Autistic POV

Is there a relationship between autistic traits and psychic ability?  Join me for a discussion of how autistic traits like hyper-sensitivity, hyper-connectivity and pattern recognition might relate to psychic abilities.  The blog post and autism trait charts I mentioned in the video can be found on my blog at: https://barbaragraver.substack.com/p/charting-my-autistic-traits  If you like my content, please follow the podcast! Visit my blog at Writing On The Spectrum (https://barbaragraver.substack.com/) Full transcript follows. If you need closed captioning, please listen via the podbean app or at AutisticPOV.com (https://www.autisticpov.com/). EPISODE 11 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 Graber and I started this podcast to share a bit of my journey as a late diagnosed autistic. Hi everybody, this is Barbara Graver. 0:21 Welcome to Autistic POV. In this episode, we're going to be continuing to talk about autism and psychic abilities. In our last episode, we talked about autism and psychic abilities, particularly in the realm of some of the research and controversy around nonverbal autistic people and their telepathic abilities. 0:45 And one of the interesting things for me that came out of that was it kind of changed my thinking on the whole concept of the spectrum. And this happened actually as I was doing the podcast. I was thinking about how I have some intuitive abilities and here are these people who... 1:02 that have these strong, apparently strong, telepathic abilities. And I was thinking, you know, it really is a spectrum. But the more I thought about it after, that one trait is on a spectrum. So to me, you can't put one autistic person... at one end of the spectrum and another autistic person at the other. 1:25 And I know people say, oh, it's not that kind of a spectrum. But the definition of a spectrum really is something that goes from one extreme to another. Like even with color, you might say, oh, red's not in any way inferior to violet. But yet red is, if you look at the wavelength of red, 1:44 you will see it has a slower, larger pattern where violet has a very pattern so it is a rating system a spectrum is a rating system and I just don't like that because the more I learn about autism the more I realize there are specific quote autistic traits and people have a constellation of these traits we 2:08 may not have all of them we may not have all the same traits but but a lot of us have a gradient of traits. For example, and I'm going to share a link to this. After this podcast, I did actually a blog post on the traits in autism, and I listed 10 traits. 2:29 I kind of loosely adapted from the DSM-5, and I rated myself 1 to 10 on those traits. So some traits like repetitive motor, I was very low. Other traits like hyper fixation. I gave myself a 10. Maybe that was too much, but I'm very, very high on that. So that's, I think that's true of everyone. 2:50 And there's other things that complicate it, obviously, like apraxia and different intellectual capacities. But I just think that whole idea of low to high that's perpetuated by the DSM-5 is very misleading. So I'm not using that word spectrum anymore. I even changed my blog. It was writing on the spectrum. 3:09 I changed it back to writing after dark because I just don't buy into that spectrum idea, that ranking anymore. However, when it comes to individual traits, we certainly can rank people. And If being psychic is an autistic trait or not, I think is debatable. But it is a human trait. 3:29 And I do think it can come under the greater heading of sensitivity. And the reason I think that is because I had a lot of experience, a lot of different psychic experiences. I've had precognitive dreams. I've had visions. I've had a lot of experiences. I do not consider myself... overtly psychic. 3:49 These are just things that have happened to me in kind of an episodic way over the course of my life. And these things have informed my belief system. I believe in certain things like the paranormal, the supernatural, because of my psychic experiences. And I use my intuition all the time in understanding things and understanding people. 4:11 It's a huge help to me. So I To me, it's a trait that falls under the greater heading of hypersensitivity and possibly hyperconnectivity too. One of the things I was thinking about over the last two weeks since I did the podcast is the idea of the brain as a receiver. 4:31 And that's an analogy the biophysicist Rupert Sheldrake uses. He says, imagine a radio. And if you took a piece out of a radio, you would no longer hear music. And you would think that the radio could no longer produce music. If you didn't understand a radio at all, you might think that this radio is broken. 4:51 It can't produce music. But that's not actually how a radio works. What's happened is that the radio is no longer receiving the music. So the brain can, I think, be thought of also as a receiver. And the question is, what are different brains receiving? And I think in autism, perhaps, our ability, 5:16 our hyperconnectivity coupled with our hypersensitivity might make us possibly make our brains a different kind of receiver. And there's been no research done on this. This isn't scientific at all. This is just kind of what I think. But I don't personally believe that the physical brain generates consciousness. I like Carl Jung. 5:41 I like the idea of the collective unconscious. I like the idea that we're receiving information. And the reason I like it is because it's happened to me. I've gotten information in dreams and I've gotten information through various psychic means. And it just made me think that maybe we're making connections in different ways. 6:05 And maybe our hypersensitivity extends beyond the material to a degree and maybe we're using a different kind of method of connecting and I know in my own life I've gotten a lot of information and and understood a lot of things through synchronicity and synchronicity part of 6:28 synchronicity is pattern recognition you could be going along in your life and there could be a bunch of synchronicities but if you don't have that eye for detail and that capacity for pattern recognition that a lot of autistic people have, you could totally miss that. You could totally miss the synchronicities because it's not going together for you. 6:52 And pattern recognition is... connecting things. So it's funny to think that the model of autism is that different areas of the brain aren't connecting, and yet we're still making connections, maybe through hypersensitivity, maybe through pattern recognition. And I don't have any answers on this at all. I have no answers, but I do think it's really worth exploring. 7:17 And I did because I started having what my one friend called the dead boyfriend dreams. I started having these dreams about people I had known and lost touch with who had died. And they were evidential because I had no idea. that these people had died, and they were unusual dreams. 7:34 And this was just a short period in 2012 when this was happening to me. And so I decided to study mediumship, which was not the way I really should have applied this, but that was how I felt at the time. I felt getting information, I'm dreaming of the dead, I must be a medium. 7:51 And so I studied with a spiritualist for a couple years, and I ultimately decided that I don't personally want to be the person who is like the ambassador for the afterlife to the grieving. I just don't want that responsibility. And it's fine for people who do. I just don't. 8:11 So after a couple years, I'm like, this really isn't for me. I moved on to something else. But I sat in on a lot of spiritualist development circles. And I did a lot of psychic development exercises. And one thing I noticed in almost all of those groups is that we were all kind of highly sensitive people. 8:28 And not that we were all autistics. Definitely we weren't, but we're all very sensitive. And I just thought that was interesting. And people used to talk about the clairs. I imagine they still do in these development circles, how you have different senses of the material and you have different senses of the immaterial. 8:50 So for example, clairvoyance is clear seeing. So you could see the material world, but some people could see the unseen realms, say, and they have clairaudience, they have clairsentience, they cover all the senses. So is this just hypersensitivity, a very refined way of sensing? And is the lack of interconnection between different brain regions in the autistic 9:20 brain not really a lack of connection, but a different kind of connection? This is what I'm curious about. And for me, I bring information in and a lot of times something happens. It's creative. It's intuitive. It could be psychic. It could be a synchronicity. Something happens outside of me that helps me make sense of that information. 9:42 It helps me connect things. It's a different way of processing. And I just wonder, there's so much about autism that's described like what you could see from looking in the window. It's all based on behavior. The diagnostic criteria is all based on behavior. And it was a model of behavioral psychology, essentially, initially. 10:07 And people are starting to move away from that, but it's still, if you look at the DSM-5, that's all stuff you could see from across the room. It has nothing to do with anybody's inner states. And I just wonder how much that's missing. And so it's interesting to me with the whole, like, 10:25 I'm not sure about the telepathy tapes

Is there a relationship between autism and psychic experience? A connection between autism and telepathy has been reported by the families of some nonverbal autistic people. As a late diagnosed autistic this interests me because intuition has been a guiding force in my life. Like all many areas of parapsychology, more research is needed, but I think it’s a topic worth discussing. In this episode I talk about my own person experience, what other people have to say, the idea of psychic ability as a spectrum trait and a bit about parapsychology (from what I have learned at the Rhine Institute). This is my first time talking about this topic, I’m going to be talking about it more in the next couple of podcasts! Resources for this episode include: Autism and the God Connection by William Stillman The Telepathy Tapes Podcast (https://thetelepathytapes.com/) The Rhine Institute (https://www.rhineonline.org/what-is-parapsychology) Dr. Diane Hennacy/Powell (https://drdianehennacy.com/telepathy/) Psychology Today article on the Telepathy Tapes by Jeff Tarant PhD (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/choosing-your-meditation-style/202503/science-skepticism-and-the-telepathy-tapes) Dr. Hennacy/Powell's Response to Jonathan Jarry (https://thetelepathytapes.com/dr-powell-defense) Sharing Our Autism Story (https://www.autisticpov.com/e/sharing-our-autistic-story-ep-6/) If you like my content, please follow the podcast! Visit my blog at Writing On The Spectrum (https://barbaragraver.substack.com/) Full transcript follows. If you need closed captioning, please listen via the podbean app or at AutisticPOV.com (https://www.autisticpov.com/). EPISODE 10 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. everybody this is barbara graver thank you for joining me today on autistic pov today we're going to be talking about autism and psychic experience as most of you 0:30 know i tried to write an autism memoir and i talk about this in an episode i'll link to it telling our autism story but i tried to write this memoir And I realized that I kind of couldn't stay in the autism lane. I was talking about autism, but I was talking a lot about the paranormal, 0:51 my psychic experience, past spiritual experience, metaphysical topics, all this stuff that to my mind then, didn't have anything to do with autism. And I thought, I can't do this. This is supposed to be an autism memoir. And nobody's going to want to read all this if they're looking for autism memoir. 