My autistic perspective.

Word! This is what people sometimes write in a comment – or exclaims when they feel someone said something they deeply resonate or agree with.

I thought a lot about the difference between words and meaning.

How I often used the metaphor of me coming into a room where they speak Korean (because I don’t understand a word of Korean – which is why I picked this language for my metaphor) – and I am assumed to understand and speak it. I used this metaphor to try to catch the essence of how I often feel in conversations with people.

I don't even believe in the concept of mental health anymore. How am I to separate out my mental life from the rest of my life?

I only have one life...

How am I to separate out my mental health from the rest of my health?

When am I the most happy? The most grounded? The most me? – Those questions are related…

I don’t know about you. But I am a contradictory… almost always have many perspectives on one thing. Many feelings about one thing. Almost nothing is crystal clear to me. Sometimes it makes me indecisive. There are so many things one can take into consideration – and yes – often they are – contradictory – or lead to contradictory solutions.

Sometimes I am contradictory just because of the above… I shift. I take different viewpoints – all seem valid, more or less perhaps, but still. Sometimes I appear contradictory because I simply have changed my mind. I am an ever-changing human.

If a person is stressed, overwhelmed, out of their window of tolerance, is the answer always to help them engage their social engagement system, on the outside, with another person or being? Is it always external co-regulation that is the best answer?

No. Not in my opinion. Especially not if a person is having an overactive Social Engagement System – as part of their defense strategy. Too much of the good is, is, as always, too much.

Or maybe – what looks like a way too overactive social engagement system is not in fact that? Or maybe it is – it depends on how you define a social engagement system. At least if you talk the language of Vagus, where the social engagement system lives in the ventral vagal complex and dissociation in the dorsal vagal complex.

I saw a Facebook post the other day about how in the US it is common that you need to fill in forms that ask about your ethnicity. And it made me think. Coming from a Nordic country – that seems very strange. Why do you need to provide that information? What is the purpose behind asking for it? Why is it important to authorities, businesses and organizations to know what ethnic group you belong to? Isn’t that more important to you?

And in today’s global world – aren’t many of us a mix of ethnic groups? Isn’t ethnicity more about where your ancestors came from? What environment they adapted to live in originally? And the cultures that were built around the adaptations, hardships, victories, communities that were mourned and celebrated in every particular spot people gathered together to live and share their lives in?

I think it is VERY important to know where we come from. Where our ancestors come from. How they, how I, ended up where I am (living) today. And how that impacted those who already where there, are there, before me.