In the lower grades as long as I was able to do well on tests my grades stayed up. That made sense to me. I took the test, passed (usually with 100 percent) so I knew the work and should get an A right?
In the seventh grade I wound up in the principal’s office often (are you noticing a pattern here?). This time it was because I was being accused of cheating on my math tests. I didn’t like being accused of cheating, or lying—ever. Giving me “F’s” on tests I had done well on was an injustice I was unable to bear.
My mother often had to come up to school because of my “cheating,” and the yelling, screaming, and crying that followed. My behavior was “uncalled for and inappropriate” is what they said.
“Do you want her to take the test again?” my mother asked. That made me even angrier, why should I have to do the work twice just because they refused to believe that I knew how to do the work.
“Yes, but she must show all her work.”
I never understood why the math teacher did problems the way he did. Why did he have to go through all those meaningless complicated steps just to get the answer, when he could have just asked me? I knew the answer, but I never knew how I’d come up with it. In fact, if I was made to “show my work,” or forced to do the math problem in the way they taught it, I could not do it. I arrived at the incorrect answer every time.
Apparently being smarter than the teacher and getting the answers my own way was unacceptable. I failed Math class for the first time in my life. This taught me two things: being smart didn’t matter, and grades mattered even less because they did not reflect what you knew or what you did not. They only reflected your ability to follow other people’s ways of doing things, even if those ways make no sense. That is something I have never been able to do.
My greatest asset was my inability to fit in, my inability to conform, and my stubborn immobility. The inflexibility to change my mind once made up, immune to persuasion has made me strange—odd—different. This is one difference that I would never change; my immunity to peer pressure.
Peer pressure is another concept that I never could grasp. Doing things you knew were wrong just to fit in, or things you didn’t want to do in order to what? Keep your friends? Look good?
The one thing no one could ever say about me, is that my friends made me do it. I never followed the crowd; I couldn’t. I led, they followed, or I went alone.
No one was able to convince me do something I did not want to do; it simply was not possible. Once I decided, that decision was final, and forever. Everything was black and white, right or wrong, good or bad—no middle ground. If I’d judged something wrong; it was wrong, and nothing, no situation, no justification could make something wrong—right.
The key here though is when I judged something. My morality or idea of such was not swayed by other people, but also was not always in line with their idea of acceptable.
“There is only one sin. and that is theft… when you tell a lie, you steal someone’s right to the truth.” ― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner
Something as seemingly simple as social niceties to me was unacceptable behavior. Lying just to make someone feel good was not acceptable to me; in fact, I didn’t even understand the concept. Why would someone do that? If I ask you a question, it is because I am truly expecting you to answer me—honestly.
It didn’t take very long for my friends to figure out that if they really wanted to know how they looked in a certain pair of pants to ask me. But if they wanted to feel good about themselves, or to hear that their hair looked fine when it was really sticking up in the air and looked like a little surfer man should have been riding the waves, then, I was not the one to ask.
I didn’t receive the manual. You know, the manual where these social rules were written—but it appeared that everyone else around me had. I often argued the reasoning for such stupidity. Why are you asking me a question that you don’t really want the answer to? If you don’t want an honest answer, then don’t ask!
I would rather you tell me that I looked awful before I walked out of the house, than to lie to me. If I looked terrible I could possibly do something about it (if I cared at the moment that is), but if you lie then you take the opportunity to make things better from me. I simply could not understand the necessity of a little white lie. Lying was not something that ever came naturally.
Chapter Ten
Immune to Peer Pressure; Learning to Socialize
Immunity to peer pressure does not mean unimpressionable. How do children learn to socialize? How do they adapt to the changing dynamics of their social life as they grow older?
My friends could not change my mind once it was made up, but what made up my mind? I was impressed upon by books, television shows, family, and friends much like everyone else with one important difference—I never felt any pressure to fit in. The things that I decided to do needed to be my decision, and mine alone. I was never going to do something simply because you wanted me to.
“She has a mind of her own.” ~Grandma
I suppose my grandmother was correct, but my mind was not always brilliant. It often had some real hair-brained ideas. Like the time Vanessa, my friend and partner in mischief, and I decided that it was ridiculous to have to reapply lipstick every day. We reasoned that since nail polish didn’t wipe off of our nails, it shouldn’t wipe off of our lips—right? If we polished our lips with pearly pink nail polish they would match our nails.
Before going to sleep that night we polished our nails, and yes—our lips. Do you know what happens when nail polish dries on your lips when you are sleeping? You wake up with dry, cracked, bleeding lips. They were far from the pretty pearly pink that we had envisioned.
To make matters worse the only way to remove the polish would have been to pick it off, piece by painful piece along with the skin on our lips. Unless—we used nail polish remover! That for sure would take it all off. It was not a good morning.
Although our lip painting fiasco was painful, for the most part it was harmless. Some other ideas we had, not so much.
