11. Bury the Lede

Asaka goes to College

Welcome to CHAPTER ELEVEN of #TechnicallyAutistic: Lessons from the Periphery, where I talk about how I started writing articles about disability in college.

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Then, COVID happened. I don’t have anything to say that no one else has already said. But yes, I was quarantining in my childhood bedroom when I was accepted into The College of New Jersey, as a Journalism major. 

Writing was always the one thing that propelled me to reach heights I thought I’d ever reach. After debating between a creative writing and journalism major, I decided that journalism was more practical. Besides, a creative writing major would require me to take fiction workshops, and with my crappy imagination, I didn’t think I would be able to pass the classes. So journalism it was.

Later that month, I was diagnosed with ADHD in the most unceremonious way imaginable. I was asking Dr. Roberts* for formal documentation so that I could get accommodations in college, and I honestly couldn’t care less what was on it, as long as I got the accommodations I needed. Dr. Roberts obviously knew that I was diagnosed with autism when I was younger and had been prescribing medication for anxiety. 

But I thought I’d ask: “I was also wondering where I could get tested for ADHD?”

“Yes, Asaka, I already have it on your chart. You have symptoms of ADHD, Predominantly Inattentive, and I’ll be sure to put that on your letter.”

And just like that, it was on paper.

Even after the world shut down, I continued to live like a doomsday prepper. Every time I had a new idea for writing, I would wonder if I could finish it “before I died.” But that urgency never stopped me from mindlessly scrolling on social media. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t bring myself to seize the moment I had right in front of me. Instead, I tried to reserve the moment I envisioned in some distant, elusive future.

Intro to Journalism was a small class with only about five people. I immediately got along with my first professor, Professor Webber.

Excitement coursed through my veins as I learned about all those sayings: If your mother says she loves you, check it out, which means fact-check everything. Follow the money, meaning investigate people’s financial incentives. Don’t bury the lede, meaning the most newsworthy part of my article should be in the first sentence, not the seventeenth paragraph.

Learning the AP style, or Associated Press’s editorial guidelines, was boring. It has arbitrary rules, like spelling out the numbers one through nine, numerizing 10 and above, and using a.m. and p.m. instead of AM and PM. I don’t think I’ve met anyone who doesn’t find these rules a bit annoying.

Once I started sharing Google Docs with other people, I couldn’t help but feel a bit self-conscious about my writing process. I couldn’t believe so many of my classmates could type a sentence from beginning to end in one go. I always spat out bullet-point-sized fragments rather than complete sentences, right up until the final draft.

Since I was the managerial editor for my high school paper, I knew how to proofread other people’s work. But when I had to write an article myself, I was so exhausted by the endless copying-and-pasting, dragging-and-dropping, and sifting through [placeholders] that I’d overlook even the simplest mistakes, like subject-verb disagreement, missing transition words like “because” or “for,” and duplicated words.

In high school, I had seven classes every day, and in college, I had four classes every week, and at last, I was free from math. But it didn’t get easier. Dense readings made my head hurt, no matter how much I broke them up, and I struggled to write detailed responses, without daily classes to spoonfeed me information and without Sparknotes to bail me out.

Six month into quarantine, my family life was falling apart; mental illness runs in the family, and I’m very, very lucky to have grown up with the education, support, and knowledge I did. After I had to leave my house for a couple of days, I began to fall behind by weeks instead of days.

I remember covering the redness of my nose with makeup in my chilly childhood bedroom, the outside eerily quiet except for distant sirens now that the cicadas were gone. I couldn’t find stability, certainly not here, but also not in the idea of having my own place someday.

I knew that I had to do something about the brain fog so that I could make a living for myself, but I feared that anyone I turned to for help would have more of a reason to say “See, it’s your emotions.” I wished the world could see what I saw: studying what I liked didn’t fix it, getting more naps didn’t fix it, and now, I was holding back tears, unable to look away from what was truly at stake.

I told you so, I wanted to scream. I fucking told you so. Instead, I typed a wordy email to Judy:

Even though I never went past the bare mininum in all my classes, I had no time or energy left to write, or even brush my teeth. It hurts to accept that this has been a recurring, persistent pattern in my life, not just a "rough patch."

Today, I spoke to my disability office coordinator, who encouraged me to take 3 classes instead of 4 classes per semester (and making them up during summer and winter breaks) from now on.

But I'm not that relieved, because, before in the blink of an eye, I'll fall off the proverbial cliff. 

I don't know how I'll transition to a 9 to 5 job, when I'll be recieving a fraction of the intensive accomodations I'm recieving right now at college. 

On FaceTime, Judy nodded with her eyes downcast, making it clear that she believed me and wasn’t going to dismiss my struggles as “depression and anxiety.” though she must’ve sensed some despair in me. She reminded me that I was starting my first semester of college in unprecedented times and that I’d overcome so much before—I could this time, too.

Then—as she always did when something major major came up—she asked: “Asaka, does your psychiatrist know?”

I bristled. “Well, she can’t do much. She’ll prescribe more antidepressants. When has that ever helped?”

“There are different medications,” Judy replied. “I’m sure something could make a difference.”

Judy said she’ll also talk to Dr. Roberts. When I met Dr. Roberts, she proposed a new option: Zealon*, an off-label antidepressant used for ADHD, to add to my SSRI. 

We started cautiously, monitoring my blood pressure. Everything was good, and the first time, I had the energy to not only do my homework every day but also write articles.

Gone were the days I had to plead with my parents for permission to start a blog. In the second semester, I wrote an article for Thought Catalog, Fuck Cheugy, I Can’t Get Over These Early 2010s Trends.

