Sharing Our Autism Story EP 6

There is more than one way to share our autism story! In this episode of Autistic POV, I talk about my experience sharing my own story through memoir writing and online media—with a focus on what did and didn't work for me and why

I also chat about my substack blog, my special interest blog and other resources. I promised to provide links these, so here they are:

• Metaphysical blog (special interest blog) MysticReview.com
• Substack blog (some special interest posts plus autism podcast episodes and articles) BarbaraGraver.substack.com
• My article Autism and the Narrative Process (barbaragraver.substack.com/p/autism-and-the-narrative-process) touches on Julie Brown's book Writers on the Spectrum. The book is more geared toward fiction, but I found it helpful. 
• Link for my Podbean website (as mentioned in the episode): AutisticPOV.com
• My autism diagnosis / bipolar misdiagnosis episode is EP 3 in app or online at https://www.autisticpov.com/e/late-autism-diagnosis-bipolar-misdiagnosis-and-being-vulnerable/ 

Please consider following and / or sharing the podcast! 

If you need closed captioning, please listen via the podbean app or through my site: AutisticPOV.com

EPISODE 6 TRANSCRIPT:

If your podcast provider cuts off the transcript, you can see the full transcript for this episode at AutisticPOV.com

Welcome to Autistic POV. My name is Barbara Graver and I started this podcast to share a bit of my journey as a late diagnosed autistic. Hi everybody, this is Barbara Graver. Thank you for joining me today on Autistic POV. Today we're going to be talking about sharing our story.

0:29

And I specifically called this episode sharing our story versus writing our memoir because I think it's important to acknowledge that there are a lot of different ways we can share our autistic experience. And writing a memoir is only one of those ways. So I love autistic memoirs.

0:50

I've read a bunch of them and I really, really enjoy them. And I decided that I should try to write one too. I wanted to talk about my experience growing up as an undiagnosed autistic and I started it. I actually wrote it. But I had a lot of trouble with it.

1:09

I had a lot of trouble with it for different reasons. And this is something that a lot of autistics struggle with. It's kind of ironic because I am a writer. I consider myself a writer. I've written a couple of novels, but I really, really struggle with writing novels. And there's a reason for this.

1:31

And writing the memoir was easier in a way because it's chronological. You don't have to struggle with structure to the same degree you do a novel. But there is still kind of a genre expectation, I think, with a standard memoir. And maybe this is something that needs to be challenged.

1:51

But the idea with a standard memoir is usually that there will be a theme. It's not an autobiography. A memoir is not an autobiography. It's not someone's story from birth to the point they write it. It's the story of a specific aspect of their life.

2:10

So with the autism memoir, the expectation is going to be that aspect is autism. And I think that's what made it hard for me because as an autistic person, Everything in my life is related to autism because my autistic way of looking at the world is global. There's no way I could step away from that.

2:34

Everything I've done in my life has been, and everything I've seen and experienced has been through an autistic lens. So I found when I tried to write a memoir about is that I just couldn't stay in my lane. And that's something, I read a book, and I think I mentioned it before,

2:52

but it was by a literary critic named Julie Brown, and the name of the book was Writers on the Spectrum. And in that book, she analyzed the writing of eight different very famous writers who are widely thought to be autistic. And she came up with these problems that all of them had, and they all had these problems.

3:11

And reading that was really helpful for me, Because at the time, I was struggling with writing fiction. And I saw a lot of those issues in my own writing. And it was helpful for me. I've written a couple novels. One is going to be coming out, I think, before the end of the year.

3:28

But they were so hard for me to write. And I actually think if I try another one, when I try, I've already got another fiction novel. story started, but I think the next time I might actually try a short story cycle because of issues I have around narration.

3:47

And this is common, and I'm not sharing this to discourage anyone. I mean, obviously a lot of people write autism memoirs. They write them brilliantly. I have an episode called autistic POV reading roundup where I talk about four books that I really love that

4:04

I read recently and three of them are autism memoirs and I love them and I think everyone should read them especially if you think you might want to write one you should definitely read a bunch that's the best thing you can do as a writer to prepare you to write is to read what other people do

4:21

But I think the issues I have personally with narration, and obviously every autistic does not have these problems, but the problems I have are not uncommon. And one of them is fulfilling genre expectations. This was something Julie Brown actually identified when she did literary analysis of the work of these writers.

4:44

one way this is a problem is because of what Bernard Rimland, who's a researcher, calls the autistic tendency to view life as an incoherent series of unconnected events. And that makes structuring anything difficult, even a story you tell, even a podcast, even to a degree a blog post.

