My Childhood Autism's Morality: Literalness. (And my quest for reality explained by a close call with two superheroes)

Batman and Superman flew by my head the other day. Of course, it doesn't happen every day that I have to leap out of the way of two superheroes to avoid a head-on collision with my face with comic book characters. However, one has found a bit of a tragic, comedic, autistic, redeeming, and childhood-reflective story within such random superhero flights. Nearby, my gym is a preschool. Some young children on the second floor decided to test whether their two superhero figures could fly just as I was passing by because that's what their beautiful, magical minds are being conditioned to assume they will do when literally processing such a fantasy—the allure of curiosity, uncertainty, and the desire to learn. To find the truth within the innocence of taking things at face value as generated by the creative escapist fantasies told and sold to us all in gendered childhood toys we all once nostalgically played with.

Until it hits you (or nearly me in this instance) in the face, a mistruth has presented itself within one’s innocent trust as cultivated by the masses. These kids’ superheroes didn’t fly, and they developed the curiosity to discover that and such truths within their innocence of play, as they lay face down on the pavement at my feet.

So where am I going with this, you may ask, from my autistic lens?

My instinct tells me that the kids would have been reprimanded and possibly excluded if they had been found hurling superhero figurines out of second-story windows, where they could have struck a passerby in the face. And no doubt, like my lived autistic child, children dislike being left out or made to feel different from their friends when figuratively pursuing the truth, as these kids were doing here ironically with their toy figures.

Truth-seeking can appear as asking many questions, a need to move around rather than remain still, or even throwing a superhero figure out of a second-story window (preferably Lego ones like in my image, not Mattel ones the next time I pass by). My autistic child and I are very familiar with this. I would have been ostracized or excluded as a child for my own efforts at truth-seeking, figuratively and regularly dismissed during my childhood into adulthood for my kind of magic questioning and investigation that enables my processing of reality and logic, and I was regularly misunderstood.

I was that literal child. If you told me Batman or Superman could fly, I took it that they could, so I had to put their superpowers into action. But a double bind also exists in that I rarely believed what you said or took it at face value until I investigated it in detail. I will initially seek all the facts instead of the bigger picture before I allow myself to escape through my imagination—something I can do and embrace often, but only as a tool for accessing rationale and logic seeking. I need to get a feel for whether it feels real or not. I need the intensity of my intuition and intrigue to find the intellect in me to decipher escapism, fantasy, and reality. I am a hands-on, logical thinker and a visual learner. Therefore, my initial default of innocent mistrust will nearly always cultivate distrust.

A bullshit filter safeguarding me from the elements of naivety that some can think I have as an autistic individual. However, if you know many autistic children or adults, as I have, you will know they have bullshit filters quite literally beyond belief. They will sense it and smell it a mile away. They will ensure they have certainty within all societies’ uncertainty, and you can be damn sure they will do all within their power to access the unknown knowns in their knowing being and doing. They say we have spikey profiles within our strengths and weaknesses. We also have spidey ones, like our superpowers and Spiderman. My spidey senses are tingling...

And so Batman and Superman would have been going out the second-floor window in my undiagnosed autistic child's hands-on investigative research. I was challenged to use my spidey senses so much more as a child by the creative escapist fantasies told and sold to me in gendered childhood toys I once nostalgically played with, like with baby dolls that weren’t babies and Barbies with freshly shaved heads compliments of my childhood demon barber skills because that wasn’t what women looked like when I was a child. So it continued. I butchered Barbie until, eventually, my dad got me an Action Man. Of course, he still didn’t live up to the expectations Mattel set for him in my literal childhood, but there you go. There wasn’t much action, and he didn’t look like any man I had seen back then or now. And so, because I questioned these norms and more, I was not allowed to be seen or heard. I was effectively put on mute, and so I muted myself.

Excluded…

An exclusion that seemingly represented a problem behavior. Imagine you are a child who needs an answer even when there is not one available, sadly, but you don’t have the emotional regulation to process that reality. You are keen to find an answer to the apparent truth you have been told or sold, so you persist for a deeper perspective, but none is forthcoming. Your inquiry has too much intensity, so you are silenced. So, you seek such a reality out for yourself. Cue on-site research: Batman and Superman take flight. While this might be curiosity, doubt, or critical thinking, it can regularly be interpreted as unfocused, impulsive, or disruptive, so you get in trouble. As a result, the child (this child) either withdraws and becomes quieter or grows frustrated and, unsurprisingly, expresses this to others. Then, a downward spiral happens.

Dichotomies are often quite appealing to humans. Whether someone is smart or not, good or bad, the masses in society can find it harder to embrace the complexities of who we are and the truth of why we end up where we do, processing reality in our unique, atypical ways. A child who is excluded or made to feel wrong for figuratively seeking truth in school may be labeled with "behavior" issues. Still, in actuality, they may have expressive and explorative needs that make understanding and decoding their environment much more difficult.

That has always been the unseen beauty of the neurodiversity of the world. The appearance of such needs will vary depending on whether they are for a young child or an adult. When we analyze deeper and question the literalness of our childhood imaginations and fairytales we are sold and told, our intuitive innocence helps us develop our intellect and character, which can help us become psychologically content and independent thinkers as we age. However, because that may not be acknowledged, such unempathetically misunderstood yet labeled misbehaving, disruptive children can end up frustrated and others irritated by their actions. As that once undiagnosed, frustrated autistic child, I retreated and launched a very effective campaign of school refusal on my mother and the school authorities, with this now becoming quite apparent as one of the downward spirals of dysregulation I took in addition to selective mutism from sensory overload and more, but that is for another day of more in-depth writing.

So, to wrap up this random rambling, the moral of my past-lived childhood reflected in my story of such non-acceptance of things at face value while almost getting whacked by two superheroes in the face is simply this:

When provided with a safe environment to courageously handle the blurred lines between imagination and reality on an emotional, mental, and physical level, children develop into adults who can save themselves and don't require superheroes. And that ability has become more important now than ever, with so many lost in escapism and logical translation on social media.

A reality-aligning and potentially life-saving superpower.

Save yourself.

Thank you for reading.

Have a good week ahead.

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