Who am I?
I like numbers. I like data, in charts and graphs and tables. I like learning about people and “big pictures.” Probably not surprising that I became a social scientist. Finished my PhD in 2019 in sociology, and around that time, I was going through a bit of an identity crisis—not unusual for a graduate student, or for anyone who is approaching middle age, and I was both. I started trying to think past the anxious, unsettled life of an early-career academic that took up most of my time and remember who I am.
Despite the pressures of the day, I found 15 minutes here and there to pick up my guitars, turn on my keyboard, tune my voice, play a few bars on the harmonica, write a drum part for a song, work on one of many half-finished writing projects. I went back to the gym. I also started doing some self-seeking. Some of that was long walks in green spaces, and some of it was eating up as many credible psychometric self-assessments as I could find. I’m not talking about the “which Star Trek character are you?” sort of thing (Worf, apparently); I mean the kinds of tests that behavioral and social scientists use to learn more about people.
I’m back in the gym 5-6 days a week, gaining muscle, losing belt loops, feeling better. I still take long walks, and I still find 15 minutes here and there to play music or write something non-academic. At this rate, and with the teaching and scholarship going right now, I’ll be able to release another album in a couple of years or so, a second book around then, and publish some fiction in my old age. I’ve also taken dozens of psychometric assessments: everything from personality profiles to mental health/illness to political psychology. Who was this person, this collection of types, staring back from these tests? Should I find someone to trust with this information, who would help me talk through it without passing judgement, pushing a cure, or shoehorning me into their worldview?
It wasn’t until very recently, when I got around to taking assessments like the one that got me the results below, that the other pieces seemed to fit together. Survey self-reporting, as I well know, is not perfect, and I am not an expert in psychology or mental health, so I take the results with a grain of salt. Multiple tests have put me on the autism spectrum. My own biases and ignorance may be misleading me, and so my next step will be finding people who know more than I do about this, and whom I can trust to help figure things out. I didn’t even consider this possibility, so I never bothered to take the assessments until now. But the other results led to new questions, and somehow knowing this makes a lot of other things make more sense, too.
It is mildly traumatic for me to eat something that has a weird texture. I have struggled for years to put emotion in my voice, and it’s still rather monotone. I find close interaction with more than two people unnerving at best, and crowds can be paralyzing. I never seem to know when it’s my turn to talk, and I am largely incapable of meaningful small talk, so I’m just quiet a lot around others. If it’s just me and you talking, and you get me talking about something I know well or am passionate about, I’ll never shut up. I often avoid eye contact because I don’t know when to make eye contact or for how long; teaching a class or performing on stage is oddly soothing because I know exactly what social role to play, and I don’t have to figure out eye contact. I find numbers fascinating; I fixate on music in large part because of its numerical basis, and find densely packed “wall of sound” music/songs relaxing (19th century classical music and black metal especially). I prefer to hyper-fixate on one thing at a time. I find patterns in everything: drywall, tile, people’s hair, ants marching across the dirt, fallen leaves, and it catches my attention so much and so often it’s distracting. I find analyzing data, putting it into tables, writing assessment reports, uniquely Zen. I cannot understand flirting, and I often misread or fail to read nonverbal social cues. I fidget, I pick at my nails, hair, skin. I often seek ways, some healthy and some not, to mask how uncomfortable social life often is for me.
The point of all this isn’t just self-absorbed navel-gazing—I take for granted that the self and the social world are connected, and feed-back on one another. I hope sharing this realization will help us to understand one another a little better, at the very least. I hope to learn to do better from this realization in terms of understanding, interacting with, and respecting the quiet struggles of, other people. Self-knowledge and self-improvement cannot take place in a vacuum because pursuing them can change one’s own little corner of the world for the better.
What do I do now? I don’t really know. I’m open to advice from others who are neurodivergent: what did you do when you found out, and what has helped you? I mean, I’m the same person now that I was before, right? How much of “me” is a result of masking what others ridiculed, dismissed, or misunderstood? That doesn’t matter so much as what happens next, because if I hadn’t experienced life as I have, then I would be someone else. And I don’t want to be someone else. I just want to understand who I am, and where I fit into all of this, a little better.
Image: my “Aspie Quiz” test results, one of multiple sources that inspired this entry.
