Autism Update

Ask what my favorite music was growing up and I won’t have a definitive answer. There were certainly musicians and artists I listened to and liked. When I was a child there was lots of 80s music (because it was the 80s), and hits from Whitney Houston, Talking Heads, and Gloria Estefan are burned into my memory along with one-hit wonders like Take on Me and Come On Eileen (by Aha and Dixie’s Midnight Runners, respectively).

My parents often listened to rock or other 70’s music, and our camping trips were scored by Doobie Brothers, Boston, Journey, Kenny Loggins, and James Taylor. As a teenager in the nineties I mostly listened to pop and rock like Mariah Carey, Sarah McLaughlin, Alanis Morissette, Green Day, Live, Dave Matthews and, because a lot of my friends listened to them, U2, and knew and liked Nirvana and Nine Inch Nails but was not allowed to listen to that kind of music in our religiously conservative family. Our very first CD bought to play in our very first CD player was the Body Guard soundtrack, which only made my love for Whitney undying.

Practicing piano in 2007 at the age of 26

Just like this summary, my taste in music was mostly generalized and often limited to what I thought was permitted, or even expected. I love music, and always have, and was a pianist as a teenager and sang in the school choir, and knew classical music and regularly practiced Chopin, Tchaikovsky, and Rachmaninoff. Classical music moved me, and was especially fun when I could bang it out on our Yamaha upright. Once when playing Frans Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 I snapped one of the piano strings and it sounded like a shotgun went off in the house.

After my parents kicked me out of the house at the age of eighteen for being gay and ungovernable I drowned my loneliness in the music of Erasure, Madonna, Annie Lennox, Cher, Celine Dione, and many other artists I had been too insecure to previously indulge. Britney Spears’ album Oops!…I Did it Again and the titular song came out as I struggled with wanting to kill myself, and along with Cher’s Believe bought me another year before I would ultimately take a knife to my wrist. Yet in spite of all this I never really identified with any of the music I listened to. It made me feel great when I listened to it, but was mostly useful to drown out the noise of depression and chaos of life which fueled it. As I recovered from my suicide attempt and grew into a man I also enjoyed other artists I had never heard before like Royksopp, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Goldfrapp, Postal Service, and Daft Punk. Mostly I listened to dance music, musicals, and other upbeat music because they balanced out the darkness that otherwise circumscribed my existence and struggle to break free of the past. When coaching a young, straight guy who was very into music I told him that I couldn’t listen to groups like Radio Head when I was younger because it would just make the sadness worse, and he told me about Thom Yorke saying “you know you're in trouble when people stop listening to sad music.” Though Thom meant it for a different reason, he was right.

But it wasn’t just music that I had no strong opinions about. When I was a teenager I one day realized that all but two or three shirts in my entire closet were some shade of green. “I thought green looked good on you,” said my mom when I asked why. I was old enough to have tastes of my own, and yet I didn’t. It wasn’t until I was seventeen when I finally realized I had the same haircut my entire life, and buzzed it off, much to my mother’s disappointment, while sleeping over at a friend’s house one weekend. Though I had read many books I had no favorite author. I loved Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit as well as other fantasy, but it was mostly because of the wonderful escapism those worlds provided rather than appreciation of the prose, themes, meanings. I knew what books and authors were impressive to recite, but rarely thought about them in my everyday life.

When I posted my article The Cause and Cure of Autism in 2022 in the midst of the COVID pandemic I had suspected I was autistic for several years. Honestly, I probably had since the time a friend called me a ‘savant’ when I was 25 in 2006 and I yelled at him because I had only ever heard the term ‘idiot savant’ and knew it was a form of retardation that I was already insecure of being. That I had, most of my life, a great difficulty in making friends which added to my depression only served to increase my insecurity of being autistic. I had long known that speaking freely won me more quizzical looks and refusal of invitations to date or hang out, so I would often not speak and simply let people invent their opinion of me. Being very tall and quite good looking this mostly led to other gay men choosing me as their fantasy boyfriend, which of course I could never live up to and always ended in disaster. I will never forget the look of rage on my fiancé’s face in the last weeks of our relationship as I explained the health properties of lauric acid, of which coconut oil contains a generous amount, and the later text to his friend I found when searching his phone in desperation to save our relationship that he had felt deceived in dating me (honestly, I made him watch the original My Little Pony theme from the original My Little Pony TV movie special starring Sandy Duncan on our fourth date, so he should have known what he was getting into).

Although I presented with many symptoms of autism it wasn’t common to test when I was a child, especially for those of us who were passable, and by the time I became an adult it felt taboo to even think about it. But as I engaged in academic research into the origins of my lifelong illness, which turned out to be undiagnosed cystic fibrosis that led to cancer and other health problems, the particulars of my experience became too great to ignore and came out accidentally in my writing. During my research into alcoholism and addiction and hair loss I also discovered that Kynurenine Pathway activity is elevated in those of us with autism which results in the production of excess quinolinic acid which is a potent and toxic neurostimulant which accounts for the increased intelligence some of us also display but also the nervous agitation and stress. This excess quinolinic acid is how the body and our biology naturally increase creative problem solving during stress, and indeed because of the conditions which create autism and colonization of the gut with harmful opportunistic microbes that produce extra histamine, tyramine, phenylethylamine, cadaverine, etc., we experience near unrelenting stress. This is why those with more severe autism than myself also often self-harm and display behaviors like constant rocking, severe agitation, or even hitting their head against a solid surface, because the inducement of endorphins from injury help dull the pain. This is also why suicide rates among those with autism is exceptionally high.

