(Personal stories about autism. If you would like to see your musings on this page, please email Mary-Minn at sirag@mindspring.com.)

 

Born under a bad sign

 

"Happy May 17^{th Birthday: This is a year of expansion, learning and using your experience and knowledge to get ahead. Changes can be made that will help you emotionally, financially and contractually. Your intuition will guide you in money matters. Your ability to take on more will impress someone who will help you reach your goals." So intones Eugenia Last, the nay-saying and bubble popping astrologer for the Register-Guard.}

 

^{Let’s pick this horoscope apart a little like we analyzed poetry in high school. "Impress" has never been a favorite word with me. "Contractual" is not a relationship I want with another human. "Learning" here connotes humility, maybe even a measure of humiliation, rather than satisfying mastery and accomplishment. "Change" is not a felicitous word for a person on the autism spectrum. Come to think of it, the only respectable word in the entire paragraph is "intuition".}

 

^{Taurus’s general astrology is even more depressing, wielding dire key words such as "advancement", "additional skills".}

 

^{I don’t know why career and finances are always at the forefront of Taurus horoscopes and nobody else’s. It’s not fair. I was born under a bad sign.}

 

^{Please pass the fortune cookies. What I was hoping for reads something like this: "This is a year of concentrating your energies and talents on what you do best. Jettison the rest. This is not a time to worry your head about career or financial goals. Take a real vacation and open yourself up to a refreshed outlook on life. Only by creative replenishment and slowing down will you begin to see the light."}

 

^{Not bad at all, if I can say so myself. Maybe I should take up writing horoscopes for other people too.}

 

^{In the meantime, I am not in a festive mood. It is my birthday and I am packing for my annual pilgrimage to Iowa to visit my elderly mother. I started packing yesterday. Packing is an emotional roller coaster. It happens in stages—"happens" in the sense that it has a life of its own.}

 

^{The first grand sweep is always reassuring. I pile the clothes into the suitcase. I have checklists for the clothes from past excursions, and many of them are duplicates in different colors. I pack my giant bag of medications, to see how much space they’ll take, which is always more than you can possibly imagine, a thought that gives me some pause, but I am able to let it go, without "judging it", in perfect meditation protocol. My affirmations are working. I am still optimistic. At this point, I feel efficient, in complete control.}

 

^{Efficiency is one of my lofty ambitions, "lofty" as in just about impossible. I love the self-righteous glow of a job efficiently dispatched. My ideal alter ego gets things done right the first time. She can comprehend and follow technical directions, fix things and perform all kinds of other miracles that reduce the real me to weeping desolation whenever I attempt them. Her learning consists of mastering new foreign languages, musical instruments and painterly techniques, rather than lowering her standards to something more realistic or not doing it that way (yet) again. The efficient other-me juggles tasks cheerfully and effortlessly, never losing her calm and easy sense of humor. She doesn’t whine and throw up her hands when the phone interrupts her concentration or freak out when someone drops by and she’s in the middle of something. Her email never has claws and teeth, and you can see the bottom of her in-box on a finite computer screen. Difficulty is never adversity for her but a refreshing challenge. She never ceases to blow me away.}

 

^{Back to packing, though. For the refining phase of packing, I move my suitcase from the bedroom to the living room because my husband and I need the bed to sleep on. The refinement phase shouldn’t take too long. This go-round, I have a strategy, so it shouldn’t take as long as it did last time. I’ve made all the big decisions. I am still the optimist with a sense of humor that is fairly intact.}

 

^{I hunt down some quart ziploc bags. I opt for the fresh new ones rather than rifling through the giant bag of ziploc bags recycled from my beading students’ past sales. I allow a certain sense of bad-recycling guilt to wash over me and let it go, again without judging it. I stuff into it my vanilla chai shampoo, Pears soap, Tecnu, non-toxic natural insect repellant for mosquitoes and ticks, face moisturizer, hand lotion, body lotion, hand cream, foot lotion, calendula salve, special toothpaste for the painfully sensitive, one scent in a small bottle.}

 

^{I cannot trust the stores in Iowa to carry my brands with the perfectly rounded scents and textures I have ever vigilantly managed to hunt down. I am inwardly embarrassed by my sensory fussiness, but know that a comforting scent and moisturized skin is my primary shield from the hostile world outside my Eugene bubble—the world of personnel and security.}

 

^{I need to leave my medications out until I actually leave, so I test run different organizing protocol that will allow me to grab them at the last minute, which will be 4 a.m. My first attempt is to divvy each of them up into two containers, so that I have enough (to page 4) at home and enough in the suitcase not to run out on the trip. So as to have accurately labeled bottles in both time zones, I search vainly for my old medication containers, which I recycle after having torn off the label. I am disappointed by this slightly paranoid habit of mine. The phone rings and I forget what I was doing or what operation I was working on in this monolithic packing endeavor. I feel my memory and executive function failing. I despair that I can ever finish packing.}

 

^{I whine to my sister on the phone about how my brain isn’t working and bemoan my sad fate at not celebrating my birthday. She cheers me up. We segue into lighter conversation and I continue to pack mindlessly. Hanging up, I notice that I have managed to fit everything from the large suitcase into a smaller carry-on, and yelp with triumphant joy. I have never been able to pull that off.}

 

^{My brain often works better when I keep it distracted with light conversation. It’s like how doodling in class rather than concentrating can relax your mind enough to take in new information. It’s soft focus as opposed to concentration.}

 

^{When she gets off the phone, I am able to figure out how to organize my medications. I count how many I’ll be using before my trip and put the rest in the suitcase, not to be touched until I get to Iowa. I write a final list of the six items I’ll be putting in the suitcase at the last minute. I zip up my carry-on and oversized purse in a paroxysm of optimism.}

 

^{"Birthday baby: You have great stamina, high standards and good ethics. You strive for greater security and financial standing." Sure. I think I’ll consult the Weekly next time.}

 

^{Mary-Minn Sirag}