Hello all,
This is a memoir on the theme of emergence which kind of turned into a piece about neurodivergence called “Emergence, Emergence, Neurodivergence”. I hope you like it.
But before then, just to revisit some of the birds from yesterday’s piece, there is a peewee family who live in our backyard.
There’s a male and a female and more recently, a small baby fledgling who is currently being taught how to peewee by Mum in our backyard.
Multiple times a day the Dad flies down to the platform where we leave Mrs JUT’s special blend of mealworms, shell grit and generic avian energy block. He’ll have a nibble, then stopping only to briefly attack his reflection in the bungalow window he grabs some more food and takes it back to the nest for junior.
He means well, loves his kids but he’s a bit dim. I call him Homer.
Today I set up my camera in our backyard to film this. And here it is. You can hear me audibly groan when he decides to fly home instead of really making this video by popping into the bird bath.
Still pretty cool though. Because my life is dope and I do dope shit.
Anyway, on with the show. More to come.
EMERGENCE, EMERGENCE, NEURODIVERGENCE…
If a thing or a person is not to plateau,
They mustn't just stagnate, indeed they must grow.
Like an oak in the doldrums, transcending the winter.
They grasp and reach outwards, by branch and by splinter.
The enigma; encoded, ensconced in emergence.
The paradox driving it, steady and urgent.
It seems to the fool like disloyal insurgence.
Emergence emerges from shards of divergence.
Status quo on death row whilst its fate is wargamed.
Now our client, so pliant; arrested, arraigned.
Revolution in prospect, all outcomes fair game.
Old breed goes to seed, germinates and then
CHANGE
SUBMERGENCE…
Sometime in late 2014 in my little room in Stoke Newington, London I consumed a gram of cocaine for the express purpose of sending some emails. It was a dumb idea that seemed smart at the time.
For the third year in a row, I wanted to perform at the Perth Fringe Festival. This is not to say that I’d performed there two years in a row and wanted to go for a third. No, I’d wanted to go for three years and not managed the admin yet.
I ran through my checklist.
• Funny show? CHECK!
• Potential venues and contacts? CHECK!
• Fingers to type? CHECK!
• The requisite self-worth to ask?
Self-worth?
The sad truth was, I had very little. For the longest time I’d been using ‘funny’ as a surrogate. An imperfect surrogate I’ll grant you, but that’s where the cocaine came in. A surrogate surrogate if you will.
These weren’t the actions of a happy man.
Remarkably for such a dumb idea, it was an early victory for emergence by divergence. I got high, sent three emails, and received two venue offers. CHECK!
I went, got nominated for an award, and met my future wife. I’d like to thank that bag of coke for doing right by me. Not all of them did.
Those of us who periodically substitute substance with substances are often labelled stupid or reckless. Indeed, we are often reckless, but we are not stupid.
We often do so because they’re out of touch with her emotions. With exactly who we am.
So much confusion. Of which I need rid. Like I’m lost in Manhattan. No map and no grid. My wants and my needs? Those were crimes that I hid. I drank now and then. And when I did, I DID.
Years ago, I read that this kind of self-destructive behaviour was very common in undiagnosed neurodiverse people. “Poor bastards!”, I’d think. Soon enough I’d be diagnosed as a poor bastard myself.
The real disorder I suffered from was ignorance. The only substance I was abusing, was myself.
CONVERGENCE…
Children become adults by practicing conversations, with people. I practiced conversations with people, before they happened, alone in my room. Absent comma, absent counterparty. Punctuation matters, kids. It wasn’t me though, the patterns made me do it.
I love patterns. I noticed this about myself early on. Probably because it was a pattern, I loved those and a pattern about patterns is surely king of all patterns. If I hadn’t spent so long wanting and pretending to be normal, the Autism diagnosis wouldn’t have come as so much of a surprise.
Inconveniencing ourselves for patterns is not crazy. It’s the very definition of intelligence. I’d love to fly off the roof, but there’s this thing called gravity. I’d love to express feelings, but it weirds out my Dad.
I didn’t want to sit on a bed thinking about what I’d say and then trying to predict which of option A or B would lead to a better outcome.
“Why am I playing both roles here? This is impossible! If I understood others enough to predict what they’d say, I wouldn’t be sitting on my bed improvising dialogue. I’d be at social events!
The primary pattern was Primary School. I noticed that kids were, let’s say, weird with me. They didn’t dislike me. But they didn’t quite know what to do with me or my incessant asking of questions. I asked questions like a three-year old, and everyone else was busy being chill, and seven.
