Becoming Yourself: Autism, Identity & Belonging with author Sol Smith
This is Wendy Halley, and you're listening to Lucid Cafe. Hello, and thank you for joining me for another episode of Lucid Cafe. In today's episode, I'm joined by author and neuro affirming life coach, Sol Smith, for a thoughtful and deeply personal conversation about autism, with a specific focus on high functioning adults, their identity and self discovery. Sol shares his journey of being diagnosed with autism in adulthood and what inspired him to write The Autistic's Guide to Self Discovery, Flourishing as a Neurodivergent Adult. Together in our conversation, we explore the often overlooked nuances of autistic experience, including high masking, social challenges, intense versus narrow interests, and the impact of societal stigma.
Wendy:Sol also speaks to the barriers many autistic adults face in accessing professional diagnosis, the importance of self diagnosis, and the vital role community support groups play in fostering belonging and understanding. So Sol has been a college instructor for twenty years specializing in mindset, happiness, and self liberation courses. As a life coach and neurodivergent consultant, he's had the privilege of helping numerous individuals realize their own potential, embracing paths that exist beyond the confines of societal molds. So please enjoy my illuminating conversation with Sol Smith. Sol, thank you so much for joining me.
Sol:Thank you so much for having me. It's exciting to be here.
Wendy:Alright. So you have a new book out. It's called the Autistic's Guide to Self Discovery. Your subtitle is flourishing as a neurodivergent adult. So let's just start with a basic question.
Wendy:What prompted you to write this book and to share your story?
Sol:Yeah. I mean, I've been working with autistic folks for a long time. I realized I was autistic somewhere around 2020, diagnosed maybe two years afterwards. It's a long process for a lot of us. And I have been working with autistic folks since then.
Sol:And, you you know, working as a life coach access is a real problem. It's expensive because there's no structure. It's sort of holding us in place, and you have to make it be worth your time to be able to do this. And I am always trying to look for ways that I can try to make it more accessible to more people. So the book was just a really sort of logical step in that process, and I had it in my mind that I was going to do that at some point.
Sol:But I have been writing since I was, you know, in high school, and I've been hunting down publishers since I was in college, and it's a really unrewarding process. So I wasn't like with that.
Wendy:Right.
Sol:I always say that it's a young man's game. I spent my twenties just mailing out all the time to agents and stuff and publishers and going to writing conventions. What are they called? God.
Sol:There's a name for it. Anyway. But I
Wendy:I get the idea.
Sol:Yeah. Yeah. And so I just kinda had it on the back burner that I'm gonna write this book. It's gonna be fine once I get some time. And, of course, time kept not coming.
Sol:And then I had somebody who was followed me who works for the San Francisco Writers Conference. And she said, hey. You know, a couple weeks, the Writers Conference is happening. You should really come up here. And I was like, that's way too late for me to register.
Sol:I don't have anything ready. And she said, no. I really think you should. I think that, like, you know, I I'm sure you have a book in you, and and you could throw something together. And I just was like, you know, what the heck?
Sol:Like, I was in the habit of trying to jump on every opportunity that popped up. So I got my college to pay for me to go up there. And it is very different going to a writer's conference when you are trying to sell a book and you have nothing sort of, like, on your resume and when you have hundreds of thousands of followers on social media. And that, of course, is irritating to me because I had people falling all over themselves wanting to talk with me who have turned down, I don't know, five, six novels. And I'm like, I'm the same guy you turned down stuff for.
Sol:Like, you know, the only thing that changed here is now I can sell for you and that kind of you know? But that being said, I found a great team. It was a fantastic experience, and that was really what was the sort of linchpin in this process that I and I only bring this up because I think that writers need to know this, that you hear all these success stories about writing, and it is really true. It's easier when you know the paycheck is coming. So writers who are established and they're you talk about their writing process and stuff, it's very different for those of us who are struggling for year after year.
Wendy:I know. It sounds like you were writing fiction before you wrote this book.
Sol:Yeah. Mostly.
Wendy:And that's a tough market to break into.
Sol:Right.
Wendy:Yeah. Speaking from experience. And a lot of people are pursuing writing now, so really crowded playing field.
Sol:Yeah. Playing field. Yeah. Yeah.
Wendy:Alright. But this book is not fiction. It is nonfiction. And so what prompted you to write this particular book?
Sol:Okay. I had recently finished in 2022, I'd finished my master's in psychology, and I had focused all of my research on autism and ADHD. And the stigma around autism and the misunderstandings around it are insane. The way that people come at it, it's just as a general public, we are so undereducated about it. And I recognize that I was really in an echo chamber of people who had really researched and dove into this and understood their experiences better.
Sol:And I felt like most of what we're combating is stigma and misunderstanding. And I just wanted to try and put it out there in a way that was more understandable for people, that's neuro affirming, that makes them feel like this is not some, like, terrible problem, but it is something to better understand and become friends with. And, it just really it it was I was very passionate about it. It was a great experience to write about it. But, yeah, I just really wanted to to a lot of the way the DSM is written, many of we who are late diagnosed never saw ourselves in that.
Sol:Just the different ways that are like, for example, having narrow interests makes it sound like you're not very interested in things. That's true. You know? Right? The emphasis is on what you're not interested in.
Sol:And for me, I was always fascinated with something. I was always getting into something, whether it was psychology or quantum physics or anthropology or a certain author. I was always obsessed with something. So it just never felt like that was a narrow interest at all. And it was only when I started looking into the actual autistic experiences that I realized, oh, what they call narrow interest is actually a very intense interest that teachers and parents are unable to point you away from.
Wendy:Got it.
Sol:They want to redirect your interest towards what is important to them. And if that's not interesting to you, we're not very attracted to it. We're not gonna get a lot of dopamine from it. We're already getting our fix over here, and we wanna stay there. And so that field narrow, but it's just that they it's hard to redirect for people.
Wendy:Okay. Well, that's a good example. I would like to dive in a little bit more too, into the other, like so we're talking about high functioning autistic folks in this conversation mostly. Yeah?
Sol:Yep. Mostly, it's late diagnosed, high masking people who are coming yeah. Coming to the realization later in life. Most people who are over the age of 18 who are autistic were not caught. Somewhere around eighty percent of women, for example, who were not identified as a child have are I mean, who are autistic were not identified as a child.
Sol:And it's similar numbers across the board, but even worse for women as usual. So, yeah, it's very much the audience is people who are trying to navigate their lives, who have had challenges that are social challenges that have been very daunting and dominating from relationships to jobs and just basic misunderstandings that finally, when you start to understand autism, that your life through this lens begins to make sense, that cohesion comes where there has been none. Instead of seeing that I had, you know, six jobs and I had different bad luck at each job, you know, different thing go wrong at each job, and the only common thing is me. I must be bad at my job. And you recognize that, oh, no.
Sol:The common thing is my social interactions with the hierarchy, my social interactions with the bosses that is really getting in the way here. And you just never really think that that's the case because you know that you're so logical and truthful about things. How could that go wrong?
Wendy:So how could that go wrong?
Sol:I know. Yeah.
Wendy:Yeah. How could it go wrong? However so so social, that's a big part of the autistic experience, right, is social challenges. And how would you describe them? Like, how would you mean, you hinted at authority as being one of the areas.
Sol:Yeah. In in in authority, like, that's one of those ones where, again, the way that the sort of, like, diagnostic language is phrased doesn't really check out with the experience where you hear them say something like they don't understand authority or they don't understand hierarchy. And I'm thinking, of course, I understand it. I've seen those charts that show who's the boss of who, and I understand what decisions are made on what level. But that's a really logical understanding.
Sol:And the difference is I've come to realize that the typical person has a very instinctive understanding of hierarchy, that they have some sort of internal mechanisms that alert them to hierarchical dangers, the ways to carry themselves differently in different situations when dealing with hierarchy. Just just for example, bosses will do this sort of, like, thing where they say that, you you know, they're friends with you, and they they treat you like a friend. But then somewhere in there, they slip in a sort of implicit demand. And I will just miss that entirely. Like, I think we're just discussing something.
