Maia Szalavitz Speaks to the Autistic Girl She Once Was

Serge
Hi, Maia.

Maia
Hi.

Serge
I’m inviting you to talk to the person you were when you were a little girl, knowing now what you know about what it was, about the experience of autism, and what you would want her to have known.

Maia
Yeah. So when I was really little, I thought that because I was having so much difficulty connecting with other people and because I was kind of obsessed with various ideas and things, that that may be a bad person. That I was like not a people person and I was somebody who would just, you know, be cold and intellectual and not loved or anything.

And so that obviously was not very good for my mental health. And so I would have loved to have known, you know, when I was little that like the reason that I am as different as I am is because I’m on the autism spectrum. And that doesn’t mean that you’re bad or wrong or that the way your temperament is dooms you to something, you know, because I think a lot of the way kids think is like they are very concrete and they think everything is this will be this way forever.

And I think that’s just, you know, the kind of the way you think when you were like have a child’s brain. Right. And so it would be really important to say, you know what, you grow and change and you can do various things to, you know, if you’re worried about being bad, there are ways that you can be good and you don’t have to be perfect and you don’t have to be perfect in order to be loved.

And there’s lots of room for all different kinds of people on this planet. And we all have different ways of experiencing the world. And it doesn’t mean anything about your like moral core or something.

And it doesn’t mean that you’ll never have friends or you will never be liked or loved or connected. So those are the key things I wish I would have known.

Serge
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so that sense of, in a way, trapped in a sense that things can change. And so the drama of being in that place where things can change. Just maybe do you want to talk a little bit more about what it felt like?

Maia
Sure. Yeah. So I kind of discovered I was on the autism spectrum by reading an article in the New York Times.

And it was this was when the sort of less severe or whatever you want to call it form of the spectrum was called Asperger’s. And I was reading this article and I really, you know, sort of never thought much about autism before because I had like these kind of stereotypes that people with autism don’t speak or that, you know, it is always men or boys. and it is about like being very, you know, disconnected, not like, you know, into people or whatever. And so I read this story and the thing that struck me first about it was there was, so there was this guy who’s with Asperger’s and his wife would tell him when he was acting, especially Aspie by saying you’re being an Asperger, was funny.

And which I thought like, oh, okay, A, this guy has a wife. And, you know, that, like, I didn’t, that a lot of what people on the spectrum experience is more like oversensitivity and sensory overload and being very uncomfortable in your skin and very, you know, I couldn’t deal with certain food textures. I couldn’t deal with clothing.

Like it had to be soft. Like I was very, you know, I got called bossy a lot because when I was a kid, because like there were sensory things that I needed to fix before I could like even, you know, be. And I just didn’t know that everybody else didn’t really experience that. Although I came to quickly realize that I cried really easily and that lots of other people like to make fun of that.

But it wasn’t like something I could control. Right. So anyway, so I read this article and I’m like, when you found you found that article,

Serge
you were not a kid. You were. No, no.

Maia
Yeah. Yeah. I think.

Yeah. It was. I guess I was probably my 40s or 30s or something.

So anyway, I like saw that and it was describing those kinds of sensory experiences and sort of the early experiences of, you know, like I started reading when I was three and, you know, so this gets identified as gifted and all this. So I saw that like, oh, this sort of combination of these kind of really intense skills that are unusual for a person of their age and this like social difficulty and these sensory things, that these were all part of the same thing. And, You know, I had had various diagnoses in my life.

I had an addiction to cocaine and heroin, so that obviously was one of them or two of them, if you want to call it two of them. And then, you know, I realized later also that I had also had depression. And I feel like the depression that I had was really connected to self-hatred, which was really connected to my feeling of being socially unacceptable.

and so like all of that stuff was a kind of iteration of the original stuff that was related to the autism that I didn’t know and so I just constructed based on my best guess about what this really is and anyway I eventually got treatment for depression which also is really helpful in terms of the like oversensitivities that are associated with the autism because one of the things I discovered when I finally got on Prozac was that like it just made it so that I was a bit less overwhelmed by things and a bit less intensely overreactive and you know people sort of pejoratively describe SSRIs as oh they’re numbing or like they make you feel less or whatever But if you’re always feeling everything overly intensely and you are always like kind of at the mercy of this intensity, something turning that volume down a bit actually gets you closer to typical. And I didn’t feel like it was making me less intelligent or less emotional or any of these things. It was just making it so that I could respond appropriately rather than over responding.