1:13 So I set it on the side, but it kind of kept pulling at me. So Not long ago, actually a few weeks ago, I decided, you know what, I'm just going to write it. I'm just going to do it. I mean, it's actually written. I thought I'm just going to edit it and finish it and do it. 1:32 And after I made that decision, I thought maybe I should do a little research on this topic, this topic. Is there any connection between autism and psychic ability? And I had never really thought that there was. To me, the metaphysical, actually parapsychological is the correct term, was always a special interest. It was just a special interest. 1:56 It didn't really have anything to do with being autistic. And maybe it doesn't. I don't know that for sure. But I do know that when I started to research, I found a book. by this guy named William Stillman. It's called Autism and the God Connection. And this was an interesting book to me. 2:14 There's some pros and cons on it, which I'll talk about in another episode, but it was a really interesting book to me because it addressed this idea that there's a relationship between telepathy and autism. And in particular, William Stillman, who is on the spectrum and does have psychic ability, I think has worked as a medium. 2:36 But William Stillman worked primarily with nonverbal autistic children and teenagers, maybe adults, but nonverbal autistic people and their mothers. And a lot of these moms were saying, my kid could read my mind. And of course, everyone's like, That's ridiculous. People are even saying really mean things, like horrible, cruel things. 3:02 And that's like part of the culture of just dismissing what is essentially at its core the inner experience of the autistic, which we'll talk about more. But William Stillman didn't dismiss it. He wrote a book about it, and it's a really interesting book, and he's an interesting guy, and he shares a lot of anecdotes about 3:23 And he mentions in the book this podcast called The Telepathy Tapes, which I listen to. And that also is about telepathy and nonverbal autistic people. And it's really compelling. It's super compelling. And it is based on and around the work of this, actually, she's a medical doctor, neuroscientist, Diane Hennessy. 3:46 And she got interested in autism and telepathy and decided to research it. And she said that she knew when she made that decision that it was the end of her scientific reputation, she knew it. And so it was. They even found a way to take her medical license away from her for a while. 4:05 And it's interesting because this is the culture. And it's almost like there's a double prejudice when you talk about this issue. There's the prejudice of dismissing the inner the inner reality, the lived experience of autistic people was just systemic. And then in the scientific community, there was the prejudice against parapsychology, also systemic. 4:31 And it's really, really interesting because I've studied parapsychology. I took courses at the Rhine Institute, which is... was started by J.B. Rhine, who did the original experiments in ESP. But I took courses there. I think I'm going to take some more, actually. And it's interesting because that prejudice towards parapsychology is so ingrained in the scientific community, 4:55 like even Rupert Sheldrake, who's that. I think Cambridge-educated biophysicists, he would submit papers when he was doing his research on morphic fields. He would submit statistically valid, well-designed scientific studies and write a paper on it and submit it to these academic journals. And they would send it back without even reading it. 5:17 They would say, we know this can't be true, so we're not even going to read your paper. Like that's the scientific community at its worst. And parapsychology brings that out. It just brings it out so much. And it's kind of interesting because on Diane Hennessey's website, she actually quotes from this paper. 5:38 And just give me a minute here and I will find it. So this paper was written by molecular biologist Jonathan Jerry in critiquing Diane Hennessey's work with autism and telepathy and what is interesting. interesting about it for the purpose of our discussion, is that he begins by talking about parapsychology. And he says, and this is a quote, 6:03 parapsychology is a grab bag of powers and experiences like telepathy, telekinesis, and precognition that involves some weird transfer of energy or information that currently exist outside of our scientific understanding, if they exist at all. And this is like kind of an interesting way to characterize parapsychology because it's not a grab bag of powers and experiences. 6:29 It's an actual science. And I'll just quote from the Ryan Institute's website on parapsychology. Like, what is parapsychology? Parapsychology is the scientific study of interactions between living organisms and their external environment that seem to transcend the known physical laws of nature. Parapsychology is a component of the broader study of consciousness and the mind. 6:53 parapsychologists study five broad areas, telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, PK, psychokinesis, and survival studies. So you can see the difference here in perspective, and you can see the prejudice of the scientific community towards parapsychology. I'm not saying that the telepathy tapes is a scientifically valid study. Like, I don't know that. I couldn't even really analyze that. 7:18 I suspect it probably isn't, but The point is, anecdotal evidence is still evidence. And it's kind of systemic of popular culture as a whole to just dismiss out of hand the lived experience of autistic people. So it's not really surprising that this telepathy in nonverbal autistic people is just going to be dismissed out of hand. 7:42 None of that's surprising. And probably when I mention all this, you're thinking, but wait, that's been debunked. It hasn't been debunked. It hasn't been properly studied, perhaps. But that's the most you can say about it. You can't say that it's been debunked. So I found that really interesting. 7:59 And essentially what Diane Hennessey and the telepathy tapes and William Stillman are all saying, some people at least on the autism spectrum have telepathic abilities. And this is like widely reported by mothers of kids that are nonverbal saying, you know, my kid could read my mind. And you think that's ridiculous. That can happen. It's a normal reaction. 8:26 I'm a skeptical person. The only reason I believe the things I believe is because of direct experience. I don't really believe anything. metaphysical other than stuff I've had direct experience of. So I'm kind of like that too. It's human nature, but it's problematic. 8:45 It's problematic when it means you can't take a look at things from a reasonable perspective. And that's essentially the problem. That's a big part of the problem. And so on the telepathy tapes, they're nonverbal autistic individuals who are communicating their spellers. They call it spellers. They're communicating via assistive devices, which is part of, 9:10 it

How masking can be helpful at times. How it can hurt. My experience with autistic masking and unmasking. My new unmasking autism workbook. I am planning future episodes on the topic. Thank you for listening! If you like this content please follow and / or share! You can get all my media and articles for free via my newsletter:  BarbaraGraver.substack.com Post quoted in the article: "Why classic therapies don't work for autistic people?" by Pascale Larivierre Workbook mentioned in the article "The Unmasking Workbook for Autistic Adults" by Jessica Penot, LPC-S If you need closed captioning, please listen via the podbean app or through my site: AutisticPOV.com Episode 9 Transcript: If your podcast provider cuts off the transcript, you can see the full transcript for this episode at AutisticPOV.com   0:06 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. Hey everybody, this is Barbara Graver. Thank you for joining me today on Autistic POV. Today I wanted to talk about masking. I'm just actually making a few observations on masking. 0:32 I do want to return to this topic at some point. But I just wanted to take kind of a pro and con approach to it today because this is something that's come up for me recently. So I have been using a workbook called the Unmasking Workbook for Autistic Adults. 0:50 It's written by Jessica Pinot, who is a licensed counselor and autistic person. And it's a great workbook. I love it. I like the way it's set up. I like the way it builds. It builds to this point kind of in the center where there are two charts that the author calls a template for change. 1:12 And I like the way the book is structured because the way it works is if you work through each section, by the time you get to this very important part of the book, you know what you want to say, which is great. So I think it's very well constructed. 1:27 And this part of the book, it basically has two sections to it. what what do you consider a gift of autism and what do you need help with and i like that i like that approach i filled it in but i found it necessary to create a 1:43 third category of things that i considered adaptive measures so they're not they're not necessarily things i want to change some some things around it i may want to change But they are adaptive measures. And one of the things I listed in this, along with some other things we'll talk about at some other time, was masking. 2:05 And I was kind of surprised. I kind of surprised myself that I put it there because unmasking has been a huge thing for me. I've suffered a lot. through masking but I did put it there and the reason I did is because masking can 2:23 have a benefit I mean masking can be a layer kind of a layer between you and the world and while it is a soul-crushing thing certainly not being able to mask is highly highly debilitating And it was interesting because I came across an article on Substack, and I'll link to it below. 2:47 The article was about two sisters, two women with autism. One was highly masking and the other couldn't mask at all. And I was surprised by my reaction to it because to me, it wasn't really an either or. To me, I could identify the experience of both of these people. 3:06 And that's because sometimes I can mask and sometimes I can't. I have had epic, epic meltdowns in public when unable to mask. And at other times I've endured difficult things without any kind of incident because of my ability to basically pretend I was okay. So, I mean, that's not good. Enduring things is not good usually, 3:30 but sometimes there isn't another choice and it is useful to be able to to step behind masking, like kind of seeing it as a shield where you can step behind it and you can interact. And, and I do this in my everyday life. I don't have a lot of contact with other people in my everyday life. 3:52 I basically spend time with my family and my pets and do media online and have a few online friends. and see an autism therapist. And that's pretty much the extent of my social involvement. But I do leave the house. I leave the house and I interact with people on a limited, kind of superficial basis. 