🌀 Finding Freedom in “Autistic Joy”

reflections on my relationship with joy

my dog Winston in a moment of joyful bliss with a “lambchop” toy

Here’s an aspect of autism I have been coming to understand lately: autistic joy.

I gather that autistic people tend to have strong emotional experiences in general, which is usually noticed in the context of meltdowns. But we also tend to have extra-intense experiences of positive emotions, like joy, excitement, amazement, awe, affection, and so on.

Hmm, what’s the opposite of a “meltdown”? … how about a “sparkle up”?

That would describe what I observe happening in my autistic daughter (“Twin 2”) when she’s excited about something. She practically vibrates with the feeling, which then comes out in “stims” such as hopping, humming, dancing, hand-flapping, and finger-flicking.

Since I have been accustomed to “masking” my feelings, it only recently dawned on me that I have correlates to this in my own experience, too.

I was telling a friend how, while driving through the West Virginia countryside on the way to her house, I’d seen a horse—and I suddenly, involuntarily gasped, with my whole body lighting up with delight and awe.

Some people get excited when they see celebrities. I get excited when I see a horse. :-D

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A deeper dive into my relationship with joy

For that same friend I mentioned, in her childhood, joy was just outlawed—it was a foreign concept, not remotely conceivable or allowable.

For me, joy was allowed, but it was polluted, twisted, and pressed into service, in two main ways.

1. First my joy was recruited for putting on a cheery show for my parents, especially my mom, to indicate that I was fine, and therefore everything’s fine; we’re all fine. “There’s no problem here.” Joy—or at least the pretense of it—was a tool I used for collectively soothing our nervous systems.

2. Then the religion stuff swept in and turned joy into something to be used for the purpose of worshiping and glorifying God. Joy meant something: if I felt joy, that meant I was right with God, walking in the Spirit, experiencing the fruits of the Spirit, and all was well.

Then I would chase that feeling in other times, because of that moral sense that that was the correct way to be—if I’m not feeling joy, I’m not being correct. (I literally had a biblical counselor tell me once that if I was not experiencing “perfect peace,” it meant that I was not right with God. That was not helpful.)

Since I left (home and) Christianity, my relationship to joy has been complicated. It has meant something still, even though my parents and God were out of the equation. If I felt joy, that meant I was doing things right—or just “things are good; we’re going to be okay.”

Now, learning about this concept of “autistic joy” has been helping me to decouple the experience in the moment of feeling joy from the stories of “I’m okay, we’re doing fine, everything’s good, I’m doing things right,” and so on. Now I can see that there’s no relationship or correlation there. Joy is just a feeling that I can have.

And I can see that that feeling of joy tends to happen in relation to certain things, such as horses, writing, forests/nature, animals, music, books, office supplies...and so on. :-)

It’s just about my nervous system and my experience in the moment. It doesn’t have to have any sense of correlation to stories of how I’m doing, which are just stories anyway. This is very freeing.

I’m free to just let joy happen as it happens, however, whenever.

Or, in other words, I’m free to “sparkle up.” ✨

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