Sol:And then it turns out that I was given marching orders at some point and had no idea because I was just relating with with a coworker in my mind. It's you see what I mean? Like like, for example, I might be talking to an administrator and and I might be in charge of a department. And the administrator says, I really don't like how this person's handling their history class. I think that it doesn't make any sense, and it's just not the way that I was taught.
Sol:And I might say, yeah, I don't really like it either. It's not super logical to me. I feel like you could do it this and this way, it would be better. And then a couple weeks later, have the administrator say, so did you take care of that problem? And I'm like, what problem?
Sol:The teacher who's teaching history the different way. And I'll go, I didn't know it was a problem. I just thought that we were agreeing that we that's not how we would do it.
Wendy:You mean, like, a generalization? It wasn't Yeah. Saying directly Sol? Yeah. I'm struggling with the way you're teaching.
Wendy:They
Sol:want you
Wendy:to read between the lines kind of and say, like,
Sol:oh, they want you to
Wendy:So that's like a that person is avoiding confrontation. Right? They don't Yeah.
Sol:They don't wanna because because they yeah. They wanna be friendly. Yeah. They don't wanna just they yeah.
Wendy:But your feelings, but yeah. Yeah. You're you're fired. Yeah.
Sol:Right. Exactly. Exactly. And it and it can come across as defiant. But you say the wrong thing at the wrong time where you like, there there may be something that's being discussed that is very much their pet project, their best idea, and you go, oh, this doesn't make sense.
Sol:We're gonna waste a lot of money doing this. And I I always said, well, let's look at the research. We don't need to reinvent the wheel. And they don't like that. You know?
Sol:They like, no one's doing that. They'll be like, well, let me tell you why that doesn't work here. And I'm like, this is your instinctive understanding, and that's not really what we need to go with. But but yeah. So so that's like an example.
Sol:Another example is building friendships is very different for autistics than neurotypicals. Small talk is really tough for me because, in general, autistics see discussion as information exchange that you use words to trade information back and forth. And small talk is essentially this way of seeing if you vibe with somebody. It's very low risk. You make immediate observations about the immediate world, and anybody can say them and not be wrong.
Sol:And it just kinda goes back and forth like, oh, it's Monday. Yeah. Sure is. And, you know, I think we're right. The traffic was terrible today.
Sol:Yeah. I can't stand traffic. So so nobody's
Wendy:rain. Yeah.
Sol:Yeah. Exactly. And so nobody's wrong. They're just making casual observations. And the neurotypical will go away from this conversation thinking, well, he was a pleasant chap.
Sol:I would like to do that again. And they will slowly get through these layers getting deeper. And it's as if like a fencing match where at first you're just practicing or or it's tennis and you're just rallying the ball, but then you see an opening so you hit a little harder and see if they can hit it back. And then so it gets deeper and deeper on these different levels. And for me, if it's not interesting, if it's not new information, I'm not super interested in discussing it.
Sol:So I don't feel this sort of, like, build building of camaraderie that they may be feeling in those things. Instead, I'm getting kinda anxious about what are they getting at. And basically, neurotypicals make friends by a process of frequency and in length. The longer they're around somebody, the more often they see somebody, they become friends. And I don't have this verified that it has something to do with very active mirror neurons that they will end up matching each other and sort of blending into a sort of friendship together.
Sol:And autistic have underactive mirror neurons. That's why we don't socialize very well. And we tend to miss a lot of these layers of basically like cultural communication going on that it's not written anywhere. Everybody just learns it from each other. And so I will jump to something very deep and people will think I'm being very trusted here.
Sol:You're opening up to me, and I feel like I can open up to you. And that can be a good thing, but then later on, they might feel like, oh, I shouldn't have shared that. You know, that was an overshare. Or it makes them uncomfortable immediately, like, oh, I didn't wanna hear about your mom. You know?
Sol:We weren't there yet. And it but I just miss all these layers. So it's really hard to sort of build that trust and friendship and to move down at the right level because you risk either oversharing or not reciprocating and coming across as cold. So eventually, you know, an autistic person will, become very self conscious. You know, you need things like very direct invitations to do things where other people may generalize.
Sol:Like, hey, a bunch of us are going to grab a drink after work. And, like, sounds good.
Wendy:Yeah.
Sol:You no idea. Yeah. Exactly. Have fun. Yeah.
Sol:And I'm like and or or I'll share what I'm doing after work. Oh, I'm going home to do this and that. And it sounds like I'm making an excuse, but I just thought we were talking about what we're doing at work.
Wendy:Yeah. Exactly.
Sol:Yeah. Exactly. And and so Autistic
Wendy:vague conversations are very confusing to an autistic person.
Sol:We like things to be specific and to be, you know, clear up ambiguity. It's a thing called the context sensitivity. Autistics are very sensitive to context. They need to have more included in order to make conclusions based on what's being said. For example, like in a math class, I always wanted to know why.
Sol:Like, why are we doing the quadratic equation? How did they figure this out? And that sounds like I'm challenging. It sounds like I'm saying to the teacher, we're never gonna do this in life. And that's not what I mean.
Sol:I just like, I want I want to engage with this so they understand it because it feels very abstract to me otherwise. Right. And, you know, to a math teacher, especially, like, it just makes sense. It's elegant. Why would you challenge this?
Wendy:I think you're touching on the thinking style too of an autistic person versus a neurotypical person. And I don't know. Maybe let's finish up with the social.
Sol:Let's do. Yeah. Thank you. I'm sorry. I I
Wendy:And we can get back to the we'll switch to the thinking processes that are different because I think it's really important.
Sol:Yeah. Definitely. So so, like, how autistics can tend to build friendships better around interests. If you're interested in something and somebody else is interested in it, this provides you a sort of small talk simulator where if I'm really into Star Trek and you're really into Star Trek, we can talk about a character, an episode, an engineering puzzle, or something. And now we're talking about something where we're not exposing anything of ourselves.
Sol:We are vibing together. We have something in common. Now we can go see a Star Trek movie together or we could, you know, go to a a convention or something. And it gives you a sort of forum to build a friendship around an interest. And that's much more sort of familiar territory because information is being exchanged, and it's also not personal.
Sol:So you're comfortable doing it for a while until you're comfortable with this person. And then you can get really deep really quickly in friendships, and that's a double edged sword too. They can burn out quickly. Now you feel like you have nothing else to learn from them. The novelty's gone.
Sol:Or it can become a really long friendship that, you know, essentially doesn't have to have a lot of new ground tilled. So you can go weeks without talking to them and feel like once you talk again, like, you're just back on the same page as you were. So that's very different. For me, for example, I never realized I had problems with friendships because I grew up with lots of friends and I had lots of friends as an adult. But then I had to sit back and go, wait a minute.
Sol:All of my friends growing up were my brother's friends. Uh-huh. I would get included and I became friends with them, but the expectations are totally different. I had a role. I'm the little brother.
Sol:I can show up. I don't have to, You know? So some Yeah. I had an in. Right.
Sol:And and I don't have to manage the friendship. I don't have to make the phone call. I don't have to make the plans. And then as an adult, I was doing that with my wife. She's making the friendships.
Sol:She's managing things. And I you know, the husband sometimes is there and sometimes isn't. And so it was very easy for me to slip in and out and plus, she does all the small talk. Right? She'll talk about me.
Sol:She'll explain things about me. And then that way when I show up, I don't have to do a lot of exposition. We just dive into what we already know. And I just never really realized that probably my whole life, made maybe one friend on my own. And that's other than that, it was very much like building from people with whom I'm juxtaposed.
Sol:So it didn't look like I had friendship problems, but when it came down to it, I never really got into that territory alone because I had other people. I was very close to doing it for they're like an ambassador very often to neurotypical culture. And very often, they're ADHD people because they understand something of your experience, but they have a better understanding of the social world and they can sort of translate for you. And it becomes very comfortable to go into the social world that way with a trusted person who's sort of like a liaison.
