Tag: autism

Hello (again) World!

I was feeling a bit down the other day, what with (gestures at everything), and I said to myself, what I really need to do is some old-fashioned blogging, the kind from 1999, when the Internet was a wild an wooly place and SEO meant typing your search terms a few hundred times into your website’s <header>.

I still had an old Blogger site, but I wanted to move to something more contemporary. So here am I at my new WordPress home! Maybe having to pay for hosting this will spur me to write more often; anything’s possible. I have imported the old blog’s content but some of it glitched out, and some of it embarrasses me, so I am pruning a lot of the old content, and will continue to. Sorry if you are a completionist? I guess your best bet is the Internet Archive.

Anyway, to reintroduce myself: I’m John McCoy. I am married (for 35 years!) to a beautiful philosophy professor who is smarter than me and dad to two kids who are a biochemist and a medical student and will therefore be richer than me. On the Internet I’m best known for being older brother to my more famous sibling, Dan, of the comedy Flop House podcast. But I am second best known for my own, only occasionally funny podcast, Sophomore Lit. The tagline for this podcast is “where we re-read your 10th grade reading list,” and in the beginning my goal was to focus on stuff you only read in high school, like Catcher in the Rye or To Kill a Mockingbird. Also I wanted it to be silly. But as time went by two things happened: first, I ran through the obvious list of books, and second, I found that my guest hosts and listeners were genuinely interested in having a podcast that discussed formative literature sincerely. So these days episodes might be about kids’ books, like The Twenty-0ne Balloons, or things you might have read in college, like the Bell Jar. Anyway I’ve been doing this podcast since my mid-forties and now…I’m not in my mid-forties.

Speaking of kids’ books, Phil Gonzales of the Deep in Bear Country podcast and I did a podcast called Klickitcast, where we read through the entirety of Beverly Cleary’s books. It took a few years but we made it all the way from Henry Huggins (1950) to Ramona’s World (1999) in 33 episodes. This podcast was always going to end, but it has a special place in my heart and I miss it.

What else? I was diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder in early 2020, just before the pandemic. Getting a late-life diagnosis was weird enough, but then there followed a sudden explosion of ASD discourse online as folks who became introspective during lock-down got diagnosed, or self-diagnosed, so I guess I was a trend-setter? A lot of people my age would have been clocked as autistic if we knew then what we know now. But self-knowledge is both liberating and anxiety-producing, and I’m still figuring this all out, as I probably will until I die (what we ASDers call “the Great Shutdown”).

Off the Internet, in the real world, I am an Assistant Director at an art museum. This probably isn’t as glamorous as it sounds to you, especially if you are a fan of The Da Vinci Code. But it does mean I get to work with art, and write about art, and plan exhibitions, and help produce exhibitions, and other art-adjacent things. So I am a lucky man.

That’s way more than you need to know about me! So what will this blog be about? Well, anything, I guess, but likely topics are: my podcast, literature, art, comics, autism, typography, art history, traveling, my dog (who I haven’t mentioned yet), creativity, intellectual property, web design, history, parenting, and, I don’t know…maybe a recipe or two?

I hope you’ll find something to think about here, either in the archives of posts I’ve migrated from Blogger or in the posts yet to come. You can also subscribe and get new essays in a convenient e-mail format! I think. I am still figuring that out as well.

There are a whole lot of things in this world of ours you haven't started wondering about yet

One summer’s day when I was nine or ten I walked into the children’s book room of the small public library in my small midwestern town. The children’s room was in the oldest part of the library, which used to be a single-family Victorian house, and in spite of renovation the space still felt homey in a way I couldn’t express. A shaft of light streamed in through a high window, catching motes of dust and falling on an old wingback chair. There was no one else there—my town had a dearth of readers, at least of my age. On top of a shelf was displayed a copy of James and the Giant Peach; the original edition with the real illustrations by Nancy Ekholm Burkert. This was a book of whose existence I was aware (from lists in Roald Dahl’s other books) but which I had never read. I took the book to the chair and leafed through it and for just a moment, Burkert’s luminous, gauzy illustrations coupled with the sunbeam and I had a sensation of flight and of being unmoored in time. I was entirely alone, and I sat there, a long while, until my mother came looking for me.

Ever since, I have chased after that emotion, whatever it was. I haven’t found it, but I have found other moments as profound and as hard to categorize. When I was a teenager I spent an afternoon walking through snow following rabbit tracks farther and farther out of town. When I hit a stand of trees I looked up to see a flaming sky, more red than I could imagine, as the sun hovered low between branches; it was past dinnertime, and I felt acutely aware of the earth’s rotation. There have been other moments.

Early this year, looking for some answers to depression, lack of direction, and some other troubling personal issues, I had a psych evaluation. I was suspecting a diagnosis of ADHD. Instead, the analyst told me I have a High-functioning Autism, formerly known as Asperger’s Syndrome (before the publication of DSM 5). This came as something of a shock to me. I was 52 and had never suspected. Asperger’s has only been a diagnoses since 1992, and I was in graduate school by then. When I relayed this information to friends and family, I found that some shared my surprise, but other shrugged and said it figured. I thought about my social anxiety, my tendency to be quiet and then speak in stuttering bursts, my inability to hold eye contact, and eventually I realized that yeah, it pretty much figured.

The thing I think about most is the number of times in my life people have said to me, “John, I passed you in the hall and you didn’t even look at me,” or “John, I sent you an email and you never responded,” or “John, is something wrong? You’re not looking at me, and you look upset.” Actually these observations have often been made by others to my wife, Marina, who has dutifully and patiently told everyone that yes, John likes you, it’s nothing you did, that’s just how he is. When you get to know him, he’ll talk your ear off. 

I worry about my diagnosis. I don’t want to be rude to people, I want them to like me. I don’t want to be awkward. Why did I never suspect this basic fact about myself? Is it something I can compensate for, or is this just me? Can I be present for friends and family, or am I always going to live in my head?

I was discussing my anxieties to a good friend over Zoom—he was one of those who was entirely unsurprised by my revelation. He had for many years dated a woman with HFA, and he found her delightful. “It’s a wonderful gift you have. You have all these interests and ideas and you live this interior life that is rich and expansive. You give everyone else a different perspective.”

Yes, I said, but I also confuse people. And I push them away, and I need so much time to myself.

“But you care about other people. And they can feel that. And the rest you can work out.”

Shortly after this conversation I was on a morning COVID walk with Marina—we have spent the long days of pandemic isolation becoming minutely familiar with local parks—and I through the trees I had a fleeting glimpse of the library and the sunlight and the peach, and something like the memory of flight. I realized that my solitary childhood reveries were also a gift from this condition, and I realized that whatever challenges my mind may pose, it has more moments to give.