Clearly not yet spotting the pattern that the questions were the problem, I resolved to discover why. Immediately another pattern revealed itself. People don’t like questions they don’t have good answers for. Or questions where the answer is “Because popularity trumps integrity, Yianni.” They hate those.
I don’t want you to picture me friendless. I wasn’t. I was ragingly popular; however, this was highly context dependent. I got along with everyone. Provided we were alone.
For the avoidance of doubt, I did not demand exclusivity. It’s just how things would play out. It was standard Dirty Little Secret rules: Acceptance, validation, DETECTION, REJECTION.
I remember thinking at the time, “I hope I don’t play out the withholding half of this conflict through my love life in my twenties and thirties.”, which looking back was remarkably prescient stuff for a seven-year-old.
I knew I was worth knowing. All the microdefectors cheating on their peer group with me proved that. But I also learned that I wasn’t important enough to risk even the slightest amount of discomfort for.
Now this was a worrying pattern: predictable and unsettling. I circled it in my notebook.
“DEFINITELY HAPPENS.”
All the while, I couldn’t quite bring myself to accept it. How could questions be the problem? Questions were straightforwardly amazing things. You asked outside of you questions, you learned more about outside of you. You asked inside of you questions; you learned more about inside of you.
Sometimes I’d feel like I was made of questions. Every time you asked one, you grew. For the second-shortest kid in class, this was big time.
Plus, questions lead amazing places. Did you know babies don’t understand that they’re separate from their environment until they’re two months old? They emerge, and then they emerge. The word ‘they’ is doing a lot of philosophical heavy lifting here.
In between these two emergences, babies will often believe that someone is hitting them, when they are in fact, hitting themselves with an arm they have yet to comprehend their mastery over.
These “who’s hitting me” emergencies nestle snugly between both emergences. The extra i is the problem, which is solved by the baby plucking it out of the emergencies and donning it in the form of an ego, which is of course just an i with extra steps.
Once its ego forms, the baby, now realising that the two militaries flanking its borders are completely under its own command, has a bit of an “fuck me this is embarrassing” moment, then immediately has two big apologies to make to its own arms.
I don’t remember this event myself, probably because I had no self to remember it. That’s kind of the point. “Forgive me officer, I didn’t write any of it down. I’d only just realised I existed.”
So yes, questions are amazing. I’d underscore the point by adding “without question”, but paradoxically that would slightly undermine the point that I’m making.
Back to school. What was I meant to do? Not ask any questions just to fit in?! Then it hit me, like a thing that had just been said in a slightly different context. What if I didn’t ask any questions?
This tweak helped considerably. As it worked, I began to see that I’d been viewing people’s reactions as the primary problem. But what if I’d been wrong. What if I was the problem?
My jobless uncle’s world-weary words echoed afresh in my mind. “Yianni”, he’d said. “Get in on blaming yourself as early as possible. That way, you can control the narrative.”
Yes, control the narrative by being what people want you to be. Why didn’t I think of that? What did I need questions for anyway? To learn stuff? Statements work just as well, and they make you feel like you already know stuff, this feels like a much less rickety position and we have had a plethora of ricket around here recently.
Questions, schmestions! A problem shared is a problem halved, but half of zero problems is zero!
That’s just maths, and I like maths. More importantly maths is true, whereas my feelings can’t be true because they change all the time and sometimes, they feel wrong. They’re not right, not right like maths and maybe if I try REALLY hard, I can solve my feelings. Like algebra.
Immediately things improved. People were much nicer to me. Well, they weren’t nicer. But they weren’t annoyed. This was good. Well, it wasn’t good. But it wasn’t worse. That was enough for now! I tossed my worries in a sack full of Thesauruses marked ‘PHLEGMATIC’ and got on with snaffling some birthday invites.
Years later, this people-pleaser right here with confidence issues would finish Law School and, spooked by the prospect of engaging with the world directly, spend back-to-back gap-decades as a professional stand-up comedian.
Never let anyone tell you humans don’t make decisions emotionally.
NEURODIVERGENCE…
“Everyone’s got ADHD now!”, some people quip sceptically. Like it’s made up or something.
My congratulations! You’re right. It is made up.
My condolences. So what?
If you must be an insufferable literalist bore, fine! ADHD is ‘made up’. But originally, so are all words. If made up things don’t mean anything now, it’s a wipeout. We’re losing ‘ocean’ and ‘metaphor’, not to mention classics like ‘blue’, ‘dental’ and ‘depth’. And I’ll fight that loss tooth and nail, to the bottom of the deep, blue, sea.
You are correct. There are no ADHD or Autism molecules in my body. But here’s why we need ADHD and Autistic people, and all the other divergents. Because we notice and give weight to this fact, that words are not decreed from on high, but made up, by necessity as shortcuts for PATTERNS that pop up regularly enough for humans to want shorthand to discuss them.
