Pretending to be Normal

by Liane Holliday Willey

  My friendship with Craig was perfect for me, it worked. I am good with friendships that allow me the freedom to assert my differences. I am comfortable and content with a few friends who know me well and understand my nuances. But I rarely remember a time, best friends in the background or not, when I did not prefer to be alone. Unlike most people I knew, I did not grow up feeling the need to make deep and strong connections with others. I do not think I ever consciously sought a friend or disregarded a friend. I was nice to people I knew and friendly to people I only passed in the halls. I was particularly good at fast bits of witty conversation, the kind of quick retorts that sounded more like a monologue I had snared from drama class, than a two-way conversation.

  Overall, I think I would say I was rather perfunctory about my relationships with peers. In reality, they were not too awfully important to me. Not that I did not like the people in my group, I did. It was just that I would not have been terribly upset if I had been all alone and without a group to identify with. My own conversations and thoughts were always my best friends. I was happy spending time with only me, happy to talk to myself and happy to entertain myself. I think the only reason I ever invited a friend to come spend time with me was because my parents suggested it and because I knew it was something friends were supposed to do. I knew how to follow the rules of the teenage jungle, exactly like I knew how to follow the rules of baseball.

  I was very conscious of the rules my friends set for themselves and the group, particularly as they applied to behaviors and other social skills. As if I had a Rolodex in my mind, I would categorize the actions of people, noting their differences and subtleties with a mix of abstract appreciation and real curiosity about why they acted as they did. I became very aware of the smallest and most subtle aspects of my peers’ movements. I took note of how they threw their long hair over their shoulders, or tucked their bangs behind their ears or how they turned the whole presentation into an art show with braids and bows and curls. I mentally recorded the way they used their eyes, how they would open them wide when they spoke loud and animated, or how they would cast them downwards if they spoke quietly or slowly. I was captivated with the way their hands moved when they spoke, how they would bend them into shapes that looked like little buildings or twirl them about as if the hands were the message. I watched people like a scientist watches an experiment. Never did I feel like I was looking in a mirror. Always did I feel I was here and they were there.

  Just as I took good notes on how people acted, so too did I make mental notes of how they dressed. Fashion trends have always diverted me, though I have never been able to understand them as entities deserving of a life filled with purpose. I was able to tell that my peers took their clothing choices seriously because everyone copycatted everyone else’s style. I knew I was supposed to follow the rules set by fashion but try I as may, I broke them all the time. I still fought with textures and colors and patterns, like I did when I was a child and I simply could not bring myself to wear certain clothing no matter how many rules I knew I was breaking. Tight jeans that fell to the hip, shirts that were the color of clay, coarse wool jackets that wore the back of my neck raw… they were not for me. I settled for coloring a smidgen outside the lines, finding a handful of outfits that blended in well enough to avert stares, but not so well that I was miserable in them. And if those almost-trendy clothes of mine were dirty, I would wear whatever I happened to grab from my drawers even if what I had selected did not look well together. Not that I noticed. I designed myself for comfort and convenience, not trends.

  This drove my girlfriends beyond distraction. They were forever advising me to pay more attention to my appearance. They would take me in the bathroom and give me hints on how to wear make-up and how to fix my hair. They would remind me how gross it was for me not to shave my legs or tuck my shirt in or wear the same outfit several times in one week. And they particularly hated my shoes, but not as much as I hated having my feet bound up in the stiff canvas of tennis shoes, or the slippery leather of dress shoes. To beat that feeling, I wore house slippers to school. I thought they were rather interesting little shoes and I saw nothing wrong with them, no matter how loudly my friends protested.

  As long as things followed a set of rules, I could play along. Rules were — and are — great friends of mine. I like rules. They set the record straight and keep it that way. You know where you stand with rules and you know how to act with rules. Trouble is, rules change and if they do not, people break them. I get terribly annoyed when either happens. Certain things in life are givens. «Thank you» is followed by «You are welcome». You hold doors open for other people. The elderly are treated with respect. You do not cut in front of other people, you stay in line and wait your turn. You do not talk loud in libraries. Eye contact is made when you talk to someone. The list goes on, but the intent never changes: rules are maps that lead us to know how to behave and what to expect. When they are broken, the whole world turns upside down.

  If all teenage rules had been open and shut cases grounded in right and wrong, I am inclined to believe I might have slipped through my high school years uncharted and unrecognized as someone who saw things so differently. But as I have discovered, most rules fade the moment they inconvenience someone. With broken rules forcing cracks in my boundaries, I was left to develop my own. My rules were different than any I had memorized before. My rules allowed me to set my own trends and my own pace. They also allowed me to showcase some of my less obvious differences.