Wendy:Okay. Yeah. Yeah. And so would you say I mean, you're referencing your own experiences a lot. Would you say that that's typical for autistics, or would you say there are different variations of that?
Sol:There are different variations of that, but I see that a lot. I see a lot of people who have the sort of service person who sort of helps them into the world without really realizing that they're a big accommodation.
Wendy:Or
Sol:either. And have convinced themselves that I don't really want friends. I'm fine alone. Because mainly, they're they're avoiding a lot of anxiety.
Wendy:Might be a good place to insert people pleasing, which is another Yeah. Another trait. Right? Mhmm. So can you describe what that is?
Sol:Yeah. People pleasing. I feel like it really comes grows out of masking that we are looking at you know, we're observing and analyzing a a culture and trying to fit in with it, where neurotypicals will blend into the culture through their neuron firing in similar ways as the other people's neurons and then trimming away unused neurons, which is the way a brain generally develops. And the autistic person has underactive mirror neurons, and they don't do as much neural pruning. So they're left with this sort of Swiss army knife of a brain that is not set in this time and place.
Sol:You know, your brain's made for any time and place. And by age five, you know, if you're raised in China, there are certain word sounds you're never gonna be able to make. And same thing if you're raised in The United States, there's certain word sounds you're never gonna be able to make by age five because your brain trims away those things. You're not using them. So
Wendy:just Interesting. Okay.
Sol:Right? So it uses that it makes neurons elsewhere. So, autistics don't do that as much. And so we mask to try and fit in. We see everybody else is behaving a certain way, and it's expected of us to behave that way.
Sol:We see people who cannot mask. We see autistics who cannot mask as well or whatever in our classes, and we don't want to be treated like they're treated. We don't wanna be seen how they're seen. And so in one way or another, we will fall in with the much more copious crowd of people and how they're behaving. And this is a really easy sort of step into people pleasing that we learn to meet people's expectations, we learn to make them happy, and it makes us feel good about ourselves because we're always wondering if we're doing it right on some level.
Sol:We always feel a little bit like an impostor. And once you sort of find the approval of of somebody, you really wanna meet their expectations. You really wanna make them happy. It becomes part of your identity to make them happy. ADHDers tend to have problems, for example, in school because they don't get dopamine from doing assigned tasks.
Sol:They only get dopamine if they're interested in something. Autistics are very frequently that same way, either because they have ADHD or because they have on just underactive on that type of dopamine, they have to be interested. And so they can substitute as a sort of substitute goal of people pleasing the teacher or their parents. So they can do the schoolwork, get good great grades, and come across as if they're good at doing their job. But, yeah, but really, yeah, they just want the gold star.
Sol:They wanna like, they wanna be the most impressive that person that that the teacher's ever had. They have to go above and beyond to really impress them to keep getting that dopamine. And there's always it comes across place in most students' lives where you run into a teacher who has, like, much more of a tough love type teaching or they're unimpressed by you for some other reason. They don't jive with you. You don't jive with their teaching, and that can just break the whole thing apart.
Sol:And suddenly, you're a junior in high school, and you don't care about school anymore, and you can't figure out why. It's just dead to you. And that's a shame that it happens that way. But also, we shouldn't have to be so motivated by making other people happy. But, yeah, we can do that socially very much where we become such people pleasers that we will adopt the likes and wants and boundaries of other people.
Sol:We see what they say as rules that will stay forever, and really they're just, you know, mouthing their opinions or their feelings, and we're picking up on this as if this is some sort of creed that other people live with. Yeah.
Wendy:Right. Yeah. Exactly. Okay. Yeah.
Wendy:Just to dive into masking a little bit more, how would you define masking?
Sol:Yeah. Masking is a semi conscious process of trying to fit in with a culture, and it's a cognitive process. We have to think about it. We have to analyze things and get into things very intentionally, but we don't know that we're doing that any harder than anybody else. You know, we assume that other people
Wendy:Yeah. Are
Sol:Exactly. Could we assume other people's internal worlds are something like ours? Although, we also feel like we're a little bit of an alien spy. Where the sort of typically, the way that we develop because we're very social creatures. We're very social creatures.
Sol:We work together really well. How could we build all of this without being social? Like, how we have this illusion of independence, but it's not really there. And so for most people, it's not a cognitive process. You know?
Sol:Just like how learning a language when you're young is not a cognitive process. You just pick up on it. Learning that culture isn't cognitive for most people. And, of course, it's a spectrum. But when you are always trying to match what everybody else is doing, you end up not really getting to know yourself very well.
Sol:Where most people develop something of a personality that feels like it has sort of solid boundaries to it. And personalities are very strange things. They essentially help us connect and communicate with other people. They help us sort of locate the people who we can work best with. And if somebody lives in isolation for a very long time, much of what they think of as their personality tends to dissipate.
Sol:Believe it or not, it's very strange. But autistics never finish really developing that personality. Instead, we develop a lot of masking skills. We adopt what other people are wanting and liking. We take their goals and sort of make them our own.
Sol:And it's cognitively exhausting. For example, they looked at brain scans of of people watching regular social interactions. And typical people when watching a regular social interaction, their mirror neuron network is lit lit up, and that's a very passive sort of learning. They're watching people talk, and they feel as if they're playing along. Right?
Sol:So it's like if you could watch somebody play piano enough that you could play piano.
Wendy:Okay.
Sol:Because your body feels like it's playing along. It's the same sort of act as if you see somebody get hurt on TV, you feel the pain. Like, that's your mirror neurons saying, like, avoid that. Feels bad.
Wendy:But that's different than empathy.
Sol:That's different than empathy. Yeah. I mean, it is very much so, I think, though they may have a common root. And then, yeah, since we're not sense
Wendy:that they would be tied together, but you're describing well, how would you just what's the differentiation then between mirror neurons and empathy
Sol:And empathy.
Wendy:Or the connection between the two?
Sol:That's a really good question. There's some really fascinating stuff about that. For example, we tend to as people, we tend to identify much more closely with people and animals more like us. So for example, if you watch a video of an ape getting its hand pricked with a pen, you may feel that in your hand. But if you watch a video of an alligator getting its hand picked for the a print pin, you won't.
Sol:We do not have that same sort of network that's making us feel like we're comrades with amphibians or lizards or crocodilians than we do with other mammals and then other apes. There's this whole hierarchy of things in our mind. And then within people, hierarchy of things in our mind. You see people siding much more with people who look like them, people who have their color hair, people who are their gender. Like, it gets more and more narrow.
Wendy:You mean people actually feel physical sensations when they I mean, it because when they Yeah. When they see someone else getting harmed as opposed to maybe the empathy piece then would be, like Mhmm. Imagining. Like, I am, oh, if that happened to me, ugh. Like Yeah.
Wendy:Yeah. That's different. I mean, not physically feeling it,
Sol:but Not physically feeling it. But imagining it and being able to put yourself in their shoes, I feel like autistics are the ones I know are very good at that, which is strange because you
Wendy:Very empathic. Right? Yeah.
Sol:Very empathic. And it could come partially from the constant reading of people's emotion, the constant reading of the sort of, like, cultural weather around them that they're very in tune with what people's emotions are, which doesn't mean that they are in tune with their motivations. Because when people veil their emotions or veil their motivations and they're not obvious, it can be really hard to read into it. Yeah. You know?
Sol:There's many times that I've thought, this person's really nice. This guy's trying to help me out at work and found out that they were actually, like, literally trying to get me fired. And I would have had no idea. Ugh. You know, like like none.
Sol:And I then I feel like I must be a child to them. It must be so silly and fun. It must seem like a fool. And, again, it's just that not being able to see behind the curtain, but being able to read what I should do in this situation as it's presented to me. And but our masking will never fully will never fully adapt us.
