Forgetting the Self

Autistic Identity in Action

In the thirteenth century, a young monk with many names travels from Japan to China to discover the truth. The journey is perilous and takes many weeks. I picture storms and sea beasts, a strange sun overhead. I picture the mast’s vertical swinging like a compass against a blurred horizon, until he barely knows which way is up.

After all that, the destination is a disappointment. Eihei Dōgen, which is the name I know him by, goes from temple to temple looking for a teacher. The Chinese monks are lazy and noisy. They fart and spit. They tell jokes in a vernacular young Dōgen, despite his excellent learning, cannot understand.

One morning, walking in the grounds of a temple, he sees the chief cook laying mushrooms out to dry in the sun. The old man moves with a lightness that belies his age. His body is made of something more fluid than skin, more fluid than bone.

Dōgen stops to watch. I have him chewing on a stalk, a frown and squint about his face, like the hero in some Western. His robes hang off him awkwardly, as if he hasn’t yet grown into them. He watches the old man for a long time. He watches as if his life depends on it. Finally he speaks.

‘Don’t you have better things to do?’ he says. ‘Why don’t you get someone else to do that?’

The old cook laughs. He doesn’t quite look up.

‘Why would I get someone else to live my life?’ he says.

Neuroqueering

As a late-discovered autistic person, I’m just beginning to understand the freedom found in being myself. Without realising I was doing it, I was living in a mask. Now I’m learning that appearing calm is not the same as being calm. That appearing to be an easy-going person who enjoys parties doesn’t mean I really am. I’m learning to say no to things, and yes to other things, learning to follow inklings and to listen to myself. Slowly I’m uncovering a sense of who I am and what I like.

There’s a paradox here and I keep tripping over it. As a long time zen practitioner I know that any identity, even an autistic one, is fluid and provisional. In laying the mushrooms out to dry, the old cook wasn’t doing anything special. He wasn’t trying to be a ‘good’ person, or a ‘wise’ person, or even a ‘normal’ person. He wasn’t performing an identity. He was simply, wholeheartedly, living his life.

Discovering I’m autistic has freed me from a lifetime of feeling there was something wrong with me, something I could never put my finger on. It turns out I’m not a wrong-headed neurotypical, I’m a perfectly adequate autistic person. But I don’t want to take on a fixed autistic identity, as if it could explain me. That would only be another mask.

The diagnostic criteria for autism are problematic, not only because they view autism as a set of deficits, but also because they attempt to pin down the un-pin-downable mess of life as we experience it. Diagnostic criteria are fixed; human beings are not. When I try to apply them to myself I have to crane my neck, looking back at my own behaviour to see if it matches what the manual says. While I’m caught up in this attempt at translation, the lived experience gets lost.

But then, these criteria were never designed to be read by me in the first place. They were written for, and by, clinicians looking at us from outside. What I’m finding more helpful is to be immersed in complex and nuanced stories shared within the autistic community. I see myself reflected in these stories, but they also draw me out beyond the limits of who I thought I was. 

The work of autistic scholar Nick Walker, in particular, has been a revelation. Walker coined the term ‘neuroqueer’, primarily a verb, to describe what she calls ‘an emergent array of subversive and transformative practices’. While she recognises that it can be useful for people to identify as autistic, or otherwise neurodivergent, she says that ‘we shouldn’t allow our conception of neurodiversity and its potentials to be constrained by such categories’. For Walker, autistic experience is best seen as a ‘horizon of possibilities’.

Though this concept has its roots in queer theory, and though traditional gender roles are thrown into question by it, Walker is clear that the term can be used by anyone, regardless of gender or sexuality. In fact, she never quite defines it, saying instead: ‘You’re neuroqueer if you’re neuroqueer’. Neuroqueering is, she says, ‘something anyone can potentially do, and there are infinite possible ways to do it and infinite possible ways to be transformed by it.’

Walker envisions a world in which we’re not constrained. For me, this is inspiring. It’s an invitation to treat life as an experiment, to question everything, and to explore our identities through everyday acts of living. As I write this, I recognise my privilege—a black man ‘acting autistically’ in public, for example, might be misinterpreted as aggressive, making him vulnerable—and I hope to come back to the impact of intersectionality on autistic experience in a future post. But in the context of the history of neurodivergence, where all who think and act differently have been pathologised, the concept of neuroqueering is at heart a political one, putting power to self-define in the hands of the autistic person—and of all people.

Active Identity

Later in life, after returning to Japan, Dōgen began to write. Much of his writing is so far beyond me I don’t know where to start with it. But there’s one phrase, from the opening chapter of his major work the Shōbōgenzō, that has been with me for years:

‘To study the self is to forget the self,’ he says.

Whether we’re meditating, or drying mushrooms, or doing anything else, we’re engaged in a process of what Dōgen calls ‘studying the self’: coming into being each moment through the practice of simply living our lives. Neuroscience supports this, showing that what we do changes the structure of our brains, which shapes who we are in the world. Because our lives are constant change, ‘who we are’ is continuously emerging. This means the process of coming to know ourselves is also a moment-by-moment forgetting: both seeing and seeing through the self. We live at the unfolding edge of a cresting wave, continuously forming and dissolving. It’s in this process that we recognise our connection with the ocean of each other, beyond ‘us and them’, or ‘me and not-me’, binaries.

Rev. Master Daishin Morgan, a contemporary British monk and descendant of Dōgen’s lineage, writes: ‘There is that which is free, even free of being itself.’ This is the freedom of self-forgetting that happens at the unfolding edge of neuroqueer experience. In order to be free of yourself, you first have to fully be yourself. The only place to do that is in the moment-by-moment practice of your life.