Chris Dodds

I’ve avoided reading much about autism, partially because the little I have read made me angry and partially because of the dumpster fire of self-diagnosis and DSM-5-inspired interpretive dance that has flooded the internet the last few years. Someone recommended Neurotribes to me at one point and it was interesting, but rage-inducing. It’s basically the greatest hits of neurospicy children being tortured by well-intentioned parents, snake oil salesmen, and Nazi mad scientists.

Instead, I spent a lot of time just thinking about my particular flavor of spiciness, how it affects me and others, and trying to sit with all of that on my own. That’s been productive, but I’ve reached a point of “now what?” How do other people deal with some of the challenges that led to burnout (and threaten it in the future)? How do I even talk about myself to others?

You tell someone you’re autistic and they roll through all the data points they have for that. Non-verbal, violent kids. Temple Grandin. Rain Man. Love on the Spectrum. Random assholes who were mean to them and blamed their Asperger’s. And I don’t present as any of those things (maybe the last one, a little), so my assumption is, in many cases, they think I’m full of shit.

But I also don’t want to lead with “here’s a thing I struggle with” - the “functional” explanation that some people go with. I’m not disabled. I just sometimes experience things that are disabling - like someone’s mic cutting in and out on Zoom and that feeling like I’m being boiled alive so I have to drop off the call. Or not knowing what “happy” feels like. Given the choices, I mostly keep quiet about it.

But I’ve been reading more. Trying to figure out different tactics to smooth out some things that are rough, and how to explain myself when I feel like I need to.

It’s great that people are talking more in the open about mental health stuff now, but that’s also brought on a wave of both well-intentioned misinformation from armchair psychiatrists and influencers trying to turn #depression into likes. There’s also the Autism Speaks-type folks who view neurodiversity as a cancer that needs curing and can fuck off into the sun.

Kieran Rose (The Autistic Advocate) has turned out to be a pretty good resource, although like most of the good things I’ve found, their website is very hard to read. It is one of the less visually offensive ones though. I legit don’t understand how people are still so bad at web design in the year 2026. /tangent

They have a post, “What is autism?”, that I found both helpful and frustrating. Helpful in the sense that it gave me a better framework for thinking about autistic experience. Frustrating, because they deconstruct the language describing autism and don’t initially replace it with anything. “There is no such thing as autism, only Autistic experience.”

I can appreciate arriving somewhere like “the labels are imperfect, but we can still use them for short hand,” on a purely intellectual level, but it doesn’t scratch the itch of “I just want an easy way to talk about this stuff without handing someone a book.”

The deconstruction is purposeful though and he does ultimately point to monotropism (albeit, in kind of an aside), which turned out to be a really helpful model for both thinking AND talking about autism. I explained it to my wife using a modified version of the metaphor the initial researchers used:

Most people experience the world like a well-lit room. The light is evenly distributed and your attention is yours to direct or re-direct mostly at will. Your attention is balanced.

Autistic people experience the world like it’s a dark room with a high powered flashlight that they only loosely control. That light puts individual things in very sharp, narrow focus. When your attention locks in, you can sit at a table and do a puzzle for 12 hours without remembering to eat. Break that focus suddenly, and it makes your brain very unhappy, like being splashed with freezing water or slapped in the face.

When there is a lot going on in the room, the flash light bounces around, trying to engage a deep focus on anything it can latch onto, but not being able to hold on to anything for very long. Your brain does not like this either. It takes a lot of energy and is very stressful. In some cases, it tricks your lizard brain into thinking a lion is about to eat you.

This framework mirrors my own experience very closely, and my wife’s response was basically “Holy shit, that makes so much sense for how you react to certain things.” It’s also one of the only (if not the only) model to describe autistic experience derived by people who have actually lived it.

I’m just starting this journey of really digging in and trying to sort through the chaff. Hopefully, I’ll find some more stuff like this. It’s both practically useful for communication and chips away at those feelings of being alone and weird and not knowing how to be people.

Four months on from April:

• 14 pieces
• 119 total submissions
• 80 rejections
• 8 personalized rejections
• 2 short lists
• 1 long list
• 1 published (short CNF)
• 2 accepted, forthcoming (novella & a short story)

Has turned into:

• 19 pieces: 1 novella, 5 short CNF, 13 short stories
• 196 total submissions
• 126 rejections
• 12 personalized rejections
• 2 short lists
• 1 long list
• 3 published
• 2 accepted, forthcoming

“Unknown Caller” went live at Pithead Chapel today, Vol. 15, Issue 8. Short CNF. This has been one of my target journals since I started and it’s really exciting to have something land there.

