Stim4Stim Transcript, S2E2: I Shouldn’t Be Giving Advice

Stim4Stim S2E11 Transcript: I Shouldn’t Be Giving Advice

[Theme plays]

Zack: Hello Mister and Mrs. Autism and all the ships at sea. You’re listening to Stim4Stim, the relationship podcast by and for autistic people. I’m one of your co-hosts, Zack Budryk. Who else is here with me tonight?

Charlie: Hi! Charlie Stern, Paris Geller Stern, and Mr. Bird. And, you might hear some bonus voices.

Zack: That’s right, we are doing a check-in episode that’s just the two of us. We know that just about everybody has been Going Through It, with a capital T and a capital G, in the meantime. So, you know, this is essentially an episode for us all to check in with one another, as co-hosts and as a community, and talk about some — answer a couple questions that we’ve got that sort of like specifically pertain to these issues that might be more acutely felt with things looking as, you know, somewhat dire as they do.

Charlie: Yeah, so, I have two new ladies in my life. Zack also has a new lady in his life.

[Zack laughs]

Charlie: So, Zack, do you wanna talk about this little lady?

Zack: Sure! We have a chihuahua puppy named Ziggy, she is somewhere around here. I should have eyes on her, but she slept all day and now she’s back to exploring. And you know, she’s very small but very fierce, to paraphrase Shakespeare. And she is — we are madly in love with her and she knows it, and she thinks that our big senior cats want to be her friends, even though they don’t, and she is just gonna keep at that, and, you know, square up with them every time they make eye contact with her and play bow to them and bark at them, and…whatever it takes.

Charlie: I admire how dedicated she is

Zack: Mhmm

Charlie: Yeah, I keep looking over my shoulder because — so, we have two new foster birds, and they are two girl parakeets, and one is the mom and one is the daughter, and one’s name is Stevie and one is named Nicky, but it’s not really important and no one at the rescue can even tell them apart. So, I just refer to them as “the girls”. And Paris and the girls have such a weird relationship, and I’m just like…

[Bird tweeting in background]

Charlie: Ok. Paris is in the girls’ cage, which is like so small.

Zack: Oh come on, Paris

Charlie: Like it’s, you know, a cage for parakeets, and not a cage for something a lot bigger, like Paris with a big long tail. [Bird tweeting in background]

[Zack laughs]

Charlie: Ok, well, he’s gonna get got [laughter]. Because he tries to like peck and hiss at the girls, but then he’ll go into their cage and he’ll get himself cornered by them, and they’re like trying to peck at him. And no one’s gonna hurt each other, they’re just like figuring out boundaries. I mean, they just got here. They just got here like exactly a week ago. So it’s been a wild week, and, you know, Mr. Bird has gotten bloodwork and we went to Manhattan and had an adventure. But yeah, this week has been action packed with the girls getting here, and the developing dynamic between them as a unit, and Paris, and obviously Mr. Bird is not involved whatsoever.

Zack: Sure, hmm. How long are the girls sticking around for?

Charlie: I mean, I have to find them a home

Zack: Ok

Charlie: Like I have to find them somewhere to go after this. I’m their third foster, and they’re not really that personable. I haven’t been able to pick them up or like have them on me or, you know, put my finger out for a perch for them. They won’t get near me. They’re like birds from the outside. So, I need someone who already has a flock of female parakeets, and isn’t looking for, you know, sort of main characters, like Mr. Bird and Paris are main characters.

[Zack laughs]

Charlie: But I don’t think people are gonna really be able to hang out with the girls as much as, you know, with friendlier guys like this. So I’ve been asking the people at the vet to see if anybody has a flock they’re building of female parakeets.

Zack: Sure

Charlie: That’s about that. They’re, you know, they’re gonna stay until they’re not here anymore.

Zack: Ok. I mean whatever works, yeah. I guess Paris will just have to deal.

Charlie. Yeah. It’s like he feels like they are his babies, just like he felt like Mr. Bird was his baby. But he’s quickly realizing that the girls are much faster than him, and that makes him so angry. So it really is a developing sort of dynamic, and I’m just like sitting here and watching.

Zack: The biosphere experiment

Charlie: I know. I told my neighbor that it really does feel like I’m on some sort of island in here.