4:14 And I have stock phrases that I can use when I'm walking my dog and someone says hello. I have certain things I'll say about the weather or certain responses I'll make. And they're not necessarily memorized, but they're things I use over and over again. And it's kind of my way of interacting. And that's masking. 4:34 And it doesn't hurt me to do that. It's not satisfying, but it doesn't hurt me. And I kind of feel proud of myself when I have like one of those little kind of ordinary exchanges with someone. And I feel like I handle it well. And it doesn't matter that nothing important is being communicated. 4:54 What matters is that I'm kind of proud of myself after I do this. And it allows me to present an aspect of myself that people can accept. So it can be good. And masking in particular could be good when it keeps you from... It keeps you from having a meltdown, say. 5:15 That's what this article on Substack was about. I am kind of all over the place, but this article on Substack, the girl said how her sister who could not mask would have meltdowns at work and how it was so debilitating. And I agree with that 100% it is. And I have done that. I identified with both. 5:36 And I think a lot of people probably can. certainly there are people who can't mask at all and that's very debilitating I'm not trying to minimize that but I think that a lot of us have had that experience of being able to mask and then not being able to mask and I think that too is worth 5:52 looking at so that's kind of how I look at masking it's not a hundred percent hundred percent bad but it could lead to some pretty dark places and I wouldn't want to pretend otherwise and unmasking is a good thing. To me, unmasking is a good thing. At this point in my life, 6:15 I am looking at it in a little bit different way than I think a lot of people do, because I have kind of a limited involvement in the world. To me, masking is not Trying to blend in or trying to fool people or trying to seem normal. I did that. I've done that in my life. 6:31 I did it in school. And interestingly, I felt like I accomplished it, like particularly in high school. I felt like I accomplished it and at great personal cost. But now I look back and I think, I don't really think I fooled anyone. I think in most situations, 6:48 people always perceived me as awkward and unusual and a little strange. And I was sometimes just kind of oblivious to that. But so I don't think I was ever really, really super successful with blending in. But That's not the kind of unmasking I'm really worried about now because it's not only that I can't really do it, 7:10 it's that I don't really want to do it. I just don't want to and I don't have to and I feel really, really lucky that I don't have to. And the way I look at unmasking now is like simple, simple things. So one way I've tried to unmask is by recognizing when something's too much for me 7:30 and to not push myself to endure situations that are overwhelming for me. And another way I've done it is by not allowing myself to be unduly influenced by other people's ideas about my personal preferences. And just a couple examples, like one way, recognizing when something's too much for me, I did the taxes this week. 7:56 And when I did my taxes, I knew if I tried to, we have a rental unit, so there's a lot to that. I knew if I tried to do it all in one day, it would be overwhelming. So I collected all the little pieces of information I needed, 8:10 and there are a lot of them over the course of a week. And then I sat down to do it on tax day, which was a mistake, but I got through it. I got through it okay because I had everything there and my son had helped me with some of it. 8:24 But I was just washed out after I did that. And even though I don't consider doing taxes hard, I don't consider it confusing or difficult, I still find it super stressful. Like any paperwork, I find stressful. So I chose to not cook that day. I didn't even make lunch. 8:44 I ordered lunch and I ordered dinner, which I never do. I don't do that routinely. But I could have pushed myself to make the meal I had planned for that night, but I chose not to because I knew it would be too much. 8:58 And I think that's a form of unmasking because it's a mask to pretend you could handle something when you can't. That's masking to me. And another thing, when I mentioned not being influenced by other people's perceptions, there are things that bother me, like ceiling lights shining in my eyes and various noise things 9:19 different kinds of noises going on and I used to kind of internalize people's reaction to that when they would say that's ridiculous there's no reason why you that should bother you I would think you're right shouldn't bother me I'll just white knuckle it and sometimes they could and sometimes they couldn't but I don't 9:38 I'm trying not to do that anymore I'm trying to tell myself that they don't understand and that that isn't my problem. So that's another way. And kind of hand in hand with that, like honoring limits, like not attributing my reactions to bad behavior or subjective labels, 10:04 like thinking I'm picky or I'm fussy or I'm selfish or I'm immature. Like I try to just think that this is something that's overwhelming me. And I try to kind of honor that, that this is a limit for me. Example is I was making dinner and everybody in our house, we don't eat at the table. 10:25 We hate to, we just, I make the food and they grab it and t

How does dysregulation impact creativity and our special interests? And what does this mean to autistic individuals (like me) who might already be struggling to identify their emotional states and stressors? In this episode, I discuss my own experience with dysregulation and creativity and share insights from autistic blogger and therapist Karen Sheriff and podcaster and neuropsychologist Dr. Theresa Regan.  The specific media resources mentioned in this episode are: The dichotomy of being an autistic creator (Sheriff) Powerful Self-Care: Awareness of the Internal (Reagan) To read about the changes I made as a direct result of my dysregulation event please see What Writing on the Spectrum Means to Me To get all of my media via email please subscribe to Writing on the Spectrum (always free) to get follow the podcast only, please follow in your favorite podcast app. Please note:  If you need closed captioning, please listen via the podbean app or through my site: AutisticPOV.com And if you like this content please follow and / or share! EPISODE 8 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 talk about dysregulation and creativity because this is 0:32 something that has been an issue for me and I think it's an issue for a lot of autistic people who are creative. And some of this I'm going to base on a recent series by Teresa Regan, who is a neuropsychologist who has a podcast called Autism in the Adult. Dr. Regan is not autistic, 0:58 but she does have a really strong background in autism and neurobiology and a son who's autistic. And I like her podcast. So she did a series on self-care, actually, that I thought was relevant to our topic of dysregulation in relationship to creativity. And she talked a lot about escape as a coping mechanism. And essentially, 1:23 she was talking about special interests, but also other escape behaviors, such as a comforting environment or person, things along that line. And she had a kind of different take on that, I think, than I do. She said that engaging in these kind of coping mechanisms tend to make us smaller. 1:44 And I'm not sure that she means that across the board. I mean, she did say they're not detrimental necessarily, but she does, she personally feels they're limiting. I don't always agree with that. And the reason I don't agree with that is because I personally feel that my own special interests are actually expansive. 2:08 I feel that my world has expanded through my special interests. So we're not exactly on the same page, I don't think, with the nature of the escape. But she did make some good points about it, and she listed some interesting strategies. And she talked about how autistics might not know 2:33 what's going on inside of us which is certainly true and it seems kind of counterintuitive because we are very sensitive but at the same time we don't notice certain things we might not notice when physical things for example like when we're 2:50 cold or hungry and and we also have a hard time or at least in my case I have a hard time identifying emotional states So Dr. Regan talks about recognizing when we are about to be put into a fight, flight, or freeze kind of situation. 3:13 And she looks at special interests or these kind of escape mechanisms as a flight reaction. And I think she's absolutely right in this. I think that's absolutely true. Again, I think that there's a value to it, but I also think it can be problematic. And I've had that issue myself. I recently, 3:40 and I talk about this a little on the blog, I recently finished my fiction story, my vampire story, and I sent it to Kindle to read it on Kindle. And when I did, I hated it. It was kind of the equivalent... When I was a kid, my father, almost everybody in my family were artists. 4:01 And my father, whenever I finished something, he'd look at it and he'd say, turn it upside down. And so you turn it upside down and you automatically see it just jogs your brain so that you automatically see everything that's wrong with it. It works. I don't know why, but it does work. 4:20 And the same is true of writing. If you write something, and then you print it out or read it on another device, you automatically see things that your mind was just kind of skipping over before. So I sent this story to Kindle, and I was not happy with it, and I thought it was done, 4:39 and it was kind of upsetting, and I decided, you know, I don't think I really want to write fiction at all. I thought, I just want to write about spiritual topics because I did that in the mystic review and I was successful with it. 4:54 And I should just write a book, a book about dreams and do the mystic review and that's it. And I decided, why am I even doing a podcast on autism and creativity if this is the direction I'm going? So I actually took the episodes in this podcast down. I redid the site. 5:13 I put up some old media I had on metaphysical topics. And I decided this was what I was going to do. So it's an interesting reaction. And I think in this case, this is absolutely a stress-induced flight reaction. And a lot of creative people, not only autistic creatives, but a lot of creative people in general, I think, 5:38 succumb to this. But as autistics, we're more likely to fall into this pattern because we do, many of us do routinely escape from stress through our special interests. For me, ever since I was a little kid, projects were my coping mechanism and continues into adulthood. And I'm grateful for this trait. It's, it's, 6:05 helped me to do things like the blog and writing and things in my home that I probably wouldn't have accomplished without this drive to always be engaged in a project. But there is a flip side to it because it's not always logical. And when I decided to completely stop writing fiction and talking about it and 6:31 talking about autism and everything around that, I tore it down. And tearing things down is not, that's not a good thing usually. That's Clarissa Picola Estes in her book, Women Who Run With the Wolves, talks about the goddess Medea, who when she was disappointed in love, killed her children. 