“Triptych” was picked up by Wordgathering, a journal of disability poetry and literature out of Syracuse. Also short CNF. I’ll link it when it’s up. This one took 24 submissions to land, which is the longest road any of my pieces has walked. I had to do a lot of thinking about market fit and pivot a couple of times. It’s kinda-sorta a prose poem and provides no resolution. It’s also almost pure sensory overwhelm. Turns out, the band for that type of thing is narrow.

I’ve gotten a much better handle on fit-to-venue and feel like I’m starting to hone in on the places that publish things that are shaped like the things I write.

I’m not really feeling anything from the rejections. There are a few I’ve been bummed about (“I really thought this was a good fit and like this magazine.”), but generally I don’t have any expectations, so getting told “no” hasn’t been hard to handle.

The bigger adjustment is internalizing how much time everything takes. Months until you hear back, months until it hits and/or you can post anything about an acceptance or publication. Just lots of waiting.

I’m still trying to navigate who I share things with and build comfort around the level of vulnerability some of my pieces have. I’m not embarrassed by anything I’ve written, but some things might hurt feelings (with or without context) or be misunderstood. I’ve just not built up the right framework for thinking through those problems yet and have defaulted to “open,” while also not doing much targeted sharing with the folks in my sphere.

The path I want to chart is one where I’m just me, take it or leave it, but that’s not how most of us are wired by default, so it takes effort to arrive there.

My first guitar was a 1930s Harmony acoustic that was mostly held together by its own memory of having been a guitar. It lasted all of six months before I convinced my parents to splurge on a $100 upgrade from the local music store. I don’t think it even had a brand name. I’m pretty sure the head was labeled “GUITAR”, in case anyone was confused about that.

I kept going for the next few decades, playing a little, occasionally upgrading, setting the guitar in the corner for a while. I never really felt compelled to get better at it. Good enough felt good enough.

About two years ago, I got the itch to get better at singing. I’m not really sure what triggered it. I think there was a vague feeling of “I need to find a way to get some of the meh out of me,” and guitar alone wasn’t really cutting it (and I hadn’t really considered ramping up writing again). So, after a couple of false starts, I found a teacher.

Progress was quick, as it often is when you start something new. My recital performances were a pretty consistent upward arc through increasingly challenging songs. I started with Elliot Smith (Waltz #2) and was doing some simpler Alter Bridge and A Perfect Circle songs with reasonable competency (if not ease) within a few months. The performances themselves left me a little cold though, and I was getting frustrated once some of the early, fast ramp started to steepen.

Doing Joni Mitchell’s “River” for a Christmas showcase made me feel hollow. I hit the notes, but I couldn’t feel the room. Right after I got off stage I watched a woman with a harp melt everyone in the audience, which kept me from wallowing, because she melted me too.

So we switched it up a bit and started to focus more on performance skills rather than pure technique. And that felt good, for a few performances. I picked simpler songs (Dave Matthews, Dylan, a very simplified Sleep Token cover) for the performances and was able to inhabit them better and feel the audience reaction. I’m not good at appreciating things for longer than a millisecond though, so right after the adrenaline of performing drained out, I was right back into “I want to do X, Y, Z that are 10x harder.”

We’re trying to balance technique and performance, with lessons split in half. I’m struggling to manage my own expectations about what should be easy (or easier) at this point and recognizing the progress I’ve made. My teacher called me out on it in our last lesson. “You’re not failing at this. You just keep picking the hardest stuff to tackle and then feel bad about it because it’s not immediately what you want it to be.” I confessed that I don’t know how to not be this way. I’ve got this asshole “be better” tiger chasing me. My taste is super specific and always outpaces my skill.

But I have progressed. I can admit that - logically speaking. It’s just hard to feel any of it. My guitar playing is better, because I’ve been playing more and adapting it to vocal accompaniment. I’m by no means competent at piano yet, but the onramp has been much smoother than it would have been two years ago. My range is much wider (and higher). Hitting something like a G5 is no longer a pipe dream. I know how to breathe now. I can absolutely crush karaoke parties. And it’s not happened a lot, but on a few occasions, I’ve been able to build the audience resonance that I’m chasing — that feeling of “I just shifted the room” — and it is intoxicating.

My current project songs are mostly female performances in their original key (Lolli Wren’s “All Mine” and Maphra’s cover of “Unethical”). Another is Periphery’s “Satellites,” which is ~10 minutes of code switching gymnastics backed by jazz-infused metal. There’s a new wrinkle in the learning arc as well, where I’ve discovered that a lot of the things that sound very emotive and cathartic to the ear, like pitched screaming, are actually pretty boring and/or technical to perform. The disconnect between sound and emotion is uncomfortable and a bit of a let down. The sound of angst feels like working a math problem.

