October 28, 2024
Remembering joy
I’m copying and slightly expanding here a Facebook post I wrote a couple of days ago. Particularly if I have any younger readers, this is for you.
***
Friends, if you’re feeling cynical or skeptical about voting in general, or about voting for Kamala Harris, there are a whole lot of people out there who are more than ready to tell you about how important it is to keep Donald Trump out of office a second time, about the danger he poses to our civil liberties and Constitution, to women and girls and trans people and queer people and our bodily autonomy, to immigrants and religious minorities, and what it would mean for Trump to potentially get to appoint two to three more Supreme Court justices. And about the implications for Gaza. And for the economy.
I want to tell you about voting in 2008, especially if you didn’t vote then or if you were too young to vote or to remember that election well.
It was a freezing cold, sunny morning in November, and I went early before work. It was the very first time I’d ever had to stand in line to vote (about 45 minutes) instead of waltzing in and waltzing out, and I was so proud to have to do it.
I had never seen group of New Yorkers, mostly strangers, as happy to be together or being as nice to each other or protective of each other. (This would of course be rivaled later on, in the course of some of the events I witnessed during the pandemic and in the aftermath of Biden’s victory in 2020. But in 2008, I’d never seen anything quite like it.)
I was with friends at a party out in Williamsburg, Brooklyn when the results were called, and on my way back to the subway home, a traffic-blocking dance party spontaneously erupted at the intersection of Bedford and N. 7th St.
And there’s something utterly, incomparably, joyful about the feeling of seeing something historic happen and knowing that you played a part. That you helped make things better than they might’ve been. Of firsthand ownership in something that we were told couldn’t be done.
That it didn’t happen without you.
That can be ours again, and it can be yours. You will not forget that feeling for the rest of your life.
You may be hearing a lot of people griping that voting isn’t enough, or that voting is the bare minimum, and that may be true, but if voting is what someone is able to do, then I want them to do it.
And I’m thankful if you do.
October 8, 2024
Communication authenticity and autistic social media
It seems that there have been a curious number of times, lately, when I’ve found myself being told, not by neurotypicals, not by supposed fake allies or parents or clueless professionals, but by other autistic people on social media, that the language I use is too complex, that it’s “eduspeak,” that I can’t expect people to understand me if I use words like those, that a phrase I’ve used belongs confined to a therapist’s office (yes, seriously), even that something I’ve said “isn’t plain language.”
![Another reply to a comment of mine from a Facebook thread reads "Emily [last name redacted] can you use different words? A lot of eduspeak."](https://chavisory.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/eduspeak-pixelated-1.jpg){kind=tracking}
And you know what? They’re right. It’s not.
And also, there’s nothing wrong with that.
I don’t speak or write in plain language. I write in my language, and there is nothing wrong with it just because it’s more complex than what you might be used to reading.
And plain language materials and media are important, and people who need them deserve to have them, and making or adapting them is a skill. Which I am not claiming to have, and which is not what I’m doing when I’m working at saying what I need and want to say.
And it’s a myth that plain language is, in any case, automatically just the most accessible kind of language for everyone. It’s not for me. It’s not how I naturally speak or write, and it’s not the kind of writing that’s easiest for me to read or understand. I probably would not be able to get through a book-length work written entirely in plain language—and I’m autistic, too.
For a community that supposedly values diversity and authenticity, I sure do get told a lot lately that the way my brain does language is wrong and the way I speak and write is wrong, and that I should change it to make other people more comfortable or challenge them less.
I thought that was supposed to be what we didn’t do.
And I don’t know if it’s coming from this wishful thinking that’s taken hold again that “neurodivergent people’s communication is honest and clear and direct, but neurotypicals’ is deceptive and unnecessarily vague,” but if it is—
From the bottom of my heart, please get off of Twitter for a little bit. Please read a wider variety of autistic people’s work, because that is a myth. Neurodivergent experience is not all one thing. Our communication is as diverse as we are. There are going to be ND people whose communication is opaque or counterintuitive to you. There are other autistic people whose communication, for one reason or another, is difficult for me.
I also don’t know if part of the issue is the reading crisis—that too many kids who started school after 1990 or so literally cannot read enough words or do not read easily, not because of any inherent disability but because they weren’t taught to, and if that’s the case, I’m sorry, but it is not my fault and it is not the fault of the way I write.