[Zack laughs]

Charlie: I also, like, I don’t know if people can hear me eating, but I will highlight the fact that sugar has gotten me through the pandemic.

Zack: Hell yeah

Charlie: And specifically living on the block that I live on, now I have access to organic chocolate mousse cake whenever I want, 24/7.

Zack: Oh my god

Charlie: So that’s what I’m eating right now. I think I read some sort of tweet thread about striking out on your own as an adult, and obviously that’s not my situation right now, but one of the pieces of advice was to find, like, a vice. To find some sort of, like, small stakes thing that could be your thing, and that’s kind of what helps you get day to day, week to week, and — yeah. Lox bagels and chocolate mousse cake from the nice bodega under my train stop. That’s pretty much how I’ve gotten from last episode to today. That’s why I carry on, is I live near such gorgeous food.

Zack: It’s a really interesting idea. I think I was onto something similar. The closest grocery store to me is the Harris Teeter in our neighborhood and they made a pretty good cranberry oatmeal cookie that I was really into getting whenever I went down there. I mean, now I come to find out they’re a Kroger subsidiary and I’m not crossing the picket line but, some day.

Charlie: Alright, yeah. Yeah I mean like, Movie Pass was such a phenomenon and I’ve heard from people that Movie Pass saved their lives.

Zack: Mhmm

Charlie: You know, I know so many people for whom going to movies is their vice, you know, is their adult, city life vice. And, you know, obviously we’re not talking about addictive substances.

Zack: Yeah

Charlie: We’re not talking about intoxicants. But we’re talking about, like, something silly you spend a few dollars on that keeps you going.

Zack: Absolutely. And, you know, as someone who went back to the movies in the mask as soon as it seemed like it might be safe, I am sort of pulling back from that now — I’ve sort of been forced to admit.

Charlie: Yeah

Zack: But Rachel got me a Kindle for Christmas

Charlie: Oh, awesome!

Zack: And for a while I didn’t think that the format was for me in terms of being able to read like I would a regular book, but, you know, I’ve expanded my comfort zone as far as that goes. And the fact that, you know, I can even buy a Kindle book — it’ll typically go for like four or five dollars less than a physical book. That is exactly the sort of thing where it doesn’t feel, like, extravagant to just go for it if there’s something I really want, so I think that’s going to work out for me.

Charlie: Yeah. I wish I could go to the movies right now, because I did discover a really good movie theater that I went to with my roommate, and then kind of everything shut down.

Zack: Right

Charlie: And I was actually also, you know — me living in New York City, I was going to live theater.

Zack: Oh hell yeah

Charlie: And it was totally like, not the kind of low stakes, cheap vice that we were just talking about because — kind of, you pay forty to seventy dollars to, like, maybe have a bad time?

[Zack laughs]

Charlie: But I was going with friends who I am involved in writing projects with, and we were going to these things and we were studying them. And so, we — my friend Emma and I, who are writing a horror movie together —

Zack: Oh hell yeah

Charlie: Yeah. We went to a couple plays and I just had such an awful time and we also made dinner and watched a movie that was really bad, and each of these experiences — we’d turn to each other and we were like, “ok, what did we learn?”

[Zack laughs]

Charlie: Like, what did they do wrong, what did we hate about it, what would we do differently? And that made my entire fall bearable.

Zack: That’s awesome

Charlie: Definitely, yeah. So should we transition into our questions?

Zack: Yeah we can. Thank you to everybody who sent us questions, and particularly the ones who sent these two, both of which we got in our DMs for the official Twitter account. The first one is from a 24 year old self-diagnosed nonbinary person. It says:

“This year I’ve been experiencing the loss of one of the biggest loves of my life, who was also autistic. We had no external support and were each other’s everything from when we were 17 to 21, so from the outside we got labeled as extremely codependent and bad for each other.”

Zack: They go on to say that in relationships since…

“I’ve realized I’ve taken on a huge amount of pressure to be able to completely regulate and manage alone, which I think is a sad thing to expect from anyone, but it’s definitely unhealthy for me as an autistic person because the truth is I really need help and cannot do some things alone that allistics can. Now finding myself very confused about what the appropriate level of needing other people is and I’m very afraid of getting it wrong. How do I ask for the consideration and consistency I need without asking for something unrealistic? Do you have any thoughts on how to develop a network of people that understand your autism and are more able to provide care during times of crisis without a high level of coordination and self advocacy on my end?”

