Dylan EmmonsANATOMY OF AN OUTBURSTThe autism outburst has two facets–excitement and anxiety. They can remain little self-contained flickers of activity; they can also grow to full-length jubilant, one-sided conversations or even drag on to become full-fledge meltdowns. In either case the outburst leaves both the observer and agitated individual with little to hold onto, grasping for answers. In stillness, my body dreams of motion. I'm in Pizza Hut as a child, having lapped up my deep dish quota in record time, watching my dad and sister chew, when the tiny beginnings of movement trundle around in my legs. Or I'm in the dining hall at Ithaca College, and the laughter at a neighboring table – more of an operatic assault on the broiling din of all of the fizzling one-pm conversations than anything that can reasonably be called laughter – sets waves lurching off inside of me, a fraternity of negative charges drunkenly clamoring down the spiral staircase of my spine. Or I'm in a sports bar in graduate school, and while my sensory system focuses cruelly on the multitude of conversations fighting for supremacy, the turbulent red of the same fucking car commercial, and the room-temperature air taking on the qualities of scalding bathwater, there does not yet exist any perspective from which to gain that crucial distance needed to observe and make sense out of my life as if from the outside. The outburst opens a whirlpool sucking my consciousness deep down into the confines of this moment, all the while battling social/sensory kraken whose innumerable limbs threaten to ensnare me. To knowingly teeter on the edge of an Asperger's outburst is to understand what it is to be electrically charged. Over the course of the day, in the interest of preserving the veneer of tranquility or indifference most readily digested by others, energy has been smothered and dampened, a calamitous mix of positives and negatives waiting to be born into the world and therefore observed as either excitement or frustration. The signs are all there to be read, provided one has the practice and wherewithal in the moment to gather them up and examine them. Snippets of songs wing around in my throat for weeks and months at a time and beat most frantically at the café or library. Several instances of small-talk interactions gone awry clench and tickle at the abdomen. The muddy mixture of conversations roll my uneasy ankles and wrists – an internal itch, but non-localized. I imagine the CGI scarabs from The Mummy movies using the striations in my forearm muscles as ladders and clawing around indiscriminately. My trapezius yank at my shoulders with the remaining fumes of today's store of patience. I might have the look to an observer, of one slightly troubled, ill at ease. Because I spent a childhood and adolescence learning to recognize the signs of a potentially reputation-ruining fit, I sense the shiver's jolt before it comes. A small measure of self-awareness, waking up my inner sensors to the store, in some mysterious internal tanks, of the body's latent firestorm of energy, means a there's a hope I can release it in an appropriate manner and setting. But if I'm not ready, the outburst comes at me like a good ending – inevitable but jarring. A lot of bargaining happens in those micro-moments at the threshold of movement, in the space between the unconscious and the intentional: namely, the need for release, the weighing of possible reactions from those I sense in my periphery. In anticipating an outburst there's a palpable sense of responsibility or guilt built up from moments past during which this very ability to reflect failed me. It's a feeling like watching Marty and Doc Brown trying to channel the storm's clock tower lightning in order to be delivered from disaster. In reality, these behaviors exist in a unique space between the voluntary and involuntary. The best comparison I can make is to the process of a sneeze. One is drinking a coffee, or crossing the road, or trying to talk to a stranger when something seizes up behind the nose. In the moments before the sneeze, one has time to plan the direction of the blast and countermeasures to be taken, even to grapple with the desire for the relief and endorphins due at the end of the sneeze, and generally not wanting to make a loud ass of oneself. Should I find myself in a department store changing room with the fifth pair of uncooperative shorts, throwing them down, fast-balling them into a corner and bellowing over the 90s soft-pop crowding in on the last shred of my sanity, I'm not sure whether or not I'll be willing the whole process, giving in to my shortcomings and their aftermath as if inevitable and only because it will feel better, not because I can't control myself. The result is a choice I must make. I can dam up the outburst – letting the excess out in manageable tics–twirling my pen, tapping my feet cracking my neck. Self-control is a wet blanket, the stifling felt when one is robbed of an orgasm. But on the other side is the unique promise of being able step out from under an awning after a thunderbumper, and completely dry, watch the whole mess slip beyond the horizon. Or–or I can let it out, watch the process play out, as if unplanned, never exactly as expected, and hope the blast is isolated enough. There's time, in the release, to consciously channel the explosion so that the nose gets buried in the crook of the elbow, minimizing sound and harm. Release is appropriate either on the fringes of population or ion the fringes of social acceptability. Swaggering down the street politely singing Top 40 won't earn so much as a bored glance in a place like New York. But screaming "Holy Diver" at eleven AM on a suburban Sunday has earned me a few caustic looks. If I have time to choose a setting, the bathroom is perfect- it's each building's own private