Monotropic

One of my husband’s favorite sayings was, “What makes ya, breaks ya.”

What made me—my indubitably greatest strength—is my ability to uber focus on my area of expertise. What broke me was undoubtedly my greatest weakness: my near-total lack of interest in anything/everything outside my area of expertise.

As soon as I read the Monotropic definition—having a single focus—I knew I’d finally found my round hole. Yup, for good or for worse, my life is my business, and my business is my life. What makes ya, breaks ya.

It don’t make me a fun person, that’s for damn sure. Using the knowings and techniques I’ve discovered and devised has never summoned crowds of friends and admirers to my side. Decades ago, my brother dubbed me the ultimate party pooper, and he was right. In an outgoing, “let’s have a drink and dance all night” family, I was a “can I go to bed early?” anomaly.

And therein lies the fundamental impetus to end myself. For what profit a man if his everything is so concentrated, so tightly niched, that he hath no pastimes unattached to his focus?

See, I didn’t merely dig myself a financial hole all those months when I was soothing my angst with plotting my exit. That was just a side non-benefit. I was also unwittingly excavating the longest, deepestly buried lie I’d been running from, lying about, and denying since my first cognition bloom: that I’m a complete individual who functions just like every other member of my species.

I ain’t. I don’t. And I stubbornly, tenaciously, recalcitrantly refuse to be.

Okay, no, that’s another lie. Not that I’m stubborn, tenacious, recalcitrant—that’s all true. But that I refuse(d) to be like everyone else.

I undertook, I swear. I strove. I participated; I gave it the ‘ol college try, again and again and again. And I ripped myself a new one, repeatedly and virulently, every time my internal crane broke down trying to raise my regard for whatever person/place/thing might possibly inch me within putting-range of being socially conventional… or at least tolerable.

I thought being mono focused was just my thing, not “a” thing. Now I’ve learned that in 1992, Dinah Murray[1] renamed my life-long peculiarity “monotropic” because… I’m guessing its more kitschy and psych-ish and hey, we all gotta get our thumbprint out there somehow.

So my “tendency to focus intently on a single or narrow field of interests to the exclusion of all else” has become a neurodivergency that some people think, theoretically, may be autism’s underlying principle.

I’m a-thinking it sure as shit may also explain everything that’s been right and wrong in my life for the last, oh, seventy-one years now. In her autisticrealms.com writings, Helen Edgar[2] claims montropism is a “happy flow state.” Well, gee, that only sounds like me utterly. Slinky® flow merely gives reason to my breathing.

According to the research I quickly did after dumbasfucking up yet another couple of what shoulda-been easy social interactions, my single-aspect focus comprises high concentration and engagement levels, even if said aspect is, in fact, multi-faceted.

Well color me duh. My first thought was, “Somebody got a grant to write that obviousness, didn’t they?”

My second thought was, “Shit. This reads like somebody’s been watching me from the inside all my life.”

Do I lose track of time and all other concerns? Yup. Do I escape into said concentration for comfort and a sense of safety? Yup, yup. Do I have trouble in social settings not centered on the one-and-only thing I ever immerse in?

In the words of the immortal Brian Zsupnik, drummer extraordinaire, “Is there a question here?”

No, there isn’t.

I’m not flagrantly anti-social. I drank in listening sans attaching with my baby formula. I mastered feigning connection before the two weeks I attended playschool were suddenly over.

I did as well in playschool as I did in every school. Which begs the question: is my crappy memory just another physical handicap, a result of childhood trauma, or a side-effect of autism, which, it appears, I may have?

Inquiring minds are curious, I suppose, but most of me wonders why I’d need a definitive answer at my age. Or is that just a manifestation of one or all the above or something else I’ve been lying, hiding, and denying all these decades?

Isn’t there a get-out-of-jail card that renders all diagnoses not discovered until after my fortieth birthday invalid, or at least moot in my case? And if so, why don’t I stop shoveling up more sludge? Is excavating entombed crap just my contorted version of a bucket list?

Sometimes it feels as if I traded my mortal-coil-off-shuffling for an okay-let’s-see-if-this-makes-makes-you-crazy grocery list. On which I always forget to add radishes, mushrooms, and avocados.

The good news, Helen Edgar @autisticrealms insists, is that embracing my monotropisity theoretically supports positive autistic mental health.

Which means… uh—I’d have to accept a covert self-diagnosis of having autism. Not that the thought hasn’t trickled in my gray matter once or half-a-jillion times since ghosting my first book on the subject, which seemed so… what’s the right word?...

Relatable.

But since I’ve known for a fact that nothing is or could possibly be wrong with me (ignore the upcoming procedure to fix one of those nothings for which I’ve used workarounds since it got me into trouble in kindergarten), I especially like the @autisticrealms claim:

Having a monotropic mind is something special and needs to be embraced and nurtured… It is an opportunity for the mind to be free and for creativity to flow.

Straw-clutching though that may be, I’m a-take it. For once, something non-self-depredating that doesn’t fall into the “love yourself, look at all you’ve achieved” generic-istic basket of spiritual/behavioral-modification mantras and affirmations that, I gotta be honest, never felt as one-size-fits-all as the commercials promised.

@autisticrealms also proposes monotropism can help children socialize, and from my vantage point, that particular bitcoin is only semi-acceptable if’n it comes with a few buckets of provisos.

Yes, I’ve always enjoyed doing live presentations and giving webinars and attending group sessions with other ghosts and writers, but truth be told, said exhilaration soon truncates after the wrap-up. For non-comprehensible reasons, people tend to gather in little groups to talk about “other things” once the show is over, leaving me in a cloud of what-had-been-and-is-now-over. The glow dims to dank quickly.

I used to chalk that up to moral impropriety, of course. My fault entirely. Who woulda ever thunk I might be waltzing off step with my fellow homo sapiens onaccounta my inner rhythm sways to the frug?

I once wandered into a middle-school-hall The Man From Uncle debate among a group of girls to which my non-boy-inity felt a potential semi-acceptance. As a rabid U.N.C.L.E fan, I was nanoseconds away from opening my mouth until the focus turned to Illya Kuryakin, played by David McCallum.

Not that I didn’t like McCallum, you understand. He was wonderful in The Great Escape and NCIS. He just didn’t shiver me timbers.

I was a Napoleon Solo fan. Not because Robert Vaughn was the better actor—he wasn’t— but rather because his presence and particular delivery always seemed just on the edge of sync. I didn’t realize it at the time, of course, being a mindless pre-teen, but I did go on to waste a lot of viewing hours on some pretty bad films merely because he was in them.

One, not bad, starred Paul Newman and captured a supporting-actor Oscar nomination for Vaughn. jar-iness between the two men mesmerized me.

Point is, I spent the rest of that middle-school day, night, and many weeks after that forty-five-second interlude berating myself for liking the wrong actor, or, more specifically, for being non-enamored of the right one.

So I’m agonna say the monotropic socialization idea is kinda iffy.

Then again, I believe Ms. Edgar’s site addresses concerned parents of young children, not old farts trying to figure out what the fuck they’ve been on about as they come up on three-quarters of a century.

My pit digging continues. Don’t forget to like, follow, share, and comment to keep my spirits up.

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[1] Monotropism theory, further developed by Dinah Murray, Wenn Lawson and Mike Lesser, published in Autism journal, 2005.

[2] https://www.autisticrealms.com/post/monotropism-happy-flow-state