  As I went through the motions familiar to many teenagers, I came to notice that everyone had some odd little habit they used in times of distress or absentmindedness. I noticed the nail biting, the lip biting, the hair chewing and the tiny muscle twitches. I heard friends humming to themselves, sucking their teeth, and tapping their feet. I knew there were all kinds of rules that people followed in order to calm themselves or occupy their time, but I think my favored habit was unique, at least among my friends. I had a preoccupation with round numbers, even though I hated and was terrible at math. Eventually, I incorporated that fascination into little chains of behaviors I would repeat by the tens. I rode my bike ten miles a day, exactly ten. Not one bit over or one bit under, even if I had to carry my bike up the driveway or ride it in circles in the garage, until I hit the ten mile mark square on my mileage counter. I also exercised around the count of ten. I might have bounced up and down in my pool one in ten groups of ten or I might have completed ten sets of ten movements for ten different calisthenics. I used to spin in a circle on my swing, stopping after I had gone around ten times. I took ten steps to make it up any set of stairs, skipping or repeating stairs, as I needed to so that I would come to the top on the count of ten.

  It would be years before I would come to realize I did, and thought, many, many things that others apparently did not. When I was in high school, I was only beginning to see how peculiar my world was — not wrong or embarrassing or unessential — just peculiar and different. I was okay with that, then. I never minded standing aloof or apart from the crowd. I never felt lonely. My friends never pushed me aside, or forgot me, or kept themselves from me. People went about their business taking most things in stride.

  My teenage memories are stuffed with good times and good people. Even when I start to remember something raw and ugly that might have tried to ravish me then, I am able to toss it off as a bad memory that had little effect on me. The experiences I had in high school prepared me for a bright future, for they gave me strength and insight and confidence to look at myself as an individual and not a parallel image. The only thing my close community of friends and teachers and counselors and mentors did not give me, the only thing they could not give me, was protection from the chill that would nearly undo me when I left them all behind.

  3

  Losing My Way

  If I could, I would ask the world to make me skates

  so that I could find its frozen water and set myself free

  to smil
e, laugh, dance and cheer.

  I’d see. the boundaries that would be in a world frozen in

  its place and they would keep me safe, away from

  where the waters warm, away from the stares,

  the thoughts that melt and the tears.

  I would ask the world to skate with me, looking at the

  gladness I had found, knowing, really knowing,

  there was nothing left to fear.

  I think that then we would all be free to live life as we

  could, with more in common than apart, the fog would lift,

  the confusion would turn and true understanding

  would hold us dear.

  I do not want to write this chapter. It is uncomfortable for me to think back on my late teens and early twenties. Hindsight has taught me a few things about those years but it has not taken away the bad memories or the deep embarrassment.

  The future is often blinding for eighteen-year-olds, blinding with unending brightness and possibility or blinding with a potential to scorch and burn. Which experience is met depends not just on the abilities or potential of the young person but so very much on the support friends, family members, guidance counselors, mentors, employers and continuing education specialists legitimately offer. This is especially true for those with any special need, even those whose needs are often invisible to the unknowing observer. In my case, I seemed destined for a future that was as bright as a star. My academic grades and high IQ scores put me on a college and graduate school course early in my high school years and by most standardized measures, there seemed to be no reason to suspect I could not handle the demands those goals would place on me. By the time I was ready to enter college, I had received an academic scholarship, admittance into every school I applied to and acceptance into every program I wanted to explore. Objectively speaking, there was no reason for anyone to suspect I needed special counseling or special tutoring or mentoring. I did not seem to need anything more than the typical college freshman needed — a stack of textbooks, a rigorous academic schedule and a dorm room to call home.

  Appearances can be deceiving. Somewhere along the line, I became convinced that only large universities were worthwhile. In fact I was so convinced, I gave up the academic scholarship I had been offered by an excellent small private school and enrolled in my state’s major university instead.

  This was my first mistake. The confusing, rambling, crowded and expansive campus assaulted my limited sense of direction, making it extremely difficult for me to find my way — literally and figuratively — around campus. I remember leaving a class totally unable to discern which way I needed to go in order to follow the most direct path to my next class. The crowds of students would fill the doorways and the halls, giving me little time to grab hold of my thoughts so that usually I would just follow the wave of students out of the buildings, as if I knew where I was going.

  Once the crowd thinned, I would try to get my bearings. I would look for big landmarks like statues or unique pieces of architecture and then plot a visual map anchored by those sites. For example, I knew that when I left the building my Shakespeare class was in, I would come to either a fountain, a street or a parking lot. From there, I could stop and decide which direction I needed to go to make it to my speech communications class which was across the street and through the quadrangle. So, if I found I exited the building near the fountain, I would turn right and there would be the street, but if I had exited by the parking lot, I would turn left and then find the street. After that, I knew to follow the sidewalk toward the downtown area until I came to a set of stairs on the left which led me to the backdoor of the building I needed.