And if it’s just that you didn’t understand something I said, that’s not a sin. It’s okay to ask someone if they can rephrase or clarify or say more. The ways all of our brains are dealing with language are going to cause friction sometimes because that’s just a risk of having a diversity of cognitive styles in a complex society that’s using a big fucking language. I might not be able to, but it’s fair to ask.
But my language isn’t necessarily less right than yours just because it’s less familiar or less comfortable or because you have more trouble than you’re used to understanding it.
I was lying in bed recently trying and failing to take a nap, and started flipping through the little copy of Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny that lives on my nightstand, and flipped to the page where he talks about the novel 1984, and the plot to progressively remove words from the dictionary, from allowable public language, until society could no longer access those ideas at all, and you know what?
When you tell me in effect that I use too many big words, when you try to shame me for the words I have to express ambiguity, ambivalence, or nuance, I do not regard you more kindly for it than when that happened to me in grade school, or when NT’s do it, or when people who just don’t want to take the time and effort to listen to me do it, or when governments try to prohibit words for whole categories of people so that they can’t even be spoken of in schools or official documents.
Please, please, don’t try to minimize the texture of ideas that it’s acceptable to express in public discourse.
I reject, in any case, the notion that our goal as an autistic community should be to make all of our language and writing as plain as possible, rather than to incubate a rich ecosystem of communication, where all of us can both find what we need and also push the boundaries of our understanding of each other and ourselves. The very concept of “neurodiversity,” remember, is derived from that of biodiversity, which posits that diversity and variation contribute to strength and resilience, both within a species and within an ecosystem. That different forms of life aren’t better or worse, but are adapted to serve different functions and take advantage of different and often very specific niches in an environment. Not that nothing is ever painful or hard, but that even traits that look disadvantageous in one set of circumstances may be adaptive in another.
I don’t think my facility with language makes me better than anyone else, despite being so accused many, many times. But this is how I talk. This is how I write. There are people with writing styles that I find more difficult to get through as well, autistic and non-autistic alike. Some of them writing in far plainer language than I do! That doesn’t make their mode of expression wrong any more than it does mine.
But if you try to take words from me, from us as a community, I have a hard time regarding you as capable or interested in standing up for real communication diversity, for the ability of all autistic people to have our authentic modes of communication valued.
October 4, 2024
Pittsburgh!
I have a handful of things somewhere between half written and nearly finished I’ve been meaning to post, but summer got away from me! In the meantime, enjoy some pictures from my recent time in Pittsburgh! It’s a fascinating city, and I’d go back.
September 19, 2024
Tackling the loneliness epidemic
I’m having incredibly mixed feelings about this New York Times article on the loneliness epidemic—how bad it was even before the Covid pandemic, how much worse it’s gotten, what the societal roots of the very concept of loneliness even are. And I know it’s not a single writer’s position to solve this, or prescribe the solutions. It’s not what he set out to do and it’s not his responsibility.
It’s a good read and that made it bother me all the more that it ended in a way that felt glib and callous.
Squint, and you can see it: a scenario in which the loneliness crisis today is really a mass period of acclimatization. It’s a bridge, an evolutionary step, during which we make our peace with certain trade-offs and realities — that in 2024, we’re not all going to race to rejoin the local grange. That we’re not all going back to church or temple or the mosque. That our kids may grow up far from their grandparents and aunts and uncles — far from the towns where we were raised. That the workplace will remain diffuse, tethered by Zoom meetings and the occasional in-person happy hour. That we may often see friends more on FaceTime than we do in real life. And most important, that despite it all, we’ll find one another again.
And sure, true enough, we aren’t going to go back to the way things worked in the 19th century or even the 1980’s. That’s not realistic and it’s probably not happening.
But the thing is I’m just not really in a place where I can accept “This is just going to suck until we get used to it.”
It’s hard for me to fathom looking at what the protective factors against loneliness of earlier years might have been, to identify those things outright, to look at how fundamentally bad for so many people reliance on virtual and online interaction is, and then effectively say “We can’t seriously consider reviving some older varieties of community or social activity, though!”
Nothing to see there.
When actually, we have choices. I know that the way the world is now makes everything harder.
But how do we think the world changes?
