I love The Clash. I’ve always loved The Clash. I was so young when I started listening to them that I don’t actually remember the first time I heard them. They formed the year before I was born and because they were always just there I never thought of them as a band that started. They were a sound that existed outside of time for me. I never wondered when they began because in my world they never began — they just were. Sometimes that’s what it looks like to love something so completely that it stops having a history and just becomes part of yours…

If you put The Clash on right now one of two things would happen. If you were in the room with me I would go very still. My brain would be laser-focused, scream-singing every word internally so loud that I genuinely cannot hear what you’re saying to me. Sorry. I’m busy. You might catch me swaying. Maybe some dorky shoulder dancing. But the real concert is inside and you are not invited. If I was alone I would grab the nearest vaguely microphone-shaped object in my home, jump up on the sectional, and lose my entire mind. Come on and let me know. Should I cool it or should I blow…

I cannot name a single member of The Clash. I could not name an album if my life depended on it. I could not tell you what year they formed or how many of them there were. If a man at a bar said “oh you like The Clash? Name three of their albums” I would have failed. And for most of my life I genuinely believed that meant I didn’t get to say I loved them.

Sometime in the last fifteen years I was telling someone about my deep and abiding love for the band Big Audio Dynamite II. How I listened to the CD so many times on repeat that if it had been a tape it surely would have snapped. How their sound lived in my bones. I have this very specific memory of walking from the ag center at my school all the way across campus to theater class in the cafeteria. Headphones on. The Globe blasting. A sneeze and a “bless you” and then come on and dim the lights, it’s party time, and I am gone. I am inside that song for the entire walk and the school does not exist and neither do I. Just the music and whatever it was doing to me that I still can’t explain.

And then I said the dumbest most amazing thing in the world.

“They just have such a Clash feel.”

“Um, Cami…”

Yeah. Yeah.

I didn’t know Mick Jones was in both bands. I didn’t know there was a Big Audio Dynamite before Big Audio Dynamite II. I didn’t even know Mick Jones’ name. I had to look it up just now while writing this. But something knew. Some part of me heard the connection between two things my brain had never bothered to file correctly and it said, out loud, in front of another human being, the truest thing I didn’t know I knew.

This has been the pattern of my entire life.

I spent more than a decade in the WordPress open source community. I knew the org chart and the humans behind it. I could walk into a room of 400 contributors and tell you within fifteen minutes who was struggling, who was about to quit, and who needed to be heard before the whole thing fell apart. I organized flagship events. I held space for people across timezones and continents. But I can’t write code. And being non-technical in an open source tech project meant spending over a decade feeling like a tourist in my own house…

I have more than 250 tarot and oracle decks in my house right now. Not because I’m a collector who keeps things behind glass. Because I’m building something with them. I’m taking orphaned decks — the ones people gave up on, the ones that arrived rubberbanded together in boxes from estate sales and thrift stores and the back corners of eBay — and I’m pulling them apart and putting them back together into something new. Something that holds pieces of dozens of different artists’ visions in a single deck. Something that only exists because all those discarded pieces found their way to my dining room table.

Though to be fair, I do keep a small personal collection and a couple of them live in a glass box. I still hesitate to call myself a tarot person because if you asked me what the Seven of Pentacles means I would have to look it up.

Here’s the thing I’m learning, late, in the middle of my life, in the middle of a medication change, in the middle of a month that the internet has decided belongs to people like me…

My brain does not store love as facts. It stores love as sensation. As rhythm. As the feeling of a thing moving through me before my conscious mind has any idea what to call it. I’ve spent a lifetime apologizing for this. Believing that if I couldn’t name it I didn’t really know it. Believing that the man at the bar was the authority on what I was allowed to love…

I am autistic. I have ADHD. My memory is swiss cheese and my pattern recognition is supernatural and those two things have been at war inside me for as long as I’ve been alive. I can feel the connection between The Clash and Big Audio Dynamite II in my actual skeleton but I couldn’t tell you who played on either album. I can read a room full of strangers with terrifying accuracy but I can’t remember what I had for lunch. I can build an original tarot spread that makes people cry and I will still look up the card meanings before I talk about them.

None of it was ever measuring what I know. It was measuring a kind of knowing my brain doesn’t do. And I spent decades believing that meant I didn’t really know anything at all.

April is Autism Acceptance Month. So I’m working on it.

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Things I learned while writing this post because I looked them up hoping no one would feel compelled to mansplain them to me in the comments:

The Clash formed in London in 1976. I knew that part. Well, the London part. And the “before I was born” part. Mick Jones was their lead guitarist and co-lead vocalist. He was fired from the band in 1983. In 1984 he formed Big Audio Dynamite with filmmaker Don Letts and a bunch of other people whose names I just read and have already forgotten. They made several albums. In 1990, Jones started over with an entirely new lineup and called it Big Audio Dynamite II. That’s the one I wore thin.