Charlie: I think my first thing that I’m gonna say is very discouraging, because as autistic people, and especially as queer autistic people who are grieving people, if we try to seek care from the wrong person or, you know, people who aren’t willing to give it, we run the risk of being punished. You know, either directly with a confrontation or through icing out, or, you know — I mean everybody’s very online, so the worst thing to see is a vague tweet that you know is about you, but the person is too cowardly to actually confront you with that. Like, I’m sure — I’m sure this person, being so young and being queer, they’ve had that experience, you know, they’re coming to us on Twitter. It seems like they have run up against punishment and spikes, and whoever in their life told them and their deceased partner that they were codependent — clearly, whoever said they were codependent wasn’t also, like, offering an alternative.

Zack: Yeah

Charlie: You know? Wasn’t also offering care to replace this. They were just sort of like — I don’t know. Maybe I’m projecting a lot but it very much sounded like a policing without offering another solution. So, wow. I wish that was a sunnier answer, but, yeah. I just wanna say that I know the kind of ‘house on fire’ sort of place this person is speaking from.

Zack: Yeah. And I agree with that, but one thing that I do wanna offer as well is that I know that it’s very easy to feel that, as autistic people, like any correction that a neurotypical person offers for how we are personing, they’re inherently onto something. And I guess my response to that is don’t just take for granted that someone is correctly assessing you as codependent because, you know, sometimes people are just being judgy. I mean you should always self-examine, just in general, like in your human behavior — that’s part of, like, I guess not being — completely letting any constructive criticism or whatever bounce off you. But also, you know, I get that you don’t want to be codependent but don’t assume you’re codependent just because some person who doesn’t necessarily know what they’re talking about assesses you that way.

Charlie: Yeah

Zack: Like I think that — I mean it’s okay that you have needs, and I understand that this problem is deeper than just being okay with that, but I do think that there is this guilt attached to it that sometimes it’s really hard to get through, even if you know that you’re not doing anything wrong. It can be hard to drown out the chorus of ableist messages telling you that you are doing something wrong by having needs, and, like — everybody is fucked up right now, first of all.

Charlie: Yeah. Yeah

Zack: And it’s okay if you feel like you went in fucked up and are now deeper in the hole — like, that’s to be expected. That’s not your fault, and to the extent that you’re not hurting somebody else, you are allowed to find ways to address that as we get through this.

Charlie: Yeah. And I can’t remember if I’ve said this before on the podcast, but — I mean this is just the thing that my best friend and I have to tell each other, like, we have to remind each other that we are also people.

Zack: Mhmm

Charlie: Like the people that have conflict with us, or the people who are positioning themselves on a hierarchy above us — that’s not correct.

Zack: Yeah

Charlie: Because we’re all people. And, you know, certainly in my romantic relationships and in some roommate situations, I have felt like — I have actually acted from a place of not being also a person, with valid needs, and with a need for safety and comfort, and, you know, wellness and warmth and etcetera etcetera. So, yeah. You’re right that you shouldn’t necessarily trust another person who is making a judgment on you if you are autistic and they are not, because you’re both people in this situation and the most important thing is that your personhood matters as much as their personhood. I think that’s what I was kind of dancing around but my brain is sort of pandemic fog right now.

Zack: Sure

Charlie: But yeah. I think that’s what I wanna say is that your personhood is as whole as another person’s personhood.

Zack: Yeah. And don’t doubt your understanding of your own needs, which can be a very easy thing to doubt but, you know — I think that we as autistic people are taught to mistrust our instincts more than we necessarily should.

Charlie: Yeah. Yeah. And in terms of like practical stuff — I’m just scrolling through the sort of uncondensed, original version that they sent us — I don’t know if I’m gonna advocate for a total overhaul of this person’s life, but I will say that if they are poor and alone and queer during this pandemic, I am hoping that they’re living somewhere where they can easily obtain state Medicaid and get free psychiatry, get free meds, get free grief counseling, get free regular therapy. I think really living in a city has saved me. And I’m sure you feel the same way, as someone who — you know, we both don’t drive.

