Nowhere-to-Put-This
taxonomically leaky methods of classification
My Dearest Analysts,
The last time you heard from me, I was writing about categories. The way they help other people read you, place you, and placate themselves with the idea that you have been organized onto the correct shelf, instead of left cluttering the corner of nowhere-to-put-this.
Since then, I have done little else but try to make myself legible.
First, there was another film screening. This one in Kingston, New York. Beforehand, I was interviewed for the Kingston Wire by a splendid journalist who had clearly done her homework and arrived with the exact right blend of respect, curiosity, and awe, which is my favorite blend and should be bottled.
The venue was big with small quarters. The screening room was where they kept the pinball machines. The films had to be uploaded to YouTube and cast from there, with no cords or wires involved. Just faith, bluetooth, and the hope that the internet would not decide to skip, crash, glitch, or sludge your precious work into unintelligible soup.
At one point, we had to stop and restart the film before mine because the image and audio had fallen out of sync. It was like stopping the music to remove a splinter from the guitarist’s finger. Necessary. Spiritually destabilizing.
Afterward, the other filmmaker left “to get some food,” likely starved from the splinter removal, and the portion of the evening where audiences were meant to do one-on-one Q&As with the filmmakers fell entirely upon me.
One man was delighted by my merch table. He told me he loved spotting the posters from each chapter of the film, that the work had really made him think, and thanked me for putting it all together. Bottle it!
Another man told me that after my moving opening speech, he was dismayed that the film began with a gag.
It was disarming. He was in until then, he said.
And then what? I wondered.
He fell off at the first chapter of the movie. What did he do for the rest of the runtime? Float away? Stare at the pinball machines? Remain bodily present while etherically filing a complaint? He did not include this in his comment.
This is one of the risks of making yourself legible. People get attached to the first label that works. Moving. Disabled. Serious. Funny. Spiritual. Bitter. Experimental. Grieving. Chronic. Once they find a handle, they begin carrying you around by it. Then, when the work changes shape in their hands, they look betrayed.
My opening speech, always the most harried part of the event for me, felt rushed and formulaic this time. As usual, I’ll include the video below for my precious paid subscribers, who may compare it with past appearances as a minor archive of self-exegesis. A flipbook of mortification and/or becoming depending on the mood.
As soon as I returned from Kingston, I took no time to celebrate a self-produced, bi-coastal screening tour. I took no rest. No earned hiatus. Instead, I jumped directly into figuring out what it would take to pitch the trilogy as something bigger. As it turns out, it was more learning to explain myself and my work and what shelf to place it on.
I started a pitching class to practice this until it becomes entertaining.
Then I jumped into devising a new film project based on the essay many of you seemed to like very much, about using your attention to manipulate time. I made a sample video on my iPhone, taught myself DaVinci Resolve, and submitted it to the Sofia Coppola short film fund.
As of this writing, my overall score is 95%, with visual quality being the category keeping me from a perfect 100 (word is, the judging panel only pays attention to those films with an average rating of 98 or above). This feels mildly unfair, since I am being rated on iPhone footage of myself acting out the movie idea, when I could have achieved pitch-perfect visual quality by simply filming myself talking about the idea from my couch, which is apparently what one was meant to do.
A helpful lesson: sometimes the thing you think makes the application special is the thing the form has no box for.
Somewhere in the middle of all this, while I was trying to make my film legible to audiences, programmers, funders, distributors, and potential industry champions, another classification system began waving at me from across the internet.
Autism.
Which is to say, the categorizing impulse had finally come for the categorizer. Last week the internet informed me that my strongest autistic trait is “social.”
This was surprising, mostly because I have spent the last thirteen years assuming all of my strange social experiences belonged solely to a traumatic brain injury.
The internet didn’t care.
It handed me a report card. Social: 95%. Sensory: 65%. Executive functioning: somewhere in the middle.
Not a diagnosis per se. More like a sorting.
I’ve already been diagnosed with ADHD, although if you asked me to point to the ADHD and then point to the brain injury, I honestly wouldn’t know where one ends and the other begins. What is the precise location where the Atlantic Ocean meets the Pacific?
And so it seems, categories continue to haunt my world. I keep bumping into them. They stand in doorways. They gather around clipboards. They appear in dropdown menus. They ask, Which of the following best describes you?
First it was brain injury.
Then ADHD.
Now autism keeps waving at me from across the algorithm.
Every few videos, someone describes sensory overwhelm.
Brain injury. Autism.
Executive dysfunction.
Brain injury. ADHD
Needing three days to recover from a party.
Brain injury. Autism.
Understanding what people are saying to me a few moments too late.
Brain injury? Autism? ADHD? Just a Tuesday?
The obvious answer is that all of these conditions overlap.
But categories themselves are more taxonomically leaky than we pretend.
The same thing that makes my submission video ‘lacking in visual quality’ and my movie ‘disarming’ and my social tendencies ‘unintentionally cold,’ is what makes me, me. And somehow there’s no box for that.
There is no box for the way a brain, damaged or born this way or both, learns to make meaning out of lag, overwhelm, misfire, and beauty…which is soooo inconvenient (!).
By the time you read this, I will be off to a 7-day silent retreat, the same one that last year produced the tick in my navel story, based loosely on true events. This year, I arrive with a few more identities under my arm, that i’ll likely set down beside my shoes the moment I arrive.
Until next time, may you you remain gloriously difficult to classify,
Abigail
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