Autism is often more than an information processing challenge, a collection of cognitive or sensory differences, the product of gut/immune chaos, particular personality traits or their blow-outs or a bunch of co-morbid 'fleas' like mood, anxiety or impulse control disorders. What Autism is for SOME people (though certainly not all) is also a labyrinth of addiction.

Some people are alcoholics. They get addicted to alcohol. Alcohol is high in Salicylates and Phenols and most people on the Autism Spectrum who are Salicylate Intolerant are certainly addicted to these common food substances found in everyday foods. They can't metabolise it properly. It makes them toxic. But they crave it like crazy. I believe Salicylate intolerance is part of why I'm an addict. It predisposed me to being one, then it primed me in becoming a worse and worse addict and by the time I understood, addiction was all I'd ever known. But addiction is an interesting beast. If you cut off one supply it just finds another. It's a glutton. It seeks the extremes, then it seeks comfort from the extremes just as addictively until the next round. So addiction to sugar followed, and addiction to cow's milk products and gluten which I also couldn't metabolise properly... anything that gave me an extreme. And I became addicted to emotional thrills, to danger and fear and rage and physical and sensory extremes, then equally addicted to self comforting and self hypnosis behaviours. Experiences are, after all, the product of chemical patterns in the brain and the addict learns by nature, and craves, how to manifest those experiences again and again and again, ad nauseum.

Somewhere in there with the food and sensory cravings came the addicts avoidance of anything that, by contrast, was 'crap'. And along came tics and OCD which seemed like addictive states in themselves... do x, y, z or feel like you can't breathe, like you are trapped, like you'll die... so you do it, and you do it, and the momentary relief reinforces the process till the addiction runs your life.

But how many alcoholics admit, face up to, and focus day to day for years on end to limit or manage their addiction successfully.

Fact is, not most, only some. And how many families of alcoholics, of addicts in general, become enmeshed in the person's addictions in ways that, try as they might, perpetuate them? Who has the bravery to dare anything else?

And if we have an addictive state and our addictions involve repetitive patterns, emotional extremes, indulging in manifesting or escalating our phobias, rage, mania or even depression, through insisting on the behavioural patterns that give us our fix, how many of us can put our hand up and admit, face up to, focus day to day for years on end to limit or manage such addictions successfully. And if we do, are we 'traitors' to our own 'true nature'?

And if we do, are we then pawns of the non-autistic world? Have we done this because we were programmed, abused, abandoned, rejected, discriminated against, mocked or thrown head first into the deep end till we had no other choice? And what if regardless of the extremity of circumstances that got us to the point we knew we could limit or manage our addictive states, we then had a choice, to return to those states, would we all do so? And if we did would we be so much more 'found', 'home'?

The alcoholic is totally at home with the bottle. My tics would welcome me with open arms if I quit my medication and gave in to every impulse they jabbed me with. My mood disorder would take me on the rollercoaster in a blink if I quit the multitude of strategies I use to manage it. My anxiety disorder would happily and so naturally reclaim my life and ability to easily act upon volition, to get that coat, to put on those shoes, to pee when I wanted. My sensory extremes would be as heaven and hell as ever if I resumed the lifestyle and behaviours that allowed them to run my life. And somewhere in there my information processing would carry all that burden. But, what the hell, I'd be 'home' wouldn't I? Back to my roots? And there is not a week where some whisper within calls me to that place, even after all these years and all these steps where I dare not look back too long because that whisper is seductive. And yes, I do need the environment to adapt a bit to my needs, but never, never to cushion my own laziness in managing my own addictions. I don't feel they owe me. Nobody ever taught me how to have that attitude. Perhaps if I'd had a taste I'd have become addicted to that too.

And in the meantime I stay busy, as speaks my art, my music, my writing, my evolving garden... I stay physically doing for then I am seizing life and as long as I don't stop too long it will never become too hard to dare start. Am I still 'Autistic'? Who cares? I'm Donna. That's who I am. Everything else is negotiable. Sure, I'm still 'autistic' for what it matters but I am comfortably less so. I process information like an Autie. Today I burned a big ring into our worktop cooking popcorn and badly burned my finger. This is my normality. But I felt blessed, blessed that I could even get the sequence roughly in order that whether the bench was burned or my finger blistered I got to eat the popcorn which I'd made. If tackling the addict gives me such victories, then victory tastes... well... like popcorn.

The addict who lives to limit and manage their addictive states is never over addiction. They live ever vigilant, in remission.