6:56 And Dr. Estes says that a lot of women are like that with their creative projects. When they go wrong, they destroy them. So that's what I did. But I wasn't just doing that only. I was doing that because I wanted to escape into a new creative project. And 7:18 Luckily I came to my senses and I reversed all that. I mean, I lost a couple of days of my life doing that, but luckily I did. But my point here is that it's an escape mechanism that could be good or bad. I don't think it makes us smaller. I don't think it's necessarily a limitation. 7:41 I think it can be expansive. I think it could open up the world. I think it can take us wonderful places. But I do acknowledge that it can be destructive too. So I launched into this brand new project. I escaped my stress and my disappointment by launching myself into this new project 8:00 that was going to be all about metaphysics and dream work which is a special interest of mine and always will be but it's not it's not the central thing it's not what I want to be the central thing so but I did it and it was interesting because I read a really good blog 8:18 article about that and I will put I will put the name of the author in the show notes but her name is Karen Sherriff And she has a blog on Substack that I read. And she expanded on something Dr. Regan said. Dr. Regan said, when we escape like this, we should look at it for clues, 8:43 clues about what is going on in our interstates. And I thought that Karen took it a little further because she said how she looks at it is in terms of let's investigate. And I love that. And she had had experience where she had put 8:59 a post on tiktok i believe and it had gone viral so she was constantly getting pinged about this post and trying to keep up with responding and and dealing with all that and it was dysregulating for her she got very stressed and she took down 9:16 all her social media and she started thinking about how she wanted to move i think to devon She wanted to move essentially to the country. And she was actually like thinking about this. So this she was in a flight reaction. She was trying to escape. 9:31 And she said when she kind of came to her senses, she thought, well. let's investigate. And I love that approach. And she looked at what she was going to do almost the way you would look at a dream, which I think is brilliant. And it's along the lines of what Dr. Regan was saying, 9:49 but in a little more expansive way, I thought. And so she said to herself, well, what does Devin or wherever she was going to move represent? Like it represents peace and freedom and solitude and all these things that She was lacking all these things that the situation with the social media blowing 10:09 up and not being able to handle it. She needed these things. So it made sense to escape to that. And I thought, wow, that's kind of what happened to me when I decided to take down all my autism media and all my things about creativity and fiction writing. 10:28 It was because I wanted to launch myself into completely focusing on metaphysics. And there's nothing wrong with focusing on metaphysics. I mean, I kept a metaphysical blog, The Mystic Review, since 2010, and I still write in it. And it's a special interest, and it always will be. 10:47 But since I got

In this episode of Autistic POV, I share 7 ways writing fiction has been helpful to me. Some of these benefits go all the way back to childhood. I discovered others as I wrote my upcoming vampire novel (Trancing Miranda). I wanted to share this info because I think that other autistic people might find this way of looking at storytelling helpful. Having said that, please note—these are my own personal perks. Not all autistic writers will have the same experience and I would love to hear any differences that might pop up on your list! Also, please note, these are interpersonal benefits that have nothing to do with building a business or making money.    Check out my blog  at barbaragraver.substack.com. You can read the blog without signing up for the free subscription, but if you subscribe, you'll get articles and media via email PLUS updates on my vampire novel (including discounts and freebies) If you like this content, please consider subscribing, liking, commenting or sharing—or all of the above! And thank you for listening!!! UPDATE: Regarding the blog name change. It seemed confusing to have the blog and podcast share a name, so I changed the blog name to Writing on the Spectrum! Please Note:  If you need closed captioning, please listen via the podbean app or through my site: AutisticPOV.com And if you like this content please consider following the show! EPISODE 7 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 my personal experience with fiction writing 0:33 and some of the benefits of fiction writing that I've encountered that I think would probably carry over to a lot of autistic people. And I wanted to do this now because I'm going to be publishing my first vampire novel hopefully this month. I kind of hoped I could get the book out there before I did the podcast. 0:55 It didn't turn out that way and that's okay. And I'll talk a little bit more about the book as we go. But I just want to go over fiction writing and why I think it's a good process for a lot of autistic people. I'm not saying everyone needs to write stories. 1:13 Certainly if you don't feel called to do it, you shouldn't feel that it's a necessary process. But for anyone who feels that call to tell a story and to live in their imagination and to share their experience through story. I strongly encourage you to do it and in this episode I'm going to try to give you 1:34 a couple reasons why I think it's beneficial for a lot of autistic people. So I do want to start with a couple of updates and the first is that I renamed my blog again. I was calling it Writing After Dark which was nice but kind of generic. So I've changed it to autistic POV, like the podcast. 1:58 And the reason I did that is because I really want to focus on the intersection between autism and creativity. And I will write other posts, certainly. I'll do a few book reviews. I'll do... Some straight stuff just about autism, just like I do here. But I do want that to be a theme with it. 2:20 I don't want it just to be another blog on Substack about writing. I want it to be more specific. So that's my first update. And I'll include a link for the blog in the description, certainly. And my second update has to do with the memoir that I talked about in our last episode. 2:41 And if you remember in the last episode, which was on nonfiction writing and memoir writing and sharing our story and various ways of sharing our story across various platforms, I talked about how I'd written this memoir and it had ended up really being more about spirituality. than it was about autism. And I didn't think that was appropriate. 3:04 And I still don't. I still don't think that's appropriate. But just sharing my autism story just didn't feel like enough to me. I think it's partially because of my identity as an autistic person. It's very difficult for me to divide my identity and from the things that interest me. And it's funny because I've been watching Elementary. 3:28 It's a show that's on Amazon Prime and I really like it. It's not perfect, but I like it. And there was one scene where Sherlock and Watson were talking and Watson was saying how she needed more. She needed her own life. She needed her own space. And she said, your whole life is what you do. 3:48 And I'm not like that. And that was a fact of the show. That's a fact of his character. He relates to people through what he does. And that's pretty much all he knows. And that's pretty much all I know, too. And so writing an autism story independent of a special interest was a big, big problem for me. 4:09 And I just realized suddenly I picked the wrong special interest. Spirituality is not as much a factor in my life now as it was. And I've talked about this before. I'll talk about it maybe more. But it's not the factor in my life that it once was. After I got my diagnosis, I kind of got my answer. 4:27 And I stopped looking for it outside myself the way I did before. So spirituality was not a good fit. And I thought, what is, like, what is my, really my essential special interest? And my essential special interest is writing and creativity. So I am going to do, I'm going to do the memoir, 4:49 but it's going to be about autism and writing from my perspective. It's not just going to be about my life is autistic or autism and spirituality or whatever. That's the focus. And I'll share life experience in it, obviously, but still, that's the theme. That's the focus. That's what I want to talk about. So that's back on. 5:08 I just wanted to share that with you guys. So as far as our topic goes, Autism and storytelling is a really fascinating intersection for me personally, and I want to share a little bit about my experience with that and some of the reasons why storytelling or fiction writing is, I feel, 5:31 a really good activity for a lot of autistic people, or at least why it's been a really good activity for me. And I know you hear a lot online about writing and building a platform and making money and all that stuff, but I'm not going to talk about any of that. That's not even on my list. 5:52 So if it's on yours, you're going to have to look for a more neurotypical kind of approach because that's not what I'm looking at here. I'm looking at how writing fiction can help us in our heart or in our soul. I mean, that's what's important to me. 6:07 So I came out with seven reasons that I feel writing fiction has helped me. May not resonate for you, but I'm going to share them. And the first one is it serves as a refuge or escape. And that was my experience in childhood. I mean, that essentially was my childhood. 6:27 I spent a lot of time lost in fantasy. I would draw. I would draw books. from my different fantasies. I would write short stories as I got older and illustrate them and bind them into books and really go the whole way with that. 6:46 And that was my way of kind of processing a world that was really pretty antagonistic to me. Another way that I have found writing fiction to be really, really helpful is that it provides a way I could connect with others. And this, again, goes all the way back to childhood. 7:08 When I was a kid, I grew up in the 60s and 70s. I mentioned this before. But we didn't have all the stuff kids have now. We had to kind of make up our own worlds. And that's one thing I was good at. I was good at crafting those scenarios. And that actually gave me a way... 7:23 to interact with other children, kind of like Sherlock interacts with people through his detective work. I was able to interact with other kids for a time. It didn't last forever through that. And I think if we write stories now, there's still that potential to connect with other people through our fiction. I mean, they may not understand, 7:45 like if we're writing about dark themes like I do, like my vampire story is dark. It's not... It's not super explicit, it's not super violent, but it is dark. And I think that... It's kind of a double-edged sword because there are going to be a lot of people who kind of freak out about that stuff. 