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Speech
In April of 2020, Indigo Education asked me to give a recorded speech for their online conference on Autism in Girls.
I thought it might be of interest to a wider audience... so here it is. (Text below.)
Youtube embed:
Locally hosted version:
Text of speech:
Hi. I'm Erika Hammerschmidt. I've written a memoir called Born on the Wrong Planet, which tells some stories along the way between the Minnesotan child prodigy and behavioral disaster that I used to be, and the thirty-something Pennsylvanian pharmacy tech and aspiring pandemic survivor that I am today.
Stephanie Gathright approached me about this convention a few months ago, and she asked me to provide some copies of my book for it. At that time she didn't ask me to speak at it, since it was happening in Minnesota and I had moved to Pennsylvania. But as this crisis isolates people in some ways, in other ways it brings us together.
I had been feeling that my recognition as an author was fading. I've been busy with other things, and the world of disability activism had been growing apart from me. This is my first autism speech in a while. It's different from other ones I've given. But it's never too late to try new things.
Even makeup. If you've read my book, you know I've written that I don't wear makeup. But I'm trying that out now too, as well as homemade artificial nails with blunt tips. It's a combination I'm testing out in hopes of overcoming my skin picking habit. Gotta do whatever I can to keep my hands off my face, these days.
I've been asked to speak about how I relate to gender, and about how education professionals in my childhood related to me. As I get through these tough times, I keep being reminded of different ways that this crisis touches on personal struggles that I write and speak about, both gender-related and education-related. One of them is my autistic fascination with self-sufficiency.
Maybe it started with my fear of the stigma of disability, the determination not to be a burden on anyone. But it kept growing even when I was old enough to realize that everyone is dependent on others, and that even the things they tell autistics to strive for as "independence"... driving a car, buying your own groceries, having an apartment and a job... are really just forms of dependence.
Dependence on stores and oil companies and car repair shops, on a landlord and an employer who could decide at any moment that whatever you give in return is not worth the burden they think you are. And this can happen to anyone, disabled or not disabled.
I think the ways that human societies deal with dependence and independence are dangerously flawed. But people depending on each other is an inescapable part of life.
It's not as gendered as we often portray it. Men are stereotyped as being obsessed with independence, in comedy routines that poke fun at the man who won't read instruction manuals or ask for directions. But even that stereotypical man insists on being dependent on a woman for basic necessities like cooking his food and washing his clothes, and carrying a purse so he can have access to the supplies she has, even though he's too manly to carry anything that won't fit in his pockets.
But that's just one facet of how gender roles don't make sense to me. Stereotypes assign some traits to femininity and others to masculinity, but neither category is really cohesive. Themes like emotion and independence are scattered at random throughout both of them in different ways.
Gender has never felt that important in my life. Maybe because in my childhood, the disorders and behavior problems I had were a much bigger deal to everyone than my gender. I know that my gender and the roles expected of it must have had an effect on how I was raised and how my behavior was dealt with. But by the time I was aware of that, my personality was established as someone who just doesn't care very much about any of the things we call gender.
What we call physical sex, I see as just some aspects of outward appearance, and outward appearance of either the body or the clothing is not that important to me. What we call societal gender roles, I see as just a couple of disorganized boxes that don't make sense to put people in, since most people don't fit in just one or the other, anyway.
And what we call gender identity is a personal, individual feeling that probably means something a little different to each person who feels it. It doesn't always mean fitting the stereotypes in those disorganized boxes, and it isn't always clear to other people just what it means. On the outside, it shows as someone expressing a connection to certain gendered words, like woman or man, he or she.
I'm a language nerd, I know that words mean different things to different people. And I'll always respect what a word means to a person who asks me to use it for them. But a person's connection to a word doesn't change how I feel about them as a person, any more than their body does.
I call myself a woman because it's easiest to go along with my assigned gender when I don't really care. I have an assortment of traits that, to me, feel consistent and mostly logical. Some are considered feminine and others are considered masculine. I strive for independence both in the feminine "don't want to be a bother" sort of way, and the masculine "don't want to look weak" sort of way. And I recognize that both are incomplete, and that perfect independence isn't possible.
But for my whole adulthood, I have been losing my trust in the structures of society. I want to be independent because I don't feel that society, in its current form, can be depended on.