Right.

Serge
Yeah.

Maia
So, you know, but yeah, so when I when I saw that original article, I was kind of like, wow, you know, this really explains a lot about my life and how I ended up going from this Columbia student, whatever, very, you know, sort of success obsessed, very, you know, not far out kind of person to somebody who was like shooting cocaine and heroin. And so, you know, because those drugs originally and before that, actually LSD, helped me manage some of this stuff. And, you know, when I was like 16 and 17 and a deadhead and like, you know, taking acid and all this stuff, I realized a lot about, you know, because one of the things like when you are on the spectrum, You’re often seen as like unempathetic when, in fact, you might actually be over empathetic.

And like what was going on for me was that I would get very distressed by other people’s distress. And I’m so distressed that I wasn’t able to be there for them because I was overwhelmed. Right.

So that looked like I was like not caring or was, you know, selfish or whatever.

Serge
Let’s stay there a little longer because it’s really a very striking point. that the appearance of being unempathetic and uncaring comes from actually being so empathetic and so caring that it’s an overload.

Maia
Yeah. And again, that sounds like it’s a justification or whatever, but that was really what was actually going on. And when I was able to, you know, have more and better emotional regulation and sensory regulation, then I was able to, you know, not be like constantly trying to like fix things so that I could feel okay and could really be present more for other people. And the SSRIs really helped with that particularly. So I, you know, but all of this, like all of this stuff that I, I was, you know, basically I was trying various ways of coping with my temperament and my experience of the world.

Serge
You were trying to regulate by using chemicals or whatever else.

Maia
Exactly. And some of them were bad for me. And some of them were helpful.

You know, and so, but yeah, when, you know, when I was into like all the tripping and stuff as a teenager, the good thing about that for me was that it really helped me with like perspective taking because I was like, oh, wow, you know, my mom is always complaining that like, I don’t do the dishes and I’m like, not like helping around the house. And like, you know what? you could just do that and it would make her happy and there would be no reason like not to do that.

Why don’t you just do that? I was probably one of the few people for whom my early drug taking made me more pro-social. If I had stuck to the sort of Grateful Dead hippie code of like, you know, no powders, I probably would have had a very different life story and not ended up in so much trouble as I did.

On the other hand, if I hadn’t ended up that way, I wouldn’t have the expertise and the life that I have now, which has come from trying to translate whatever the heck happened with all that, right? And understand why people get addicted and, you know, how things like depression work and why sometimes the things that give you, you know, your greatest gifts and talents also give you your worst, like, weaknesses and disabilities and issues.

Serge
Yes. So you’ve traveled to the other world and you can come back and explain.

Maia
Yeah, yeah. And I mean, I think, you know, it’s always, you know, I think a lot of people wonder a lot about, like, well, if I zigged or zagged at this particular time, like, what would my life have been like, right? But we can’t really know that. But we can’t, And sort of do things that will ideally help kids make the best choices. Especially because I think like when you’re really little, you don’t articulate this stuff very much at all.

Serge
No, no. And actually, as you were talking before about what it was like, what’s very clear is there was a ton of pain, you know, that came to that sense of you’re different and you’re bad. But a lot of pain around that. So do you want to talk a little bit about what it felt like?

Maia
Well, yeah, the most horrible but best way I have of expressing this is that, you know, so when I was, I don’t know, 11, 12, somewhere in there, I decided that, like, okay, well, nobody’s going to be my friend. So I have to, like, get really rich and really famous so people will pretend to be my friend. Like, that’s horrible.

I feel so bad and want to love that little girl and say that’s not like that. And I mean, but that was really kind of how I felt. And, you know, obviously not always.

There were plenty of moments of joy in my childhood and lots of other stuff going on that, you know, was not about all of this. But there was this underlying pain of that kind of feeling. And so I had to really learn that this was a distorted perception that I had adopted somehow.

Serge
If we go back to that little girl you said, you know, who was convinced that she had to be rich and famous to have friends. Obviously, that felt that that that was very strong feeling. this. How do you think that little girl, how could you have explained to her, you know, that bridge? What kind, you know, like, what could she have heard?

