The Holidays on Planet Autism

In the spirit of Festivus, it’s time to air some grievances

The holidays have come back.

The hellscape that is late November to January 2nd is on a repeating, endless loop.

Frosty is melting and Rudolph’s nose is overheating.

I’m not saying the holidays don’t feel good at times. It’s kinda like going on a sleigh ride with a group of happy people on a bitterly cold night, singing carols while you are tone-deaf.

Yeah, it mostly sucks.

If they only lasted two days, that would be okay. Forged somewhere in Satan’s lower intestine, the feast of Thanksgiving and the celebration of Jesus’s birthday have turned into a Season.

You don’t have to be neurodivergent to hate this season, but it helps.

You can be a soldier lonely halfway around the world, a college student stuck in the dorm on break, in recovery, unhoused, or going through a divorce.

The holidays were not made for outsiders, which is why A Christmas Carol is both beloved and annoying. Tiny Tim is the mascot of the underdog. He needs love but got dealt a losing hand.

Still, crippled children are kind of a downer.

Tiny Tim is over being a charity case, though. He’s all grown up now and has a prosthetic leg. Unfortunately, it turns out he’s also autistic.

That poor guy can’t get a break.

We neurodivergers hate overstimulation, love our routines, don’t tolerate alcohol well, have eating disorders, and parties make us anxious.

Trust me, you know one of us.

When we say we hate the holidays, it’s because they suck balls.

We’d prefer Festivus, in which everyone gets an equal chance to speak, the rules are clearly spelled out, and maybe, just maybe, someone wants to hear what we have to say.

What Constant Overstimulation Feels Like

I go to community acupuncture to relax, and one day a treatment provider says to me:

“You’re awfully sensitive to pain.”

She doesn’t say it with compassion but rather annoyance. After that, I always ask for someone else.

She said it as if I had some kind of control over how I reacted to pain.

So, I was in pain while she was telling me to essentially stop making her feel guilty. I was a problem patient, just lying there and daring to need help.

This is a place I went to for help, where I was paying money, and where I was vulnerable.

I’m at the open-air art fair during the “holiday season” with an overly talkative friend. You know the kind — won’t shut up. You know the venue — open booths with a dizzying array of wares.

Window shopping is exhausting and a cold wind is whipping around.

It all adds up terribly fast, like an algebra problem with a cocaine habit.

I ask if we can sit down and get a drink. The only seating indoors is a local loud pizza place. As I sit there waiting for my drink, she says:

“Why are you so tired? What’s wrong with you?”

There’s no way to explain it because I don’t have the resources. The time when I’m overwhelmed is the hardest moment to articulate something so complex and frustrating.

I’m a high school teacher in a new school during the first week. The attendance software didn’t come with a manual, I’m learning the names of 200 people, and every day is meetings, meetings, meetings.

I’m standing on a box on top of a student desk, fixing the LED projector when my friend and fellow teacher tells me she wants to quit now. I grimly nod my head. I’ve signed a contract.

I slog through exhausted until the school year ends.

I’d done okay teaching Special Ed, with 50 students, when no one ever came into my classroom except helpful coaches and teacher’s aides, but at the new school administrators checked in randomly to make sure I was following all the rules.

I completed my contract at the expense of my health. Many other teachers left at the end of that year — including two who had actual mental breakdowns. My sleep was terrible for nine months; I spent the weekends recovering.

More than once, I heard that the problem was “lazy teachers” — sometimes from other teachers.

If I could sum up the times I’ve been called sensitive, too tired, or too different, I’d have a book. I could call it “the highly sensitive person” except that title’s already been taken. It mostly describes autistic people but without using the A-word because it’s really the R-word.

If you know someone who is suffering during the holidays, please consider the fact they are completely overwhelmed, and they are remembering every other holiday in which they couldn’t do it right.

Which brings us to a simple cure for holiday hell: Festivus.

Festivus Is about Honesty, Anger, and Bragging

Festivus is the fictional holiday now celebrated in many homes after it became widely known in a 1997 episode of Seinfeld.

’Tis the holiday for “the airing of grievances” in which you tell people what you’ve felt all year but never said.

You are also able to report “feats of strength.”

Everyone gathers together around the aluminum Festivus stick.

When holding the stick, you are free to be completely honest about how you feel about anyone there.