And I've felt this way from the moment I began living independently by society's definition. From my alien viewpoint I see the irrationality of the decisions that shape how this world works. And I have never felt really safe.
I have always dreamt of this impossible safety where I live in a self-sufficient bubble and make everything, reuse everything, grow all my own food. Any shreds of that life that I can imitate in reality are precious projects of mine. But they're so far from being enough.
And what's happening around me now is a weird mixture of fear and hope.
I see people rethinking ideas of dependence and independence. I see new ideas for restructuring the ways that human beings take care of each other, and some of these ideas fill me with hope and others scare the hell out of me.
I see people having the realizations that I had a long time ago. I see some of them joining in to share my fascinations, finding reusable and homemade and homegrown alternatives to some fragments of our dependency. And I see others running in the other direction, scared that anything reusable or homegrown is just another way to spread germs.
I don't know where humanity is going to go from this. But I have to hope.
I was an alien as a child. I never fully grew up to be an Earthling. I was writing stories from the time I was four years old. Almost everything I wrote fell into two genres: memoir and speculative fiction. Half the time I was writing to record my experiences, to analyze society with a critical eye, and to organize my insights and put them into words I could express to others. The other half of the time, I was writing to make up other worlds and escape from this one.
Writing and reading were my world. Social isolation was my norm. It was what I relished when I was so incredibly lucky as to live in a single dorm for four years in college. I felt a need for friendship as I grew apart from childhood friends, but when I made online friends they filled that need. I still felt the lack of romance, and when I fell in love and got married after college, that was filled too.
Even now, as long as I have an active social life on the internet, I can happily go months at a time never socializing in person with anyone outside my household. I fill my time with inventions and creative projects. When I take a long staycation, the only thing I wish is that my home were a little bigger, so I could have more space to myself when I feel like it.
It's another stereotypically masculine thing, this idea of being a loner. But there are feminine expressions of it too. Virginia Woolf wrote about a room of one's own as something women need for writing fiction. I think many of us need it, regardless of gender or what creative projects we work on.
Some of us need our own room more than others. Personally, I feel I was made for quarantine.
But I don't actually get to be part of it. And it is messed up that, in this global disaster, that's something I have to be thankful for.
Through some combination of luck, and skills I built, and codes I learned to live by, I worked my way into what happens to be one of the most safe jobs to have during this pandemic. I'm a data entry technician in a pharmacy that ships medications to long-term-care facilities.
A job that is vital right now, plenty of work and no chance of being laid off, but also no exposure to other humans except my coworkers. Not as safe as working from home, but I still hit the jackpot of safety, both from the virus itself and from the economic hit that it brought.
So even though my isolation-adapted mind isn't getting any of this famous isolation, I have to count that as a good thing.
I also have to be thankful that I'm physically low-risk, not elderly and not with any disorders of the heart or lungs. That I know of. But the virus could still hospitalize or kill me. We know so little about the risk factors. There are cases of seemingly healthy people dying from it.
I've always been afraid of death, always aware of it even when being in denial about it was normal. I've always been the smart-aleck who replied to people saying "Oh, don't complain, you're not going to die," by saying "Yes I am, we all are." I was the teenager who wrote wills, and then pointed out the hypocrisy of adults who told me I was too young to think about that, since they were the same adults who complained about young people thinking they're immortal.
I deal with things I'm afraid of by preparing for them. My way of preparing for death is to try and make sure I'm remembered. It doesn't always dull the anxiety.
The only reason I'm not immobilized by anxiety right now is because I've spent so much of the past several years wearing out my ability to feel anxiety. Every year has felt closer to apocalypse than the last. Fear gets desensitized, or maybe just too tired to move.
Some time in the past couple years I began to let go of my fear of death, not because I gained any more faith in anything, but just because my adrenaline tanks had run empty.
I don't always feel the emotions that the world expects me to feel. That's always been true for me, and probably for more people than you'll ever hear admit it. Social expectations of feeling are too simplistic for the diversity of real life.