Sol:There will always be something a little bit off. For example, autistics we we'll do the eye contact thing when we know it's expected of us, But usually, there's a trick to it. Not every autistic can't make eye contact, but many of them feel uncomfortable doing it. So usually, like like for me, I always look at the forehead right in between the eyebrows, and that was usually my way of trying to keep eye contact. But when you look at how much eye contact neurotypicals do with each other, they do a different amount when they're talking to them or when they're listening.
Sol:And I forget what the numbers are, but it's something to the effect of while they're talking, they're making eye contact 60% of the time, and while they're listening 45% of the time. Something like that.
Wendy:Oh, really?
Sol:Yeah. Something like that. It may be eye contact more when they're listening. I'm not sure. I'll have to look up Because it up.
Wendy:Would make sense that an autistic has more eye contact when listening.
Sol:It would make sense.
Wendy:They're observing
Sol:Mhmm.
Wendy:And trying to learn from the person. Right?
Sol:Right. Right. I mean,
Wendy:it would Does that does that line up?
Sol:I make more eye contact when I think that I'm supposed to. So so I feel like what I generally do is make much more eye contact than is typical. And then it comes across as there's something off. There's something like a little weird. And they may not know it.
Sol:They may not understand that's what it was, but they're having something with him. And then, like, people like, yeah, he never comes out for drinks after work. Yeah. And what's up with the way he teaches that? Yeah.
Sol:And, like, eventually, this can turn into, like, there's just something sort of uncanny valley about you. But, like, for me, if I'm really listening and I wanna understand, you know, I I for example, my classes, I taught my students that when they're reading their paper to me, I'm going to be staring at the ground or covering my eyes. Because the less input's happening, the more I can direct my attention towards what they're hearing. Yeah. What I'm hearing.
Sol:Fidgeting too. Like, fidgeting is a great way to to sort of focus your inputs. I don't mean wanna get too far away from the masking thing. But as much as we try to mask, our mask will fail us because we aren't in on the different nuances that are so particular to neurotypicals. Like, there's the whole stories about the ways that when, one when a war is happening and they're trying to identify which side you're on, asking them to pronounce certain words.
Sol:And the way you pronounce it shows where you grew up, shows what side you're on. And it's like that, but with these very small sort of cultural markers that we may be completely out of tune with. So it it really is so as well as we think we mask, it still creates all sorts of problems for us because we're not doing it quite right.
Wendy:So in your studies of this Uh-huh. And and working with, I imagine, both women and men, well and well, all genders.
Sol:Sure.
Wendy:Do you notice a difference between how male autistics present socially, their their socials challenges versus female Yeah. Social challenges?
Sol:Definitely. Because because, you know, women are so more heavily socialized than males are in our culture, there are more expectations put on them about how they should act and behave. And a lot of those expectations have to do with emotions and concerns about other people and caregiving. And so no matter how much you aren't socializing with the world around you, part of you is socializing. I mean, that's how you're learning language.
Sol:That's how you're learning how to walk. Right? Like, part of this is happening. And so, you know, the way that I sort of see it is, like, if men are you know, an example of how men aren't as socialized is boys will be boys. Right?
Sol:That they're allowed to behave some ways because we expect them to act out. We expect them to be a little bit violent. We expect them to be a little bit selfish. And, you know, by a little bit, it's as much as you, like, want to imagine it at that given point.
Wendy:Yeah. Got it.
Sol:Yeah. And and so women, like, it's much more expectation just from the get go that they will behave in certain ways and you'll be not being ladylike and everything else and, oh, you need to be clean, you know, all sorts of things that and I mean, just the way that you dress them, like dresses and heels, that kind of thing, were meant to make it where it's obvious that you don't work. Like, it was a sort of status symbol of, like, you know, your wife doesn't work. How could she possibly work in this tight skirt with those heels? It precludes any sort of physical labor, so it's a status symbol.
Sol:You know? And so girls take
Wendy:on that.
Sol:Right? And so girls are are, you know, brought up in dresses and skirts. You you can't hang upside down in a dress. You'll get you'll get chided for it. You can't sit in the grass in a dress, like, things like that.
Sol:So usually, when you see a a woman autistic, one reason why they're not identified early is because they were seen as a tomboy. They they their unsocialization had to drift through the whole typical male area of socialization. Yeah. And and so they get along better with boys. They like to play boy things.
Sol:They like grabbing worms, whatever. And it's just they're essentially more free to be a little bit more themselves. And it sort of takes a lot of autism, so to speak, to get them all the way to the point where it's very obvious to everybody because we built all of our understandings about autism around the way boys present and about how that's different from typical boys. And so the same amount of drift from typical girl to autistic girl looks very tomboy. Yeah.
Sol:So so they're much better at masking. It's much harder to identify. They're much more brought up to be people pleasers. And so even in the doctor's offices, they will begin to agree with bad assessments about themselves because they understand that it's a problem to speak up. And I mean, know, that like, down to, like, getting groped in a subway that that attackers will know that a woman does not want to make a scene, wants to assume that the politeness is important, wants to assume that the woman is gonna give them the benefit of the doubt that maybe this was an accident.
Sol:All of these things that that assume this very heavy socialization for women. And once you can break through your own socialization to do something really screwed up like that, you take advantage of all those ways that that other people are hardwired to behave in very predictable ways that avoid making a scene. That's kind of neither here nor there, but it's a good example.
Wendy:Okay.
Sol:Yeah. And that's why, you know, sociopaths can get away with so much because they just they don't have to behave that way at all.
Wendy:Right. Right.
Sol:Because
Wendy:yeah. They, yeah, they don't mind harming people. That's
Sol:And they understand, like, how hesitant other people are to get out of the herd and, you know, say something's wrong.
Wendy:Right. Right. Yeah. So, oh, so many more things. I know.
Wendy:And time is running out. So I don't know. We talk about you don't have to go into great detail, but just touch on rejection sensitivity and what you mean by that.
Sol:Yeah. Yeah. So in general, autistics have trouble with friendships, and autistics have trouble with jobs. There's a lot of rejection. What we find is that there's much more rejection in general in an autistic person's life than in a neurotypical person's life.
Sol:And they don't know why they don't fit in, but they feel like they don't fit in and they have to act differently in order to fit in. So they get very used to the idea that if they are themselves or they are too comfortable that they'll be rejected. And, you know, a lot of this is they're trying to fit in with the wrong crowd and less and less accepting people or the people whose approval they want. And so, yeah, when that sensitivity happens, it begins to you but the real problem with rejection sensitivity is that one, it'll stop you from reaching out. It'll stop you from trying.
Sol:You know? Like we said, autistics will convince themselves that they're happier being alone, but having nice human interaction is is actually really freaking good for you.
Wendy:It's good for everybody. Yeah.
Sol:Yeah. It's good for everybody. Like, down down the line.
Wendy:Sociopaths. I don't know.
Sol:Right. Yeah. I wonder. And, you know, autistics, they're gonna have varying degrees of social needs, but anybody wants some nice social interaction. But they'll convince themselves that it's just not even worth the risk.
Sol:They'll stop taking risks. They'll stop putting themselves out there. But the worst is where they start to see rejection where there is none. And this is like, for example, feeling like you weren't invited to a party is one thing. But being invited and convincing yourself that you were invited just because they felt bad for you and they don't want you to come, that's where the reject insensitivity really gets in the way.
Sol:Right? Or, like, you know, oh, yeah. She's going out with me, but she probably just feels bad for me. And it's like, no nobody does that. Nobody feels so bad for somebody else that they form a relationship with them.
Wendy:Yeah. But how sad that your mind goes there.
Sol:Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. And it feels real. It does.
Sol:It feels very real. And then it feels like you have to be somebody else to be accepted. And this whole process of shrinking yourself and and it's, yeah, extremely difficult.
Wendy:Yeah. It's also hidden. It's also hidden.
Sol:Yeah. It's very hidden. It's very veiled. And you look at the different cultural changes that we've gone through to see how different things could be. Just for example, the current generation of teenagers has a much better vocabulary of themselves than we do than we did.
