I'm not an alien: Autism in adulthood


Loving a Earthling when you're an alien

My husband is my home on this planet. He's the first person who looked at this alien chick and didn't ask for an instruction manual. He just opened the door and said, "Come in."

He swears he's never thought I was "weird." And in the language of love, he's telling the truth. In his emotional dictionary, "Lizzy" is a proper noun that means partner, love, connection. It's not an adjective that gets modified with "weird" or "normal."

But there are moments when our native languages clash.

I speak the language of Filing and Analysis. When I'm telling him about my fifth time reading American Psycho — about the seams of unreliable narration, about satire used as a scalpel, about that razor-thin line between the monster's delusion and the reality of the system that created him — my words make perfect sense to me. It's like a technical report on something I find fascinating.

He listens in the language of Common Sense and Emotion. And what he hears is: "My wife is obsessed with a book about a psychopathic killer."

That's when The Look appears. It's not that he loves me less. It's the look of a native Spanish speaker listening to a poem in Japanese: you recognize the rhythm as language, you admire the passion in the voice, but the actual words? No idea.

Sometimes, trying to put words to something he can't quite name, he'll say something like "you're kinda nuts," said with that smile you use when you're pointing out some endearingly weird quirk of someone you love. It's his way of saying, "Your mind runs on a frequency mine doesn't always pick up, and it catches me off guard, and I love you anyway."

I've learned that inter-neurological love isn't about being completely understood in every layer of who you are. It's about being accepted as a whole package, even the parts your partner visits like a curious, bewildered tourist, with no intention of ever moving in.

He doesn't need to understand why I file away every sensory detail or obsessively analyze transgressive novels. He just needs to know that this filing, this analyzing, is part of the woman he loves. And that, when you get right down to it, is the most perfect translation of love an alien could ever hope for on a strange planet.

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