My father often sent me around the corner to buy beer and cigarettes. It never occurred to me that children were not supposed to be allowed to purchase these items since this was always how it had been.
One day Vanessa and I decided we were going to hang-out and drink some beer together. We knew that we could purchase the beer and no one would ask if it was for my father or for us.
“How much do you think we should get?” she asked.
“A six-pack each?” I said. That was what our fathers always drank, a six pack in front of the television. But we were not going to drink in front of the television; we were going to drink a few blocks over in an alleyway that ran behind a row of houses on 61st Street.
We walked the four blocks from the store toting our six packs inside brown paper bags. When we arrived at the alleyway, we walked down the sloping drive and sat on the curb in front of a row of garages. It was already getting dark, and it was chilly.
We talked and laughed chugging down our cans of beer, which we both agreed tasted disgusting. The taste, however, faded the more cans we drank until we didn’t notice the nasty taste at all. We laughed, fell over, and giggled some more.
“What are you kids doing back there?” a voice shouted from a nearby window.
“We better get out of here,” Vanessa said, “Run!”
We ran up the sloped drive leaving a mess of beer cans, and crumpled bags of chips behind. We ran at least another block before stopping to laugh. We laughed so hard it became difficult to not pee our pants. We needed to get back to the house to use the bathroom, and quick.
The two of us walked up 20th Avenue back toward my house. The thought never occurred to me that we could be in trouble, or that we shouldn’t have been drinking beer. I spent my entire life emulating and adopting different personas to see which fit into different social situations. Hanging out with friends and drinking beer seemed a good “fit”.
The tw
o of us stumbled to 64th Street laughing before Vanessa was sick. We almost made it; we were only a block from my house. We had drunk those beers down so quickly that we had no idea what was coming; no idea that alcohol takes about 30 minutes to work its way through your system. I suppose that 30 minutes had passed.
Vanessa borrowed her Aunt’s sweater before leaving her house earlier that day. When I say borrowed, I mean she borrowed it out of her closet without asking her first. Our heads were spinning so we sat down on a small brick wall outside a storefront. Vanessa wound up with her head in the bushes as more beer expelled itself from her stomach.
Laughter had turned to crying. “Kim’s sweater!” Vanessa said with tears rolling down her face. “She’s going to kill me.”
“We need to get back home, and then we’ll wash it,” I said.
“No, she’ll know I borrowed it. She’ll kill me. I have to get rid of it. Let’s throw it away.”
The night had turned cold but with a six-pack of beer in each of us we didn’t feel the cold. In fact we didn’t feel much of anything. When Vanessa borrowed the sweater that morning, she had no way of knowing it would wind up in the 20th Avenue sewer covered with beer induced vomit by the end of the night.
Yes—that was what we were worried about. Not being in trouble for drinking beer, that was normal, but ruining a perfectly good sweater. Instead of washing it, our idea was to get rid of it by throwing it in the sewer. Can you see we were not thinking too clearly?
I had to run up the block to get my mother. I never worried about her being mad, in fact, that thought never crossed my mind. Why would she be mad at me for drinking beer? They drank beer every day; it wasn’t illegal. I guess the fact that I was not yet thirteen years old never factored itself into my legal vs. illegal equation. I considered the small detail of alcohol being legal without applying it properly to the whole picture of under-age drinking.
Vanessa was too sick for me to help her back to my house alone; at least my vomit waited until I was back at home.
I would like to report that it was the first and last time I deemed drinking with friends socially acceptable behavior, but that would be a lie. Maybe it was a lack of consequences that instilled the idea that alcohol was a good social tool to use. Maybe it was something that I was so familiar with because of my home life that it provided a comfort of sorts. That coupled with the numbing effect it had on my senses made it the tool of choice for many years to come. Instead of being in constant sensory overload, alcohol offered an interesting quiet, a dulling of my super-senses.
My junior high school/middle school years rushed by in a blur. I made many new friends, and we developed a tight knit group. But there were groups even within our group. Many things were changing, and probably too quickly for my brain to really keep up.
The unfortunate death of my best friend Vanessa’s father changed everything. She changed, and more than I realized at the time, more than I was probably able to understand. Her beautiful carefree and often a little crazy spirit turned cold and angry. She wasn’t the same person; she was distant. I rarely saw her smile.
As a child I was sad for her, but I don’t think I really understood. I couldn’t help; I didn’t know how to. Sad, grieving, people made me uncomfortable because I never knew what to do. I never had the right thing to say—is there even a right thing to say?
I had no experience, no script to draw from, and so I too, was lost.
Even today, looking back I feel sad for my friend, but I am sure that I do not “feel” this the way other people do. Not the way people think I should, and it is a source of deep internal guilt. How can I feel so disconnected, so clinical, so matter-of-fact about such events? What kind of person is like that? I must be awful.
I still carry this guilt even though I know the truth of it; the truth about autism and empathy. Autistic people do empathize in the strictest definition of the word. “The intellectual identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another.” I think the problem is that during our youth we have less intellect and experiences to draw from, and may appear more aloof and uncaring. That is not at all the case. We care; we feel; we hurt; but sometimes we cannot show it no matter how much we want to.