If we haters-of-holidays could tell you how we really feel, it would be so liberating we might not even need to yell!

If you would listen to our lived experience, it would help us feel loved and accepted.

We don’t want every day to be Festivus, but an afternoon of listening to us isn’t too much to ask, is it?

No Thank You, I Don’t Drink. No, I’m Not an Alcoholic but Thanks for Asking. Yes, I’m an Alcoholic and Believe It or Not It Isn’t Fun and I Don’t Want You to Out Me During a So-Called Party.

The whiskey, wine, and Budweiser are more dangerous than the bizarre egg nog and drunken fruit cake — but if you can’t or don’t drink they all bite the big hairy you-know-what.

We can’t drink, or we don’t drink, or we don’t get drunk, or we shouldn’t get drunk.

Enjoy your cocktails and your burgundies, but for Pete’s sake, stop pushing them on us.

This goes double for cakes and pies and cookies and candy. We have eating disorders. “Just one bite” isn’t a thing when you have a food addiction.

The opposite of eating and drinking and being merry is overeating, overdrinking, and having to recommit to a recovery program.

Buying Sh*t Is Stupid and Overbuying Sh*t Is Moronic

Neurodivergent people struggle with something called having an income.

Employment rates among autistic people are abysmal. I oughta know, I’ve had 90 jobs. It’s not through lack of intelligence, effort, education, or opportunity. I can’t keep a job because people don’t like me. I don’t get promoted because I can’t figure out social norms.

I’m one step forward until that one false move trips me three steps back.

It’s a slippery ladder.

Prior to that, I’m hilarious. I’m a clown or a mascot, or evil, and nothing in between.

I’ve been scapegoated at so many jobs I’ve given up.

We’d love to stop buying what we can’t afford and getting crushed in a pile of debt and misery. One gift is enough! One day of Christmas is plenty!

Turn Down the Volume and Switch Frequencies, Kenneth

People with lots of friends have social privilege.

The academic term is “social capital” and it’s a very real form of abundance and wealth. Having lots of social capital is like being a millionaire.

You’ll often hear people say this. People are what’s important. Friends are everything. My family is my rock.

Wealthy people will maintain to their dying breath they deserve it all, the money and the friends, because of hard work and being “good people.”

Nope — you got that rizz from God’s grace. Stop pretending you decided.

We who struggle with making and keeping friends feel the social capital wealth gap acutely, and the holidays are a giant neon sign we’d like to unplug.

Turn that Frown Upside Down with a Simple Headstand

Nature is telling us to rest, and you are telling us to sprint. The forest is quiet, but everything gets brighter and louder and busier.

We wilt, then someone jabs us and says:

“Cheer up!”

Sadness is sometimes just us resting. When you tell someone to feel differently, you aren’t letting them feel what they feel.

We are often overwhelmed and wish we had what comforts us: known routines and time alone to recover.

We’d settle for someone just being near us without questions or advice.

It’s hard to have gratitude when you are praying the intrusive sunshine will stop glaring in your eyes, the jarring laughter will subside, and the crowds thin.

Sorry, don’t mean to rain on your holiday parade. Tiny Tim was cute and all but it takes work to love a cripple.

Festivus for the Rest of Us

Festivus dove into that wormhole between TV land and the real world, and made it to the other side because many of us don’t like the intensity of The Season.

The antidote to the Christmas madness is fewer, simpler rules, and a magical aluminum stick that acts as a universal translator.

Here we, 25 years later and Jerry Seinfeld has come out as autistic. Seinfeld’s co-creator, Larry David, sure acts like he’s on the spectrum in Curb Your Enthusiasm.

These crazy ideas don’t come out of nowhere.

Festivus resonates because some of us need a different world.

Turns out plenty of us want to air our grievances.

Thankfully, there is also Star Trek, ComicCon, The Big Lebowski, The Umbrella Academy, and a whole truckload of imaginary worlds where weirdos win.

Your normal holidays freak us out. On the upside, some of us created a whole new fresh weird galaxy just to cope.

You’re welcome.

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Jean Campbell is based in Hot Springs, Arkansas. She has been writing on Medium for years and recently published her first novel, Down and Out on the Road South, with Wings ePress. She is serializing the first part of her second book, City of Lies, on Substack.