Sol:So, like, I have a trans son. I have a nonbinary kid, and at least one of my other two kids is queer. And I did not know even that many weird people growing up, and I have that many in my house. But so they have a much better understanding of themselves. There's much more acceptance of of that.
Sol:And even especially within autistics that they are much more free to to be that way. And if they understand themselves to be autistic, they're much more free to stim or be fascinated with something and info dump, things like that. And, you know, my my nonbinary kid, like, they're just obsessed with trying to gender David Bowie. They're like, if David Bowie you know, like, if he were coming of age right now, how would he see himself?
Wendy:That's a great question. I
Sol:don't know. They dig through, like, songs. They dig through interviews, and they just love to try to come up with different Yeah. Yeah. You know, gender fluid or agender, like or nonbinary.
Sol:Like, what would it be? So, yeah, you can imagine that when you're very rejection sensitive and you're masking and people pleasing, that you're gonna act how you you're expected to act, and you're not going to make those changes.
Wendy:And I mean get lost in the process.
Sol:Yeah. You get lost in the process, and we see even neurotypicals in some ways do that because, like, you know, we have a big surge of people coming out later in life as as bi or gay who've lived their whole lives not knowing that they were because they were yeah. And and that's tragic too. Yeah. So so, like, everybody's, like, afraid that, oh, everybody's turning gay and everybody's turning autistic.
Sol:And what we're really seeing is this one time change in our culture where people are coming to this realization, and we're not gonna see that many people changing over to it at once ever again, ideally, because they'll grow up knowing more about themselves, and they won't have to make that big change.
Wendy:But you're also just demonstrating how incredibly judgmental of a culture that
Sol:Yeah. Oh, it is.
Wendy:That we we live in. And then it's opening up, though, and with the younger generations as you're pointing out.
Sol:So And it's like oh, sorry. I I was saying that, you know, growing up in the eighties, there was this little this weird obsession for a while with Japanese culture in eighties media. And there was a lot about how strict they are and how look how they behave this way, and isn't it weird. And, like and and it's just because we can see the differences in somebody else's culture much more than we can see the nuance in our own. We think we're behaving regular, and they're behaving in a really weird, restrictive way.
Sol:And that should really clue us into deconstructing our own culture and going, wait. What ways are we forcing people to act in ways they don't want to? You know? Yeah. Yeah.
Sol:Wild.
Wendy:So let's touch on thinking styles. Right? Oh, how would you because you described in your book, you described an interesting thinking style of an autistic person versus a neurotypical person. So Yeah. Lay it on me.
Sol:Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So so bottom up thinking is typically what an autistic person does, and it differ it's different from top down thinking in that top down thinking starts with knowledge that they already have and are assuming about something. And then they make generalizations from there where autistics tend to build a bigger picture from the ground up.
Sol:The example that's usually given is like going into a restaurant. A neurotypical person will typically know what a restaurant is, and it's this sort of like, within that experience, there are smells, there are sounds, there are people rushing about, taking orders, there's food moving around, people sitting down and eating. And for an autistic person, those are all very different stimuli that are not filtered out as much. So we're hearing a lot of the sounds at the same time or getting a lot of the smells and not filtering it. The background music may be too loud.
Sol:We're not filtering that out. And that's essentially a lot of what autism is is we're not on the same wavelength, so we're not filtering out as much stimuli.
Wendy:Right.
Sol:So that thinking sort of leads to this difference between inductive and deductive, between putting the parts together or between assuming parts, and it's much more energy efficient to think top down. Your brain knows that it's using way too much energy to think. So it wants to put its resources in the most important places. Only think when you absolutely have to. So for example, if somebody says four plus four, you go eight.
Sol:No problem. But if they go, you know, 42 times 12, now you have to stop and think. So moving into that system two is really hard to make yourself do. But for an autistic person, they're slipping into system two a lot to try and decode what's going on and better understand it. We don't build as many cognitive shortcuts.
Sol:And cognitive shortcuts can be inaccurate, but they can also be very friendly to, you know, having enough information to get by without, know, quote unquote overthinking. So the best example that I can think of of this from my experience that I wish I had thought of when I was writing the book and I asked them if I could put it in during the audio recording is I used to teach this class about media literacy. And what we would do, one of the sections was analyzing print advertisements. And I'd put up a series of print advertisements, and I would say, listen. You know, in in order to help them analyze this, I I wanted to give them a little schema.
Sol:And I said, we're gonna look at three different levels of meaning in each ad. And I'll say, number one is you just wanna list literally what you see here. What is this a picture of? What is happening in this picture? Okay.
Sol:Number two is the advertiser's intended meaning. And anybody can probably figure this out because they're made to communicate something. So what's the intended meaning of this ad? And then number three is what stereotypes or cultural norms are they using to communicate that meaning based on what's literally here?
Wendy:Okay.
Sol:And I just thought this is the perfect the perfect tool to give them so they can do this. And then I put up an ad. We start in the fifties because it's easier to see stuff that's, you know, not in our immediate world. Put up this ad from the fifties and I'd say, okay. So level one, what do we see here?
Sol:And somebody would say, Coke is delicious and refreshing. And I go, no. No. No. No.
Sol:What level one. What do you see here? And they say happy people like Coke. And I'm like, no. No.
Sol:No. And they Coke makes you happy. And I'm like, no. You see a girl smiling in a swimsuit holding a Coke bottle. And they go, oh.
Sol:And I'm like, that's so weird. And I realized that their top down thinking skips right over the details to the conclusion. It skips right to that meeting.
Wendy:Why aren't they talking about the picture that they're seeing?
Sol:Right. Exactly. The it it jumps right to the top down. It it, like, in every single time it did this, and I'd be like, you know, I would think like, wow. These kids are really, like, not trying or they're not analyzing very well at all.
Sol:I'm glad I did this. It's just basically they're jumping to that generalization.
Wendy:Them a favor.
Sol:Right. And but then that'll come up again socially. You might be arguing with somebody and you might say, listen. You know, when you decided that we were gonna go dancing and I told you that I don't like dancing, that I really wanted to go to dinner, that really kinda bothered me that you didn't show that sort of care for me. And, you know, I just wanna make it clear that I would like to not do that again.
Sol:And then they might go like, I'm sorry that you think I'm a terrible person. And he go, no. Like, not a lot. You're saying I don't care for you at all. No.
Sol:I'm like, this is the one really specific thing. I didn't wanna go dancing on Friday, and I felt like
Wendy:you didn't yeah.
Sol:I felt like you didn't consider my feelings when you picked the activity, and they're going, well, I'm sorry that I don't consider your feelings. I'm sorry. I'm so awful. And I'm like, wow. Like, that's not what I'm like like, the more specific you get, the more personally they take it.
Sol:Now then in the same argument, a neurotypical person might get very angry and say something globally insulting, like, you're such a jerk. I can't believe we ever got together. But they can fall back on, I didn't mean it. I was upset. I shouldn't have said that because it didn't point out anything specific.
Sol:But if you are a top a bottom up thinker and you point out specifics, the other person feels like, dang, they're picking me apart. They're taking notes. They're holding things from years ago and and and bringing it up again because we're seeing patterns and pulling out things. That's it's supposed to be things. Yeah.
Sol:Right? Isn't it? And it's supposed to be very, very specific pointed feedback that, like, if we could just fix this, everything else gets fixed. But instead, it feels like, wow. I did not know you saw me this way.
Sol:I didn't know that that you held all of this against me all these years. And it's like, woah. No.
Wendy:That's No. No. No. That's not what I'm saying. Exactly.
Wendy:Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yikes.
Wendy:Yeah. Alright.
Sol:Wild. And and, you know, and and usually usually those arguments won't come up for a while because of the people pleasing.
Wendy:Right. Right.
Sol:You know? But then once they do That's true. Yeah. Once you bite the apple, you can't unbite the apple. And then personal problems will become bigger and bigger just based on those two thinking styles.