I think this may have been what happened to me back then. My heart hurts even now penning these words, thinking back to my friend, and realizing that I was probably very little comfort when she needed me most. It makes tears flood my eyes because I wish I could go back and find a way out of myself to let her know how much I truly cared about her, what she was feeling, and what she was going through.
I know that there was nothing different I was capable of at the time; I do. All I was able to do was withdraw, to pull a little further away, and spiral into the madness my own life had become.
I succumbed to that internal guilt; to that inner voice who told me that I was a terrible, uncaring, human being. Autism literature says that we lack empathy, but with more life experiences to draw from I wholly disagree.
Empathy is about identifying with other people; seeing yourself in their reflections. That is something that as a younger person I could not do. I did not see my reflection anywhere. There was no one else in my world that was like me. Only as an adult, after diagnosis, did I finally begin to see my reflection.
For the first time in my life I found others who looked like me. I had something contextually sound to relate to, which makes all the difference.
Empathy for autistics is about relations. The person, situation, and/or feelings, must in some way be related to us or our experiences. We must consciously direct our intellect to sift through our experiences so that we may understand what another is going through. It is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to relate to something or someone who is wholly disconnected from ourselves. Even when there is a connection, our responses may not be what is considered “normal” by others, but make sense to us.
Despite a need for a situation to relate to myself, I stand firm on the issue of empathy. I do not lack empathy; I crave it. I search it out, I look for it, and I track down books, pictures, paintings, hungrily looking, searching, needing to find a glimpse, a reflection of me.
This search is not a new occurrence; it is a search I began long ago.
Middle school and the beginning of my high school years were a glorious time of carefree oblivion. I was unenlightened, and off kilter, but assumed it was not me who was “off” but the world around me. I had been searching for something; something I could never place my finger upon. Even when I was unaware of my search, it did not go unnoticed by my friends.
They didn’t understand me, or what I was looking for. The fact is, neither did I; I barely knew I was searching at all. The truth of it is, I was, I was searching for me.
Recently an old friend of mine stumbled upon my Asperger’s Syndrome and writing blog. She made this comment, “You seem to have found that thing you were always searching for and could never grasp…” Doesn’t everyone search in this manner? I’d never considered that others would not think, experience, and see life as I did. They confounded me with their thoughts and actions.
I had never shared my diagnosis with my friend, or with anyone for that matter. My own siblings had not been privy to what I had discovered about myself—to my diagnosis. I’m not hiding it, I just don’t share; it doesn’t come naturally.
My journey has always been a solo one, with little need to include others. The truth is it is also a journey with little thought of including others.
On the outside this looks like I am running around haphazardly jumping into situations without thinking, but that’s not true. I think about situations probably more than I ought to, weigh choices, endlessly analyzing possible outcomes. The fact that I don’t share my thoughts, ideas, or interests with others does not mean that I do not have them.
I have often been insulted by such accusations as, “you don’t think before you do something,” or “you should have talked to us
about it.” Why? I truly could not fathom why I would share my thoughts, or discuss my actions prior to executing them. To my mind this makes absolutely no sense. I have thought something through, come to a decision, and acted upon my decision. Isn’t this the way everyone functions? Shouldn’t it be?
My failure to share may have been an integral part of my immunity to peer pressure. I never asked for anyone else’s input, nor did I want it most of the time. I worked out what to do on my own, without the need for others to validate my reasoning. To me, this is normal. Finding out what a group thinks before I make a decision, is not me thinking for myself.
In order to stand behind a decision I make, I must make it myself and have the confidence in that decision to act. This confidence is what defined my adolescence—my need for no one, my ability to think for myself.
Chapter Eleven
The High School Hopping Aspie
“If you liked being a teenager, there’s something really wrong with you.” ~ Stephen King
Maybe Stephen King is right! I can admit that the high school years were an absolutely insane time. But as crazy as it was, I have some of my fondest memories in this period of my life like getting up every day, doing my hair, getting dressed, waiting for my friends to show up at my house in the morning to walk to the candy store.
I spent my first semester of high school at Franklyn Delano Roosevelt High School in Brooklyn—also known FDR. The first semester was filled with ideas, homework, hopes, and dreams that quickly were pushed aside. During freshman semester one, I joined the student government, tried out for a play, the drama club, and twirling team—none of which captured my interest enough to last more than a couple of weeks.
It didn’t take long to figure out that things were changing. I felt like an earthling walking in the midst of a sea of Martians. Today, I feel like I am from another planet, but back then I assumed that I was the normal one, and those people around me must have been from somewhere else. Their ideas, emotions and actions, were completely foreign. I could never figure out what made people act the way they do, and others could not figure out what made me act the way I did.
Twirling Naked in the Streets and No One Noticed; Growing Up With Undiagnosed Autism Page 7