  Once inside the buildings, I had a heck of a time finding my way around. Normally I had to rely on trial and error unless the interiors had their own landmarks — art work, display cases, unusual paint scheme — I could use as visual cues. Most of them did not, relying instead on the same plain beige walls dotted here and there by identical looking bulletin boards that did nothing to help me out. I would know enough to understand which floor I needed to be on, but once on that floor, I would have to wander up and down the halls until I found my room by the number etched above the frame of the door. This normally meant that by the time I found my class, I would be at least ten to fifteen minutes late, wet with nervous sweat and anxious from bone to bone. At first I would attend the class even though I was arriving so late. But I soon found it very uncomfortable to walk into a room in the middle of a professor’s lecture. I knew it was rude, I knew the professor thought it was rude and, worst of all, it made me feel hopelessly feeble minded. Sometimes, I would just sit in the hallways outside the class trying to listen in through the closed door. It was not long before I quit going to any class that I could not find within the ten minute period we had between the end of one class and the beginning of another.

  I was aware I should have been attending every minute of my classes and yet, for one reason or another I did not. Though I was not to know it then, it seems obvious to me now that it was my AS behaviors which kept me from simple accomplishments like finding a classroom or sitting through a lecture. I was not simply a young college student interested in going through life at a casual pace without regards to outcomes and consequences. I think the person I used to be was unwittingly caught in a game of cat and mouse with AS. I was the scared mouse and my AS the unpredictable cat that would jump out at me when I least expected it and chase away any rational thought I might have been capable of. Time after time, I acted without giving one thought to the aftermath. I completely quit my biology class at mid-term, without one thought to the low grade I would surely get, the moment my professor set a formaldehyde soaked fetal pig in front me, because I could not tolerate the intensely invasive smell. I only sporadically attended my college algebra class, again without concern for my grade, because the instructor’s voice aggravated me beyond my limits. And I dropped out of one of my favorite dramatic arts classes because the room we met in was dark, musty, windowless and creepy — the kind of room that begs to be filled with old boxes of discards, not young students.

  My perception grew more clouded every day. A fog set and would not lift. Spatial difficulties, sensory dysfunction, poor problem-solving skills, over-reliance on my visual thought patterns — the AS kept finding me — even though I never realized it.

  With my. limited class attendance, my grades quickly plummeted. I knew this could only mean a crash course with disaster but I really did not know how to avoid it. I am not certain if special needs learning centers existed then, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but I do know it never would have occurred to me to visit one anyway. Having never been identified as anything other than gifted, I had nothing to raise my suspicions, nothing to make me think I would benefit from study skills partners, peer mentoring, social skills counseling, or even career planning. I tried instead to manage on my own, even when my troubles continued to mount. The campus and my curricula might have been my most obvious stumbling blocks, but they were not the cause of my worst memories. I think I could have survived as most college students manage to do, if those had been the only kinds of problems I had to contend with. I imagine most students do poorly in at least a few of their courses and I am positive there are many who never quite adjust to living away from home and everything familiar. My real difficulty came when I began to tell myself my differences were not just superficial incidentals, but cracks in my dignity.

  I was aware that college would bring many changes in my life.

  I knew the geographies and academics and amount of responsibilities and kinds of challenges would be different, but I never gave thought to how different the social life would be. I had no way of knowing that AS left me without an intrinsic awareness of what it means to make and keep friends, to fit in and mold, to work cooperatively and effectively with others. Most people who come from supportive families learn to jump from their childhood to their young adulthood as if they are on a trampoline. They h
ave the neurological balance to be buoyant and carefree, so that as they move through their experiences they can bounce here and there, making mistakes along the way with the certain confidence that they will be given an opportunity to land on their trampoline and bounce right back up to begin again. People struggling with Asperger’s often find there is no trampoline to catch them as they fall, no soft and pliable cushion to propel them back to the beginning for a new and improved, better prepared jump. AS makes it difficult to learn from where you have been. It makes it difficult to generalize and problem solve. Without a built-in springboard to catch you as you fall and encourage you to try again, Asperger’s people often find they fall to the hard ground, damaged and broken. I remember too many times during my college years when I did just that.

  I must have thought the people I would meet in college would fall into my life just like those from my hometown did. But what I never included in my grasp for understanding was the fact that my hometown was more than a group of randomly placed people. It was a group of cohesive friends who had learned, over the course of a good many years, to accept one another for all our quirks and idiosyncrasies. I gave no thought to the possibility that I would move to school and end up any differently than I had ever been, a well-received young woman with some strong academic skills and the respect of my peers. I had no way of knowing college students would be so cruel to those who did not fit in the circle of their normal.