In writing about my research I did a classic autistic behavior in which I spoke about conditions without referencing my personal experience, especially since much of that experience is typically embarrassing and is used to denigrate us, speaking as if they should know that I wrote from personal experience. Several of my cousins have children who are also varying degrees of autistic, and having discovered that autism was caused by the premature ingress of ammonia producing microbes into the gut and bodies of children I excitedly shared my research with them. One of my cousins began incorporating my advice with her son’s routine and he started being less agitated and making more frequent eye contact. I asked if I could share that in an article on the cure for autism and she gave me permission, so I wrote about my research, experiments, and hypothesis and published it on my website, and afterward she completely stopped talking to me and to this day has never responded to a single email, and her entire family has ignored me when I tried to say hi or catch up with them.

There is an abundance of abuse in our family, and her father in particular was quite monstrous, so I’m not entirely surprised at being treated like that by them, though my entire family treats me with contempt, having not only been the black sheep who chose to be gay instead of mormon but now the crazy guy who claims to have found the cure for cancer, depression, alcoholism and addiction, etc. Once when trying to help someone on the internet with her children’s health issues whom herself and children are all on the spectrum and were suffering greatly from medical issues she sent her audience after me, to cancel me, after claiming her page was a ‘safe space,’ and many of her followers left horrible, heinous replies, insulting my symptoms and accusing me of trying to ‘cure’ autistic people. Many with autism have been victims of parents and healthcare professionals who have tried to ‘cure’ autism or treat it in ways which were and are in fact abusive. But having just taken the RAADS–R test and scored comfortably in the autism spectrum these experiences were especially demoralizing, and I don’t think I have ever felt so alone in my entire life, which is saying a lot since I have spent the far majority of my life alone. It’s a good thing I found the cure to depression years ago, otherwise it would have probably been the end of me. Instead, I woke up every day feeling grateful for my life, sorry for people who have unresolved trauma, and though I had to go it alone the Universe was taking care of me and giving me a kind of happiness I never thought possible, and all I can do is my best, and to show up for opportunity.

My work doesn’t cure us of our personalities or unique dispositions, but instead resolves the underlying suffering caused by pathogenic microbes which are the reason for symptoms like frequent and debilitating stomachaches so bad I had to call in sick to work on an almost weekly basis, cause incontinence, malodors, crippling brain fog, or what exacerbated my depression to the point of suicide. Once when visiting a support group on social media there was a young man of sixteen who posted that he just wanted to stop requiring a diaper and have a normal teenage experience, and when trying to help I was shouted down by more abled ‘advocates.’ I love who I am, but I hated my gut problems and depression, they nearly killed me, and it breaks my heart to see others suffer, especially when the resolution to these problems is actually not very difficult and requires very simple changes in diet and behavior like getting sunshine every day and eating carrots with all protein and sulfur to block the activity of hydrogen sulfide producing microbes.

In one of his articles the biologist Ray Peat, whose work on which mine is primarily based, talked about the human brain and discussed how even adult brains can grow, and once I finally relieved a majority of the ammonia burden which dampened by cognitive development and gave me constant brain fog, migraines, and interrupted my sleep I began to find that my understanding of myself began to increase and change. I had long loved plants and take pride in my personal space, but I had never in my life engaged in anything resembling collecting or developing personal interests, only doing things as I thought I should, and here I was developing a small botanical collection and designing my personal space with the pinks and salmons the way that I felt I wanted.

Earlier this year too I began to FEEL music for the very first time in my life. What an experience. It was like being a child again and discovering Fleetwood Mac for the first time even though I have listened to them since I was a child. Even as I type this Stevie Nicks is singing “I’ll make a path to the rainbow’s end,” into my ears for probably the fiftieth time the last few months as I listen to them on a near loop, and though I have heard Seven Wonders many times in my life it was only a few months ago that I first felt it, and I feel it to the very core of my being, and I know now why music is so important, and it is an experience I didn’t know was possible or that I was even missing, and it makes me cry from the joy of it.

For the first time in my life I have an answer to “what is your favorite band?” I don’t know if Fleetwood Mac’s music just has resonance with my soul in particular or if it really is due to their exceptional talent, but I also found a similar experience from Awolnation whom I listen to whenever I am angry and need to rage against my frustration with people and the world, and though Aaron Bruno has been in my playlist since 2015 I did not know I could feel like that listening to him rage too. It’s no longer just an escape to drown out the world, but an experience which lifts me and renders me speechless. Rereading East of Eden earlier this year was also a new experience, although it was one of my favorite books as an adult I actually connected not only to the characters and their experiences for the first time but also to John Steinbeck as an author and what he was trying to communicate, and the lives and loves of the people his characters represent, which is something more than mere words can accomplish, much like the intent of this quick, silly article, and felt for the first time the power of such work.

At the root of my writing is the edict to care for your wellbeing—physical, mental, and spiritual. Regardless of what specific problems you might have in life you are the only one who can do anything about it. My entire ethos has been to remove barriers to wellness such as third-party providers or expensive pharmaceuticals or supplements, founded in the natural biology of the human animal. We are not doomed to eternal suffering, which only comes instead from ignorance. I haven’t found the answer to everything, but to quite a bit. If you need help, just start reading.