They're another thing that's over-simplistically gendered, as well. Stereotypes call women emotional and men unemotional. But even stereotypes, when you look at them closely, break it down by specific emotions. Stereotypical men have to repress the feelings that make them look weak. They can show anger but not fear; happiness but not sadness; lust but not love. Women are supposed to express the opposite emotions and repress the opposite emotions, because the ones that make a man look strong instead of weak make a woman look threatening instead of docile.
And even this is all just the caricature of humanity that I see in comedy and fiction. My experience with real humans is too chaotic to know just how close to true any of these stereotypes are, how much these supposed rules are actually followed.
Among the people I spend time with, I'd say it's very little. But I'm quite guilty of selection bias in my choice of friends, so there's no point in basing any sort of scientific statement on them.
Don't trust the results of any experiment done by aliens on humans. As an alien, I can tell you I would not know how to pick a representative sampling of humanity if I tried.
But I'm convinced that the emotions we show, and the emotions we actually feel, are varied from person to person, across humanity. Sometimes we feel what we're supposed to. Other times we feel something different, or sometimes nothing at all.
Even when feelings are exhausted, I find that the scaffolding around them remains.
My rational mind still provides my opinions of what is right and wrong and my plans for how to do right. Even when fear runs dry, my mind still keeps me aware that I would rather stay alive and keeps me making choices that make that happen. Even when my sympathy and my sorrow for other people have worn out, my conscience continues to set and enforce rules on treating others kindly.
Emotion is partly a framework of opinion and motivation in the brain, and partly a dance of hormones and physical sensations that make it feel alive. That visceral part gives urgency to the feeling. But it's not dishonest or hypocritical to keep living by the cerebral part of it when the visceral part goes dormant.
And as weird as this may seem, one thing that fills me with encouragement is that people still have humor in this time. My father is old enough to remember the last time life felt like this, during the polio epidemic. This is not the worst epidemic in the past or the possible future, not by a long shot. But I have no memory in my own life that feels this much like the end of the world. Nothing close to the number of people all over my home country who will suffer and die in such a short time as this, from something so new and sudden.
And my groups online are full of nonsense memes about toilet paper hoarding and cabin fever and obsessive hand-washing, and pandemic-themed songs that people make up in quarantine desperation because they don't know what else to do with themselves.
There's been an underbelly of humor to every great disaster of history. And sometimes it's an angry and satirical humor, sometimes it's a sad and morbid humor, and sometimes it's just absurdism because why make sense in humor when we can't make sense of the world.
As much as it can seem like trivializing something tragic, humor is what gives us the moments of happiness that recharge our energy just enough to keep going. It's what can make an unthinkable thing just approachable enough to deal with. And even if I die in this whole mess, I'll want humor to be a part of my memory because I fear that the moment something horrible loses humor is the moment it becomes too horrible to survive.
The more I think about my progress toward being a human adult, the more I realize how important the ability to have fun and laugh has always been to me. It's pulled me in every direction, backward and forward. It's probably a part of the reason behind my childhood behavior issues, the reason I took so long to learn the most basic lessons of social interaction, like "don't threaten or insult people," "don't physically attack people."
Because my own eyes and ears told me that didn't always apply, and a lot of interaction between friends consists of playful threats and insults, even playful roughhousing. My fascination with fun and play had made me fascinated with that line between humor and hurt, and why some things I did and said would cross that line and some wouldn't, and trying to learn exactly what the difference was.
I built that knowledge, piece by piece, but I still can't describe it in simple rules. With jokes, all sorts of factors played into it: the context, the wording, the tone of voice.
Maybe sometimes even my gender, because humor is another example of gender roles being more complicated than they seem. It's not that men are funnier than women, or that being funny gets a man more respect than a woman. Or at least it's not only something as simple as that. The kinds of jokes expected from men and women are different. In some settings, a man making a feminine joke or a woman making a masculine joke can get as bad a reaction as a joke in the wrong words or the wrong tone.
I learned. I won't say I learned perfectly, or that I even learned much more than the fact that the line is fuzzy and everyone sees it differently. I learned the general area that the line is in, and how to stay on the right side of it most of the time.
But I hurt people as a child, at least as much as other people hurt me.
And I don't blame my current self for the alien child who used the humans around her as experimental subjects to find out just what it takes to hurt a human. But those memories have still pushed my adult self very far in the other direction.