8:04 But I think there are a lot of people, too, who will be hopefully, hopefully with my story, I'm envisioning like, I don't know, I'm envisioning bad Amazon reviews at this point. But I think there is that potential for people to see something in your story that they identify with and to make connections through that. 8:25 And I think that's important. My third thing is using story as a form of emotional healing. And I think as autistics, given our unique neurobiology, we run afoul of social norms and relationships all the time. And that generates a lot of unresolved trauma. 8:46 A lot of it goes back to before we even had language for what was happening. And we carry that with us. And most of us carry that with us. And stories are a way to explore that stuff and to express it, to bring it on into the light, as Jung would advise, and to look at it. 9:07 And to reframe it. And I think that's something I was doing, honestly, as a little, little kid when I was still drawing my stories before I was even using text. I was reframing things that happened to me. I can see it now. 9:24 and I think we could still do that and like my story my vampire story it's called trancing Miranda should be out soon there's a lot of dark stuff in that there's trauma and codependency and addiction and violence and a lot of dark stuff but I'm reframing it and when we take thi

There is more than one way of sharing 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

My experience with working a job vs. following my calling and how this relates to autism. As a late diagnosed autistic, I now feel that my original job choice was actually a form of masking that interfered with my ability to engage in my true calling. In this episode, I talk a bit about how that happened and why I think it's so important for autistic people to embrace their special interests, honor their true selves and follow their unique calling If you like this content please follow and / or share! Episode 5 Transcript: (If your podcast provider cuts off the transcript, you can read the full transcript by viewing this episode at AutisticPOV.com.) 0:06 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 on this episode of Autistic POV. Today we're going to be talking about work versus calling. 0:31 In other words, a job versus what you were born to do. And the reason I wanted to do this, well, two reasons. The first was that when I did our last episode, the Autistic Reading Roundup, I talked about several books that I'd read, science fiction books, several memoirs. And these were all books written by autistic authors. 0:54 And all of these authors or their characters struggled to find what it is that they were meant to do. And I think that's a struggle that is pretty much universal, certainly not confined to the neurodiverse. But in all the memoirs I read, autistic people had a lot of trouble with work. They had trouble fitting in at work. 1:16 They had trouble finding the right place to work. They had trouble dealing with colleagues. And I certainly have experienced that too all my life. So I think work is a big issue for a lot of autistic people. Certainly has been for me. 1:30 And I think the key to all that is the kind of work that we choose to do. That's my theory. So a job, it's the even exchange. You give a certain amount of yourself and you get compensated. And what you're giving may not be who you are. It may not move you. 1:51 You may not feel passionate about it. You might not enjoy giving it, but you do it to get the compensation. And sometimes this is okay. This can be okay. I've had jobs where it was okay. But I think a calling, on the other hand, is something you would do even if nobody paid you. 2:08 You would still show up because you love it, because you're not just making an exchange. You're sharing something of yourself that you need to share, that you feel called to share, that you want to share, and that you love to share. And I think this is huge. Particularly for me, 2:27 my special interest was always had to do with, I guess you would say communication, which is a little ironic because I'm very bad at face-to-face communication. But I loved communicating through story. I would draw a series of pictures that told stories. I would stay awake all night pretending and constructing these elaborate worlds in my mind and characters. 2:54 And I would escape into that all the time. And I loved it. I would write the stories down. I would illustrate them. I would make little books. I just loved it. And I always had social problems. But when I was younger, 3:08 I was kind of able to fit in with the neighborhood kids because I grew up in the 60s and 70s. So That was when playing pretend was a big deal because we didn't have a lot of the stuff that kids have now. Like we had to create our own worlds. And I was always really good at that. 3:26 I was the idea person when we would. want to create a pretend scenario, I was the one who did it and did it well and had the ideas and kind of kept things going. And so that was an outlet for me. It was a way I could interact with other kids for a time. 3:45 I mean, obviously, as I got older, that no longer worked. The point is, story was always huge to me. I loved to read. I loved to watch TV. I loved media. I loved to draw. I was very creative and it all kind of revolved around the idea of story. But as I got older, 4:05 I began to look at more and more, look at other people and how other people were living and how other people were acting. And as I experienced more and more social setbacks and social troubles, I decided to model myself more and more after other people. In grade school, I even changed my handwriting. 4:26 I still have two completely different kinds of handwriting because there was a girl who was very popular, and I would actually copy her handwriting. I started to write like her because I wanted to be like her. And I fell into this, this is my dog shaking her collar. I began to mask. 4:47 I began to want to behave like other people because that was safer than behaving like me because I didn't want to target on my back. I didn't want to be different. Even if it meant not being creative, even if it meant not doing the things I loved, I wanted to be like other people. 5:01 I wanted to blend in. So I worked really, really hard at that all through high school. I worked super hard at it in college, and it was stressful. And I'll talk more about masking and the toll it took on me maybe in another episode. But I think picking a career became part of the facade for me. 5:21 I wanted to do something that was normal, quote, and acceptable. And I wanted to be just like everybody else. And it's kind of sad when you think about it, that you have people who maybe could be an author or playwright or artist, 5:39 and they don't want to do any of that stuff because they don't want to be outlier. They want to be like everybody else. And that was where I was at. So I went away to school the first time. I majored in experimental psychology. And I did have an interest in experimental psychology, and I still do. 5:55 But college was not for me. I found college very difficult. I left school. I came back a few years later. And at that point, I had a child and I wanted to be practical. But more than that, I wanted to be ordinary. That was my goal. 6:09 And it's so sad to think now that there are a lot of us who could be extraordinary. And still, what a lot of people still want most is to be just average. And it's sad, but Average does not put a target on your back, and exceptional does. And I wanted to be average, 6:31 and I'm not saying anything against the career I chose because I've known people who, when I decided to be a nurse, and I've known people who have gone into nursing who are exemplary nurses. They're extraordinary nurses. They're so good at it, and they're so gifted at caring for people, and they're so intelligent, 6:50 and they do a great job. And I'm not putting that down. But I didn't choose nursing for those reasons. I chose nursing because it was what everybody else was doing. And I wanted to be like everybody else. So even though I didn't have a great aptitude for science, I mean, I could get through science, 7:10 but my real aptitude was for English. When I took my SATs, my English score was practically double what my math scores were. And Part of that was because I didn't go to school, but also part of it was because that was my natural aptitude was always for English. I always tested really, really high on things like that. 7:34 That was my special interest, and yet I chose to major in nursing because I wanted to be just an average girl with an average family. And I got my nursing license, and I went to work, and I raised a family, and I tried to do things the way other people did things, and it just imploded. 7:58 It definitely imploded. But I think what really is... The main way that it was damaging for me was that I was so sensitive and being in the hospital and being around people who were being brutalized by modern medicine was extraordinarily traumatic for me. I had a lot of trouble coping with it. 8:25 And I did it, but I just was hanging on like by the skin of my teeth the whole time and It was just really awful for me. It was really hard. And sometimes I think I did a good job, and sometimes I did a mediocre job, but it was not where my gifts slide. 8:43 And I think that's true of a lot of people. I think a lot of us, we want an identity, a specific identity, and we want to keep our heads down, and so we pick something safe. And there's no true safety in that. I don't think there's any true safety in that, I think, ultimately. 9:01 that situation can become at least emotionally unsafe for a lot of people. And that's what happened to me. And when other stresses in my life began to pile up, I got to the point where I couldn't do it anymore. And I talked a little bit about this in the last podcast, too. 9:18 But my point is this was a form of masking for me. To be a nurse was a mask. I actually envisioned myself not as somebody helping people or making a difference, but as a typical girl in a white uniform fitting in. 9:35 That was where I wanted to be, and that's what I did until I couldn't, until I couldn't do it anymore. And it was always hard for me. I never really fit in with the other nurses and I never really felt, I always felt like I was struggling just to, just to do a good job. And 9:58 I was somewhat successful. I got promoted everywhere I worked. I was in administration and supervisory positions, and I wrote policies, and I was always good at solving problems. So people like that. Administrators like the person who sees the problem and writes the policy. They like that person. And so I always was getting promoted. And that was fine. 10:22 That was fine. But I never really fit in. I was never happy. I was very stressed. I was just always, always terrified of making a mistake. I would wake up in the middle of the night worrying.