Zack: Yeah

Charlie: We both tend to be isolated people even though we know so many people and we have so many friends, and we share a lot of the same friends, but, you know — this is such bad advice, I shouldn’t be giving advice [laughs], but this person, if you’re listening, please move to a city. And get support and get state Medicaid, because I think you’re so young and you’re feeling kind of like it’s the end, and we are all feeling like it’s the end, kind of all the time.

Zack: Yeah

Charlie: But, yeah. I really want you to orient yourself right now around obtaining free therapy and obtaining community mutual aid. And that’s gonna be easiest in cities where there are already a lot of younger queer people.

Zack: Sure. And I think that, going back years, I think that this has been sort of the go-to move going back decades for queer people.

Charlie: Oh yeah

Zack: Especially those who are maybe in a rural or less understanding or more insular community. And I think that, you know, it may seem like something that’s easy for a person to say, like, “simply move!” I mean we definitely understand the challenges involved in something like that, but I think that this can be a very high risk but also high reward situation.

Charlie: Yeah. Yeah. And even just starting out the pandemic living in Philly and living in a studio apartment and kind of being an adult in the city in that way, and then coming here to New York City, like that’s been life changing. Because I can go take a train and wander around Chinatown and not feel unsafe at all and just, you know, do my, like, vampire shit —

[Zack laughs]

Charlie: — just like, do my wandering, and that wasn’t possible in a smaller city. But in a larger city, you know, you can find what you’re seeking because people before you have sought it out and found it.

Zack: Yeah, yeah. So it’s almost like the Annie thing, like [singing] “two bags, five bucks, one me!” Just getting off the —

[Charlie laughs]

Zack: I’m sorry, I got a little more theater kid with it than I typically do. You know, I generally suppress that a little as a public health measure.

Charlie: Yeah

Zack: But I think, you know — maybe we’ll cut this, maybe the reaction I got was too funny to cut, we’ll figure it out.

[Theme plays from 23:53 to 24:01]

Zack: And this is someone that we have been in touch with in the show DMs before as well, but they recently followed up with us and we figured that we should — since we tend to take a little while between episodes we figured that we should go ahead and take their question as well, since they just sent it yesterday I think. They say:

“I think I’m starting to truly accept that I’m on the spectrum, I just feel like I’m grieving. I don’t know how to explain it. On one hand, it’s a great thing to feel like I’ve found out the “why”, even though some days I doubt it. It just feels like this internal struggle to fit in — not just mask, but actually fit in. It will be a factor for my entire life. Now I’m feeling like I’m acting more autistic now, so it’s making me question if it’s even autism or if I’m just really bad at being a human and not on the spectrum at all. I feel like Ariel in “Part of Their World” when she wonders what it’d be like on land.”

So this is I guess a little less practical advice than that first one, but I don’t think this is an uncommon feeling at all. I think that, you know, particularly when so many of us have become familiar with the concept of autism through media, before we necessarily come to realize it about ourselves.

Charlie: So my immediate answer would be that it’s incredibly common for an undiagnosed autistic person to feel half human, or to feel non human. Or to feel like everybody has their own rules on this level above you, but you’re kind of a robot and you kind of can’t access their world. You know? Like you feel like an animal, or a robot, or a mermaid, or some other cryptid, because you can’t understand why some people are better, in your perspective, at being people. You know, they must have something that is so different from you, or that you must be so different from them that you are like a different species, or come from a different world.

Zack: And it’s also really easy once you understand your own neuroatypicality to feel like any kind of confusing human behavior is only confusing to you because you’re autistic, and that’s not necessarily true. Like, a lot of human behavior is just weird even if it’s commonly accepted as normal.

Charlie: Yeah

Zack: And you shouldn’t be kicking yourself for missing a step every time you find that confusing, because a lot of people are faking completely understanding it, and a lot of people have maybe come to accept it more than they should necessarily.

Charlie: Yeah. Yeah. For some reason we expect non-autistic people to have the rule book.

Zack: Mhmm

Charlie: And we don’t, but they also don’t have the rule book.