karaoke room/sensory playground. Why not turn on the water and the fan and flush the toilet three times, laughing emphatically? Why not take advantage of the width of the doors and limited auditory capacity of those in adjacent rooms? The release is a bit like pissing. There's no telling how long it will go on. At times of high agitation, stress, or pressure, the rush will catch up to me. Being caught on the hopper during a stressful day I could go on for a five or six minute, contextless and by any outside standards, wholly nonsensical, rhyming diatribe with gesticulations like made up baseball signals to a non-audience. "Banterman and flander tin and candor din and sander thin! Gahaha! Drain filler, stain killer fain grill sir." The time spent in the flow expands on itself. The momentum is self-perpetuating. The end result is like a drawn out internal lightning strike. All of this charged information stored up in my muscles – all of my legs' caged pleas for movement – wants to use this jolt as a pathway, suicidally, a means to an end. The process can be thought of as originating in the thunderclouds of my brain, and the electricity, the very material of sensation itself, can be thought of as having adhesive and cohesive properties like water. The shiver has an unspooling effect, wetting my limbs with electric intent, impulses that trace back on themselves in a closed circuit and yank at the corners of the brain responsible for language and movement. In the milliseconds before the electricity sorts itself out, inevitable, contradictory thoughts both for and against the idea of the oncoming cathartic outburst, of its merits and detriments. An outburst is a force ignorant of propriety, defying categorization as distinctly "frustration" or "excitement," "positive" or "negative," labels which carry no grounding weight in the intensity of the moment, except maybe the vague and arduously learned threat of alarming others. One can surface on the drive home or in the store. Depending on the setting, it might amount to twitching my neck muscles and screaming "Juicy Juice!" at myself in the bathroom mirror. I might want to yell "Globular!" at a display of cereal boxes. I may only raise a hand as if swatting a fly, and walk away from the display as if I'd suddenly remembered an upcoming appointment. As a kid watching Lassie get herself into trouble, I shadow the T.V. like a basketball defenseman, my arms pistoning, my body relegated to an unwitting vehicle for a runaway engine. In college, in the wake of most of the semester's befuddling anxiety and before my last Italian exam, I sing "What's My Age Again" at full volume in the shower, oblivious to my housemate's blooming hangover. As a twenty-something waiting for my paycheck to clear at the scheduled time, and so rushing around my bachelor suite, chasing down and bobbling recyclables and admonishing them for falling out of my hands, I hum and click my teeth together to the incessant and locomotive bassline from Pink Floyd's "Money." Inevitably something will occur to take me out of this groove – I'll receive a text message, and with it a reminder of space and time and obligations and context, or I'll drop something, or the energy uses itself up, reverts back to background static and I look around in a wild, damage-assessing sweep. If alone, say, in a bathroom, I'll spend a moment with the fluorescent hum of harsh light, wash my hands twice for that cooling, librarian's hiss of running water. I may pull myself together, laughing at the very idea. But if on the other hand I have had a lapse in judgment, and I've let my inner workings spill out into public consciousness, all hope is not lost. Part of the embarrassment of being found out or noticed in the midst of an outburst lies their inexplicable nature. Having grown in an internal world of idiosyncratic rules with Escherian logic, it's a fair bet the experience will be, to a degree, untranslatable, confusing, disconcerting. And this generated awkwardness can be put to use. In analysis, a significance can be gleaned from the self-sufficient and inherently purposeless universe of an outburst. That is to say, they're not always completely useless. In trying to become more aware of my outbursts, the outbursts themselves become occasions for awareness. Sometimes, an excitement outburst serves as a signal to the conscious mind of the excitement itself- its nature or its scope. It's an externalization of inner reflection, bringing a concept out of that muddy, isolated dreamscape geography of my inner world. Was it a natural product of being wired for routine in an entropy-ridden world? A short-circuiting of my patience after a long day of keeping minor frustrations in check? Was it another case of my audio-sensitive brain compensating for the pattern-less garble of public dining areas? In any case, it can be seen as behavior, as communication with the self. The lesson of the outburst, if there is any beyond the concept, crucial to feeling grown up, of soldering causes to effects, actions to consequences, may be to teach me in my haste to calm down for a minute. To make the outburst really count, then to really make meaning of it, is to be easy on oneself, let the years pass and with them their tallies of unwanted lapses in control, knowing that the real victory is applying newfound awareness in the moment. In cleaning up from my day at the tutoring center and rushing to meet a friend, I may have elevated without even knowing it, my movements becoming slightly more herky-jerky. With the weight of wind and sun intensifying, the hard-won intuition to isolate myself shimmering on the moment's horizon like desert wisdom, my legs take me to the bathroom, giggle bubbling out under my breath, and that old strained energy equation starts resolving itself.
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