In my first reading roundup I talk about a wonderful Sci-Fi series and three incredible memoirs. All of the books covered are written by autistic authors. The memoirs detail the lived experience of three amazing late-diagnosed autistic women. And the Sci-Fi series features an autistic protagonist central to the adventure. Just as interesting, in my opinion, the theme of finding our true autistic calling is central to each of these books. All of the books featured are available in ebook. They are: Xandri Corelel Series (affiliate link) by Kaia Sønderby : 0. Testing Pandora, 1. Failure to Communicate, 2. Tone of Voice Drama Queen (affiliate link) by Sara Gibbs Label Me (affiliate link) by Francesca Baird U Don't Seem Autistic (affiliate link) by Kathleen Schubert If you like this content please follow and / or share!   Episode 4 Transcript If your podcast provider cuts off the transcript, you can see the full transcript for this episode at AutisticPOV.com Closed captioning is available on the website or via the podbean app.   0:00 This is Barbara Graver of Autistic POV and today we're going to be talking about four books by autistic authors. 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, this is Barbara Graver. 0:29 I'm so happy you could join me for my very first autistic POV reading roundup. So we're going to be talking about four different books, actually one series and three memoirs. And the reason I chose these books is because they all kind of center on a common theme. And  0:48 this is the theme I want to explore probably in our next episode, but I'm going to talk about the books in this one. The first one is a sci-fi series, and this series is written by Kaya Sounderby, and it's the Zandri Corello series. series, and it begins with a fantastic book called Failure to Communicate. 1:13 The second book I'm going to be talking about is Drama Queen, written by Sarah Gibbs, and this is an amazing memoir. It's my favorite autistic memoir I have read to date. It's fantastic. And then I'm going to talk about two other memoirs a little more briefly, primarily because they go along with the same theme, 1:32 and one is called You Don't Look Autistic, and you in this is spelled with a u, Actually, You Don't Seem Autistic is the name. And the last one is Label Me. So we're going to talk about all these books. And I'm going to try to explain why I like them and why I think they're, 1:50 they're all have a lot of value. And I do want to say with memoir, like I've heard people say, there's so many autism memoirs out there and that's true. There are, but I feel like all of them have value. Like every autistic memoir I read, 2:07 I resonate with or pick up on something different and I find them all helpful. They're helpful on multiple levels. I think they're helpful in terms of making you feel a little less alone. They're helpful in giving you insight. And they're helpful in terms of learning and support. I think they serve multiple purposes. And these books, 2:29 all of these books, and I just want you to kind of keep in mind as we talk about them, all deal with the importance of our calling. So the first series I wanted to talk about, the first book I want to talk about is the Zandri Corello series. And this is a sci-fi series. 2:49 It's set in just an amazing world. It's just a wonderful world. And the characters are great. And one of the things I loved about the world was the diversity of the world. And it shows... quote alien species as not all humanoids not they're not all guys in suits and i 3:08 understand why i i watch a lot of sci-fi and i read sci-fi and i like sci-fi and i understand why say star trek like all the quote aliens had to be able to be an actor in a suit and understand why the humanoid ideal is always or often represented in sci-fi, 3:29 and that every species encountered is a variation on the human ideal. But I really like the fact that this author, that Kara Sounderby, treated the various races throughout the galaxy as being capable of evolving from different types of life forms, different species. So there might be a species that's like dolphins. 3:56 There might be one that's very like various kinds of mammals. There might be others that are humanoid. And I thought this was a really cool way to present this. And the book was really, really well constructed. It was plotted out very well. It was suspenseful. The characters were engaging. The main character, Zandri, is autistic. 4:18 And I thought the author did a really good job of that, of portraying the challenges and the strengths of autism really well. And she is the heroine of the series. She's not a peripheral character. She's the heroine. And she has unique abilities to communicate, which seems kind of ironic, but really the way it's presented in the series, 4:41 it isn't, to communicate with different types of cultures and different languages and different kinds of people throughout the galaxy because of how she'd had to learn to do that as an autistic. And it's really well done. It's really suspenseful. It's a really great series that has three books. There's a kind of a prequel called Testing Pandora. 5:06 Then there's Failure to Communicate. And then there's Tone of Voice. That's book two. Testing Pandora is book zero. Failure to Communicate is book one. And Tona Voices book two, and I hope she writes book three, I really do. And I really liked the theme of this, of the autistic protagonist struggling, struggling with people, struggling with her past, 5:30 struggling with all kinds of things. But also finding her niche. She finds her niche in this. She finds her calling. And that's kind of a theme with all these books. And I think it's an important theme. And the second book I wanted to talk about is a memoir by Sarah Gibbs. 5:45 And that is called Drama Queen because that was something she was told all her life, that she was being dramatic. And that's a very common theme. charge, I think, that's leveled at autistics. It may come in various kind of deliveries, but it's a common thing that's said. And she focuses a lot, she focuses obviously on her childhood, 6:08 everyone talks about their childhood in these memoirs, but she also focuses a lot on her work life. And she does an excellent job of showing how she didn't fit in in the standard office 9 to 5 and why. And how other people treated her and how unfairly she was treated and what a double 6:28 standard really there was for people who were neurotypical and people who were autistic in general. And she was diagnosed relatively late in life, and I identified with a lot of what she said. Now, not everything. I never identify with everything people say in these memoirs, and I don't really think you should. 6:47 But I did identify with the fact that she was always making these fresh starts, and that was something I did really all my life. So she would just get overwhelmed and she would walk away from things like jobs and make a fresh start. And she was always making a fresh start. And I used to do that too. 7:07 I actually, I think between the ages of maybe 17 and 20, I didn't live anywhere. And by anywhere, I mean different states, different cities for more than six months. I just kept leaving and making these fresh starts that always failed. And she has the same mentality. She's like another fresh start. 7:30 And so I really, really identified with that. And another thing she talked about that I found really insightful is obsessiveness. And for her, a lot of her obsessions had to do with relationships. She would get very, very obsessed with either someone she was in a relationship with or someone she just had a crush on. 7:50 She even called it her crush monster. An interesting thing is she talked about how once she found out she was autistic, that kind of went away. And the reason it went away was because she understood that she was looking for something. She was looking for an answer in these partners, in these romantic partners. 8:13 She was trying to find an answer. she found that she was autistic. She had an answer for why life was so difficult for her, and she didn't need to do that anymore. And I thought that was brilliant. And I've kind of experienced that too. And I'll talk a little bit more about it. 8:29 Maybe we'll do an episode on spirituality at some point. But for me, my answer was not so much relationships, although I did some of that, but spirituality. I was always looking for an answer in terms of either organized religion or different specific spiritual practice. And I went through so many religions and so many spiritual practices. 8:53 I was like the perennial seeker. And I would go kind of from one thing to another. And not just when I found out I was autistic, but when I started to really think about it and integrate it and understand it. and kind of gain some perspective because of it, 9:11 that need to be immersing myself in different spiritual practices just kind of evaporated. It was really, really surprising. It just isn't really there anymore. And when I read that in Sarah Gibbs's book, I thought her crush monster for me, it was like crushes on spirituality more. The same thing kind of happened to me. 9:32 And I thought that's really interesting. So I'm kind of curious if anyone else has had that experience. And the other thing I really appreciated in Sarah Gibbs' book and Drama Queen was that she needed to find out what it is she did. And it turned out to be writing comedy. And the book is just brilliantly funny. 9:54 And I think that's a testament to how much this was her calling. And I feel personally that people with autism are probably more

In this episode, I talk a bit about being misdiagnosed with bipolar disorder for 20 years, prior to getting my (correct autism diagnosis) and why I've switched gears with the podcast. The memoir I mentioned in the episode is Drama Queen (affiliate link) by Sara Gibbs.  If you like this content, please follow and / or share! Episode 3 Transcript: If your podcast provider cuts off the transcript, you can read the full transcript by viewing this episode at AutisticPOV.com. Closed captioning is available via the website or on the podbean app. (If your podcast provider cuts off the transcript, you can read the full transcript by viewing this episode at AutisticPOV.com.) 0:06 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 and I'd like to welcome you to the show. Today I wanted to talk a little bit about late diagnosis and particularly my late diagnosis and 0:32 And you may have noticed that I changed the intro to the show a little bit, and that was because I listened to my first couple episodes, and the first episode was kind of just me talking, and the second episode was more informational. And I thought it's nice to share information, 0:52 but that's not really what I had in mind when I started the podcast. What I had in mind was just sharing my experience, my point of view, hence the name. So I redid the intro to be a little more reflective of that. And I also changed my plans for this episode a little bit too. 1:15 Initially, I was going to present facts and some of my experience, but facts too. And I decided that you guys could get that anywhere. And what I would like to share is my experience. I've been reading a lot of autism memoir and books by autistic writers and one 1:40 thing that I find particularly helpful is when I resonate with something someone says and I never resonate with all of it because we're all different. We're all different people and different people have different issues and different talents and different abilities and different ways of looking at things. But there are commonalities. 