I know we’re all busy, I know we’re all tired, but what that doesn’t mean is “helpless to make choices about how we have relationships and the kinds of communities we build.”
If you specifically miss having a church community, for instance… can you consider going?
They do still exist. I won’t pretend that we’re all going to run back to church or temple or mosque at the rates that we used to attend, or that that’s the right choice for everyone, but if that is specifically the kind of community you’re missing… they are still there.
Can you write somebody a letter or postcard? (Mail is cool but I know not everyone can write by hand! A good friend of mine who moved away in the pandemic and I trade “letters” by Facebook messenger like it’s 1996 when this is what teenagers were using e-mail for.)
Can you make a coffee date with a friend? Honest to goodness, stop saying “we should get coffee sometime!” and then not doing it, and assuming that the expression of the abstract intention is good enough?
Can you make a date and call someone on the phone? I know, I hate the phone, too! But I started making plans again to talk to friends on the fucking phone again, once in a blue moon. I knew things were bad when I started thinking one night “You know what, I think things felt better when I used to occasionally talk to someone on the phone for two hours, and I can’t remember the last time I did that, and I don’t know why we stopped.”
Yes, I have shitty auditory processing, and yes I get hand cramps, and it still helps, it really does, if the alternative is just not talking to someone you miss and not knowing what’s going on in their life for years.
No, none of it is a panacea. None of it’s magic. All of it helps.
And part of what turns these things into fixtures of our lives again is just continuing to do them.
Yeah, we live in a world now that makes things harder, but part of making them easier again is just habit.
Social structures don’t rebuild themselves out of nowhere and no effort by us.
And I have seen a lot of vitriol out there from people who’d rather we all still be living in lockdown, who accuse those of us who aren’t or can’t be, of feeling entitled to frivolous entertainment despite the dangers…but it also feels to me like the pandemic made a lot of us forget certain things were or are even possible, because they were literally forbidden for such a substantial amount of time, and heavily tabooed for even longer.
And now a lot of people are left looking around, feeling lost and unable to even imagine how to alleviate their loneliness, and there is also a very substantial danger in that.
It’s true, we’re not going to reconstitute American society the way it was 50 years ago. And we also aren’t helpless to identify the things and the kinds of interactions that we’re missing and figure out ways to add those things back into our lives.
To say “Hey, why don’t we do this anymore?” And… do it.
Yes, new ways of togetherness are probably going to emerge. But there are also things that there just isn’t really a substitute for. I go to a lot of concerts. I’ve had deeply meaningful experiences in crowds of thousands of people. It’s not a substitute for having people actively involved in your life on a regular basis. I treasure my online friends and the unique intimacy of some of our conversations. It isn’t a substitute for spending time with friends in person.
And I think whatever newer forms of togetherness emerge are going to be better if we don’t accept our current loneliness as something inevitable or just a stage that has something waiting for us on the other side we don’t have to build ourselves.
August 16, 2024
Why autistic people can’t get healthcare
I’m describing here some events that have taken place over the last three months or so. The following is more or less what I was going to say to one of my doctors at a follow-up appointment I didn’t get to have recently, because my community health clinic’s air conditioning was broken during the brief interval I had appointments scheduled between returning home from one regional gig and leaving for another, about the test results I was supposed to have by now but do not, because I think it’d be worth it for him to hear it from me in person why they are not.
Because the reasons why they are not are very directly relevant to why my stress and anxiety levels are what they are.
To make an incredibly tedious story as short as possible, I first went through 15 phone calls attempting to even get the appointment for this imaging test scheduled in about four rounds of Mt. Sinai Morningside claiming they didn’t get the referral, my clinic sending it again, only for Mt. Sinai to claim they didn’t have it, culminating with a representative from my clinic getting on the phone personally with Mt. Sinai Radiology to try to figure out what was going on, and calling back to let me know that they definitely had it now.
This surpassed the previous record held by Northwell Health, with whom I once traded 14 phone calls in order to not have this very test done (followed by two more in order to speak to someone at the executive level at Northwell about what exactly had gone wrong).
That time it wasn’t even over the referral—I actually had an appointment confirmed it was over the reception desk staff’s inability to understand a question about a Covid screening form which I was alerted by text message I should be receiving, but had not received due to a typo in my e-mail address on file.
“We don’t do Covid tests here.”
