How to tell whether it’s an anxiety attack, whether it’s an asthma attack, whether it’s a spiritual attack:

Lesson one: It is always a spiritual attack. This is what a pastor tells me when I’m seven. We live in Lawrenceville, near a shallow creek that I cannot visit, and we’re always church-hopping — until now. It’s a large church, the kind that broadcasts its sermons on television, and my mother worries that a camera will immortalize her while she’s blowing her nose. After service, my parents force me onstage during an altar call. I carry a beanbag doll that I rescued from the Salvation Army. Frightened, I hover behind the pulpit, choking on excess mucus, the pastor’s words escaping with the air.

It’s always a spiritual attack, repeats the pastor, who is now my pastor.

One day turns into many days missed from school. I can’t go there, I tell my parents. I’m sick.

It’s a lactose attack, says my doctor. My father thinks she’s a quack. He takes me home and has me drink milk and eat cheese, conjures a self-congratulatory smile. See? he says. And then he calls the pastor, or a pastor, or my pastor. I’m never quite sure which, or whom.

It’s a spiritual attack, says my father. We pray, and later I vomit.

I am hardly in school when I’m seven. When at recess, I try to follow a girl named Brittany because she wears hair ribbons, ribbons dense and packed as a poodle’s coat. I find them fascinating.

Brittany does not find me fascinating, nor does she find my orphan baby doll fascinating.

It’s got beans inside, I tell her.

Your head’s got beans inside, she tells me. She runs away.

Later, the shoves and punches come, my body wriggling beneath the violent hands of older boys that I do not recognize. I come home from school, crying, upset that I’ve been spiritually attacked. My mother lends me her bible and her kaopectate. My father lends me his albuterol and his collection of wheat pennies. Coins line the bathroom floor. I breathe, then not breathe, and my mother runs the shower at full temperature, my father gently nudging my face toward the steam. I wheeze in, wheeze out, long gasps, tired gasps, spiritual gasps. The air doesn’t like to come. Satan makes air distant.

There are hospital visits, but never school. I won’t allow school. Satan won’t allow school. Jesus won’t allow school. It’s almost as though we have a pact. I stay home, puke green stuff, struggle to breathe, press in the stomach of my beanbag doll, spin pennies across my dresser. These are my days, and I’ve come to accept them.

Lesson two: It is never in your head, unless you are possessed by a demon. This is the news my father brings home from a pastor. He applies the spiritual logic to me, a bittersweet syllogism. Later, there are people. Later still, there are hands, on me. Later still, I am on the floor, pressed down, surrounded by the elbowing sound of tongues. I am sobbing, not from Jesus, not from Satan, but from hands.

Lesson three: You are not praying hard enough. We are back north, and our new pastor tells us this from the podium of a high school auditorium. Church bulletins crinkle in the hands of the parishioners, hands that grate against the hum of the spiritually dead microphone. The air is never still in this place, and I struggle to catch it.

I am seven. I am gasping. I am sinking. I am fighting the hands, the godly hands, the demonic hands, the hands that pry and shriek and grieve against my face. I am dead, but I am not dead.

So, compiled below, I’ve addressed what I feel are the most interesting and perhaps ridiculous phrases that have attracted web visitors to my aspie rhetor blog. Hopefully, in addressing these keywords, the web searches of my mythical visitors will not have been in vain.

1. aspergers and the inability to realize the need to vomit

I keep reading over this one. When I paste the phrase into Google, my site comes up as #8. (Should I feel flattered?) A lot of things make me want to vomit, and I usually try to reduce needing to vomit by avoiding the things that will induce it. Of course, I am but one aspie, and perhaps other aspies don’t realize that they need to (or want to?) vomit at certain junctures.

My only guess as to this particular in-the-dark-about-vomithood sensation might revolve around aspie perseveration. When I was younger, especially, I’d get so engrossed in something (e.g., reading maps, playing with dolls, or listening to ELO) that I’d fail to realize that I needed to take heed of necessary bodily functions, such as eating or using the bathroom. But never with vomiting.

2. why do presbyterians hate pentecostals

Presbyterians hate pentecostals?

Actually, my experience has been the other way around — pentecostals hating Presbyterians (or, more realistically, pentecostals hating anyone who isn’t pentecostal). I grew up in a pentecostal family and ended up in a Presbyterian college for my last two years as an undergraduate student. Though the presbies I came in contact with did not theologically coalesce with those of a pentecostal persuasion, they always seemed fairly cordial as compared to the pentecostal people. (Of course, perhaps presbies are just more restrained in their hatred. After all, the pentecostals are rhetorically glossolalic and tend to be more charismatic.)