2:00 And I think after a lifetime of feeling alienated and alone, when I read something by someone who we share a commonality, it's helpful to me. So that's where I'm going with the podcast. And I wanted to talk just a little bit today about my own diagnosis. I got diagnosed very late in life. 2:25 I grew up in the 60s and 70s when people didn't really even know what autism was and if there was any concept of it at all it was Hans Asperger and his work and the idea that mostly mostly boys were autistic or only boys were 2:45 autistic so there was nothing to fall back on and my parents I think like all parents of that era felt that the best thing they could do for their kid was to make sure you could function in society. And just like everybody else, no matter how hard that was, that really didn't matter. 3:06 They thought they were doing you a favor if they forced you to be able to function as seamlessly as possible in society. So there's a lot of pressure, a lot of pressure to do that. My mother used to make excuses for me. 3:23 She'd say things like I was the youngest kid in the class and I was an only child and these things were supposed to explain some of my problems, but they really didn't. And I got other explanations, too, that were not so positive. And, you know, 3:43 I was often told that I was selfish and uncaring and just like my father who may have been autistic. And I was made to feel very defective growing up. And I tried very, very hard to fit in. And I never really succeeded. And it's kind of funny looking back. I look back and I think, 4:06 grade school was horrible but I think in high school I was actually able to do it I was reading this really really good book by autistic writer and I'll link to it in the comments and she kept talking about her fresh starts like all her fresh starts 4:23 and that was what high school was for me and I turned myself inside out at a very high cost to fit in and quote be popular And it was kind of funny because I actually thought I fooled everyone. And now, looking back, I think popular girls, they get a pretty bad rap, and oftentimes it's deserved. 4:46 But I think looking back on my experience in high school, I think people felt sorry for me. And I think people were, some of the girls I hung out with were just plain gracious about And it wasn't necessarily that I fooled them, but I tried. And the effort, the Herculean effort to do that caused me, I think, 5:09 to have my first probably autistic burnout when I was still in high school. And that was really severe. And there were a lot of other problems that went with that. Maybe I could talk about that at some other time. But I can't say that I knew I was different because 5:25 because I didn't know when I was young that someone could be different. I thought I was just defective. I thought my difference was that I thought life was that hard for everyone. I thought I didn't try hard enough, and I just didn't really understand why things were so hard for me. I thought I was selfish, 5:43 and I thought I was lazy, and I thought I was all kinds of things, but it could have never occurred to me that I was autistic. But I was able to eventually get through college and have a career for a while, even though it was very difficult. 5:59 But I was able to do it for a period of about 13 years. And my self-esteem, I think, was so low because the thing that was hard for me was I knew I was reasonably bright, but yet I made all these terrible mistakes. And the only explanation for that was that I was just being a fool. 6:22 I was just foolish. I was just impulsive, and I was just so many bad things. And I got that feedback consistently probably throughout my life. And eventually I hit a wall. And I had been working as an RN for about 13 years, raising a single family, having meltdowns, like struggling, finding life really, really difficult. 6:51 And finally we had a family tragedy that happened that made life, went from extremely difficult to impossible. It was just impossible for me to cope with this tragedy. And I experienced what I guess would be severe autistic burnout at this point. It was almost like a breakdown. And I just couldn't cope anymore. 7:18 I could not do it anymore. My employer went out of business, and I was glad. I was glad he went out of business because I had to stop. And so I entered the mental health system at that point. And I was told I was bipolar. Like so many people are, I think nowadays. 7:37 And, um, I was put on medication for a time. I was on a lot of medication and it never helped. And I kept telling people it's not helping. And when you tell people that, um, what they tend to do is just put you on more medication. And this was in the early 2000s. 7:58 And autism in women still wasn't really well known at that point. So I don't necessarily blame anyone for that. But I do feel that somebody should have realized that I was not bipolar. And so I ended up on medication. I did go back to work as a nurse. And it was terrible. It was still terrible. 8:19 And I kept telling people the medication isn't helping for a period of about Almost 20 years I told people that, and they basically didn't listen to me. And finally a family member was diagnosed with autism, and as happens to so many people, I started reading about it because I wanted to understand what they were going through. 8:41 And as I read it, I identified with more and more things that I read. More and more things seemed to be oddly like me. And so I met, actually met with the psychologist who had identified, diagnosed the family member. And I said, you know, it's the funniest thing. 9:02 I'm reading this stuff, and I feel like it sounds like me. And I expected her to say, don't be silly. And I said, I wonder if I should have an evaluation. And instead of saying, don't be silly, she said, I think that might be a good idea. And I was really taken aback. 9:20 that this could be the issue, this was in 2022. And I had my evaluation, it took, well actually I think it was in 2021 when I spoke with her and it took a period of time to get all the ducks lined up with insurance and scheduling and all that stuff. But I had the evaluation. 9:41 It was a very good evaluation. It was very extensive. And I was given the diagnosis of autism. And she told me she didn't think I was bipolar at all. And I did have some other comorbidities, such as anxiety and mild depression, which I think anyone, well, I shouldn't say anyone, 10:01 but I think a lot of people who live their whole life as undiagnosed autistics will end up with anxiety and depression. I think it's very, very likely. So I got the diagnosis, and initially I was really excited to have it because I had been telling people for 20 years I didn't think I was bipolar, 10:23 and I had been telling people in particular 19 years, I guess, and I'd been telling people in particular quite, quite often for probably seven years prior to that. that something else was wrong. I kept saying something else is wrong, and one of the reasons I thought that was because of problems I was having with writing. 10:46 I was trying to write full-time at that point, and I considered myself talented as a writer, but yet I was still having these terrible, terrible problems with constructing plots and with staying on a storyline and the actual structuring of the story. And I knew there was a reason for that. 11:10 And I knew it had nothing to do with being bipolar. And that was one of the things that kind of moved me to keep telling people over and over

An autistic perspective on freewriting and how it can help us improve creativity, explore identity, and even improve physical and emotional health. This episode was a bit of an experiment. While it was fun sharing information, future episodes will be more conversation and based mostly on my personal experience (as opposed to research). I wanted to share the following resources that I used to prep for this episode: Psychological Benefits of Free Writing. Therapeutic Journaling PDF I also referred to Expressive Writing by James W. Pennebaker and John Frank Evans. And Tony Attwood's book The Complete Guide to Asperger's Syndrome. Both should be available from your local library or elsewhere via interlibrary loan.  If you like this content, please follow and / or share! Episode 2 Transcript: If your podcast provider cuts off the transcript, you can read the full transcript by viewing this episode at AutisticPOV.com. Closed captioning is available via the website or on the podbean app. 0:03 Welcome to Autistic POV. My name is Barbara Graver. I am a late diagnosed autistic, and I hope you'll join me as we talk about life, identity, and self-acceptance from an autistic point of view. Today, I wanted to talk about free writing. And free writing is to essentially just start writing and to keep writing. 0:29 And it's a stream of consciousness thing where you jot down whatever comes into your head. And one of the reasons I want to talk about this is because I'm doing it right now. And I've been toying with the idea of writing like an autism memoir for a long time, and it's very hard for me to do. 0:46 So I thought maybe the free writing would help. And I think it is. It's early days, but I think it is. So the main things I wanted to cover about free writing, I have three points I'd like to make about free writing. And I do have references for each of these. 1:01 Those will be in the show notes because this is a short podcast. I'm not going to be taking a real deep dive. So if you want to learn more, I'm going to give you the references that I used and hopefully they would answer 1:13 some of your questions or at least get you started on your own research if this resonates. So the first, the three topics I want to talk about are free writing and increased creativity. Free writing as a way to explore identity and and free writing and the potential for healing. 1:32 And you could do a whole podcast probably on each of these, but I just want to give a little bit of an overview. So increased creativity. There was a study that was published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology on free writing and creativity. I actually couldn't read the study because it was paywalled, 1:51 but I did find a website that talked about it. So that's what I'll be linking to in the description. But the gist of it is that the study showed that people who did free writing had increased innovation and creativity. And this is something that I think a lot of people already know. 2:09 I mean, there's the artist's way, there's various things about journaling and how it helps. But I think a lot of people haven't actually tried it. I mean, we know it'll probably work, but we don't really want to put the time in. And that's understandable. I mean, I kind of feel that way too. 2:26 So one of the things I've done is I've limited it to 20 minutes. I have a timer and I recommend, I love my timer. I have a timer that when you turn it, it's actually, I'm not sure how to describe this, but as you turn it, it's a colored timer. 2:43 It shows a colored wedge of how much time you have left. So every time you look at it, you could see that time going down. And it's very helpful. I find it very helpful. So one of the strategies is to just do a set amount of time. And with free writing, 2:59 a lot of times people think free writing is just writing whatever comes into your head. And it's not necessarily. You can pick a topic. Particularly if you're, and we'll discuss a couple different kinds of topics, but if you're dealing with a creative issue, you could start writing something about that, definitely. 3:18 Or, you know, you could write something unrelated and just see what kind of pops in. And autistic people tend to be very, very creative. But we also tend to have a lot of issues around creativity. And I'm going to talk about that, just that, in another episode. But I think if you're autistic, you're probably creative. 3:39 And if you're autistic and creative, you probably already know this. And we can get in a loop with our creativity. And there are a lot of negative things that could come in, like perfectionism and self-censoring and judging ourselves that can really get us all tangled up. Or at least that's been my experience with writing. 