Maia
I think really that you’re okay, and it’s okay to be how you are, you know, and that maybe right now, like, you are not surrounded by people that you necessarily connect with, but they’re out there. And, you know, the fact that you have difficulty with this does not mean that you’re a bad person or that you’ll never have friends or that you will be unlovable forever. Because you do have these, or at least I did have these extremes.

It’s like, it’s always going to be this way. It’s catastrophizing, right? And it’s not like you’re just like having difficulty connecting with people. You are somehow inherently permanently unlovable, Right.

It’s like this very and, you know, I’ve always been extreme in general. So like the fact that I take that to extreme is not out of character. But, you know, I don’t know.

So anyway, but yeah, like I would really, you know, and I think it’s it’s really hard because like, you know, kids don’t tell you these things like you can look at them and they seem perfectly fine. And, you know, they have all this stuff going on in their head that they’re thinking and that they’ve decided is true. And they’re framing the rest of the world through that.

You know, I mean, I like I don’t have kids, but I have, you know, nieces and nephews and cats. And the cats don’t really need this part. But the nieces and nephews, like the, you know, just like it’s like it’s so, you know, I feel, you know, for parents, Because, like, you could make an offhand comment that your kid takes in a totally weird way.

Or, you know, you could be trying your absolute best to, like, make them feel good. And they’ve, like, taken in something from somewhere that you’ve never known about and, like, extrapolated it to a terrible degree.

Serge
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And so you say extreme. So extreme, how did you become aware as a kid of being extreme?

Comparison to others? And so how did it feel?

Maia
Yeah, so okay, so this started in nursery school, right? I was just intense from like day one. I was like very alert, very, you know, picking up on things really quickly.

And hence the early reading, right? And just very, you know, I mean, I don’t think I had like especially extreme tantrums, but I certainly had them. And the, you know, which is typical for kids, right?

But it was just like, you know, I would, I was just, I was scared of a lot of things. I was overwhelmed by a lot of things. I, you know, certain, it was just like, you know, sounds were too loud and lights were too bright.

And I would get incredibly scared on the subway. You know, I was in Manhattan. And like, you know, it just like it was an intense world.

And there’s this whole theory of autism called the intense world theory that kind of posits that if you are, you know, in a brain that is just like really taking in massive amounts of information and getting overwhelmed because like it’s not regulated, that that is why you develop some of these like repetitive behaviors or, you know, which I definitely had. And or these like other things that you develop to cope because, okay, I have to sit in this position. I’ve got to do this at this time. And I’ve got to, you know, if I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen, I’m going to be very anxious.

Like, right. So like, I would just develop ways of like coping with this intensity. But the intensity was always there. And like in the book that I wrote, Unbroken Brain, which is about like my sort of journey from this like childhood into addiction and figuring out the autism stuff, you know, I would always like, and this was in the like 70s and 80s. So I was like, I was always trying to go from intense to mellow, right?

Because mellow was a big thing then, but that, Melo, I am not going to be. Like, I can be a little chill, but like, I am not going to be your most relaxed person. That’s okay.

I’m always surprised when people think that there’s no genetic tendencies, because if you’ve seen more than one baby, you know, and watched more than one kid grow up, it’s like, they’re different from the start, you know, and that’s not to say that, like, genes are everything, but their kids have temperaments that are there before, you know, they’re even born. And, you know, you can either work with them or work against them.

Serge
Yeah. But so for the intensity, maybe you had a predisposition to be intense, but also very much what you’re talking about is you’re born in a world that’s too intense for you because you’re have such sensitive receptors that everything is amplified beyond what other people can receive.

Maia
Yeah. And so that can be good if you’re like trying to learn something, right? Because you can learn something really quickly, but you can also get really stuck in something you learned incorrectly really quickly too. So it, you know, I think it’s really, you know, the same thing that gives you the advantages also gives you the disadvantages, basically.

Serge
Yeah. Do you think that as a kid, you would have understood the notion that, say, you have receptors that are more sensitive than others? Or what kind of notion would you have understood?

Maia
Yeah, that would have been fine. Just getting that, like, it’s not, like, bad to, like, you know, be overwhelmed easily. And just kind of getting that, you know, it’s okay to start where you’re starting from that, like, everybody, you know, does kind of start from a different place.

And that doesn’t mean, like, one’s better or worse than the other. It’s just that, like, it’s different. And I would just stand out because of the intensity of my responses and my attempts to cope with that.