Noone said ‘internet’ until 1967 (or whenever) because noone had coined that word yet because the thing it related to didn’t exist yet. I wonder why it might be that more and more people are reporting difficulty regulating and focusing their attentions?
They facilitate the very important process of what I call ‘thingification’
Nouns define patterns in space into things.
I (separate thing) have a cup (separate thing)
Adjectives subcategorise the noun things
I (separate thing) have a red (category of thing) cup (separate thing)
Verbs describe the change of things over time and
I (separate thing) am dropping (change of thing) the red (category of thing) cup (separate thing)
It (separate thing) is falling (change of thing) to the floor (separate thing) and breaking (change of thing)
I (separate thing) have a broken (category of thing) cup (separate thing) and some (quantity of thing) small (category of thing) cuts (separate thing) on my foot (separate thing)
These are abstract and imperfect distinctions of course. Don’t take everything so literally, what are you, autistic?! This last sentence is of course, both hilarious and a great way of filtering out dickheads.
Words, at their core are just boxes for our brains to split the vast, interconnected, eternal everything into separate, individual ‘things’. This has pros and cons.
PRO
One can say “Can you please pass the salt”, and other people will tend to do so instead of throwing the salt out of the window.
CON
Eventually, one can very easily forget that although things like salt (and ADHD) certainly exist in our brains, that they do not exist separately from all of the other things.
Really, fundamentally there’s just:
All of the everything and;
Some of the everything thinking about the everything.
Every thing is everything, yet Everything it’s not.
For a thing lives in the middle, between nothing and the lot.
People report the things we call ADHD and Autism all the time. They’re patterns, like “red”. Sure, “red” describes light, and Autism describes a set of subjective experiences. Same picture, higher resolution. What more reality do you demand?
EMERGENCE
Emergence is often pictured as a beautiful butterfly emerging triumphant from an obsolete husk. More often however, it feels like early-stage compound interest: glacial yet imbued with great potency. Of course, that’s also the stage where most people lose patience, cash it out and take it to the track.
In its adolescent phases it trips over its pant legs; old dance moves in new shoes. But in those lucky few strong enough for it to be protected for long enough to avoid their emergent selves being judged, abused, traumatised, self-sabotaged or terrorised out of existence, the process ultimately matures, and there it is.
Another overnight success, forty years in the making.
In the last two years, I’ve gone from a periodic binge drinking underachiever to successfully switching careers, getting engaged and existing happily in my own skin for the first time in my life.
I even send emails now, coke-free. I just take my ADHD meds, which have fancy names, but are really just a small, regulated dose of amphetamine. Maybe I wasn’t so dumb after all?
I have realised who I am and astoundingly, I stopped hitting myself. I have apologised to my arms and nostrils, and thingified it into the past. It’s not a tragedy, or a failure. It’s just a thing that happened, to be used for context and reflection.
So say ADHD is made up, but I’m glad they did make it up. I’m the evidence. My life is the proof. Please provide your reasoning as to why your deficit of imagination necessitates my pain.
To deny people a community and a shared vocabulary is perhaps the most insidious (and ancient) form of oppression. It’s the bit of Orwell’s 1984 no one talks about because they’re too busy worrying about ChatGPT. It’s double plus bad.
Maybe babies had it right all along? Maybe we’re not separate at all, but just an eternally merging series of streams who collectively merge and form an eternal ocean?
But what would I know? I think differently, and am therefore easily dismissed by the lazy in exchange for yet another easy moment.
Or just maybe, I’m actually not different at all? Maybe I’m exactly how you’d look if you saw yourself in higher resolution?
I’m just spotting patterns. And asking questions.
Whatever is the problem?
EMERGENCE, EMERGENCE...NEURODIVERGENCE. “No man is an island”, the baby began. “And trust me in what I am saying. I once was two places, and now I am one. Though that may be a role I’m portraying. So I’m new here you see, and I think you’ll agree. That this ‘me’ thing is really quite hairy. Now you gave me this name, and I’m okay with Shane, but there’s something that leaves me quite wary. When unmoored from Mum’s cord in the hospital ward, just that snip could not leave us distinct. It just forked a new branch off the world’s only plant, bough and offshoot both raveled and linked. And this treating your “I” like some separate guy, is a practice in concept quite sinister. It forgets we’re divergence, emerging at once, just with different bits to administer. Can you write this down? OW! Please stop wiping my…POW! These damned fists are attacking again! If you purge the divergence, emergence will wither and perish. HAVE YOU GOT A PEN?!?"