provide ‘curated’, rather than definitive, recommendations for the pantheon of #actuallyautistic creators and activists out there.
I can’t wait to dig into to all the ways movies like The Matrix, Matilda, Home Alone, Rushmore, Jaws, Jurassic Park, Mean Girls, Priscilla Queen of the Desert, Young Frankenstein, Toy Story, Men in Black, Strictly Ballroom and many others that make my autistic soul sing. And I’m looking forward to reaping all the benefits for my dopamine starved brain of hits, likes, and comments, on these ramblings (or fall into a pit of rejection sensitive despair if/when these fail to materialise).
But before we dig in, I’d just like to clarify that while I am #ActuallyAutistic, I’m not an autistic ‘expert.’ While I draw on relevant and reliable research and writing from other #ActuallyAutistic people, I’m only an expert on my own life. But, I believe #ActuallyAutistic voices are the ones the world should be listening to if we genuinely want to understand the highs, lows and deep joys of being neurodivergent.
Super excited, thanks for sharing and creating a space for nuerodivergent people!