I should probably start off with the important disclaimer: When you’ve met one autistic person, you’ve met one autistic person. No two of us are alike. That’s why it’s called a spectrum. We have different sensitivities, strengths, weaknesses, interests, and needs for accommodation. That’s a big part of why we are so misunderstood, and I think, why so many people think so many of us are lying about our being on the spectrum in the first place. But that’s not what this post is about.
Hi. I’m Barb. And I’m autistic. Some people prefer to identify themselves as a person with autism, but I’m not one of those people, because that makes it sound like it’s something I could be cured of, or something that could be cut out of my brain and you’d suddenly have the “normal” person that the world is always pressuring me to be, and nothing could be further from the truth. I have blue eyes, and I’m autistic.
I’m also introverted, and I’m also, well, me. So some of the following characteristics may be purely a result of my autism, and some may be a sweet, sweet combination of everything that makes me who I am in general. Who knows. But here are some facts.
- I thrive on routine. When I’m expecting things to go a certain way and something throws a wrench into the works, it freaks me out.
- It makes me nervous to try strange food. When it turns out that I like it, I love it, but if it is cold when I expect it to be hot, or the texture is off, or I just plain don’t like the taste, I get this “Oh HELL no!” panic, run away, run away reaction that I struggle to conceal.
- Crowds make me nervous.
- I can’t handle overstimulation in the form of too much noise, lights, activity, strange places, excitement, etc.
- I have limited energy and need to recharge between activities, and can only do so much in one day.
- I have zero tolerance for frustration.
- If something doesn’t make sense, I need to know why. Like, I NEED to know why. NOW.
- I’m easily confused.
- I like to have a plan, and I like for things to go according to that plan.
- I can only tolerate change if I have advance notice, and if the change is rational.
- I absolutely hate not knowing what’s going on around me.
- At the end of the day, I like to come home to my familiar place and see my familiar husband and my do my familiar thing and pet my familiar dogs and sit in my familiar chair and eat my familiar food and sleep in my familiar bed.
But what do I live for? Travel. Particularly: Foreign Travel. It’s my reason for being.
I know. It makes absolutely no sense. Given everything I just told you, it’s a miracle I even leave the house.
But it’s true. Iceland will be my 24th country. And one of the things that bothers me the most in this life is that I’m getting older, and there’s so much to see, and not enough time left for me to see it. That breaks my heart into a thousand pieces. I sincerely hope that when I take my last trip, I don’t know it’s my last trip, or I’ll be crying the entire time.
But back to the subject at hand. Why would someone like me find travel so meaningful?
For a long time, I couldn’t answer that question. But then my therapist helped me pinpoint it. Travel is like a vacation from the immense pressure society puts on me to stop acting autistic.
When I travel, I’m surrounded by people who are expecting me to act strange (from a neurotypical perspective), so my acting strange doesn’t seem strange to them. I am afforded a little bit of grace, because “she’s not from here.”
They are also not looking at me through a lens of accumulated irritations. They’ve never met me before, so they’re not judging me in advance. They’re not thinking, “Oh, God, here comes Barb again.”
They’re actually giving me a chance. Like people do the first time they interact with me. It’s like being in a universal societal autistic honeymoon phase.
When traveling, I don’t have to experience the post honeymoon rejection of, “Yeah, let’s do this again sometime!” and then watching them avoid me whenever they see me. Or finding out what they say behind my back. Or overhearing the, “She’s weird” whispers. There’s nothing quite like that state of perpetual ostracization, especially when most neurodivergent people experience it, and yet most neurotypical people tell us we bring it on ourselves.
Because, yeah, I don’t have the body language or the facial expressions. I don’t do the eye contact. I don’t always get the jokes. I care about things others don’t care about. The things that interest me bore the shit out of other people. I make people impatient. I overshare. I’m blunt. I’m awkward. There’s “something off” about me. So the honeymoon never lasts long.
But then the people you meet when you travel never last long either, do they? So, it’s a movable clean slate. A chance to be accepted at face value. A chance to not have to explain yourself every freakin’ minute of every freakin’ day.
When they think, “There’s something off about that girl” in Iceland, their next thought is, “Oh, well, she’s not from Iceland, so of course she’s going to seem a little off.” And they cut me the slack that I don’t get in my regular life.
The liberation that comes with that is a heady feeling indeed. It actually makes me feel giddy. Is this what it feels like to be “normal”? Like, an automatic get-out-of-jail-free type acceptance card?
God, you lucky bastards.
And then, there’s the boomerang effect, too. Because I’m feeling giddy, I’m more relaxed. I’m less traumatized. I let my guard down. I’m not expecting the inevitable hot poker, so I don’t flinch in advance. All the beautiful stuff in me comes shining through. And that has to show, and in turn make people more willing to want to be around me.
Travel. The gift that keeps on giving.
And it doesn’t hurt that while all of that is going on, I’m getting to indulge in all sorts of other nerdiness, such as museums and art galleries and history and anthropology and geology and geography and nature and the pure joy of learning new things and gathering new fodder for this blog. Who could ask for anything more?
So given that, I’ll take the disruption in routine, the weird food, the overstimulation, the exhaustion, and the confusion. Although I must admit that after about day 8, I really start missing my dogs and begin to get homesick. But like I said, I only have so much travel time left in my life, so… onward.
So, yeah. I’m Barb. I’m autistic. Don’t mess with my status quo. And the world is my oyster.
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