Sol:And it's really hard to get people to bridge from one to the other.
Wendy:Okay. So that is a very distinct differentiation. So what I wanna touch on before we're
Sol:Mhmm.
Wendy:We're winding down here is you are encouraging people to self diagnose.
Sol:Mhmm. Mhmm.
Wendy:And what brought you to that conclusion?
Sol:Access is such a problem. It depends on what state you live in, what insurance you have, how many people there are to do the diagnostic. During the pandemic, you have a lot of people staying home by themselves, dealing with with their own world and not masking. And so right as lockdown is lifting, you have a lot of people like me who are like, oh, I didn't know we wanted to go back to normal. I thought we hated that, and I can't do it anymore because I've spent all this time unmasking.
Sol:And so all of a sudden, like, if you're trying to get a diagnosis, there was, like, years long waiting lists. We do not have enough medical health professionals for enough people in the country on any level. Much less involved people
Wendy:assessment too.
Sol:It's a very involved assessment. Like, altogether, it took about a year and a half from the beginning of my assessment to the final paperwork. And for me, it was free because I had bougie insurance at the time, and I was referred to the right person. And I think in California in general, it's more affordable because we have a law that says that mental health has to be treated the same in insurance as physical health, but many states don't have that. So so it's like extra or don't cover diagnosis for something like that at all.
Sol:So you're out of pocket $3,000 or something. And and for what? Essentially, be to find out that you're distrusted on another level. Because a lot of us feel like, well, once I get the official diagnosis, then I will stop feeling like a a a what's the word? Dang it.
Sol:Impostor.
Sol:Thank you,
Wendy:Imposter, yeah.
Sol:Yeah. They'll say, once I get the official diagnosis, I will stop feeling like an impostor in this autistic community the same way I felt like an impostor in the neurotypical community. And my family will stop will believe me. They'll stop thinking that I'm yeah. And not once.
Sol:I haven't seen anybody show up with their diagnosis and have their mom go, wow. You were right. You are autistic. It's always like, oh, that doctor doesn't know it. Anybody can get that.
Sol:It's a trend.
Wendy:Well, I wanna speak to that because Yeah. Is it trendy? I mean, because it's
Sol:Mhmm.
Wendy:There's a lot of people becoming very popular with neurodivergent reels and social media posts. And, I mean, I've heard people say things like, well, we're all on the spectrum. And and Right. To me, that's dismissive of Yeah. People who are actually really truly struggling with autistic traits.
Sol:Yes. Definitely.
Wendy:What do you say?
Sol:Yeah. I mean, essentially, that we're all on the spectrum is it's something that I think people say to comfort themselves, to comfort the situation. It's uncomfortable to be faced with something that somebody who I have known for a while may have something different happening that I've noticed, and it also accompanies just a complete lack of knowledge about autism. Yes, all people do have autistic traits because autistic traits are human traits. So very often, one of the very difficult things for an autistic person when they're trying to convince somebody that they're autistic, they'll say, listen.
Sol:Do you remember that one time when you said this and I thought you meant that? And the person will say, that happens to everyone. They'll say, okay. It happens to everybody once, but it doesn't happen to everybody all the time.
Wendy:All the time.
Sol:You know? And it's hard to communicate the frequency that this kind of thing might happen. Or it can be like, I have to mask through things, and they'll say, I have a customer service voice. Like, I go to the dentist. I I mask there.
Sol:And you go, yeah. But that's not supposed to be fun. I masked at my birthday party. You know? Like like, I'm trying to fit in at even the fun stuff.
Sol:It's anxiety inducing to do anything. And so it's really hard to get at, like, that frequency with which these traits are stacked in an autistic person's lives. So so yeah. The thing we're
Wendy:all to be to be acknowledged or seen and, like Yeah. It's like, this is this hasn't been easy. This isn't Yeah. Actually really challenging that the amount of energy you're describing that goes into Mhmm. Getting through a day is Yeah.
Wendy:Intense, like, between how much energy your brain is using to just think and how much your nervous system is processing all of the information because you're not your brain hasn't pruned. So you're Yeah. Just taking in a shit ton of information all the time Right. And trying to make sense of the world, and then also trying to make sense of your social exchanges, and how you're gonna fit in, and how you're gonna plan this interaction with so and so.
Sol:Right.
Wendy:And then just, like, like, your relationship with your body in general. Oh, yeah. Touched on that. But
Sol:Yeah. Definitely. But yeah. And you're hitting on something. The the number that's thrown around a lot, and I have not found where this number originated.
Sol:It passes the SNF test, but I'm not sure is that an autistic person's brain is using 42% more energy at rest than a neurotypical person's brain. That the default mode network is 42% more active. So all those things that you mentioned going on in the brain makes it much more exhausting. And not to mention that part of masking is not only matching people's behaviors, but restraining things that you want to do or Yeah. And that's more exhausting than decision making.
Sol:Restraining yourself, it feels odd. Like, for example, for me, an example of restraint, I have a sort of a bad relationship with food. If I go to a movie and I have a pack of M and M's and my wife has a pack of M and M's, hers will last her the whole movie. But for me, if I'm have those M and M's, I'm either thinking about them or eating them. And I will try to get it to the last pass the previews or whatever.
Sol:And at some point, I'm like, I am ruining my whole experience sitting here thinking about the M and M's. And I'm just like, boom. I'm just gonna eat them. In that way, it's out of my mind because that restraint is what I'm feeling. I want to eat them.
Sol:When am I gonna do it? And what's acceptable? How long should they last? It's it's wild.
Wendy:It reminds me of, like, how many systems you have to create in order to get through too, like, to manage.
Sol:Right. I'm talking to there's so many systems. Exactly.
Wendy:And if anybody knew the systems
Sol:Right.
Wendy:Be like, what the fuck are
Sol:you doing? No. That that's a really good point. That's a really good point. If anybody knew all those systems that you're constantly toggling and, you know, the way you ritualize things.
Sol:Right. You create
Wendy:them. In order to, like it it's like a way of making sense of your experience in order putting things in order and helping you to remember things and whatever. Yeah.
Sol:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like, you yeah. Yeah. And and that's why, you know, we hear this thing about how autistics do things repetitively.
Sol:They don't like change. Because it's basically, if if you have things be predictable, then you're not crunching as many numbers, and it's sort of like neurotypical simulator if you're in your the same room all the time because you don't have to think about everything. And so, like, with my kids, synergy. We Yeah. Exactly.
Sol:Like, with my kids, we we like to watch a couple TV shows every night, and we'll cycle through them. Like, we're watching Lost and Survivor or we're watching x files and severance or whatever. And they find that very comforting. But if I say something like, hey. Why don't we watch a movie tonight?
Sol:You know? Why don't we watch Good, Bad, and the Ugly? Then they'll be like, it's just not enough warning. We could watch it next week. Like, they need to know that it's gonna be a movie and not the regular show well ahead of time.
Wendy:We were planning on the
Sol:They were planning on the show. Usually, scene. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly.
Sol:And and it it's like that times a thousand just in every facet. And it's yeah. So it's yeah. It's a cognitive burden. And, oh, it it you know, I don't even remember which one we were talking about at this point.
Sol:They all bleed together so well. There was something good though.
Wendy:Well, yeah, I I we were well, we're about what were
Sol:we? You had a I'm looking at a really specific question. It was really good. Oh, oh, oh, oh, about we're all on the spectrum. Exact.
Wendy:Oh, that one.
Sol:Yes. That guy. Yeah. Yes. Exactly.
Sol:Because when okay. So all autistic people are on a spectrum. Right? That the spectrum is there so you understand that autism is very different for lots of different people. For example, like, I don't have mathy autism, but evidently my dad did, and my dad also had language autism.
Sol:He could pick up languages like crazy. He spoke, like, seven languages, and he could do complex math in his head, and I didn't get either of those. So so what a rip. But I'm pretty decent with English. But, you know, in some people will not be able to communicate at all orally.
