The autistic experience of being forever lost and grasping

"We are lost and anxious and confused and grasping for any connection that could help us put the pieces together."

Just like autistic brains tend to connect thousands of data points together in a beautiful and complex web of interrelatedness, understanding autism seems to follow that same pattern. Everything connects. Each trait is inextricably linked to another. Nothing happens in isolation. You don’t just “stim”; you stim within the context of monotropism, sensory overload, bottom-up processing, etc. It is all happening all the time. There is no singular trait happening in isolation and, therefore, we cannot really understand any aspect of autism in isolation from the entirety of what autism is: a complex web of thousands of experiences, both internal and external to the autistic person.

With this in mind, I want to talk about an autistic experience that has become quite well known to me as something many (if not most) autistic people experience: confusion.

Being autistic can be inherently confusing for a number of reasons. We are bottom-up processing everything or have delayed processing, so the pieces of reality never seem to fit together enough to make sense. We tend to think in binary ways, which causes us to get confused because it forces our brains into perceived, skewed versions of a nuanced and, unfortunately, gray and ambiguous world. Being confused is anxiety-provoking and, in an attempt to solve the problem of endless confusion and uncertainty, we seek certainty. We seek explanations. We seek knowledge. We seek data. Anything to tie together the endless barrage of data points that never seem to materialize into something with a strong foundation of making sense.

So when we ask for clarification or more detailed instructions or explanations, it is a desperate attempt for us to find some sense of understanding because, most of the time, we are lost. We are lost and anxious and confused. We are grasping for any connection that could help us put the pieces together. Even monotropism is a way to zero in on something so narrow and specialized in the hope that we can finally find a complete understanding of something. And infodumping is simply a playful expression of some fleeting grasp of something that finally puts our brains at ease, if only for a second, whether it be penguins or medieval weaponry.

So please bear with us.