By Jersey Noah
My boyfriend is inside my house working, I'm sitting outside playing on my phone.
He walks out the back door, "are you smoking a joint?" I was, in fact, smoking a joint.
He walked toward me, his brown eyes glimmered in a ray of sunshine, "can I join you?"
I feel relief in my chest from anxiety I didn't know I was having. I like smoking in the sunshine with my favorite people.
My boyfriend has a fancy job. I do things like this, write random blog posts, post memes, take naked photos of myself for my only fans (you know, the typical 9 to 5). I'm a ball of chaos, he's a ball of chaos; our chaos is so different and yet, it's so complementary.
I'm Autistic (and ADHD, and epileptic, and..and..and). I am the type of autistic/ADHD person who needs a balance of sameness/consistency with newness/change. For example, everyday I listen to a different song for the whole day.
My boyfriend is bipolar, he leans towards change and newness in a lot of ways.
I can tell he appreciates my consistency; he likes that I enjoy going to the same restaurants and rewatching the same TV shows. And when he desires newness, he tells me. Sometimes, in the form of a question like, "do you mind if we try something different tonight?"
I don't think anyone has ever asked me if I'm okay with a change. Even when I tell people that I need to know when change is coming, I'm not often told once it's actually happening. I think this is because people do not often think that my needs are a "big deal" because it would not feel like a big deal to them if someone showed up 10 minutes early unexpectedly (for example). Now that there is someone in my life who understands my need for communication around change and actually includes me in decision making around change, my answer is almost always, "yes, something new sounds good to me." Without me, I think there is a lot more change in his life. Without him, there is definitely a lot more sameness in my life.
But sameness can be isolating; too much routine can drag us away from our reality and stop us from living in the present. Letting go of my "normal" and accepting change is one of the hardest things for me. I've learned, though, that there's no escaping change. So, I try to embrace it; the impermanence of...everything, means the that the hardest moments have an end, too. Accepting change means that if my plan to go to the grocery store doesn't work out because of sensory overload, I can leave. I can change my plan to live a better, calmer life.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a disaster lol. But I do have some half decent coping mechanisms for the neurotypical world that we are forced to live in and walk through as if it's not a complete disaster for all of us.
Anyway, back to my boyfriend and his sparkling brown eyes. He wears his emotions on his face, he's easy for me to read. When he's working near me on his laptop and I see his stare become wide, his eyebrows heighten, his head shake from side to side, I can see he is frustrated with a work project. When we are in a coffee shop and the room is echoing the grinding machines and I see his smile fade and his voice quiets, I can tell he's having sensory overload and I can encourage him to wait outside for me.
I'm a dude with very low affect, people can't always tell the difference in my face when I'm happy versus when I'm sad. Often, people notice a change in my state of emotion and then they make an assumption about what I'm feeling based on their perception of what emotions "look like" on people. I do not expect anyone to guess how I'm feeling, I know I can be very hard to read. When my boyfriend notices a change, he tends to just let it exist for a few minutes, I think he knows that sometimes the adjustment to change is momentary for me. When he notices the state of emotion lingering, he usually says something like, "Jersey, I can't read you right now. How are you feeling?" Often, my answer is "I don't know how I'm feeling," but I can quickly trace back the state of my emotion to a change, a thought of change, a concern around change, a fear of change, etc. Sometimes, I reply with, "I feel happy, I'm just adjusting to feeling happy in this moment" because moving from unpleasant feelings or neutral feelings to something more pleasant and positive is still a change.
To be clear, I don't think my boyfriend and I have good understanding and communication around each others physical and mental health needs just because we are both neurodivergent. Once, I was casually seeing this autistic person (or just being friends with benefits with them, I don't know, it was confusing lol), but anyway, they said something to me when we stopped talking. They said, "we are both autistic, this was supposed to be easy." And I remember thinking to myself how I wish that were true. Just as neurotypical people do, even neurodivergent people with the same or similar neurodivergencies have different communication needs and wants. Sometimes, if I'm around another autistic person, reading them can be very hard! If they're like me, with low affect, I have to stop and remember that their facial expressions, their hand gestures, etc don't necessarily match the emotions I've assigned to them in other people. A neutral face may indicate happiness, it may indicate sadness, it may indicate concern or relief, it could mean anything! And while I understand this, because this is me, I do tend to look too far into nonverbal communication. My hypervigilance, the reason i feel the need to access and understand the emotions of those around me, is a product of a lifetime of misunderstandings.
My boyfriend and I work (for now..I mean, in reality there are countless undetermined futures that could unfold)...
...but we work well in this moment and I think it has a lot to do with our compatable needs, desires and communication as neurodivergent people in a neurotypical world that only really gets either of us when we perform, when we mask. There are plenty of people I am around who I can unmask around and it's not always a romantic or sexual connection of course. Just like how there are plenty of transgender people who affirm my gender as my friends, there are plenty of autistic and neurodivergent people who affirm my autism as my friends. The sexual and romantic connection is another added layer to the affirmation, the understanding, the alignment of experiences and communication. Without alignment in all of these areas, I find that romantic relationships are very very temporary, at least if one person is willing to recognize and address the incompatibility.
That autistic person I was talking about, the one I was into and maybe, sort of had something with, they said something to me that I think about often, it really helped me understand why some relationships aren’t compatible and why they do not work even when you want them to.
They said, "It's like when you love a certain food, and then you find out your body can't tolerate it. It's a mismatch of what you can handle and what it can offer. You don't need to change your digestive system, you don't need to ask the food to change. You just, stop eating it, and focus on other foods that work."
They were right, I opened myself up to newness, I stopped imagining what a relationship could be like with someone and just started seeing relationships for what they are.
Now, I’m going to go roll my boyfriend a joint before he wakes up from napping.