5:05

But the longer the piece, the more difficult this could be. And a memoir is essentially a chronological story and you can tell it chronologically but what I found is that I still had trouble staying in the quote autism lane I kept veering into spirituality and that's another issue because if you have somebody buying an autism memoir they

5:32

know this was my problem they don't necessarily want to read a book that's like half or two thirds about the author's spiritual experiences that's not why they bought it And it's not fair to them and it's not fair to you because odds are you're not going to get great reviews from that.

5:46

But mostly it's not what it's supposed to be. And that was the problem I ran into. And I have this debate with fiction. Do we really as autistics want to be about fulfilling traditional neurotypical genre expectations? I'm not sure. I think that's a good conversation to have. And I'd be curious what other people think about it.

6:08

But if you're looking to write a traditional memoir, you may have problems staying in your lane, potentially, or you may not. This isn't everybody. But you may find it a little bit difficult to structure things. And this is something that has been identified as an issue at times for some autistics. And autism researcher Matthew Belmont says,

6:33

and I love this, that we move from chaos to meaning through narration. So in other words, that's how we make sense of our lives. And it makes me wonder if the difficulties some autistics may have with narration, the difficulties I have with narrating,

6:49

might have to do with the difficulty I have in having a coherent sense of self. I was listening to This Jungian Life, which is a great podcast. And they were talking about, and I forget the name of the episode, but they were talking about your narrative, your life narrative and how that, impacts your sense of identity.

7:10

So it's all connected. I think it's all connected. And I do think that writing a memoir, like I'm glad I wrote it, even though I'm not going to publish it, at least not in its present form. I think writing a memoir is good because I think it helps you reflect on your life.

7:26

I think it helps you see your life more as a narrative. Even if you don't, like I didn't end up, I felt with the kind of narrative that other people would want to read. But it helps you see your own life as a narrative, which is a really valuable thing, I think.

7:41

So it helps us make sense of our lives, and it helps us to share our experience. It can be validating for other people. It can help other people feel less alone. I'm not against writing an autistic memoir at all. I think it's a great exercise, and I think more people should do it.

8:01

so if you feel called to write a memoir you should definitely try it and the time you put into it will not be wasted because even if like in my case I feel at this point I probably won't publish it I may change my mind about that and and try to

8:15

rewrite it but even if you don't publish it it's still a valuable exercise I think it's still worth doing and a memoir does not have to be super long so Decide if you want to fulfill genre expectations or if you just want to do your own thing.

8:33

I kind of feel like I'm getting to a place in life where I feel we should just be doing our own things creatively. We shouldn't be worrying about reviews and critique groups and whether other people get us and get our work and our creativity because I'm not sure that the traditional accepted

8:54

expected way is better i'm not sure that at all but anyhow it's that's a hard thing to do creatively because if you go outside what people are looking for you're you're taking a risk you're definitely taking a risk So definitely if you want to do it, read other memoirs, think about it,

9:15

decide what kind of memoir you want to write. Possibly check out Julie Brown's book, Writers on the Spectrum. It's not a cheap book, even in paperback. I bought it, but it's something you could probably get an interlibrary loan. So you might check that out just to be aware of some of the common pitfalls that

9:34

autistic writers go through. And if there's an interest, I could do an episode just on that probably. But I want to talk about two different ways you can share your story because this is kind of what I'm doing. There was a time when the only way you could share your story was to write a book.

9:50

That's not the case anymore. We have blogs and podcasts and YouTube and even social media. Like there's some people who use things like Instagram to share their stories. I don't do that personally, but I think if it works for you to use Instagram or Facebook to share your story, Do it. Go for it. Definitely.

10:11

To me, I like blogs. I like podcasts. I like YouTube. And what I've kind of done, and this has sort of worked for me because writing my memoir, I just could not keep my special interests out of it. And it ended up being more about my special interests, I think, than it was about autism.

10:28

And I didn't feel that was working. And I kind of didn't know how to fix it. Maybe I'll figure it out. Maybe I'll publish it as is. But as of right now, it was like half, maybe a quarter autism memoir and three quarters spiritual memoir. So it didn't work.

10:44

But what I've done, I have a blog called The Mystic Review, mysticreview.com. And that's purely about metaphysical topics. I mean, I talk about, I call it like, traditions, mysteries, and something, and dreams. But I talk about dreams. I talk about Carl Jung. I talk about spiritual experience. I talk about, sometimes I talk about faith.

11:09

And I talk about various topics that interest me about metaphysics. I've always been fascinated by the supernatural, the paranormal. And I can talk about all that in the blog. I can talk about anything from paranormal investigations to God in that blog. And that's perfect for me. And that blog actually does really well.

11:32

Like a lot of people read it. And then when I want to talk about autism, and I try to stay in my lane, I find the podcast works pretty well for that because it's short. I keep it pretty short. This one's going a little longer. And that's a way to tell your story.

11:51

I mean, I told my story on here. I have an episode that I think I'll link to it in the description, but it's about being misdiagnosed with bipolar disorder, being involved with the mental health system for 20 years. That's a big story. And I was able to kind of tell it, I felt, in a podcast episode.