“We don’t require Covid tests.”
“We don’t screen for Covid.”
“I don’t understand what you’re talking about, we don’t do that.”
…and a couple of rounds in which I was transferred to entire other facilities or even an ER reception desk, trying to get someone to fix my e-mail address in the computer system so that I could be sent a form without which I would not be allowed to have the appointment, before I just canceled it.
Ironically, I’d asked to be sent to Mt. Sinai Morningside this time around because I wasn’t treated like this last time after I’d finally given up on Northwell and asked to be sent somewhere, anywhere, else.
Anyway. So back in May, I finally get this appointment made for the week I’ll be returning from an out-of-town gig in July. And two months go by. During which I actually turn down another gig in part because this set of appointments has been such hell to get made in the first place, I don’t even want to think about trying to reschedule them.
So then the morning of Friday, July 5, about 9:30 AM, I get left a voicemail from Mt. Sinai Radiology to the effect that my insurance pre-authorization hadn’t come through yet, so my appointment was being rescheduled for July 19, if that was okay.
It wasn’t okay.
The phone calls I spent that morning alone trying to get it sorted out took me up to 25 with no luck, and the fact that it was Friday of a holiday weekend, during which, in addition, I had multiple two-show days before which I was going to be traveling back home from out of state, made the chances pretty much zero that it was going to get worked out in time.
I sent an e-mail update to the patient services representative I’d already been corresponding with to the effect of all of this—that no one in the prior two months had told me anything about needing a prior authorization or there being an issue with my insurance, that if they had, I’d’ve been able to get on top of it earlier in the week at least.
But now it was the Friday morning of a holiday weekend and no one was picking up the phone at the clinic, and there was no way I was going to manage to get my doctor on the phone with my insurance to fix this.
I was told at least twice, by different receptionists, that “if it’s an emergency you can just go to the ER.”
For an appointment I’d had scheduled for two months that was being canceled out from under me purely because of someone else’s negligence.
The patient representative had a supervisor from Radiology call me personally to try to figure out what had happened and again, long story short, but it turned out that not only was it not true that my prior authorization just hadn’t come through yet, but it had never been submitted; there was no insurance even listed for me. And to the best of my understanding, because someone saw no insurance on file, she assumed the prior authorization was the problem and rescheduled my appointment.
No one had asked, I said, or I could’ve given them that information.
The supervisor took my insurance info and commenced trying to get the authorization.
Long story short, but I’m now up to 29 phone calls on this, I have a letter from my insurance confirming this is a covered procedure, but the authorization number still isn’t showing up in the Mt. Sinai computers, and I got yet another phone call from a representative to tell me the procedure hasn’t been approved so my appointment is being rescheduled again.
To a date by which I will not only once again be out of town for work, but will have different insurance.
And this is what everything is like.
This is virtually every time I try seeking the most minor healthcare more complicated than a simple office visit. This is always what it is like.
It’s when I got wrist surgery for a ganglion cyst a few years ago that had to be rescheduled four times—because I was scheduled for a date I couldn’t do and had specifically said I couldn’t do, because I was about to fall into an insurance donut hole and they wouldn’t schedule the surgery within one week of me regaining my insurance or something like that, because the surgery center waited too long to tell me I had to have somebody to take me home, because of conflicting information about whether I’d be under local or general anesthesia or local anesthesia with sedation (this was actually like five micro-rounds by itself but I’m trying to be concise here), because the surgeon who was finally scheduled to do it left the practice a day before my surgery date.
It took me fully six months to succeed at scheduling a surgery that ultimately took 30 minutes to perform.
It’s the NYU Dental School clinic twice in a row failing to tell me that because I hadn’t been seen in over two years, I’d be forced to start their new patient intake process over again from the beginning and therefore not get a cleaning on the day I’d had scheduled, but instead go through a three-hour interview and come back again in a week. And being willing to give no leeway whatsoever to the fact that part of the reason I’d had to wait so long was that the last time, I’d had that process interrupted by the Covid pandemic.
It’s the last time I had this test! Which, even after I successfully had it at Mt. Sinai, no one bothered to call me about the results for four months and I had to call multiple times just to get them tracked down!
(My doctor at the time was very apologetic that that had happened, and said “obviously someone would’ve called you if something were seriously wrong,” but no, it is not obvious that someone would’ve called me if that were the case!)
