Autistic joy is being in alignment with your body, sensory experience, a place where you have cared for yourself enough that you can safely inhabit your body again
Where does autistic joy happen?
Its called autistic joy not because it only happens for autistic people but because my understanding of autistic is different and defines at more as something related to the body-we see this joy originate
Autistic joy is being safe liberated and educated enough to trust your own body and feelings and what is right for you- we spend a lot of time questioning ourselves being told or misled
Being able to say that our way of knowing is valid and that we don’t need anyone else to decide for us. Knowing that it is valid to feel the ways we want to feel and do what we want- liberation from prescriptive advice from others or that is forced on us. It is assuming the position that you are the expert of your own life and trusting that you are capable, that you dont need to live up to neurotypical standards to have a good life, and that you dont need to question your sense of what’s happening in a social situation, that you dont need to second guess yourself. You shouldn’t like bulldozing people but questions are a tool for joy as they help us navigate things in a clear way we can understand. It’s also allowing yourself to explore new and culturally foreign things that might help you. Its deeply related to diagnosis and how we frame experiences and also the tools that can come with having a diagnosis.
Is it also giving yourself permission to resist things? To reject what you dont want and fail in the eyes of others in pursuit of your own empowered erotic life?
This can take the form of unmasking which can then lead to Aurdre Lorde’s erotic that comes out of self care.
Dr. Neff writes that “Sensory self-care helps you learn to listen to your body’s needs regarding what you see, hear, touch, taste, and smell and then address those needs in a way that works for you.”1
When we listen to our bodies in ways that honor and address their needs, apart from what we think we need for ourselves we may be able to come into contact with Audre Lorde’s concept of the erotic because we are able to find a deeper connection to ourselves and the aspects of our lives that we previously didn’t acknowledge or ignored: “For once we being to feel deeply in all aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of. Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence.”2
This deeper connection with our bodies that we gain through the practice of self-care informs our sense of joy and liberation, in that once we begin to liberate ourselves and bodies from oppressive systems that seek to divide us from ourselves, either by demanding more of us than possible to give, or by telling us that we cannot or are not allowed to trust our intuition about what we need or want, we find a joy within our bodies that we then know that we deserve to feel all the time. Once we feel the erotic we form a connection that cannot be severed so easily with out bodies and which demands that we maintain our erotic connection to ourselves, or as Lorde says our “erotic knowledge.”3
For example, the process of unmasking when autistic is a process of gaining this erotic knowledge through reconnection with our bodies and what we know through feeling. Teagan Rose-Bloid writes that “When you spend so long being unable to express parts of yourself for fear of punishment or ridicule, it can be almost as if those parts never existed. You have to uncover those parts of yourself again. You have to dig them up from where you buried them. You have to revisit all the things you stopped doing because you were made fun of or corrected and you have to face all that shame and embarrassment all over again. It might take years to let go of all that baggage, to reclaim all the traits that you smothered for the comfort and ease of everyone else. It’s a process but it’s worth it.”4
We can also see a reconnection with the erotic knowledge in the process of receiving a diagnosis as Laura Kate Dale writes: “My initial response to getting an autism diagnosis was relief, and a calm wave of joy. Yeah, I had a disability, but that wasn’t new. The day I got my diagnosis wasn’t the day I became autistic, but it was the day I put a name to the beast. It wasn’t the day i became different from my peers, but it was the day i learned that i was not alone, ad tha other people out there had been through what i was going through. It wasn’t the day i started to struggle but the day i realized there were other people out there, with tools to cope and survive in a difficult world, and i could seek out their advice for ideas on how to live my own life in a way that was less confusing and scary.5
Once in touch with the erotic and our own bodies and knowledges autistic joy will come about and can look like this:
“I’m working on how to let myself unashamedly hand-flap. It’s kind of stereotypical, sure, but have you ever done it? It’s actually astounding how effective it is at burning out excess energy. And it’s fun. If you’re reading this, even if you’re not autistic, I implore you to try it the next time you feel a bit overwhelmed. It doesn’t have to be a full arm flap, you don’t have to put a tone of power into it, but give it a try and see if you feel better after. Even if you aren’t autistic and don’t quite understand the value of stimming, you’ve probably partaken without realizing. Have you ever been so excited that you bounded on your feet? Or have you ever been to a sporting event and gotten swept up in jumping, screaming, high-fiving, and fist-pumping? That is, technically, stimming. That’s just experiencing a wealth of sensory or emotional information and physically expressing it, which is the core of autistic stimming.”6
- Neff, Megan Anna. 2024. Self-Care for Autistic People. Simon and Schuster. ↩︎
- Lorde, Audre. 2019. “Uses of the Erotic.” In Pleasure Activism : The Politics of Feeling Good, 27–35. Chico, CA: AK Press. ↩︎
- Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic.” ↩︎
- Rose-Bloid, Teagan. 2023. “Rediscovering Myself.” In Stories of Autistic Joy, 108–19. Jessica Kingsley Publishers. ↩︎
- Dale, Laura Kate. 2023. “The Joy of Diagnosis.” In Stories of Autistic Joy, 210–13. Jessica Kingsley Publishers. ↩︎
- Rose-Bloid, “Rediscovering Myself”, 119. ↩︎
The Art of Autistic Joy 