Zack: No

Charlie: Cuz it doesn’t exist

Zack: Absolutely. And I don’t wanna make it seem like our experiences are universal, because they’re not and there are a lot of parts of being autistic that neurotypical people are not party to, and a lot of struggles thereof, but they are trying to figure out how to be human as they go through life too. They just, you know — there’s just this default assumption that they have it figured out and you don’t, when often you’re on the same footing and often you’re on better footing, whether you realize it or not.

Charlie: Yeah, kind of as an autistic person, I have felt like I see things more honestly in terms of the fact that everybody is grifting —

Zack: Mhmm

Charlie: — and everything is a grift. Like I feel like I am aware of the things I do that are coasting on other people having false confidence in me. And that’s pretty much what every neurotypical person is doing, is they are faking it until they make it.

Zack: Yeah

Charlie: But the autistic experience is like, on one side you’re like how are they doing that? And then on the other side you’re like oh…I’m a magician. You know?

[Zack laughs]

Charlie: Cuz like, either you haven’t figured it out yet or you have found a way to gamify and that’s how you get through. But, yeah — neurotypical people don’t know what they’re doing. And they often do not know what they’re about to say before it comes out of their mouth, and we should not be worshiping them as God.

Zack: Yeah. I mean that was actually one of the big things I realized. You know, I spent so much time feeling like I was faking it, eventually I came to think, well, so what if I am? Like, look how many people I’m fooling if I am, that’s badass, I’m like a master criminal.

Charlie: Yeah. Yeah, I don’t think it’s a mistake that you and I are both interested in crime.

[Zack laughs]

Charlie: And that is also the way we approach, like, being very talented and accomplished in our field.

Zack: Yeah

Charlie: You know? Anyone else would look at our credits and look at our work and be like oh they’re good at what they do, but then here we are, and we’re like oh, we’re con men.

[Zack laughs]

Zack: Yeah. I was also reminded of something that one of the more famous autistic people, Greta Thunberg, has said — that she thinks that she is an effective activist because she’s autistic. Because she recognizes bullshit PR speak and all that when she hears it, and feels less acclimated to just nodding along like it means anything, like neurotypical people might be used to doing.

Charlie: Yeah. And the common refrain in this person’s submission is masking, the mask is slipping, acting. And the answer is, you know, it’s all fake.

Zack: Yeah

Charlie: Which may not be very comforting, but that’s unfortunately the answer.

Zack: I’ve been through a similar thing, and I ended up sort of likening it to breathing. Like if you think about the fact that you need to constantly breathe, you’re gonna have a bad time, you’re gonna get really hung up on thinking about how you need to do that. But, you know, probably most of the time you’re not thinking about that at all — you’re just on autopilot as far as that goes. I think that everybody is faking it but is letting the instinct take over probably for most of the time, and, you know, eventually — what’s the difference, if you’re just faking it in that way that instinct takes over?

Charlie: Apparently that’s what happens with driving.

Zack: Oh really?

Charlie: But I’ll never find out cuz I’m too scared.

Zack: Yeah! Me neither

Charlie: Yeah. But I talk to people who drive because obviously I get rides from friends. And I, you know, in the passenger seat am freaking out because it’s a machine and we’re on the road with other machines, and then I talk to my friends who are driving me and they’re like “oh yeah, you forget about the life and death thing.” And it’s just like, wow, autopilot. That’s not a play on words. It really is — you no longer think about it.

Zack: Yeah. We stopped by my dad’s a couple months ago actually and we ended up talking about how he had tried to teach me to drive, and because I couldn’t get that autopilot thing through my head he eventually just got really frustrated with me, and it was almost literally exactly like the Bob’s Burgers where Bob is teaching Tina to drive and she’s just like drifting towards the one other car in the parking lot, and Bob just keeps going “we still have a lot of time to just turn in literally any direction Tina, it’s fine!” But yeah. I mean the driving thing is a great example. And it also gets back to our earlier point in terms of it’s really good to live in a city with a transit network.

Charlie: Yeah, that’s another thing. If you’re a young autistic person and you move to a big city, you get to ride the train!

Zack: Mhmm! Mhmm

Charlie: You get to ride buses, you get to ride trains, you might even get to ride trolleys. So that’s kind of a bonus.

