On the Autism Question

Are you allowed to convert? I did make it most of the way through obtaining an adult autism diagnosis a few years ago, but only most of the way, as I got fairly suicidal and decided not to finish the process, meaning I never got an answer; even then, I knew from dialectical philosophy that certain aporias can’t be resolved through contemplation alone, so as an experiment, I decided to live my life as though I were autistic, and I found that doing so generally improved being alive for me in pretty profound ways, which convinced me that “identity” is kind of a pointless thing to think about: I can live with me being “strange,” and they can live with me being me.

My experience of life is basically this: I am good enough at writing to be whatever version of myself I want to be when I am existing textually; I am not great at being alive and can really only be the one version of myself when I am doing that, as that’s one of the key features of being alive. Writing a lot, then, and pretending to be other people a lot and having other people know that I write a lot and pretend to be other people a lot — and also, ultimately, being literally always myself no matter who I am trying to be — has generally been pretty confusing for me. I am often confused. I am often so confused that it seems to me that the only solution is to kill myself.

This is, as far as I can tell, the basic structure of what it is like to be me, Isabel Pabán Freed. I think a big part of making art — what I like to do — is about giving other people the chance to experience the world as you do. Another big part of art is thinking about the world as it exists independent of your experience of it. And of course, it’s good to remember that there is someone else receiving the art, and they experience the world in their own way, too. What makes art exciting for me are the tensions that emerge when these things contradict each other, as meaningfully dealing with those tensions involves moving, because, as far as I can tell, if you are not moving, you are not thinking. Written language and spoken language are two dominant ways we have been socialized to think, as written language and spoken language are generally effective ways of communicating with The Other. They are not the only ways to do so — think of how many human practices have their own nonlexical “language” — but because words are particularly abstract and particularly static, and because life is particularly concrete and particularly dynamic, I believe that Literature offers an experience of it that is like nothing else in this world. I also believe every single individual thing in this world is like nothing else in this world, as that is one of the key features of being a single individual thing. But I do like Literature. It is a thing that works for me.

This is who I am, right now, and this is what I think, today. Next week, I will publish a new novel called It’s the Characters! I hope you enjoy it in the way I have described here. If you do not, then, on my own terms, I have failed as an artist. That would be sad but not necessarily discouraging — I’ll have another chance, I think!

Cheers,
Isabel Pabán Freed