A Keen Observer of the Neurotypicals
When I was diagnosed with autism at age 46, in 2017, I remember the diagnostician asking me a lot of questions about my childhood and what she called “bullying.” This was the first time in my life that I considered that what I’d experienced as a child was, in fact, bullying. Until then, I’d though my childhood was fairly typical. I assumed everyone hated recess and tried to avoid it. I assumed that most people had few friends. I assumed that others chose to wear less comfortable clothing to fit in better, and I felt sorry for them. Yes, I did feel sorry for the neurotypicals.
But when I started talking about my childhood to another adult, as an adult and a mother of teens myself, I could see clearly how much I had been bullied. I had had one friend only for most of my growing up years (a friend who now also thinks she is autistic) and I didn’t do social things. I didn’t want to do social things, it’s true. I mostly didn’t even see them as a category of things to be done. I was that blind to social interaction. I focused on pleasing the teachers and following the rules. Both of these tended to make the other kids mad, but as a kid, I really did think that was just because they were jealous I was so good at those things. I had no idea there was anything else going on.
The kids who chased me around at recess—that was just something that happened and I dealt with it. One of the weird protective parts of autism and not seeing social interaction was that I really didn’t spend a lot of time dwelling on how hated I was by most other kids. I didn’t care. I didn’t want or need social acceptance. And so I wasn’t hurt by the bullying. I mean, I was hurt by it because it isolated me more, but I didn’t care very much about that because I couldn’t see what I was missing. It was literally invisible to me. I’m frankly glad that I was so blind to what was going on as a kid. It made it a little easier to be autistic.
In sixth grade, I began to really start paying attention to kids whose lives were not mine. I thought of them as “popular” kids, but they were probably just neurotypical. I noticed that they had friends and that I did not. I tried to become a careful observer of what they did that seemed to have an effect on other kids that made them more protected from bullying than I was. I was completely incapable of seeing many of the things they were doing. I could only see the most obvious, visible, and literal things. But I could see at least those. I could see that wearing a particular brand of jeans (Levi’s 501) seemed to be something that other kids noticed and that gained you “popularity.” The same with Polo shirts. I could see that not raising my hand to answer every question helped. I could see that being quiet in general meant I got noticed less, and that was good for me.
When I finished with my diagnostician, one of the things she said was that I had essentially done ABA therapy on myself. I suspect many, many autistic kids end up doing this. I am not at all sure it is a good thing, but it did keep me alive. It meant that I had time to grow up enough that when I hit high school, I was able to find an entire group of maybe a dozen other smart kids that I was able to mimic normality enough to become friends with. And that was when the bullying almost entirely stopped. I had two really good years in high school because I masked so damned hard. I don’t really regret it, honestly. But I also didn’t keep doing it in college.