Serge
Yeah, yeah. So you use the word overwhelm like this. As a kid, did you think of it as overwhelm, or is this afterwards that you came to think of it as overwhelm?

Maia
No, I mean, I definitely knew that, I mean, you know, I was called intense all the time. I definitely knew that, like, my reactions to things were different and sort of larger. And, you know, I mean, I think like for a while it was just like I just identified as like, OK, I’m smart and that’s the only good thing about me. And so I was like, OK, well, that intensity probably has to do with that. So, OK, you know, but it was really, you know, yeah, it was I definitely felt the experience of stuff being like too much.

Serge
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you come back to, in a way, that sense of trying to make sense of life, trying to make sense of yourself. So part of, you know, just like, how do I belong in this world?

Maia
Yeah, yeah. No, and one of the things that also was definitely influencing me, my father was a Holocaust survivor. And so, you know, he was really depressed.

And, you know, we always knew, like, he didn’t really talk about it much, but, like, we all, like, knew. Like, I always felt, you know, like, you could just never please him. And it was not because I was bad.

It was because he couldn’t be pleased by anything because he was depressed. And he had good reason to be depressed, but we didn’t know that that’s what it was. And, you know, it was just like it’s kind of interesting the way, again, children will interpret like, you know, parents’ expectations or whatever.

And just, you know, you try to make them happy and proud of you or whatever, and you feel like they’re not. And it’s not because they aren’t. It’s because they can’t express positive emotions at that particular time because they’re depressed. Right.

Serge
Right. So the overwhelm was in the family.

Maia
Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Serge
And in the society through the family, yes.

Maia
And I mean, I think my dad was pretty spectrum-y. And my mom has her own traits that are probably less so that, but just like, you know, outlying.

Serge
Yes, yes, yes. So that left you very alone with trying to figure it out as opposed to being guided through it.

Maia
Yeah, no, I mean, you know, they absolutely did the best they could. But, you know, it was a time when people didn’t really talk about, like, you know, diagnoses or mental illness or any of this. You know, it was just trauma, like, let alone that.

You know, I mean, I later found out that, like, you know, my dad had been in a conservation camp and all this. And I knew this from a pretty young age. But a lot of the sort of fears I had were really similar to stuff that he was actually went through.

He was in one of those horrible train cars packed in with people and not able to escape. And I am just like, I need to be in an aisle seat. Crowds and claustrophobia at the same time.

Just my worst thing. I don’t know how, like, I didn’t know any of this, like, at the time. I don’t know how I sort of picked it up, but I definitely did.

um uh you know the um but yeah like he um when you know he was like five or four or five when when he was going through that and like he got back to school after that and he didn’t speak for a year uh you know and again i never knew any of this till i was much older um but you know they thought he was um intellectually disabled we would now call it um and you know um he wasn’t he went on to become a chemist and like you know again quite an aspie uh field um but um you know uh the it was um you know like people just didn’t people thought that like oh kids are resilient and that like they’re they can just go on and not be affected by stuff that happens like when they’re pre-verbal pretty much right yeah and like that is just not true and I mean it’s not surprising that I have gone on to like you know write a lot about child trauma and try to like understand it

Serge
um given all of this yes yes yes yes given that actually you early on we’re trying to make sense of it as a part of a survival.

Maia
Yeah. And it was, people are always like, you know, well, were you traumatized as a kid? And like, I didn’t have the, I mean, I certainly was bullied and that was traumatic itself, but I certainly had the experience of a very depressed parent, sometimes both. And, you know, but when you’re comparing it to what happened to my father, I’m like, no, I had no trauma.

Serge
But essentially what you’re describing is that being highly sensitive to the stimuli of the world puts you in a state of being in constant overload. And so that’s too much of trauma that it’s more than you can handle.

Maia
No. And I mean, I think like this is the thing, like I do think like most kids on the spectrum, even if they don’t have like overtly traumatic experience, typical experience can become traumatic to them. And so that is definitely, you know, part of my story. And it seems like, oh, you’re just a little princess and you can’t deal with anything. But if you’re wired this way, intensity of normal stimuli is more than it typically is.

Serge
Right, right, right. And so, hence how much it made sense, how it just gave relief to have an explanation for what was happening.

