Diving For Pearls

Discovering Autistic Depth in a Horizontal World (Part One of Two)

I recently watched a very moving South Korean epic drama, which begins with a young woman diving for abalone. In the era in which the film is set, this was dangerous work, mostly undertaken by women on the island of Jeju. They were often the main breadwinners. Occasionally they would be lucky enough to find a pearl.

The Haenyeo — or sea women — have been diving since the 18th century and although numbers are now considerably less, some still dive today. Their skill lies in being able to hold their breath for minutes at a time, enabling them to descend to great depths, working in cold water under pressure. This could place great stress on their lungs, and sometimes resulted in work-related deaths. It is hardly a romantic image, but one of depth, discipline and risk.

This felt like an analogy for the autistic mind.

I came of age in a culture that equated worth with productivity.

I was among the first wave of girls told we could have careers — meaningful ones. Freedom was offered, but still ran on patriarchal metrics.

Growing up, my way of surviving in the world was to perform, which meant earning my right to exist. That was how I survived as an autistic girl; it was the subtle, underlying driving force that kept me safe.

Being a career woman only added to the performative burden.

Keep performing and you will matter. Stop performing and you will become irrelevant.

From my early twenties I was regularly rattling my cage — I had a strong sense that my life was lacking depth. I had the trappings of a successful career, but I had attained this at the cost of pushing and dissociation. It felt a hollow victory.

Something inside me was searching for meaning, although I didn’t yet know what that looked like. I just knew I was unhappy.

I began this search in earnest, exploring suggestions of alien life (I made a TV documentary about it), reading books about radical new age philosophies, and also by spiritual teachers — some more qualified than others.

Disillusioned with merely skimming the surface of life, I was looking for abalone under the sea. After exploring new age philosophies, I dove for Eastern spiritual traditions to pick up sources of meaning.

In Tavira, Portugal in the mid Nineties, I undertook a ten day silent retreat — a full immersion into my own body and mind that elicited something important and would shape the next few decades of my life.

I discovered some fascinating things. Through ten hours a day of intensive sitting, I experienced extreme restlessness and discomfort, inner mental anguish, and a gruelling practice of sitting and observing the breath for the first three days, followed by a further week of observing body parts — both their exteriority and interiority.

This kind of meditation is often called insight meditation, or Vipassana, and this retreat was particular to the Burmese Buddhist tradition of practise that is both hardcore (perhaps not for some, but certainly for me) and potentially liberating. Sitting and observing my body at depth led me to a profound understanding of its workings, not in the logical sense, but in the felt sense.

I became acutely aware of its more subtle and not so subtle sensations — tingling, pulsing, numbness, pressure, discomfort, pain — and how the mind resisted, squirmed, softened and sometimes settled, with the changing sensations.

This was depth embodied. This was empirical research at the convergence of my own body-mind’s utter impermanence and refusal to coalesce. I was beginning to get an experiential understanding of a self beyond identity. A shifting, changing experience that marked a turning point, as I acknowledged I was not who I thought I was. Not at all.

Now I was beginning to understand what it was I was diving for.

It was only through this descent that I began to spy the sea bed.

When I arose from the final sitting— managing to string a few sentences together over lunch with fellow retreatants, and bidding my farewells — something had irrevocably changed.

I was almost gliding through the streets of Tavira towards the train station. I felt lighter. Less dense. More aligned. I knew myself to be impermanent; not just intellectually, but from the depths of my lived experience. All those hours of submersion in the field of sensation had created an inner culture from which I could grow. Not horizontally in terms of knowledge, accumulation and outer success, but internally in terms of plumbing the depths of my own being to reveal its insubstantiality - its ultimate reality.

My body, its sensations, my sensory experiences and my mental processes are all fleeting. They are not even momentary — because a moment suggests something tangible.

That was the insight.

That was the beginning of a pearl forming.

What I could not know then was the cost to my health of deep diving, but still having to maintain life on the surface — without knowing I was neurodivergent.