Welcome to the Real World: Part 1

The Matrix did not just change cinema, it changed our very perception of reality!

Mar 08, 2024

For those who have been here long enough you might recognise this week’s essay as something I posted at the very beginning of this adventure. I have been very short on spoons, or had no spoons at all, to dedicate to the upkeep of this newsletter over the last two months because *life* was just a bit much1 and this rewrite was sitting in a virtual filing cabinet. I hope in this revised draft that I’ve done the movie, and my own neurodivergent experience a little more justice!

Welcome to AutCasts, a free bi-weeekly newsletter by writer, Aisling Walsh, exploring neurodivergence through cinema’s oddballs, misfits & rebels!

‘You’re here because you know something. What you know you can't explain, but you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life, that there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.’

-Morpheus

Replace ‘world’ with ‘you’, as in ‘there’s something wrong with you’, in this iconic line from The Matrix, and you will have some sense of what it means to exist in this world for 37 years without realising you are autistic.

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.

A splinter in my mind

The Matrix premiered in 1999, just before I turned 15, and changed cinematic and cultural history. One of my life-long regrets is that I never saw it in the cinema, but on VHS months later. Despite the tiny screen and grainy video quality, which did not allow for a full appreciation of the ground-breaking CGI, it was the story, rather than the special effects, which enthralled me. From the very first viewing I was obsessed. I watched it repeatedly, finding solace in Thomas Anderson’s disconnect from the world around him. I was swept along with his struggle to adapt to the alternate reality he is reborn into and the mixture of relief and joy when he finally accepts himself for who he really is and embraces his extraordinary abilities. Though I was not delusional enough to believe I was some kind of messiah figure, I was desperate for some kind of escape, or rescue, from a reality in which I felt I was perpetually threading water to keep myself from drowning.

Thomas Anderson’s fin de siècle ennui and alienation from the world around him was a sentiment which I, even at 15, could readily identify with. He is an aloof, suspect, loner, with seemingly no emotional connection to other humans. By day he plays the part of corporate worker-bee at a non-descript dot.com company. By night he scours the depths of the dark web under his hacker-alias, Neo, for answers to a question he is only beginning to formulate… what is the Matrix?

I came of age into the world Agent Smith declares to be “the peak of your civilisation.” Yet, as a “highly sensitive” child, I was all too aware that the civilisation he refers to was constructed on foundations of colonisation, war, poverty, inequality, famine, exploitation, genocide and overwhelming injustice. My adolescent insomnia was driven, in part, by reading large tomes on the atrocities of the 20th century into the early hours of the morning. Neo’s refusal to fully accept the reality he had been presented with spoke intuitively to the sense that I should not have to accept the world’s injustices.

But beneath the rage of a barely-pubescent social justice warrior, there was a niggling fear, a suspicion I hardly dared to voice, that there something deeply out of sync between me and the rest of the world. I struggled where so many people seemed to just get on with things. I was confused where other people saw sense. I rebelled against arbitrary rules other people seemed to have no trouble accepting. I had ever more destructive meltdowns, where other teenagers were learning to control their emotions. While the world around me felt real enough, my place in it felt less than secure and my days were plagued by permanent existential crises.

Unlike Neo, I became convinced the problem was with me, not the world. My whole life I had dealt with the painful consequences of trying, but failing, to mould myself to a world that seemed unwilling to make room for my particular quirks and foibles. But I had no language, no frame of reference to understand this. As the years passed, my struggles to adapt to the demands of school, work, relationships – all those things we like to call “adulting” – only seemed to get harder, despite years of therapy. I became convinced that I was broken and beyond repair.

Down the rabbit hole

Once I had access to a personal computer and WIFI in my early twenties, my sleepless nights were filled by scrolling through google, reading the symptomology of every mental health conditional from anxiety, to depression and Borderline Personality Disorder, hoping to stumble onto something that would explain me to myself. Was I just an introvert, a highly sensitive person, an INTJ or simply traumatised by the separations and losses that marked my childhood and early adulthood? These explained some, but not all, of the things I experienced.

In the end I found the nudge I needed in the form of the bespectacled, gay comedian, Hannah Gadsby. I watched their show Douglas days after it premiered on Netflix in early 2020. The show’s set-up is both a reveal and explanation of their own autism diagnosis with their characteristic mix of wit and intelligence. At the time I knew nothing about autism but something in Gadsby’s performance (specifically a very literal mike drop and comment about her aversion to loud noises) tugged at a loose thread deep in my unconscious. The first thing I did after watching Douglas was to Google a definition of autism. The initial hits all described the most stereotypical autistic traits (failure to make eye contact, lack of empathy, maths genius) which I then dismissed inapplicable to my experience and promptly forgot all about it.

The blessing, or curse, of algorithms meant that more and more articles about neurodivergence, particularly late-diagnosed ADHD and autism in women, found their way to me. I saw my story echoed in their words over and over again. I read more and took multiple online quizzes, recommended by professionals, scoring well above average in all of them.

But still I doubted. I was half-way through my PhD in sociology and knew all about how questionnaires work. I knew how easy it would be to manipulate my answers to make myself seem more autistic. (Because actual neurotypical people want more than anything to convince themselves they are re autistic, right???) I thought I was clutching at straws, desperate for an answer to things in my life which only seemed to be getting harder and ready to latch myself on to any label or ‘condition’ which might explains things. Surely if I was autistic I would know by now? Surely one of the eight therapists I had seen over the course of my life would have spotted it?

And yet the splinter remained, ever more present and insistent the more I read and researched. In the end, the weight of evidence began to point towards a reality I could no longer deny, and like Neo, when he opts to swallow the red pill, I just wanted answers.

After a lifetime of gaslighting (from myself and others) I knew I would never trust my own perception if I self-diagnosed. In fact, I knew so little about the neurodivergent community that I didn’t think anyone would take me seriously without a professional diagnosis, so I got one. What I did not realise was that this would be the beginning, rather than the end of the adventure.