Now what I want most of all is to help. To be kind. To convince others to be kind. To look at things from other people's viewpoint even when it's different from mine, and try to say and do something helpful in a way that different humans can understand and benefit from.
This is what I wish more of my teachers had understood about me as a child. That I'm a person and have thoughts and feelings, and they're complex, as complex as yours, as complex as everything in human society.
I don't expect anyone to understand all my complexity, all at once. And I know some of my thoughts and feelings couldn't even be guessed at by someone with a different mind.
But I still wish that instead of assuming simplistically, more people had taken a moment to really think about it, to at least try to imagine in actual detail how they would feel if someone talked to them the way they were talking to me.
Maybe then, some of my teachers would have understood why I responded to a patronizing tone with defiance instead of obedience. Or why I was more likely to suck it up and follow a rule I considered unreasonable if the enforcer of that rule at least showed some respect for my viewpoint.
Basically, I wish that non-autistics were a little better at empathy and theory of mind.
I'm going to close with a little story from my childhood. The first time I wrote down this story, it somehow became the most popular thing I've ever posted on Tumblr. I have no idea why. It's a random, irrelevant little anecdote, but it does touch on who I was as a child, and what things were important to me and what things weren't.
Since then I've rewritten it as sort of a spoken-word poem, and I think this is a good time and place to share it. We might all need a little randomness right now.
One time in grade school,
I was minding my own business
telling stories to myself,
or searching on the ground
for tiny bits of precious garbage,
or whatever lonely thing I did that day
when some other kid came up to me.
I don't remember anything about them--
name, or race, or gender,
even age,
it was some time in elementary school
but I cannot
remember
when.
I just remember
what happened next.
The kid told me, "I won a pig."
I had no context for this revelation.
I didn't know this child,
and our school was in the city.
I didn't know of any local contests
where the prize could be a pig.
And if there were one, why would it
be any of my business?
My mind had no idea
what it should do with this.
nAnd so my mind
did what my mind
would always do
when it had nothing else to do.
It made a pitifully awful pun.
I took the words "I won a pig"
and punned the second word, the "won"
from a past-tense verb into a number
and proceeded to the second number
in the sequence
and I said "I TWO a pig."
And the other child--nameless, genderless--
just looked at me and paused a moment
and decided just to go along with it,
and said, "I three a pig."
And we kept going,
four a pig, and five a pig, and so on...
...all the way until the other child said
"I seven a pig,"
and I replied,
"I eight a pig."
And then I realized this was all a setup...
and I wasn't even mad, 'cause it was funny:
it was another pun, and one of those
elaborate grade school jokes
where you try to get somebody to say something
that's embarrassing or silly,
like "I-C-U-P."
I-ate-a-pig.
And it wasn't til years later that I realized
what a leap of faith this kid had taken,
walking up to me without a context,
calling out "I won a pig," just trusting
that I would carry on the chain
that took that joke to its conclusion.
Were they somehow so familiar
with my word-playful mind
that they predicted
that I would make that one
specific pun on "won" and "one",
although I didn't even know their name?
Or did they actually forget
that when you tell that kind of joke
you have to start by laying out the rules:
"okay, repeat the words I say,
but when I say a number
you just say the number that comes after"
they left that part out,
and if it had been anybody else but me,
the joke would be a failure,
but they were just unfathomably lucky?
Or maybe
maybe they had actually just...
won a pig,
and wanted me to know about it,
and when I made the pun
they just decided
they would run with it for fun,
and it was sheer coincidence
the conversation accidentally became a joke.
The world's absurd.
If this story has a meaning
it's that stories do not always need a meaning.
Nothing really needs a meaning,
even life
It's an insult to your life
to say it has to have a purpose,
'cause an object has a purpose,
and a tool can have a purpose,
and its purpose, almost always,
by some method or another,
is for keeping us alive...
Life doesn't have a purpose
'cause life IS a purpose.
and so is happiness,
and so are all the things that really matter.
And sometimes happiness is nonsense,
smiles sprouting from absurdity,
And stories can be worth it
for their meaningless absurdness
and their mystery alone,
so, my forgettable and memorable classmate,
if you're out there,
I wish you all the pigs
that you
could ever
win.
Thank you for watching.
Stay safe.