And it all just makes me feel punished for even trying to take care of myself.
I’m well aware that I should get a mammogram. I’m well aware that I should get a colonoscopy. I should probably see a cardiologist and an endocrinologist and an ENT, but how? When any one of these things turns into this?
(I probably can and should go see my orthopedist again, they tend to be easy to at least get an office visit with even if their surgical scheduling department is a three-ring circus. But I also have to wait till I’m back on the Equity-League insurance and also be in town and also not be in rehearsal for a production because that so severely constrains my daytime availability.)
Seriously, how? I gave up days’ worth of mornings before rehearsal and lunch breaks to deal with Mt. Sinai Radiology Chapter 2 Part 1 as it is—to not have yet had that appointment. I have had two separate people in this saga tell me “well if it’s an emergency you can just go to the ER,” but am I honest-to-god just supposed to go to the ER for everything? I thought the point of having a doctor and having insurance was that that specifically is what I’m not supposed to have to do?
What if something serious or life-altering is actually wrong? What if I actually need surgery for which I do have to be under general anesthesia and therefore need someone to get me home? Plan to stay with me for 24 hours?
What if I just want someone there for me?
How many times (as detailed in this post) can I ask a local friend to take off work, give up income, possibly have to find or hire their own replacement, disrupt their own lives like that, only for the procedure to not actually happen before they lose patience, or just the ability to rearrange their lives endlessly?
How long before I do? How long am I supposed to?
How is someone whose language, auditory processing, executive functioning, or tolerance for phone calls, anxiety, or unpredictability, are even slightly more compromised than my own supposed to?
This isn’t manageable.
And this is even before we get to things like sensory issues, altered pain tolerance, paradoxical drug reactions, accessibility of healthcare facilities, and the way we’re treated once we’re there.
This is me trying to have an imaging test which is not that complicated and for which I don’t need any special accommodations or pain control, at a hospital ten blocks from my apartment, when I have insurance and a referral.
I’m terrified to find out I have something actually serious, not because I’m afraid I wouldn’t be able to cope with treatment or even of the financial consequences or that my family wouldn’t help me out financially if it came to that, but that trying to save my own life turns it into this, unendingly, and probably not successfully, that I’d just die while either waiting for everyone else to get their shit together or trying to bully someone into doing their own job, when I am the only person facing consequences for them not.
It just feels like signing up to be treated badly, and probably ultimately to have it just not matter.
And I know you don’t know what this is like, but it’s the bureaucratic equivalent of how there are so many people who literally do not hear my speech as human speech, who cannot register the fact of me speaking to them.
Only it’s not like just being able to go to a different bar or a different coffee shop when that happens!
You weren’t out of line, strictly speaking, to ask if I’d be interested in therapy. Would I like someone just to unload all of this to in person?
Sure!
But will my trying to get therapy about this mean that it stops happening?
Or am I just signing up for another 15 phone calls of being treated this way?
On Thursday this week, a day before I actually wound up in the ER from, probably, severe dehydration, but that’s another story, I was fuming at home, angry from yet another round of Mt. Sinai being unable to figure out what on earth is even going on, and also the appointment I was supposed to have with you got canceled on me for the second time in two weeks for reasons that I realize were completely out of your control, I started thinking “You know what I should do today instead is go get a tattoo. That sound great, actually,” before I started scrawling this instead. (And it turned out to be a good thing I did not decide to just go get a tattoo because, again, it turned out I was critically dehydrated, but that’s another story for another time).
But I had a lightbulb moment about why tattooing seems to function so effectively as mental healthcare for so many people, probably… Is that every single tattoo artist or studio out there is almost certainly better at keeping appointments, giving clear pre-appointment and aftercare information in a timely manner, and being upfront about costs and expectations, than every doctor’s office or medical practice in existence.
And that stuff is just a huge component of being made to feel like your time and comfort and peace of mind matter when something is happening to your body.
I know it also has immunological effects and triggers endorphin release and stuff, but.
The fact that once you walk in to a tattoo studio, talk about what you want to accomplish, put down a deposit and get an appointment on the books, then barring an act of God or civic catastrophe, that appointment is happening.
Anyway. Sorry. I know that you care and you’re trying and this isn’t your fault but I am so tired of this.
