Sia

"Is It Me or ASD?" is one of the most intensely personal songs I have written because it is truly about me.

It started with a question I have asked myself more times than I can count.

Is it me? Or is it ASD?

The song wasn't planned. I wasn't sitting down intending to write about autism. I was actually trying to regulate myself during a difficult moment at home.

There was a lot of energy around me. Movement. Laundry. Work. Phones. Numbers. Accounts. Tasks. Things happening quickly and intensely. I could feel myself reacting to it.

Historically, I might have focused entirely on what the other person was doing. Through therapy and a lot of work on myself, I've been learning to stop there and ask a different question.

What do I actually know?

What am I interpreting?

What belongs to the other person?

And what is happening inside me?

I knew the environment felt intense to me. What I didn't know was why someone else was behaving the way they were behaving. I couldn't diagnose that, and I couldn't assume their internal state.

So I tried to let it go.

And somewhere in that process I thought:

Maybe it's me.

Or maybe it's ASD.

Then I realized it rhymed.

That was pretty much the end of that.

## Looking Backward Through a New Lens

I wasn't diagnosed with autism until adulthood.

That creates a strange experience.

You don't suddenly become autistic when somebody gives you the diagnosis. You look backward across an entire lifetime and begin reconsidering experiences that happened long before you had the vocabulary to understand them.

Things I thought were personality traits.

Things other people considered defects.

The intensity with which I think.

My need for clarity.

Pattern recognition.

Hyperfocus.

The difficulty I sometimes have separating what someone literally said from what they intended me to understand.

The enormous importance I place on sincerity and consistency.

The tendency to examine something repeatedly when it doesn't make logical sense to me.

The difficulty letting an unresolved contradiction simply remain unresolved.

And, perhaps most painfully, the experience of believing I communicated something clearly only to discover that someone else experienced the interaction completely differently.

Suddenly there was another variable in the equation.

Autism.

But that created another problem.

I didn't want ASD to become an explanation for everything.

I don't want to escape accountability by saying, "That's just my autism."

My choices are still mine.

My mistakes are mine.

My responsibility for understanding how I affect other people is mine.

So I found myself repeatedly asking:

Is this me?

Or is this ASD?

That became the song.

## "Trying, I'm Trying"

The first verse isn't about having an answer.

It's about excavation.

> Trying

> I'm trying

> Trying understand

> This every part of me

That word, trying, matters to me.

There have been times when my efforts to understand, explain, repair or communicate haven't been experienced by another person the way I intended them.

That doesn't automatically mean the other person's experience is wrong.

It also doesn't automatically mean my intentions weren't real.

Both pieces of information can exist simultaneously.

That's one of the hardest things I've had to learn.

The images that follow are deliberately physical:

> Calcified

> Rope

> Wrought tight

> It's a true mystery

> An enigmatic vault

> Locked

> Sealed from sight

That's what decades of patterns can feel like when you suddenly begin examining them.

You pull on one thread and discover it's connected to something from thirty years ago.

Then something from childhood.

Then a relationship.

Then work.

Then communication.

Then creativity.

Eventually you're staring at this enormous woven thing and wondering how much of it is personality, adaptation, masking, experience, fear, learned behavior or neurological wiring.

## The Chorus

That's why the chorus needed so much repetition.

> Is it me...

> Or...

> A...

> S...

> D...

Again.

And again.

And again.

The repetition isn't filler.

It's rumination.

It's the question looping.

And eventually the chorus doesn't even finish it:

> Is it me

> Or

> ...

There's just space.

Because sometimes I genuinely don't know.

## Accountability Without Self-Erasure

Therapy has been an important part of this process.

Not because I'm trying to learn how to become someone else.

I'm trying to understand myself accurately enough to distinguish explanation from excuse.

That became:

> Tried therapy

> For clarity

> For truth

> And accept I'm infallible

> To acquiesce

> Learn

> Admit

> Be accountable

The intended word there is fallible in meaning, even though the lyric and pronunciation evolved through the production process around "infallible." The underlying idea is simple: I can be wrong.

I can misunderstand.

I can hurt someone without intending to.

I can become defensive.

I can discover that something I've believed about myself isn't completely accurate.

But accountability doesn't require self-erasure.

That's an important distinction for me.

There is a difference between:

"I did something wrong."

and

"There is something fundamentally wrong with me."

Learning to accept the first without automatically collapsing into the second has become part of understanding myself.

## Unmasking

The breakdown is where the question starts changing.

> Break molds

> Unmask

> This part of me

>

> Can't fit in-side.

Masking can be useful. Sometimes it's necessary. Everybody modifies behavior depending upon context.

But there is a cost when the objective becomes continually reshaping yourself so that your natural way of processing the world doesn't inconvenience anyone else.

Eventually I have to ask:

What actually needs to change?

What needs accommodation?

What requires accountability?

And what is simply different?

That's where the plume appears:

> pro-JECT with voice

> A conscious choice

> The plume re-writes

> this

> lesson

The plume connects this song to the larger Egyptian language running through WATCH ]|[.

Writing allows me to revisit an experience without pretending I can change what happened.

I can change what I understand about it.

## Why SIA

That is also why this song became the beginning of SIA.

Sia is an ancient Egyptian concept associated with perception, insight and understanding.

That describes what I want this album to explore.

Not diagnosis.

Not justification.

Not proving that I'm right.

Understanding.

"Is It Me or ASD?" isn't ultimately asking the listener to decide whether my interpretation of every experience is correct.

I'm questioning my own interpretation too.

That's the point.

## OR Becomes AND

The most important word in the entire song may be only three letters long.

AND.

For most of the song I'm asking:

Is it me OR ASD?

But eventually I realized that's a false choice.

Autism isn't another person living inside my head.

It isn't something sitting beside the "real me" that occasionally takes control.

My autistic brain is the brain with which I have experienced every friendship, every relationship, every mistake, every success, every loss, every piece of music, every pattern, every moment of confusion and every moment of extraordinary clarity throughout my life.

So at the end, the question finally changes.

> It's me...

>

> AND...

>

> A...

> S...

> D...

That doesn't answer every question.

The old OR even returns briefly in the background harmonies, because understanding something intellectually doesn't instantly erase decades of questioning yourself.

But the final harmony changes it permanently.

AND.

I am responsible for my actions.

I am capable of learning.

I am capable of being wrong.

I can acknowledge how my behavior affects other people.

I can also stop treating every difference in how I experience the world as evidence that something inside me needs to be repaired.

Both can be true.

Maybe that's what I've actually been looking for.

Not absolution.

Not approval.

Not an excuse.

Just enough honesty to understand what I'm looking at.

> It seems that time

> is a dichotomy

> Memories

> always haunting me

>

> Now

> I see with clarity

>

> All I crave is honesty.

And after 56 years of asking some version of the same question, maybe the answer isn't OR.

Maybe it was AND all along.

WATCH ]|[

See it. Hear it. Feel it.