The Ledger

An unplanned essay in response to Jaime Hoerricks, PhD's "Priced Out of Personhood: A Preface" https://open.substack.com/pub/autside/p/priced-out-of-personhood-preface

Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash

I read Jaime Hoerricks's essay this morning, and it landed in three places at once. I began writing a restack note and it became something more.

I was one of the people who messaged her.

What I was carrying when I began reading the series When the Future Won’t Hold was recognition. Not sympathy. Not even empathy, nor concern from a safe distance. What I felt was recognition. The kind that lives in the body before it finds words, the kind that arrives as pressure rather than thought. The kind that feels true.

And I typed: I hope you’re okay.

That is the form available to us. The shape language makes in those moments, conditioned and careful, not quite touching the thing itself. The reach was not empty on my end. But the words were frosting on something much heavier than I could express in the moment and through that medium. Her writing already knows this. That gap is part of what she is describing.

What she is also describing, though she could not have known it about me specifically, is the particular position I occupy inside all of this.

What I know about myself is this: I am the monetizable kind of autistic. The acceptable kind. The kind the market can use.

I have a relatively stable financial foundation. Prior savings that are cushioning a collapse that has kept me unemployed for eight months — autism diagnosis, trauma, burnout, core relationship loss, all of it arriving at once, all of it finally refusing to be performed away. I have language. I have legibility. I have enough social grace that my divergence reads as interesting or quirky rather than threatening, most of the time, to most of the people whose approval I have needed to survive.

I know what that means. I know it is not equally distributed. I know there are people living the same internal experience I am living — the same nervous system, the same pattern recognition, the same exhaustion — without the cushion. Without the savings. Without the words that make gatekeepers comfortable. I know that my collapse has been survivable partly because I have been palatable enough, for long enough, to accumulate something to fall back on.

That knowledge sits in me like a stone.

Not guilt exactly. Something more like the discomfort of being the exception that proves the rule. Of being included in a system on terms I did not fully choose, at a cost I am only now beginning to fully account for.

And there is a particular edge inside that I am still learning to name. I did not know I was autistic until recently. The collapse made that visible. And once visible, impossible to re-conceal without risking the same harm again.

So I lead with it now. By choice, but not freely. I could still hide it. I won’t, because I can’t afford to.

What I didn’t expect was the quiet revolt I feel at having to make it the organizing story of a reinvention I didn’t plan, at 52, inside an economy I already know the numbers on. The skills are real. The thirty years are real. The wanting to use them to help people rather than to perform my own legibility — that is also real.

I am an accountant by education and by training. I have been watching the ledger on my mother’s fixed income. She is eighty, not autistic, surviving on Social Security, watching her meager income increases arrive while the cost of existing outpaces them quietly and reliably.

I have been watching the numbers of the world long enough to know what a full analysis would show. I have not done that analysis. Not at scale. Not yet. Because I already know what is there, and there is a particular kind of grief in knowing something precisely that you cannot fix.

That is Jaime’s quarter turn, for me. Not into despair. Into accounting.

Into the knowledge that my writing — this essay, the ones before it, the ones I am building toward — is the only contribution I can make right now. And that it will not be enough. Not by itself. Not for the people most exposed to what she is describing.

Recognition is not rescue. Clarity is not a policy change. And I cannot fully know whether my experience, cushioned as it is, will reach the people whose circumstances differ most from mine.

What I can do is be honest about where I am standing when I write.

I am standing inside this neurology, with a better view than most and more protection than many. I am writing from a position of partial legibility, trying to say true things about a system that rewards my particular kind of legibility while pricing others out entirely.

I sent the frosting message because I did not yet have the words for what I actually meant.

What I actually meant was: I see the structure underneath this. I feel it in my own body. I am afraid of what I already know about the ledger. And I am grateful someone is finally reading it aloud.