[Theme plays from 34:46 to 34:54]

Zack: Ok. So, for our closing segment, which is something we typically do with our episodes with guests but we’re gonna do with the two of us as well. The setup this time is: what is the most pleasant surprise that you’ve recently encountered, in terms of just something to pass the time? Like something you watched, something you listened to, something you ate, something like that. Charlie, do you wanna go ahead?

Charlie: Yeah, so. It’s kind of not a straight pleasant surprise, because it’s the fact that I discovered — just as we all kind of on Twitter are discovering as a community, as a looser queer community or people in the arts, etcetera etcetera — we’re all sharing the bad experience and the painful experience of being into Sex and the City.

[Zack laughs]

Charlie: So obviously the new show, called And Just Like That, just came out, and if you’re non-binary like me you know about the non-binary character and how truly awful the writing is surrounding that one person and all of the other characters’ interactions with that one person. But I have now gone back, because I have access to HBO Max, and I am just consuming an unholy amount of the back catalog of the original series. And I [laughs], I’m so miserable, but it’s so comforting.

[Zack laughs]

Charlie: You know, it’s not like me enjoying the show Insecure, which is genuinely one of the best TV shows I’ve ever seen, and, like, so true and so real. Sex and the City and also And Just Like That think they are real, and that’s what makes it so absurdly uncanny valley. So all of us gay people online are just having such a bad time, and it’s making me feel so comforted.

[Zack laughs]

Charlie: And so a part of a community. So, yeah. I’m enjoying myself.

Zack: Hell yeah. So, I talk about this fairly often but I don’t know if I’ve talked about it on the podcast before, but I’m so uninformed about music. I’ll just discover one new artist I like per fiscal quarter, maybe? Or sometimes even just like one song I like per fiscal quarter. But I’m really into this artist Yebba, and she’s — her vibe is like a spooky Appalachian Adele —

Charlie: Ok!

Zack: — and I really dig it. She’s got this one song that I discovered her through, it’s called “Boomerang” and it’s just like this archetypal, sort of angry woman, “You Oughta Know” / “Goodbye Earl” -type kiss-off song, which is the kind of thing that I obviously really go in for. As I tend to do, I got a couple songs that are the only thing I listen to for an extended period of time and she’s part of that, so it’s an exclusive club. I hope she appreciates it.

Charlie: That’s awesome

Zack: Yeah

Charlie: Yeah. Let me open up my Spotify and see if I’ve even listened to anything new. [Mouse clicking sounds] Not really, honestly. I mean I did discover some really fucked up post-punk slash new wave slash no wave that came up on one of my shuffles and I was really into this one album I discovered. I took a brief trip up to Rhode Island —

Zack: Yeah, I remember that

Charlie: — and so this experimental 80s album was like, both ways, my Amtrak soundtrack, and I was very, very intensely playing it on repeat, and now that I’m home and in my normal life I’m back to listening to the same albums I’ve been listening to for, you know, eight years.

Zack: Sure. Yeah, I try to discover stuff through Spotify but I really enjoyed the Steven Spielberg West Side Story remake and I listen to the soundtrack to that a bunch, so now my algorithm is like hopelessly fucked up with show tunes, which — I mean, I like them, but they aren’t putting new stuff out on a regular basis necessarily.

Charlie: Yeah, well that soundtrack — isn’t it just like a redo of the old soundtrack, so it’s not really new music?

Zack: Yeah. I’m trying to think if they did anything differently, but no, I guess it’s mostly just the script that’s different.

Charlie: Yeah. So I think we did it. So listeners, I’m gonna encourage once again that you write in to stim4stim@gmail.com. Finally we’re going to address your grooming, self care, skin care, cooking, roommate, etcetera etcetera, submissions on our next episode, which we’re really excited for. We finally got the perfect guest.

Zack: Mhmm!

Charlie: So please write in all of your concerns and tips and tricks, and burning questions: Stim4stim@gmail.com or find us on Twitter @stim4stim.

Zack: Yep! Hope to see you soon, and hoping that by the time you listen to this things are looking up, however slightly. We’ll see you next time.

[Theme plays from 41:32 to 41:42]