3. the baddest evilest vilest web site ever

I hope that this site didn’t exemplify what the searcher was hoping for…

4. elo and autism

Someone who wasn’t me actually searched for this?! (Or maybe it was me who searched for this.)

When my parents first heard about Asperger’s way back when, the first DSM criterion they pegged onto me involved that of the  intense, unrelenting interest. ELO, for me, is a very serious thing. The first ELO album I owned was 1975′s Face the Music, which I had on cassette. To the chagrin of my sister, who happened to share a room with me at the time, I’d play the tape over and over and over. Eventually, my parents had to separate us into different rooms as our personalities were so disparate: I needed to control every aspect of the environment, and any time she so much as moved a sock, I’d flip. Moreover, she could no longer tolerate the sounds of “Evil Woman” or “Fire on High.” (My father still jokingly refers to us as Felix and Oscar.)

5. aspergers sufferers

I hate this term. I don’t “suffer” from Asperger’s. I have a rather large problem with the autism spectrum being defined wholly in terms of suffering and deficit, hence the letter I wrote to the president of my university. This idea of ASD being equated with suffering seems a largely neurotypical construct to me, as if anyone who isn’t “normal” must somehow be suffering, and the problem of the suffering lies entirely within the so-called sufferer.

Many say that those with ASD have “problems” socializing –  but I would posit that, while spectrumites have difficulty socializing with NTs, so too do NTs have difficulty socializing with spectrumites. I’ve met very few people who “get” me, and I’ve likewise met very few people that I understand socially. Communicating with NTs, for me, sort of feels like cross-cultural communication: there has to be some give and take from both sides, because when I’m the only one giving or compromising in the way that I communicate, I’m effectively draining and killing myself, my personality. My autistic ways of communicating aren’t marks of my suffering self. My autistic ways of communicating are constructed as those of a “sufferer” because they deviate from a one-size-fits-all, neurologically typical society.

I have some painful sensory experiences sometimes — but even here, I hesitate to use the term “suffering,” and, if I ever use it, I put it in scare-quotes, because “suffering” is so inadequate as a term, so emotionally and neurotypically loaded as a term. Who’s to say that NTs don’t “suffer” from their sensory experiences? Though spectrumites may be “missing out” on how NTs perceive their surroundings, NTs are “missing out” on how spectrumites perceive theirs. This construct of suffering depends upon who controls the dominant discourse surrounding neurology and (dis)ability.

Lately I’ve been pondering what I’ll be writing my dissertation on. I’m just entering my second year and still have at least three more classes to take, so I do have time to decide. I won’t be locked into anything for while, probably about a year. And yet, I see two very distinct possible threads that I might pursue, threads that may, indeed, be dissertation-worthy. My current scholarly obsession is Pentecostal rhetoric, and I’ve been sort of fixated on Aimee Semple McPherson, a preacher in the 20s and 30s and founder of the Foursquare church. I’m currently writing a book chapter (a draft of which is due in less than two weeks). My problem, as always, is that I feel like I can’t stop reading, I can’t stop collecting, I can’t stop taking notes.

And then there’s the other thread — the disability studies/autism/Asperger’s thread. I think that the recent proliferation of media-driven constructions of autism needs rhetorical scrutiny. And reading disability studies theory, from a humanities standpoint, allows me to talk about social constructivism until I’m blue in the face and have unknowingly bored everyone around me.

I have personal connections to each thread, obviously. My parents left the Catholic Church when I was in kindergarten and became born-again Christians. I was mostly raised in Pentecostal churches, and attending a Presbyterian college was an interesting transition (and resulted in another of my obsessions, John Calvin). I really enjoy dissecting these various theological frameworks and trying to understand what makes them tick, what makes their audiences tick.

There’s a lot of overlap between pentecostal/charismatic churches and faith-healing. That’s what led me to McPherson, especially, and I think she’d be interesting to examine from a dual feminist rhetorical/disability studies standpoint, especially since she was one of the first radio evangelists in the U.S. (second to Billy Sunday). But I’ve yet to find overlap between McPherson and autism… and I hate the idea of dumping one interest for the other. My only thought thus far is to explore faith-healing generally…but I hate “generally.” I’m more in favor of “super specific.”

In any event, it is August, and I’m writing a book chapter on McPherson, and I just submitted a webtext on autism and embodied authorship to an online publication. I’m tired and I can’t wait to go apple-picking next month.