It’s a Saturday afternoon and my best friends and I are hitting uncharted levels of merriment as we build our first Dungeons & Dragons campaign together. We’re a group of neurodivergent creatives, so world building together feels like letting each other in on the secrets of how we think. Around the time I start squealing about a new idea for our campaign, it hits me… I’m jumping up and down while infodumping about fantasy creatures and my friends are smiling. They’re not listening out of obligation, they care about what I am saying. They care about me and my excitement. My heightened feelings are welcome in this group of people.
I take a second to fully appreciate this moment. I have created a life that welcomes my authenticity. I have found the people who bring out and fully accept my Autistic joy.
This life I’ve built didn’t happen by chance. I built this community, these daily routines, and my life with a hyperfocus on choosing to do what brings me joy. I am an Autistic adult, and before I get any further into speaking on joy, I must come clean. Things were not always this positive. For much of my life, I focused on trying to prevent bad feelings. I feel things intensely and with my full body. Meltdowns are not uncommon and they are not pretty. After years of fixating on the aspects of myself I needed to avoid and isolating myself to hide the “shameful” parts of my brain, I knew I needed a new way of thinking. It turns out that deeply disliking myself would not make the hard parts of being Autistic go away.
My big feelings are a core part of who I am. I might always feel sadness and confusion intensely, but I feel other things intensely, too. My last name is Newton. I am quite familiar with the laws of physics. Whether it’s apples falling from trees or heightened emotions, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. I thought maybe if I learned to embrace the depths of my sad emotions, I could begin to love the heights of my happy emotions.
One of those heights is Autistic joy. I believe that Autistic joy is a deeply personal feeling, so I can’t offer any deeper definition than, Autistic joy: joy felt by an Autistic person. For some of us, that looks like jumping up and down and stimming in big, joyous ways. For others, extreme joy can be felt from within, while externally, we may look completely neutral or bored. I experience both. When I am with friends sharing a special interest or freely info dumping, my joy is expressed in fast talking and freely stimming. I love going to concerts because live music brings me great joy and a concert is one of the few places where dancing, singing, and jumping up and down is welcome.
On the other hand, I also experience heightened joy when rewatching a comfort movie or listening to a comfort album. I feel joy in little traditions I have created for myself. Every year on the first rainy day of the fall, I watch Twilight (I was 11 when it released, you’ll have to excuse my taste). Sitting on my couch wrapped in my favorite blanket, I spend the 130 minute runtime rocking back and forth quoting nearly the entire screenplay. I have seen every Wes Anderson film more times than I can count, and still, staying in on a Saturday night watching Moonrise Kingdom is a perfect, joy-filled evening to me. There’s a feeling of familiarity while watching something I know I love that activates a double level of joy. I love the movie I am rewatching and I love how intensely I love it. I have learned to love being a very particular person because it means I know what I love and what makes me happy. Just like I know what social settings, textures, sounds, and smells make me feel bad, I know exactly what movies, music, books, and clothing make me feel good!
I think it is important to address that feelings look different to each person. I recognize that to an outside observer, choosing to stay in by myself and watch a movie I’ve seen many times could seem sad or boring. However, if I could open my mind while watching Twilight on the first rainy day of fall, I promise that observer would see extreme joy. Autistic people get the reputation for being bad at reading social cues. I don’t deny that, but I wish more people understood that often, it is just as hard for a neurotypical person to read an Autistic person’s emotional cues. I say this to emphasize how important it is to listen when an Autistic person tells you they are enjoying themself. Their joy may not look as expected, but that doesn’t make it any less real.
So often the world views Autistic people in a negative light, focusing on the “bad” parts of the neurotype as I did in the early years following my diagnosis. I hope that with better representation and more support and understanding for Autistic adults, the beautiful, joyous parts of our brains can be seen, too.