Sol:That that's the extent to which they weren't able to socialize that part of their brain. And so when somebody says I'm autistic and they go, well, you don't look like my cousin Billy who can't live independently. Not for all of Yeah. We don't all look like cousin Billy. Like like, that's one way.
Sol:It's a the spectrum is meant to communicate to put your expectations down because any two autistic people on average have a more different brain than each other than they do from a neurotypical person. So they're we're more different from each other than not. But the fact that we're not neurotypical is what makes us all the same at all. And so the spectrum is meant to denote people who are who are autistic. We can make a spectrum for all people, but it becomes meaningless because then we aren't talking about anything.
Wendy:Well, and you're talking about actual physiological differences in
Sol:Right.
Wendy:How our brains are working.
Sol:Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. The actual different way that they're that they're, yeah, put together and functioning.
Wendy:Yeah. So that's a difference.
Sol:Yeah. It's a difference. Yeah. And, you know, if we all could get fMRI scans, then we could diagnose people instantly. But and honestly, that would be cheaper if we had the equipment because then you're just paying a tech to look at things or you're putting it through a machine model that can recognize things, and it would save hours of work for somebody who's paid hundreds of dollars an hour.
Sol:But instead, because of the way things work in our world, we have everything backwards economically. We don't do it that way. And instead, we have to go through these long processes, and it makes us feel very alien. It makes us feel very much like impostors. People still don't believe us because they don't like to step out of their comfort zone of belief of how the world works.
Sol:And it takes a long time to chip away at it. It took a long time for my family to accept it. It took a long time for anybody to accept it. I came out about it very slowly. I didn't wanna, like, throw it at everybody.
Sol:I don't think there's a problem with that. I have a friend who had an autism coming up party, and I think that's fun. But That's cute. You know? But but for me, like, work, I would say something like, we were talking about something that came up about accommodations or neurodivergence or whatever.
Sol:I would say, well, as many of you guys know, I'm autistic and la la la. And I felt like saying as many of you know made it sound like this wasn't new. Like, I've been open about it and make them kinda go, oh, was I not paying attention? And then that sort of saved me from getting a lot of questions. Yeah.
Sol:Right? So
Wendy:If you're paying attention, you probably would have figured it out.
Sol:But Right. Exactly. Exactly.
Wendy:That's a you problem.
Sol:Right. I'm sorry.
Wendy:So I had another question I was gonna ask real quick. So you have this very thorough book, which is super helpful for anybody who's curious about themselves or want to understand people in their lives who are struggling with autism. So you also work with people, as you referenced I think you referenced earlier
Sol:Yeah.
Wendy:As a coach.
Sol:Uh-huh.
Wendy:And then you also work with people in groups. So why don't you talk a little bit about the way you are helping folks?
Sol:Yeah. Yeah. The I mean, the the book is obviously a really big outreach effort to hopefully give people a place to start. Coaching, one on one coaching is pretty intense. We meet virtually these days and talk about whatever it is that that challenges that we have and goals that we wanna come up with and basically sort of deconstructing the fact that a lot of us have been living a life that's not a good fit for our particular autism.
Sol:And we wanna redefine our goals. We wanna redefine the way we wanna live. We might not be chasing money as much anymore. We might be chasing more time. We might be chasing more peace, different relationships.
Sol:So there's a lot that goes into it. And then to try to increase access from there, because I only have so much time that I can do that and it's expensive, I made a community. And the community is called the NeuroSpicy community. I just tried to make something that's kinda easy to search. So it's at neurospicycommunity.com.
Sol:And basically there, we do 12 different support group meetings every week. We have message boards, and I put some general, like, video courses up so people can better understand it and better understand challenges of ADHD and autism. And it's been a really great project. It's a much more affordable price, and people from all over the world are there. We've been trying to diversify our time offerings because it's really hard for the people in Australia and Thailand to show up sometimes.
Sol:So we're trying to spread that out and trying to get more into the depths of autism, like like stuff about some have to do with work, and some have to do with relationships, and some of the support groups have to do with being a woman. So I have a variety of leaders who lead these groups, but I lead a majority of them myself. And it's really great because you really get to feel like you've been saying. You really get to feel heard. You get to feel understood.
Sol:And for most of us, it's like the first time in our lives. We have 70 year olds in there who have never understood themselves as well as they do now, and it's been wonderful. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.
Sol:Exactly.
Wendy:Yeah.
Sol:That's big.
Wendy:So you gave the neurospicycommunity.com. And then what's your other website?
Sol:The other one is professor.com. And from there, you can sort of that's sort of home base. You can bounce out to the community or find the book. But it that's also where the coaching is housed at professorsoul.com.
Wendy:Okay. And then I also have to ask, have you been listening to The Telepathy Tapes, or have you listened to them?
Sol:I listened to the first episode. Okay. I dig the paranormal. I dig things
Wendy:Little too out there for you?
Sol:No. I okay. I'm only going from the first episode. But the first episode, there were too many bridges of communication happening. There was too much translation happening with people who were really trusted, And I don't doubt that many of these people might believe that that's what's happening, but So there was this thing I don't remember if I talked about this in my book or not. I talk about it my I think in my second book, which isn't out yet. That there was god. I can't remember his name. There was a horse. And this horse, it was a German horse, and it was amazing.
Sol:This horse could do math. So they'd bring it up in front of a crowd, and they'd say, what's two plus two? And it stamps out four. And people are like, okay. Okay.
Sol:Well, they probably taught it that. So they would start asking it more and more complex things. You know, what's three times three? And they would do nine, and everybody's cheering. This is amazing.
Sol:And to the point where the owner just felt like, I have an amazing horse. You know?
Wendy:Not they referenced this story in a later episode, actually.
Sol:Do they really? Okay.
Wendy:The skepticism.
Sol:That makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense.
Wendy:Because of of what you're probably getting to is watching the cues of the humans.
Sol:Yes.
Wendy:Like Yeah. Just a subtle little cue the horse is watching and then giving a response in response.
Sol:Horses have been bred for centuries to understand human body language, and they're very sensitive a and in ways that we don't understand. So even the owner felt like this was
Wendy:Yeah.
Sol:A nearly magical horse, but eventually, they sort of decoded this. And and I feel like, at least in that first episode, these people know each other too well, the the people who are translating for each other. You know? You have a kid translating for a grandma. The grandma can't speak to the host.
Sol:It there's just so many different bridges going on here.
Wendy:Well, yeah, the first one was, yeah, Spanish speaking.
Sol:Right. Right. And and that's Yeah. And that's cool. It's just that, like, this going through those different steps gives a lot of ways to sort of generalize and then focus in a way that feels very confirming, the same way that you might do a cold reading or something.
Sol:And I don't wanna take away from it because the Well, it I I should listen on. Yeah. I I really should
Wendy:I would recommend if you because they do address the skepticism. They have a whole episode on the skepticism.
Sol:And Well, that that'd be good because one of the things with the first one is they went on and on about how much the camera guy believed it and how much the sound guy believed it. And then I'm like, okay. Wait. I don't wanna hear how much they believe it. Like, you gotta convince me.
Sol:And, like, I don't wanna fall into belief, like, through transitive property. But but but listen. Like like, I have read so many books about psychics and remote viewing and stuff like that that the government was experimenting with. And I don't have any reason not to buy it. You know?
Sol:Like, I really like and if I didn't if I'm not sure, I would choose to buy it because it's much more exciting to sort of examine those things sometimes. So I'm not totally against that. I just felt like with that first episode that I was reading a psychology book. Yeah. And the enthusiasm was so high.
Sol:And okay. I bring in natural skepticism the minute it's recommended to me too many times. You know what I mean? And I hate that. It's like when everybody's like, oh, you've gotta see this movie.
Sol:You gotta see this movie. And then pretty soon, you hate that movie. Yeah. It probably is. Yeah.
Sol:Dominion of Queen's. Yeah. And then you finally see the movie, you're like, okay. It was good.