4:02 Been writing all my life, but I've never published anything. I've rarely even showed my writing to people. And so it's not surprising that we have reservations and feel conflicted. And I think that journaling can be a way to recover from this. It's a way that we can kind of regain our center with our creativity. 4:25 And if you've read The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron, she was essentially in creative burnout when she started the process. So it helped her, and it's helped a lot of people. But also what I find with journaling, and I also use dreams this way, but just sticking with journaling, 4:44 is that I get ideas when I journal, even when I'm not journaling about my writing or about my work. And this is why with free writing, you can pick any topic or no topic. And whatever you pick, it's very likely that while you're doing it, because you're in kind of a flow state, 5:03 That something will just pop in. It's kind of like the way you get ideas when you're in the shower, except you're writing. So you just write it down. You just add it in. That's what I do. Like I'll be writing about an experience or I'll pick a topic. 5:17 of some kind and all of a sudden an idea pops in and I just include that, put a little asterisk by it and I come back to it. So that is one way and it is a proven way. It's evidence-based way to increase creativity and innovation and you do not have to write about your project. 5:34 You can write about whatever you want and you'll still get that effect. So that's the first one, increased creativity. That's the first benefit. The second one is that free writing can be a way to explore identity. You just write about anything, and it could be experience that pertains to identity, certainly. It could be your special interests. 5:56 A lot of us, we get our identity from our special interests. So this is something we can explore. One of my special interest going all the way back to childhood was vampires. I was always very interested in vampires and gothic fiction. And I could trace this all the way back, 6:13 like I grew up in the 60s and 70s, so I could trace this all the way back to the TV show Dark Shadows and the main character Angelique. And there were reasons why At that point in my life, I identified with this. 6:27 And through the free writing, I could see why grade school was very, very hard for me. And there was a reason why a powerful, beautiful, exotic witch like Angelique would appeal to me and why the whole world of Collinwood and stuff was kind of escaped from me. 6:46 So the same thing with books, like along that line, I always like gothic fiction. So this is a way that we shape our identity because oftentimes our special interests kind of become our identity. And this is something that happens with neurotypicals too. Somebody will be like their job, like they're a lawyer. That's who they are. 7:06 For us, it might be we have a certain interest and there's nothing wrong with that. Tony Atwood in his book on Asperger's, which I'll also link to, kind of like an old book, a little out of date, but still he makes some good points, I think. 7:21 And one thing he says about Asperger's, I always want to make that a B, is that identity is an issue. Identity is an issue for autistics. It just is. We don't have that strong sense of central coherence that neurotypicals have. So we spend a lot of our life 7:42 trying to figure out who we are and define who we are and feel secure in who we are. And it can be a really difficult journey. And this is another thing we should do a whole episode on, so I don't want to go too into it. But we can explore this through our writing. 7:58 We can explore what our identity is, how it was shaped, what we want our identity to be. And again, we don't have to necessarily set up. set out to talk about these topics. Like I was writing about an incident that happened to me in grade school, which I'll talk more about in our next point. 8:16 And I got a clear sense of how my identity formed from this. So that could be very helpful. But I think the main thing about free writing and identity is it's learning about who we are and how we became that person. And it can be about who we want to be and changes we want to make. 8:34 But I think it's more lends itself to actually discovering who we are. And we tend to think of ourselves as odd or weird or, you know, and sometimes we need to understand the process. Like, is it weird to be interested in vampires? Not so much now, but when I was younger, definitely. And yet, 8:55 when you see how that happened and why, it just goes a long way to kind of incorporating that and feeling good about it. So I think that's another great example great way that free writing can help us. And the third way is the potential for healing. And this is kind of what I'm doing now. 9:14 I got this book, Expressive Writing by, I think it's James Pennybaker. Again, I'll put a link to this in the show notes. But Pen

A bit about my autism diagnosis and my plans for my podcast, Autistic POV. I hope you'll check back and, if you're able, please consider following the show. This episode includes a few important caveats for the show, including my target audience. I'm planning on airing new episodes about twice a month. I do hope you'll check back!  #autism #late-diagnosis If you like this content, please follow and / or share! Episode 1 Transcript: If your podcast provider cuts off the transcript, you can read the full transcript by viewing this episode at AutisticPOV.com. Closed captioning is available via the website or on the podbean app. 0:03 Welcome to Autistic POV. My name is Barbara Graver. I am a late diagnosed autistic and I hope you'll join me as we talk about life, identity, and self-acceptance from an autistic point of view. 0:18 Hi everybody, this is Barbara Graver and today I'd just like to share a little bit about what I'll be doing on the podcast and what I have planned going forward. And this is kind of hard for me a little bit because it's my first time really talking about autism in public. 0:39 And it's funny because I could talk about a lot of things online and have--personal spiritual experience, my work, my feelings, you know, personal stuff. But I've never really talked about this. So it's new. It's a little bit threatening, but I'm going to go ahead and try it. 0:58 So, part of the reason I think it's a challenge for me is because I wasn't diagnosed until 2022, which means that I've been kind of trying to fit into a world that I could never be totally comfortable with for decades. And it was a lot to process. 1:18 It kind of cast my whole history and experience in a new light. And it took me a while to To sort of get a handle on that, I mean, honestly, I wouldn't say that I have necessarily got a handle on it, but I think I've made progress. 1:36 So I got diagnosed in April of 2022, and now it's two years later, and it just so happened that Some of the issues I've been having lately with my writing kind of peaked and I thought, kind of like Joanna Penn says, maybe I should create the kind of content I need to hear. 1:57 So I was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder one. I was diagnosed by psychologists and autism spectrum disorder one is what used to be called Asperger's and to me it's sort of like the walking wounded version of autism people can function in society 2:17 more or less but there's cost to that or at least there has been for me there's been a cost and that cost has actually been pretty high I would say across the board but I do have mixed feelings about honestly about about talking about the challenges of autism. And part of the reason for this, I think, 2:39 is because I've known people, known a couple moms who've had nonverbal autistic children. So sharing that same diagnosis is weird to me. I wish they'd kept Asperger's, honestly, but they didn't. So this is the terminology we have. And I'm going to use it with the understanding that most of the stuff I talk about 2:59 in this podcast is probably going to be pretty autism spectrum disorder one specific, because that's what I know. And even within that demographic, I know there are a lot of differences in the way people process things. So I don't know if what I say is going to make sense to you necessarily, but 3:19 But I think that's always the way. And I think all we can really do is try. So I guess those are my caveats. But for me personally, my initial evaluation for autism was really comprehensive. And there was a lot of cognitive. I received a lot of cognitive information as part of that. 3:42 And I know not everybody can do the evaluation, but I think for anyone who can, it's worth it because a good evaluation will give you a wealth of information about your mind and the way you think. It's not just about checking the autism box. It's about everything else you learn. And, you know, 4:01 one of the things I learned was that there was a cognitive split, which is not uncommon with autism. And I think that's part of the reason why I find constructing novels and staying in my lane genre-wise kind of a challenge. but there's a lot more I want to learn about this and share. 4:20 I don't, this is just the introduction. I don't want to try to go into everything, but, but there are a lot of issues and they're different for different people. Also, there are a lot of really good resources out there and I'd like to share some of them. 4:34 And I think doing the podcast to kind of keep me a little bit on track with that. As far as the format for the show goes, um, Interviews are hard for me. I've been active online for a while. I have a kind of successful blog, mysticreview.com, and I've done a lot of media around that. 4:54 And I can do both sides of interview if I have to, but I do find it stressful. So I'm presently undecided about the interviews. I do definitely want to share information, but this might be in the form of a review or a resource or a topic or aspect of my own experience. But we'll see. 5:16 I'm not closing the door to interviews. I'm just saying that I'm not sure. And it's kind of like to me when I undertook the journey of to understand the psychic dreams and psychic experiences I was having all the way back in 2010. When I chose to undertake that journey, I felt very isolated and very alone. 5:40 And that's when I started the Mystic Review because I wanted to take other people with me. I wanted to share that with other people. And I did. So that's it. That's my intro. So please consider following the show if you're interested in this kind of content and checking back. And I hope to see you next time 6:02 And so until then, this is Barbara Graver, and I hope to catch up with you again soon! _______________ Theme music by Caffeine Creek  

How a recent synchronicity helped me apply a bit of Jungian theory to a dream (The Spirit Dream) whose full meaning has eluded me. This synchronicity explained what a synchronicity was, provided an example of a synchronicity, AND helped crack a dream I've been wrestling with forever! You can read the blog post on this experience on the Mystic Review (MysticReview.com) here: A Creation in Time: Jungian Synchronicity, a Very Special Dream and My New Favorite Podcast You can also read the Spirit Dream in full here: The Spirit Dream and let me know what you think! And if you like my content please subscribe, comment and/or share!!! Please Note: I misspoke when I was talking about Jung's concept of the self. It is psychoid membrane NOT memory :) Also, I don't do a very good job explaining Jung (or Murray Stein) here, so if you want a little more depth please check out the Murray Stein quote in the blog post or the original video on This Jungian Life!

Just wanted to share the welcome to my new (actually reclaimed) YouTube channel. All of my podcasts will be posting to YouTube. Many, though probably not all, will have video. So if you like to listen on YouTube please check out YouTube.com/@MysticReview! I will posting all new episodes of the podcast as both YouTube videos and podcasts! To read the articles that accompany the videos please check out my blog at MysticReview.com #dreams #paranormal #video