Maia
No, absolutely.

Serge
Essentially, it’s understanding that’s the wiring.

Maia
Yeah. And just sort of realizing that, like, there’s other people that have this same weird combination of symptoms and, you know, or some variety of these, you know, three groups of symptoms that people have, you know, that like that this is a thing was really great to know because, like, there was so much of my behavior that seemed so unusual and seemed like, why is she doing this? You know, and this was I was like, oh, OK, like this is why I’ve always been like, you know, sort of trying to seek to like, you know, not be overwhelmed and to find ways to be connected that it’s harder for me than others to necessarily do.

Serge
Yes, yes, yes, yes. And so before we started the recording, you were telling me that you’re in the middle of writing a book about how we become who we are or something like that. And so it makes a lot of sense as we’re talking, as you have that journey. But do you want to say a little bit about what it’s like for you to explore and to write this book?

Maia
I’ve been looking at a lot of this just because I like I wonder how we can help kids create good identities starting early and how we can think about our adult lives in light of the tendencies that we’re born with and the environments that we’re in. And especially our experience of that environment and the interpretations we make and the interpretations other people make because we kind of iterate this. And I think like when you I’ve been reading a lot of stuff about, you know, the brain is a prediction engine, which is very abstract, but is really interesting to me because that idea basically means that our entire experience of reality is a projection.

because we’re constantly like saying, okay, I’m experiencing this and then looking to see if there’s a prediction error. And so it’s always this like you predict this and then you respond to the prediction and et cetera. Now that doesn’t mean there’s no reality or any of this, but like what it does mean is that your expectations play an enormous role in how you experience things.

And if you can set them better, you can do a lot better. Now, obviously, it would be great to like, maybe not have expectations or whatever. But given that we’re wired to predict things, that probably isn’t happening.

So the best thing to do to be as much in the now as we are capable of being is to understand the way this works and then use that to feel better and be better.

Serge
Yeah. But so we’re talking about that prediction involves also calibration. So every time there’s a prediction before the event, and then some kind of an analysis of seeing so that to adjust to fine tune the prediction. But interesting, if we come back in a way to your childhood through that lens of prediction, calibration, and of course you were not aware of that at the time, but what comes up if you think of it in terms of what your predictions of the world were and to what extent you were able to calibrate or not calibrate?

Maia
Well, there were a lot of things where I was not correcting prediction errors that I should have corrected, especially in the neighborhood of self-hatred. But there were, you know, also good things that, you know, I felt confident that, you know, if there was something I wanted to learn, I could learn it. And I felt, you know, capable of doing things because, you know, early on, I had shown I could like really do things like way before it was expected of me to do them.

And so I could then, you know, have that sort of positive prediction error thing going on. But yeah, like the, especially in the social world, that got very confused. And I mean, I think, you know, teenagers in particular, you get this, first of all, you’re kind of aging out of that black and white stuff from, you know, the era of childhood prepubescent, right?

And then you are just overwhelmed with all this like social connection desire and you’re trying to like grow your cortex to actually control all these impulses that are going on while this is happening. So, you know, it is, it’s very easy to get, you know, caught in a prediction error that you don’t correct. And so I think kind of understanding that and understanding that, you know, managing uncertainty is hard for everybody is, I think, useful.

Serge
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it’s not just your situation. It’s like part of the human condition.

Maia
No, exactly. Like the way kids can even learn in the first place is because the environment is reasonably predictable. And yes, there’s uncertainties in it, but you can kind of put the probabilities on various things and be like, okay, this is likely to happen. This is less likely to happen.

But if it’s like completely unpredictable, this just causes enormous stress. And I feel like a lot of us are experiencing that. At least I certainly am right now.

Serge
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Is there something that you might want to say to end this or does it feel right to end here?

Maia
I just think it’s really important to like not be too hard on yourself. I feel like the wrong people hate themselves and to really also like realize that being connected to other people is crucial to, you know, human life. We don’t understand that the only way that we can be, you know, happy and functional is to, you know, have some people that we can rely on and they can rely on us, you know, and that doesn’t mean you’re codependent or bad or anything like that. We’re all interdependent. Kind of recognizing that and being, you know, gentle with yourself through all of this, I think is especially important right now when we’re just dealing with such a crazy world.

Serge
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Thank you, Maia.

Maia
Thanks.

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