Wrong Planet / Right Mind: Dispatches from a Late-Diagnosed Autistic on Logic, Masking, and the Life

"I was not born. I landed."

For nearly half a century Christian Gajewski took reality apart piece by piece. He studied the neurotypical as an anthropologist studies an Amazonian tribe. He read physics, biology, philosophy, science fiction to understand how to operate the biological machine he had been assigned. At forty-eight, a psychologist named the thing: autism, level 1. Twice-exceptionality. The perceptual glass behind which he had always lived turned transparent, and the entire trajectory of his past reorganized itself.

Wrong Planet / Right Mind is the missing manual nobody handed him at the moment of landing. Twenty-three chapters that take apart the adult autistic experience in three sections: the Body (senses, pain, movement, insomnia), the Mind (logic, language, monotropism, alexithymia), the World (hierarchies, authority, love, parenting, politics). The thought proceeds in a network, a fractal, a hypertext. Digressions cross from forest mycelia to non-local consciousness, from Japanese blades to Resource-Based Economy theory, from Baudrillard to David Bowie, from Star Trek to thermodynamics.

The book addresses two readers. The Alien who has always felt out of place, who checks the silverware at restaurants for symmetry, who hides in the bathroom at parties to breathe, and is now starting to suspect that he is not defective. The Terran neurotypical who wants to understand what it feels like to live inside a bare antenna, why someone who avoids your eyes is protecting their survival, why pedantry is an extreme form of love for truth.

Phenomenological account, anthropological essay, technical survival manual for the species. Autism as necessary variation. The samurai who learned his own geometry.