It was surreal because that website was popular when I was in middle school, and I was able to get a byline, just in time before they rebranded into Collective World. I remember pitching the article as something like “Eff Cheugy, I Can’t Get Over These Early 2010s Trends” and when I saw that they had spelled out the four-letter word on the headlines, my face turned red because I thought Professor Webber was going to hate me (she doesn’t). But more than anything, I was proud.

As a teenager, I wasn’t the author of my own story. I was a method actor, cycling through existential fears by taking platitudes like “Nothing lasts forever” and “The future is unknown” to their bleakest logical conclusions. If Frankenstein conducted botched thought experiments, I was the zombie. If Candide, ou l'Optimisme was about cynicism, then I was your guy Candide. But when I wrote that article, I wasn’t thinking about any world other than the one I lived in, the only one I had.

In my next article, I buried the lede. I wrote about how my disability affected me, never once using the word “autism” or ADHD for that matter. In the sixteenth paragraph, I wrote:

By now, you’re probably wondering: Asaka, what’s your disability?

My disability is known as autism and ADHD, though you can also think of it as a generalized learning disability. I say it that way, instead of “My disability is autism and ADHD” because I find it nearly impossible to define my disability through clinical metrics.

My reluctance to label myself is not a matter of euphemism — in fact, quite the opposite. There is nothing shameful about being diagnosed with autism and ADHD, but I don’t think these terminologies are as precise as we’ve been led to believe. Although I technically meet the clinical criteria of autism, there are a number of caveats, and my autism and my ADHD are so closely intertwined that I can’t parse apart the two. The whole thing is a semantic nightmare.

Looking back, I cringe at how abtruse and philosophical this sounds, because that’s exactly what I’m trying to criticize. My point is that if I hesitate to declare that I’m autistic or that I have autism, it’s not because I see autism as an insult, or because I think my “problems” aren’t “that bad.” It’s because I want to present all the pieces in a way that makes sense to me, and not worry about the borders society has drawn.

In another article, Surprising Things ADHD and Autism Have in Common, I explored the relationship between the two diagnoses.

Autism and ADHD can be mistaken for one another. For example, being blunt out because you’re feeling stressed or antsy (impulsivity and restlessness, a characteristic of ADHD) was different from being blunt because you say exactly what you mean and don’t see much else to it (literal thinking, a characteristic of autism). 

But these similarities are “more than just skin-deep,” I explained. For example, I said that my difficulty with completing multi-step tasks can be “counted” towards either autism or ADHD. Last but not least, I made the point that although I had functional difficulties that fit under definitions of autism or ADHD, they were linked to internal experiences that weren’t specifically associated with one or other.

Case in point: I’m a non-linear thinker, with little to no inner speech. My inability to clearly “see” or “hear” my own thoughts presents as two sides of the same coin: while I experience communication difficulties typical of autism, I also experience chronic disorganization at the heart of ADHD. 

In another article, Surprising Things ADHD and Autism Have in Common, I wrote:

Nothing is set in stone. I can only hope that our language will refine, alongside our knowledge …  In the meantime, I want the world to remember just how broad a singular diagnosis can be. Saying autism is a spectrum doesn’t just mean that autism looks different on everyone — it also means that autism, at least under its current definition, is felt and experienced differently by everyone.

I don’t know about you, but every time I meet someone new, I ask the same questions, trying to get a sense of who they are: Where do you work? What do you study? What do you like to do in your free time? And my favorite: Do we have any mutual friends? If I haven’t yet (I’m a big Insta stalker), I’ll be sure to look them up on Instagram.

According to the Uncertainty Reduction Theory, proposed by Charles Berger and Richard Calabrese in 1975, our urge to learn more about someone isn’t random—it's driven by our fear of uncertainty. Berger and Calabrese identified three main factors¹ that affect our ability to get over the uncertainty hump; anticipation of further interaction (like knowing you’ll be working with someone), incentive value (when they offer something we want—whether it’s money, status, or irresistible charisma), and deviance (when they act in unexpected ways).

The last one is interesting. People often defy expectations, all the time (Judee K. Burgeon, another scholar, says there are two types of expectations: predictive expectancies, which is what you think a person would do in a given situation, and prescriptive expectancies, which is what you think a person should do²). A bit of unexpected behavior can make us go, “Hmm, what’s up with that?” But past a certain point, it might make us shut down: “I don’t even know what’s going on. I’m out.”

In other news: we’re all running from the beast called uncertainty and every person who’s in your life is here because of our fight-or-flight response.  

When I sat down with one of my first college friends, Madison*, to give her The Talk, what she said surprised me:

“I know,” she said. “You wrote about it in your articles. I actually looked through your website and read everything. I dig it.”

This was why I did what I did.

And still, my digital footprint revealed another jarring inconsistency: the discrepancy between my spoken and written communication ability. 

Offline, I was plain-spoken, usually observed mumbling indistinctly and trailing off into laughter: “I don’t even know what I was saying.” Online, I was sharper than a needle. Any conversation deeper than what I ate for lunch sort of became an exercise in flowery writing. I don’t have nudes but I have old text and email exchanges that either read like a scathing WaPo editorial or a sanctimonious breakup announcement from a child-actor-turned-spiritual-healer on Instagram. Go figure.

For a long time, I thought the only reason people didn’t trust me was because they didn’t know what I was capable of. They thought I couldn’t understand the same things they did; any piece of contrary evidence, I assumed, they dismissed as a one-off thing or me just copying what I saw other people do. But what if people didn’t trust me because they knew what I was capable of?

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1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_reduction_theory#:~:text=Uncertainty%20reduction%20theory%20claims%20that,Dale%20E.

2. https://www.businesstopia.net/mass-communication/expectancy-violation-theory#:~:text=Predictive%20expectations%20are%20behavior%20and,particular%20environment%2C%20situation%20or%20context.