12:11

And it's a way to share. It's a valid way to share. And I like podcasting because for me, it's easy. I like YouTube also. I do metaphysical YouTube things from time to time. And I do share this podcast on YouTube. But I don't do video because usually when I do these episodes on autism,

12:32

I have to edit them because I go off track. And that's what I like about the podcast. I could do that. If I go off track, I could take it out. When I do a short YouTube on metaphysics, that's not so much a problem because that's a special interest. And I also have a sub stack.

12:48

And on sub stack, I share my podcast episodes on autism. And I share some of my metaphysical posts, not all of them. But I share a lot of different content on that, and I kind of don't care. I mean, that's sort of fragmented, and I don't really care. I just do it. And that's another option. I mean,

13:09

there are a lot of options for blogging, but I think Substack is kind of nice because there's a growing autism community on Substack. And if you decide to do it, if you decide to go on Substack, look me up. I'm Barbara Graver. I call my Substack writing after dark, but... I'll put a link to that too.

13:30

So Substack is definitely an option. And the nice thing about blogging or even podcasting or YouTube, you can end up with written content that you can repurpose if you want for an e-book at a later date. So you don't necessarily even have to look at it as either or.

13:47

You could do these things and very easily generate a transcript and And then you can repurpose it for a book if you feel you want to do that at some point. And getting an editor is also an option. But like Julie Brown says in her book, which I thought was a really good point,

14:05

she says that if we heavily edit these stories to make them more acceptable to neurotypicals, are we kind of negating the autistic creativity of them? And that's something I haven't completely come to terms with yet, but I feel like I need to. And the other nice thing,

14:24

last thing I'll say about podcasting that I think is nice is if you don't really have anybody to talk to in your everyday life about autism, like I don't, I do see autism therapist and she's good, but that's like once every two weeks. And if you don't really have anyone to talk to about these things,

14:42

having a podcast or a YouTube is really nice because you're actually talking, like I'm talking to you about this. And sometimes people comment back or even email you and you can actually have a conversation. And monologuing or just sharing your side of things is kind of an autistic tendency. I think everybody knows that.

15:04

So podcasting and YouTubes can work pretty well because it allows us to do that. We don't have to really, I mean, we should ideally worry about people getting bored, but not in the same way when you've corralled somebody in the kitchen and they really don't want to hear it.

15:18

So my point is there are different ways we could do this. And these are my three things. Writing a traditional memoir, definitely an option. Consider writing kind of avant-garde autistic memoir that doesn't adhere to the expectation. You could do podcasts. I use Podbean. I really like Podbean. I think it's a good deal.

15:40

It gives you a website and it's a nice, a real nice interface, I think. or YouTube, or even social media. These are all options, and it doesn't have to be one or the other. You could start where you're at with what you're comfortable with, and then you can see where it goes. You could build.

15:59

And I think that more of us need to do this, however we do it. I think we need to keep sharing our story, because I hate when people say, oh, everyone's autistic, because no, that's not true. Like 2% of people are autistic. We are a minority. And I think anyone who is part of any kind of minority,

16:18

if for no other reason than statistics, you're going to be underrepresented in the media. You're going to be underrepresented in books. You're going to be underrepresented on TV. I mean, that's just what happens. And I think it's important for us to be heard and for us to share our experience. I think it's validating.

16:37

I think it makes other people feel a little less alone. And I think it has the potential to educate people, which really, really needs to happen. That's a whole other topic. I'm not going to talk about that. I'm not going to talk about that today. So this is my episode on sharing our story.

16:55

I don't know if people want more specifics about any of these kind of platforms because I've done them all. Let me know and I'll consider a future episode on that. And I guess that's it. So... I don't actually know what I'm going to do for the next episode, which is unusual. I just realized that.

17:18

I hadn't thought about it. So it's going to be a surprise. Usually I like to say what we're doing next time. This time I'm not sure, so it'll be a surprise. I will put links to all my different stuff if you want to look at it.

17:31

Not that it's perfect, any of it, but it could give you a little bit of an idea of what I do. And if you want, let me know what you think about the idea of... not adhering to genre expectations. Let me know what you think about that. I almost feel like it should be a thing.

17:50

So that's it for today. If you have any questions or comments, please put them on whatever platform you use, and I will look for them. And I'll put a bunch of links at the bottom, and I will surprise you next time. If you like this content, please, please, please feel free to subscribe or follow or share.

18:11

That's highly appreciated. This is still a pretty new podcast, and I found... that I can really only do it about once a month because I've got all these different platforms going. But please do subscribe or share if you like it. It would be very appreciated. So that's it for this time.

18:31

And this is Barbara Graver of Autistic POV. And I want to thank you very much for listening.

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