And I will probably at some point just go get a tattoo over it.
July 11, 2024
Close of day
Back home from my latest gig. I meant to get more writing done while I was away, but things turned a bit hectic. I’m glad to be back, but among other things, I’ll miss the quality of the summer light in the evenings up there, which has such a specific and slightly saturated quality it’s hard for the camera to even catch. (This was the sunset over a local park on an evening stroll.)
June 19, 2024
Stage management and the opposite of magic
This is adapted from a recent Facebook post.
This graphic was posted on the page of a Facebook group I follow a few weeks ago. It’s part of a whole genre of memes and rhetoric about the magic of the job that stage managers do. And I don’t want to be unkind about this, because I don’t believe the person who made this or the people sharing it meant to be unkind.
But actually… Kill the myth that stage managers are anything but your very human, equally fallible, hard-working collaborators.
We are not wizards. We are not time travelers. We do not have time-turners. We wish we did, but we don’t. We have the same number of hours in the day as the rest of you.
We are exhausted. We are struggling so much with work/life balance and quality of life. We are usually being under-resourced. We are so often being asked to function well outside the scope of our job. (And some of the things listed here are part of someone else’s job, or literally whole entire other jobs, which also deserve to have their existence and necessity respected.)
I don’t want to be called magic even one more time anywhere near as much as I want a stage management team appropriately staffed, compensated, and provided the resources we need for the scope of a project.
I don’t want to be called magic even one more time as much as I want to never again be asked to my face how much further stage management can be short-changed to fill a budget gap somewhere else.
I don’t want to be called magic as much as I want two days off in a week. As much as I want appropriate script support for first-time playwrights. As much as I never, ever, ever again want to see a fully-produced new musical rehearsed in two and a half weeks.
We aren’t flawless. We get to make mistakes, too. Rehearsal is for us, too. We do sweat. We do have feelings.
A lot of us are disabled! And I think these characterizations of stage managers as “magic” is functioning in largely the same way as when people call things like ADHD and autism “superpowers.” I get that it’s well-meant, but it actually makes it harder for other people to understand the work we’re doing and the kind of support we need. I think it leaves us feeling insufficient to the job when it doesn’t feel like magic, and blamed when we can’t make it look like magic, because, in fact, it isn’t.
I don’t want to be called magic again as much as I want to be seen as another human who is in the artistic process with you.
***
Some specific footnotes:
- Audio engineers and A2’s are whole entire jobs. That’s a whole other team of people making hard things look easy. Most stage managers do not have the kind of training or experience that being extremely good at them requires.
- It is still not taken for granted that the PSM still needs table space of our own during the designer run, and then, I promise you, these things are not happening flawlessly.
- We are being expected to use our own cell phones for giving calls and backstage communication a lot, especially for virtual work, but also just where Clear-Com systems are absent, insufficient, or outdated.
- There are a lot of things I can handle myself in a pinch; that is part of the job, but I do not take the place of having an electrician on call, or support for props and scenery repair and maintenance, for the length of the run.
- I don’t even quite know what to say about this one. Is this well-timed cups of coffee we drink ourselves, or well-timed cups of coffee we’re expected to provide to keep things running smoothly?
If the latter… that is not our job. And the expectation that it is detracts from our ability to do vastly more important parts of our job.
If daily team coffee is something a producer wants provided, then they need to have sufficiently staffed their company management, budgeted for hospitality, and hired PA’s.
I will gladly refresh a pot of coffee I find empty if I have time, or drink the last cup of, but this simply cannot be made my priority in rehearsal. - Yes, there is a huge extent to which demeanor and temperament and levelheadedness are important parts of the job. There’s also a point beyond which I have so often felt like I was the only person in the room being expected to keep it together.
- This one rankles especially. Because there are actually a lot of ways to be a good stage manager. There are a lot of personality types who can do the job well, but who will bring a different tenor to a room, and that’s okay. That’s good, actually. We don’t have to be able to be everything to everyone to succeed at this job. We don’t need to have this communication style to lead every team or every kind of project, or to fulfill our responsibility in helping maintain the morale and confidence of a cast.
Because of the proportion of women in this career field, and the level of emotional labor and sublimation already being expected of us. Because a lot of us are introverts, and we’re allowed to be, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It doesn’t mean that we can’t be caring and personable and expressive, but we might be those things in ways that read as less exuberant to some, and that has to be okay.
