On the night of November 5, 2024, I felt my entire body sink and grow heavy with dread seemingly out of nowhere.
For most of the day, I had been doing something I loved. I was working on my novel, consolidating feedback from my wonderful beta readers, and making some headway into the first 25 pages of what I hope will be a newer, much stronger draft.
Yet no matter how much Mario Golf for the Game Boy Color that I played through my Nintendo Switch Online membership to decompress that night, I couldn’t shake the growing density of my stomach, the weariness of my eyes, and the unshakeable feeling that my life would change forever.
When I went to bed, I slept poorly, waking up through the night and finding my body too hot beneath the mountain of blankets I usually slept under. A common stress response.
To my body’s complete lack of surprise, my life did change.
A white nationalist, a misogynist, a xenophobe, an ableist, and a conman had been elected the next president of the United States of America.
Again.
All morning on November 6, 2024, I felt hungry—another stress response likely the result of my body’s release of cortisol. Just in case riots broke out on the streets of where I lived, my body wanted me to be ready for anything that came in the next 24 hours. Thankfully, nothing did, and I went on with my life as best as I could.
Because I had scheduled a neuropsychological evaluation, of all things, for 2 PM that afternoon.
About two months prior, I had started to suspect that I lied somewhere on the neurodivergent spectrum. For most of my life, I had trouble adapting to changes in routine and thrived in rigid environments like academia. To this day, I occasionally have trouble detecting sarcasm, reading people’s minds, figuring out if someone is teasing me or not. I also prefer being alone over being with others, though I still enjoy group events on occasion. It’s just that I find that I need to mentally prepare myself for the event through plenty of advance notice and rest afterwards—to appropriately budget my spoons so that I still have enough energy for myself. I also recently discovered that I prefer monotasking over multitasking simply because it made more sense.
And so, according to the evaluation, I have level 1 autism—formerly and becoming less commonly known as “high-functioning” autism or Asperger’s syndrome.
If you find that what I’m saying resonates with you, I strongly recommend that you find a way to get a neuropsychological evaluation done through your medical insurance before fascists take it away. If you don’t have access to affordable care or such services, I think it would still be beneficial to read about neuroscience, neurodiversity, and anything else you can about the brain before you very well can’t read anything anymore.
As for me, despite the grim picture I’m painting, I couldn’t be happier. For so long, I had wondered why certain things felt second nature to others but not to me. For so long, I had wondered what was holding me back from making friends, getting a job, or facilitating significant change in my life. I had thought that it was my generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) causing most of these problems, but really, the GAD was a manifestation of my behavioral tendencies on the autism spectrum.
And for those of you reading or listening to what I’m saying, I am not happy at this diagnosis because I see it as a justification for who I am. That’s not it at all. To me, what this means is that I now have a better understanding of who I am, how my brain works, and how I can work with myself instead of against myself. I won’t be as tempted to self-flagellate for not meeting supposedly neurotypical societal demands, and I’ll be more willing to try new strategies and techniques to help make my life a little easier.
On the night of November 6, 2024, I had a burlesque show all to myself.
I slipped in my earbuds, flipped to Pomplamoose’s cover of Daft Punk’s “Something About Us,” danced like no one was watching, and serenaded like I was a siren.
Hips gyrating, smirk flashing, I danced for the person in the mirror whom I had always loved and fought for but never truly understood. The gap between who I thought I should be and who I was had always threatened to become a tear in the fabric that held my being together. Yet now, that gap that had seeped so much cloud-like stuffing was finally being sewed close with a loving bit of needle and thread.
And with this release, I sank deeper into myself. I sank deeper into my curiosity about the origins of white supremacy and gathered a list of potential books for radical reading. I sank deeper into the bowels of X (formerly known as Twitter), liking and reposting as much content as I could because I was mad as hell and wasn’t going to take it anymore. I sank deep into the bath I prepared with offerings of Himalayan bath salt and soap with essential oils, letting enlightenment soak through my skin.
Because the dread is a sign of the deepening within me. It is a clarion call from my body/mind/soul/spirit to affirm my calling as a storyteller—to preserve truthful histories, to create imagined worlds, and to disseminate stories from marginalized voices.
And as you read or listen to me speak these words into being, I encourage you to do the same. I encourage you to grieve, to process, to deepen your loves because our first instinct is to panic like a bunch of marbles, scattering across the floor. We wonder if we should become doomsday preppers or activists or scholars, and before we realize it, we become crushed by the weight of our fears and desires, surrendering to complacency.
Sink into precisely what you feel, and don’t let yourself become numb. Because as Rebecca Solnit writes in her latest essay about a second-Trump presidency:
No one can deal with every issue at once, and choosing which part of the problem to commit to is part of the work of resistance. Some of you are already doing important work on human rights or climate or criminal justice. Some of you can commit to addressing immigration or the underground railroads for abortions. Some of you will find your commitment or have skills and resources to bring to multiple issues. Daniel Berrigan, the Jesuit priest turned anti-war [organizer], once wrote: “One cannot level one’s moral lance at every evil in the universe. There are just too many of them. But you can do something; and the difference between doing something and doing nothing is everything.”
Sink into despair, if you must, but sink well knowing that your despair comes from a deep place of love. A love for things you care about and wish for others. A kindness that guides you through life.
Sink into rage. Sink into truth. Sink into fear so that you might finally find the key that unlocks the courage you’ve always been searching for to organize and create safe spaces for the most vulnerable in your communities.
Let the deepening begin, and let it take hold of you. For when you hit the bottom of that loving ocean and meet those “Weird Fishes” that Radiohead and Lianne La Havas sing about…
you just might escape
whatever’s been
holding you
back.
Share this post