I’m not sure how people find the joy in the process. All mine seems to come in those moments where everything locks into place and I nail whatever it is I’m after. I want to be capital-G good, but I don’t know that I could easily define what that means. Maybe it’s being able to move the room consistently. Or being able to reach for a song and the skill and intuition is there more often than it isn’t. I don’t know. I’m not good at being bad at things.

Someone is speaking at the lectern. There’s not enough room in my brain for whatever it is they are saying. An old man in front of me coughs every few minutes. Children tap their feet, whisper when will this be over, crumple paper. Parents shush. Teens in the balcony smack gum. Two ladies at the back murmur. Someone kicks a metal water bottle, picks it up, clicks the lid shut. I hear and feel my starched collar rubbing the hair on the back of my neck.

My hearing isn’t great — it’s fairly damaged, actually. The problem is that every one of these sounds arrives with the same priority as the speaker’s voice, and my brain won’t let any of them go. Each one lands like a small, sharp weight. My heart rate ticks up with every addition.

For most of my life I assumed this was just how rooms worked. That the stress was a character flaw I could train away with stoicism and “toughness.” I got good at the performance. Calm under pressure became part of my identity and people noticed. A coworker once told me, “You’re the guy everyone wants around when they crash a plane in the wilderness.” I told him we’d eat him first. I filed those compliments away and used them as fuel: if I can’t handle a situation, I’ve failed.

What nobody was measuring — including me — was the cost. The plane-crash guy isn’t serene in the wreckage; he’s running on adrenaline and habit, scanning every input, holding the whole scene in working memory so nothing gets dropped. That’s not peace. You’re just filling up a buffer until it overflows and you start dropping stuff or buckling under the weight. It’s fucking expensive.

About six months before I turned 40, recovery stopped working. Situations I’d glided through — or at least white-knuckled through — became impossible. A loud room for more than half an hour. A week of back-to-back social immersion on a work trip, ending with me curled up in a ball in my hotel room. The beach, which I’d always found busy, turned into something that felt like the whole universe landing on me at once — crash of waves, seagulls, yelling, four wheelers, the wind, the sand on my skin, umbrellas, my wet swim trunks, everyone else’s swim suits, the spray hitting my face, every piece of trash, the grass in the dunes, the salt smell, the fish smell, the suntan lotion smell, the beer smell, the clouds.

My therapist mentioned autism. I laughed. “You’re a world champion at masking, but the debt has come due.” I’d read a bit by then, and I knew the label fit in the abstract. Knowing and believing your own experience are different things though. I don’t really care about the label, but it’s hard to quiet the judgemental voice that I’ve heard most of my life. “There is no ‘specialness’ here, only flaws to fix.”

Then I started talking to people in my life about it and the response was almost universally “Yes. Correct.” It turns out, I was the last to know. My wife asked “You really thought it was normal that you could sit in a chair doing a puzzle for 10 hours at a time?”

Yes?

I keep getting slapped in the face with evidence and I’m still “Hmm, maybe I just didn’t get enough sleep last night.”

Three months on from January:

• 12 pieces: 1 novella, 3 short creative nonfiction essays, 8 short stories
• 80 total submissions
• 43 rejections
• 6 personalized rejections
• 1 short list
• 1 long list
• 1 acceptance
• 1 thing I can’t talk about yet, but is very exciting.

Has turned into:

• 14 pieces
• 119 total submissions
• 80 rejections
• 8 personalized rejections
• 2 short lists
• 1 long list
• 1 published (short CNF)
• 2 accepted, forthcoming (novella & a short story)

First publication: “The Desert” went up at Marrow Magazine on April 6th. Short CNF. Travel, grief (or lack thereof). Go read it and the rest of the issue. Lots of good stuff.

So… currently: 36 responses pending across 11 active pieces. Mostly flash / short-short fiction with a literary horror lean. Still finding the right rooms for some of it. So maaaany journals.

I keep posting about this stuff because I think the data + context is helpful. Duotrope, Chillsubs, and Submission Grinder will give you just the data, but having it humanized is important too. I see people on reddit and forums despairing over not hearing back from a journal after 2 weeks and I’m like “Oh, you sweet summer child.”

The rest of life has been busy recently so my output has slowed a bit, but I’ve got a couple of pieces in progress that will join the herd soon. Fly, my pretties, fly!