Wendy:It well, right. I mean, I I only say that because, I mean, it's I think my whole my interest is consciousness and Oh, cool. How expansive it is and how Uh-huh. How its territory that we are we don't know much about. It's very mysterious.
Wendy:And having a lot of direct experiences, and it's reality is complicated beyond
Sol:No. I I agree. Much
Wendy:much beyond the materialist materialism is part of it, but there's a lot more beyond that. So it's There's actually a
Sol:a degree that I would love to get. It's I'm googling it to make sure I get it right. Oh, come on. It's from a a school that's in it's a college in San Francisco area, and they have a master's.
Wendy:Integrative studies. What is it?
Sol:It's philosophy, cosmology, and consciousness. Yeah. And I love that idea because finding links between those things, I think, is is essential for understanding how the world works.
Wendy:Right.
Sol:And find our perception of the world is what's designing how we think the world is. But, yeah, our consciousness is part of that perception.
Wendy:Exactly.
Sol:Yeah. Like, you can only know enough about your brain as your brain is willing to tell you.
Wendy:And then how much do we shut our brains down with our belief systems? So, like, the belief that that's not possible all of a sudden makes that not possible to you.
Sol:Yeah. Yeah. Totally. My dad used to say that, like, we describe the world to our kids when they're born and that it constantly narrows their possibility the whole And
Wendy:that talk about yeah. That's sort of, like, cognitive pruning in a way.
Sol:Yeah. Yeah. It's like, you know, this is blue, and we know that hundreds of years ago, we don't think people saw blue. That it was it it's not a word, like, for example, that's in the Odyssey or the Iliad. The ocean is never described as blue.
Sol:The sky is never described as blue. That's fascinating. Nothing is ever blue. Yeah. That like like, they did not perceive the sky to be that.
Sol:They thought the sky was gray or green. They thought the ocean was dark. It's kinda like called the wine dark sea. They either thought it was black or gray or green. It was never blue.
Sol:And yeah. So we we tend to separate these things out later and then all sort of follow that description. So I I think that designs our very perception, honestly.
Wendy:One one of the things that the reason why I wanted to ask you about that Yeah. Because I assume you've been asked that question a lot about the telepathy tapes, is that I wonder if people with autistic traits on the entire spectrum
Sol:Mhmm.
Wendy:Have a greater propensity for expanding their consciousness because of the way their brains are wired.
Sol:I I I think that probably that yeah. It checks the sniff test, and and, honestly, I think that it's probably something that would be even stronger if you're very affirmed from childhood. You know? Yeah. Like, for sure, if you're affirmed in those types of things.
Sol:My parents were full of stories about little things that we would say as kids that were clearly, like
Wendy:Where'd they get that?
Sol:Correct psychic messages. You know? And I loved hearing those stories, and I saw that in my kids too. And it's amazing how much, yeah, how much that we we begin to you know, our belief system changes everything.
Wendy:And Yeah. Well, yeah. And and the fact that an autistic nervous system is picking up so much information that some of that information may be nonphysical Yeah. Yeah. And Beyond emotions and that kind of thing.
Sol:Right. And and I think that it's fair to recognize that we do know that there's a lot of stuff that is not within our spectrum of experience, like certain colors and stuff that we're able to detect without our eyes. So and if none of us ever saw, we wouldn't even know the difference in lots of ways. You know? If nobody ever saw, we wouldn't have a word for blindness.
Sol:Right?
Wendy:Exactly. Exactly.
Sol:Yeah. And so just for, like, taking this to the extreme, for all we know, we're much like plants and that we're being farmed by some other creature that's harvesting something from us, and we wouldn't know. You know? Like, this is how we would experience that because our evolution or our breeding would not have brought us to being able to be aware of what they are or perceive what they are. You know?
Sol:How does a spider see me? How does a tomato plant see me? Like, we have no idea.
Wendy:Right.
Sol:You know, how what's their perception of it? And
Wendy:That's a hard question.
Sol:Yeah. Yeah. And I so our perception is very much focused on what kept us alive walking through a forest and living in the belt, and it hasn't changed really since then. Right. Right.
Sol:But before then, like, who knows? And I always like to think about old stories. Like, I like to read old books, And it's very sad to read of, like, you know, witch hunts or something. But it's very interesting to read deeper into some very specific stories where you see that, like, something like a witch or a monster or something felt so real to them. You know, that it didn't feel like a myth or this is a folktale.
Sol:It felt present and real and that it molded a lot of what they did. I mean, obviously, eventually to a fallacious point, though, witch hunts were very much a Christian excuse for getting rid of a lot of people.
Wendy:Correct.
Sol:You know? Yeah.
Wendy:Yeah. Unfortunately. Yeah.
Sol:In fact, I've read somewhere before that a lot of pharmacology really started with the grimmaries from women who they executed. Yeah. Aspirin, St.
Wendy:John's wort. Medicines. Yeah.
Sol:Yeah. Yeah. That checks out.
Wendy:Yeah. Well, so I appreciate you going down that little rabbit hole with me.
Sol:Yeah. Anytime. Yeah. That's fun. Yeah.
Sol:I I love thinking about consciousness. I'm rereading the Carlos Castaneda series now. And there's so much worse
Wendy:to say on that whether it's fiction or not. Yeah.
Sol:Totally. And it's one of those things that it's like, you know, a lot of it really feels like fiction and a lot of it doesn't. But a lot of it where if when it doesn't, it feels like it's doing that thing where it doesn't matter because it's saying something true. You know what I mean?
Wendy:So whatever you whatever you garner from it, I guess that's what's important. Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah.
Wendy:Well, Soul, this has been fun. Thanks. Yeah. Thanks. It definitely hit close to home.
Sol:Good. Appreciate hey. I really appreciate your patience. Thank you so much, and thank you. Like, I I'd I'd have to start listening to your show because I love how you're doing this.
Wendy:Oh, thanks. Thanks so
Sol:much. Yeah. You god. You remind me of somebody. Just somebody from my yeah.
Sol:Somebody from my life who yeah. I this is exactly the kind of show she would do. I haven't seen her for a year. But, anyway, yeah, just one of those things where suddenly somebody's echoing from, like, somebody who was transformative in your story.
Wendy:Oh, okay. Cool. So it wasn't
Sol:an asshole. Right. Oh, no. No. No.
Sol:She was wonderful. Yeah. Okay. Totally. Alright.
Sol:And you seem very comfortable you seem very comfortable with yourself in a way that makes me feel like you've had a really difficult run.
Wendy:Yeah. Well, thank you.
Sol:Sorry if that sounds insulting.
Wendy:No. I no. I appreciate that. It's a
Sol:Yeah.
Wendy:It's an interesting observation and probably very accurate.
Sol:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like, I'd mentioned it in my book and if you've read the whole thing. Like, my my wife came to understanding her sexuality later in life, and it's just changed everything about her life before then and everything about my life before then. And the same thing with, like, autism that, like, when you come to these things later in life and you go, man, what what would have been like without all the friction that brought me to this sort of violent understanding of myself?
Sol:Anyway, I I think that it ends up producing somebody who's more comfortable in their skin than people who have just been affirmed in following the pack. I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong.
Wendy:I could see what you're saying. Yeah.
Sol:That Okay.
Wendy:There's that that makes sense.
Sol:Okay. So I appreciate it. I'm not trying to generalize or make assumptions. I'm sorry. Man.
Sol:No. I appreciate
Wendy:it very much. No. That was cool.
Sol:Okay. Oh. Alright.
Wendy:Thank you very, very much.
Sol:Thank you very much.
Wendy:Man, we sure covered a lot of ground in our conversation, didn't we? If you'd like to learn more about Sol, his work, or to get a copy of his new book, The Autistic's Guide to Self Discovery, please visit professorsol.com. A link will be in the show notes. Well, thank you so much for tuning in. Next up on Lucid Cafe, we'll be taking a trip into the cosmic zone.
Wendy:Uh-huh. Where we'll explore a fresh perspective on astrology. Until next time.
