Your Mind the Map

In Which Autistic Masking, Walt Whitman, and a Poem of My Own Make an Appearance

Firstly, an essay of mine is up at Midstory Magazine. It’s about autistic masking, and though I am generally comfortable with being pretty transparent about myself in my writing, this is a bigger step than I’ve ever taken in taking off the mask in front of readers, especially those who know me, but don’t know this about me. Time for truth to out, though. Time to dance off the page into who we truly are (see poem below):

When you grow up autistic but you don’t know it, you know two things:

1. You’re doing the whole relational shebang wrong, and

2. You must hide this fact from everyone to keep shame at bay, to feel safe.

You know you don’t got this. You learn to walk down your sweat-scented high school hallways telling yourself, with exponential anxieties, You’d better get this before you turn any corner and encounter a person with whom you must socialize. 

I built up my mask from birth, mirroring facial expressions, tones of voice, and cadences of laughter like an expert actor—or a survivor.

Read the full essay at “Losing the Mask in English Class.”

Secondly, a poem of my own that embodies much of what I explore in my essay above: the freedom-feeling of learning who you really are and then leaning into that. It is based on Jo Anne Tucker’s painting “The Kitchen Goddess” from Rattle’s February ‘23 Ekphrastic Challenge, and it received Honorable Mention in Black Fox’s music-themed Monthly Contest last summer:

art credit: Ed Fairburn – Artist/Illustrator

Your Mind the Map
(Rebecca D. Martin)

after “Get out the Map” by the Indigo Girls

Now you know stimming spans
farther than school, the children’s
foreheads to the floor, heavy
with words that cannot emerge.

Today, you carried a package to post,
one envelope within another, a
complicated project and you were
never very good at understanding instructions.

Now you know the electric incandescence
of performing a task right
for the first time at age forty-five
alongside the mute satisfaction of that
emerald green two-dollar stamp thumbed flat,
its gold embossed knot
interlocking winding knots
just the way the words you heard
in the song about maps this very morning
have constellated in your mind by midafternoon.
It’s beautiful
you say, meaning everything.
The postal worker only asks about
priority and arrival.

You don’t care.
You go home and raise a spatula to
the highest line in the lyrics— You’re
going to drink that sun–and stimming
inside, stimming out, you sling
sauce orange with saffron and
ginger onto the ceiling, a pattern of stars
that signals a vast spectrum of being,
your skirts soft against your calves
your feet bare just as you always
wanted to be.

Dare to lift the lid
on this secret: the mode of delivery doesn’t matter;
the sauce will leave a stain you will navigate by.
You are not too old.
The song is everything.
You are finally here.

And finally, Out for Stars has a new page: Poetry Any Place. If you’d like to follow my poetry readings and spider-mapped meanderings into poetic meanings, check it out! To tempt you, I invited Walt Whitman to my most recent reading.