I think that there are people who look to a stage manager to reflect their own sense of urgency back to them, and that’s what tells them that their stage manager is taking a situation seriously. And there are people who look to a stage manager to not do that, to project a sense of calm and reassurance, and that’s what tells them that we have the situation under control (or we will), and everything’s going to be okay (eventually). One isn’t better than the other, but we may be better stage managers for different types of people, different directors, different productions.
Because as an autistic woman in this field, I am starting to suspect that my career trajectory has been deeply affected by how often my quieter modes of engagement have been mistaken for passivity.
Because if I were a college student discovering what I thought might be my calling for the first time, discovering again for the first time that a job existed at which I might not have to distort myself far beyond my capability in order to be accepted at, then I might have been dissuaded by yet another person telling me “no, actually, you’ll never be enough for this if this isn’t your natural mode of expression or interaction with other people.”
May 20, 2024
Out of town
Well, I have found myself somewhat unexpectedly working out of town until the middle of the summer. Here’s a little photo dump of my first two weeks in Massachusetts, of prep work, hikes, and just around the neighborhood!
May 13, 2024
Grief and multipotentiality
A word I had never heard before until recently, while I was listening to this podcast episode, is “multipotentiality,” a term for when the realistic possibility exists for a child to achieve at very high levels in a wider-than-average variety of fields.
Emily Kircher-Morris and Dr. Jon W. Goodwin talk in this episode about the anxiety involved in multipotentiality, about how it would seem like having a larger range of strengths to draw on would make it easier to choose a career or field of study, and that parents and teachers often blithely assume that these students have nothing to worry about because they have so many options available, but how actually it can magnify a student’s anxiety and contribute to choice paralysis.
And I kind of wish I could say as someone for whom this was true, with the hindsight not only of age but also of having wound up in a career I do love, that life is long and it’s not worth worrying about, that you should do what you care about and trust that it’ll lead you in the right direction, that nothing has to be forever–and all of that can be true.
But also? There is a grief involved in it. There is a sense of loss about it. I do grieve all the things I wish I would’ve had the time or the bandwidth to do, that I haven’t and most likely won’t. I miss the careers as an artist or a writer or a conservationist or a dramaturg that I also could’ve had. I yearn for aspects of those lives. There have been paths that, because of my unacknowledged disabilities when I was younger, were never truly open to me, but there were ones that were. I would still love to do those things, and the reality is that I am not going to be able to do them all.
It is hard when you care about so much.
I’ve been talking with a friend a lot recently, also, about how when you’re also disabled, the time available to you is not the same time available to everyone else. The costs and tradeoffs of career choices are not the same. Whether physical disabilities or chronic illnesses mean that medical appointments, pain, fatigue, or fighting with insurance take up a lot of your time, or whether autism means that you wrestle with inertia and transitions, or motor planning takes up a ton of your energy, or you need vastly more time to internalize and distill information or have a daily word limit on your language use. And that when your passionate interests are very intense, very specific, and very eclectic, the avenues for them to find interest or funding or publication can get more and more limited.
And so a lot of the independent research and writing that we’re capable of is going to live forever in our hearts instead of ever being done.
I’ve probably got three non-fiction books in me and the probability of ever having the time to write them seems hopeless. I like to think I still could go to grad school or art school. But the fact of the matter is that the risks and obstacles involved would be higher for me than most people.
And for all that, I don’t think I chose wrong when I chose the career I have. I would also never have wanted not to have had this life. But the truth is that the choices I’ve made have had profound impacts on what my life is like and what my range of options moving forward is. In some ways that, sure, I could choose differently tomorrow if I really wanted to, and in others that are not revocable, and students for whom this is a true state are not wrong to be concerned that almost no matter what they choose, there are other paths that they are closing the door on, and that there can be grief involved in that.
April 21, 2024
Blogging “A Lost Lady”
I have once again picked up a Willa Cather novel off of a free community bookshelf and inadvertently fallen into liveblogging my way through it.
If anyone’s interested in following along, all posts are tagged “a lost lady” over at my Tumblr! Once again, not promising any particularly organized analysis, just thoughts as they occur!
Chavisory's Notebook 