The terrible, beautiful pang

Using my special interests to ground me in the midst of chaos

We’ve known we were going to be moving to Maine for several months now—since back when our 1973 Airstream home was parked in a snow-covered desert in Southern California.

But a lot happened on the road to get here (we’re in Maine now).

And this is our first big move since I’ve found out I’m autistic.

We’ve moved dozens of times—a hundred?—since we started living and traveling in the Airstream, but those were all small moves. One night, or two—two weeks at most, usually. And the whole time you know each move is temporary. In my experience of road life (which has admittedly not always been kind to my neurodivergent brain), the temporary itself is the permanent, steady thing.

But this is different. My partner, Ethan, got a job here that could be long term. We’re already committed to being here for at least six months—which is longer than we’ve been anywhere for a long time. As we crossed the border into Maine, I caught myself taking a mental picture of the trailer in the rear view mirror, and Ethan in the driver’s seat, and our parakeet, Slightly, in the carrier between us in the cab, chirping along to the road sounds, and wondered when it will ever be like this again. Further down the road, signs announced names of towns I recognized from my obsessive googling of places nearby the new job, and it really started to hit bottom: everything is going to be different now.

Two days later, and I was a complete wreck.

There’s a lot about this change that could be good for my autistic self once we get really settled, but in the meantime, it’s hitting me hard.

Everything feels upside down, and confusing, and it doesn’t really matter how logically I step through how all this could help in the long term—I’m still dysregulated a lot of the time.

Out to sea in a storm.

An untethered astronaut. (I first used this metaphor two years ago, before I knew I was describing autistic burnout)

Like I desperately need an anchor.

A few panels from a comic I made for paid subscribers.

Past, undiagnosed, Gracie would attribute this to normal moving stress, that surely everyone else feels just as big as me, so why can’t you just pick yourself up get on with it, already, Gracie?

But knowingly Autistic Gracie is trying something new.

I’m not going to say it’s been my way out of being a wreck quite yet, but my way through at this particular moment has been to try to dig deeper to find myself when everything in me says that’s the wrong thing to do. My logical brain is telling me to solve the unknown problems, do research, make things knowable. Housing, jobs, finances—just how, exactly, is this all going to work? But all the googling and spreadsheets in the world can’t magically conjure up the feeling of being secure and stable.

So many times in my life I’ve looked to other things for that stability, and felt gutted and lost when things didn’t work out as planned. I know I’ll always have these kind of struggles with change in my life, but I want to build a practice of turning inward first when it happens. To find something in myself to be the steady thing. Something I want, that feels right, that I can create about and from no matter what else is happening, that I can hang on to right now.

I drew this for my 2021 phrase of the year, “Dig Deep,” when I wasn’t even in the middle of what’s been a very extensive excavation of self. I’ve been this a slow, painful journey of self-discovery since 2017, but it’s been well worth it.

So today I made a cup of tea, and “lit” one of my battery-operated flickering candles (that are safe for birds), and flipped through a sketchbook from last year, where I drew and wrote:

Things I like.

Things I’m into.

Things I care about.

It’s a simple concept, but a powerful one—to document, all in one place, some of the things I like to draw and stories and creators and aesthetic and concepts I care about most. The ones that really speak to me on some deep level I can’t explain.

When I drew these, I didn’t know I was autistic—that a lot of these bits of my soul scribbled here are what you might call special interests—although it seems hardly enough to call them that. Identity and interests really feel like the same thing, at least for me—and I imagine that’s probably true for a lot of other autistic people, too.

Today I’m tying all these bits of my identity together as a life raft for a deeper, stronger stability. To get back to a sense of self, and maybe even a creative practice, that can ground me when everything else is chaos.

I’ll be creating from this place for the next few weeks, if it feels right (I have a rough plan, but I’m trying to stay flexible, and rest, too).

Today I’m reminding myself of who I am—and if you’re going to stick around here, you should know, too.

This is me, at least at the moment, captured in some scribbles on a few pages:

After a brainstorm of some of my favorite things to draw and mediums (above), I focused the next page (below) on some of my favorite creators, and gave them speech bubbles with what I imagine they might say to summarize their work—or at least what I love most about it, that I’ve learned from studying the stories they tell. The little extra lists in black are some of their favorite stories and authors, too, for me to look into if I’m not already familiar with them.

J.D. Salinger, Markus Zusak, Neil Gaiman, J.M. Barrie, Isabelle Arsenault, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Wes Anderson, Emily Carroll, The Duffer Brothers, are a good start to a list of my favorites. I need to add in Daniels of Swiss Army Man and Everything Everywhere All At Once now, too!

I finished the whole thing off (at least for now) with some of my favorite stories, with a bit about why each one hits me so hard, and what they say to me, and what I want to communicate in the stories I tell, too. These are the core parts of why these stories matter to me.

All these things taken as a whole gave me that gut-level, sucker-punch of emotion I can barely put into words, that just… is… me. This is what matters to me as I create, what I’m trying to capture, what is most fulfilling for me to express. It’s what gets me up in the morning, honestly—or what does if I’m not getting too distracted by all the research-to-try-to-make-the-overwhelming-knowable and ableist ideas of productivity for productivity’s sake.

And I’m trying to orient myself around that feeling right now, so that everything I do has some of this in it, and that can be my true north. The mess, and the pain, and the beauty of it, somehow. To keep creating when I can, gently, in the midst of it all, without expectation. Leaving the fingerprints where they smudge, and valuing the amount of time I can spend in that gut-level feeling space over any measurement of productivity or progress or a sense of having figured things out.

To be imperfectly prolific about the terrible, beautiful pang of it.

Let’s make that the one stable thing.

But that’s for me—what would these pages look like for you? I’d love to know if you’d like to share. To get to know the deeper you under all the *shoulds* and confusion.