#jack’s autism toolbox

[epistolaryfairy]

ooooooooh is that why you named yourself paul

It is! The short version is: He is my namesake because the Beatles Phenomenon is my Special Interest. The longer version is that Paul is my ‘avatar’—yet another thing in my life which was Mysterious until i had words for Autism. If yall don’t mind the Old Dog telling another Autism In The Time Of Violent Erasure story:

When i was growing up, my communication disability was significant, but was universally misinterpreted as Shyness. When i expressed distress at being unable to talk to others, i was told ‘just be yourself’. I found this Baffling, as i had never tried to be anything else. I remember thinking, ‘but what if my “Self”, doesn’t talk?’ I knew I would suffer harm and deprivation for not speaking, and yet I was not holding back—the problem was that very often, no words came at all.

I had no words to express any of this. Because productivity is valued over humanity in our culture, any framework which did not paint my disability as something negotiable was rejected by every adult in my life, and replaced with solutions and explanations that were for other more solvable problems and not my own. In this case i was led to believe my Wordlessness was not Me, but rather a symptom of ‘anxiety’ i needed to overcome, so that i could ‘be myself’. Because I was essentially forbidden to embrace the nonspeaking part of me as Myself, I felt empty of personality.

I often sought comfort in The Beatles; they are my Special Interest. One day when i was maybe 14 or 15, it occurred to me that, although i did not know what I would say in a given situation, I could often guess at what Paul might say. So, i just began to imagine myself as him, and say his Words where i had none. Back then i wrote that i had ‘grafted Paul’s Personality Matrix onto my own’, where mine had been deemed insufficient.

Because he made sense to me—and very likely because he was not a woman—this did not feel like the impossible, suffocating imposition ‘pretending to be a normal 90s girl’ was. It was workable, and that was lifesaving. My Beatles friends (in retrospect likely fellow Beatles autists) sometimes gave this name weight by each taking a ‘beatle name’ and role of their own. I have been ‘The Paul’ to probably three such groups, so the name is deeply meaningful in a relational sense as well; for example it represents a mutual and weighty connection with those in my life who have resonated with John.

Either way, this solved the issue of my Silence in places, and gave me words to say, yet i was aware my interpretation of Paul was only an approximation, a reflection of what i could see as a Fan observing his actions through the lens of history and notoriety, thirty years after The Phenomenon occurred. I often explained: ‘I am Paul, and also, I am not Paul.’

Over the years i ran into others who did this with other personalities. In fact i believe it may be what John Linnell (edit: i am told this is Flans, my bad) is talking of when he says ‘put your hand inside the puppet head’. I imagined it as a sort of ‘sock puppeting’, yet this gave the impression of artificiality, distortion, even deception, and that was not true for me, because unlike someone wearing a sock puppet, I also am the puppet, and often cannot directly interact without it. On learning of the spiritual term ‘avatar’ to describe nonhuman entities’ needing to manifest as imperfect extensions of themselves to interact with the earth since they do not ‘belong’ in our realm, my friends and i began to call these our ‘avatars’.

Thanks for asking about the name; I didn’t realize it had been so long since i talked about it!