Something is Wrong With Me

When you are autistic, you spend all of your formative years with a deep sense of “something is wrong with me.” Something is wrong with me because I don’t parse things the way that other people do. I don’t understand the facial expressions and body language. I don’t intuitively guess social cues. I don’t mind-read because I’m not enough like other people that I can guess at their intentions. I spent a lot of time even as a child trying to understand other humans so I could at least understand their behavior or hints after the fact, when I spent hours going over and over social interactions trying to reinterpret them since at the time, all I could manage was to smile and nod or laugh if other people were laughing—even at myself. I felt like something was wrong with me when I liked things that no one else liked, old books or old films, the wrong kinds of clothes or the wrong hairstyles. Something was wrong with me when I had sensory issues and couldn’t stand to have lotion on my skin or hated the texture of certain foods or couldn’t stand flavors (banana laffy taffy anyone) that other people liked and thought were normal. When I couldn’t stand how loud music was when other people played it, or got overwhelmed by music and couldn’t think about anything else but the music, other kids and even adults or teachers weren’t shy about telling me directly that *I* was the one who was going to have to change because the world wasn’t going to stop throwing sensory information at me in a way that I didn’t know how to handle. Bullying, too, was something that I was expected to learn to endure without crying or reacting because it was only natural that people would target me for bullying behavior because THERE WAS SOMETHING WRONG WITH ME.

By the time I was teen, I had deeply internalized that there was something deeply wrong with me and that everyone else expected me to simply be different in order to survive. So I hid myself. I focused on wearing very specific kinds of clothing that other teens were wearing that seemed to make them popular. I didn’t hope that me wearing the popular clothes (in junior high, it was Levi’s 501’s and polo shirts) would make me popular, only that it would make me invisible. That was the height of what someone who believed something was wrong with them could hope for. To not stand out. I can’t tell you how much effort I put into being invisible and how long that lasted. A friend pointed out to be when I was in my 40s that she admired what she thought of as my “classic style.” She noticed that I didn’t buy clothes that were trendy, only clothes that you could keep wearing for decades because they never went out of style. That wasn’t at all what I was going for. I only wanted clothing that wasn’t awful to wear and that aided me in my goal of invisibility, the most conservative possible styles in the most conservative colors, usually black or white, or possibly a dark green. For most of my life, I thought those were my favorite colors. They weren’t. They were just the colors that saved me from being targeted by people who noticed which person stood out the most in a group. I did not want that. I didn’t want people to see on immediate contact that there was something wrong with me.

But you know what? There was still something wrong with me, and even in my 30s and 40s I still had the sense that I was hiding. I would carefully craft one version of my life for one group of people (writers) and another version of my life for another group of people (church people). Then I had to remember which bits and pieces each group knew and not mix them up because I was TOO MUCH. That was what was wrong with me. I had too many intense interests that were unusual. Normal people don’t write novels for a national publishing market in a variety of genres AND also do Ironman triathlons at a level that makes them competitive at every race AND also do yarn work with knitting and crocheting AND also have a PhD in Germanic Languages and Literatures from Princeton University at age 24 who graduated from college at age 19, only two years after high school. Normal people are smaller and quieter. Or that’s what I thought. I wasn’t normal, so I had to work really hard to avoid the scrutiny that I hated. I watched to see if it was my turn to talk and then timed myself to make sure that I wasn’t taking up more than my percentage if you divided it up evenly by all the participants. Yes, I literally did this. With a watch. And still, I had the sense that I wasn’t doing it well enough to avoid for every long the “autidar” that neurotypical people seem to have. They could tell that I wasn’t doing “it” right, whatever “it” is—I still don’t know. I did the eye contact thing, but then it was TOO MUCH eye contact. How am I supposed to know? Tell me the rules and I will follow them.

But neurotypical people will tell me that’s ridiculous. No one has a list of rules for social interaction. You just have to have empathy. I was accused so many times of not having empathy, even though that wasn’t what was wrong with me at all. I just don’t display empathy in the right ways, using the right scripts, or with the right facia expression for neurotypical people to believe that I have empathy. They think I’m faking it. And to some degree, I guess I am? I’m trying not to fake it, but then I’m still doing something wrong because acting the way that I would do without following someone else’s script would lead to VERY BAD CONSEQUENCES for me. So when I let go of my masking rules, I’m told that I’m not trying hard enough and when I feel the pressure of trying, I get told I’m trying too hard, and when I just opt out of social situations entirely, I’m a loner and need to practice my social skills more. No matter what I do, I’m doing it wrong. And no matter how many rules I make, I didn’t get this one little wrinkle or didn’t understand why this is obviously an exception to the rule. It’s exhausting and I am just tired of being always wrong no matter how much my true self I am. Unmasking is not something that I really trust the world to allow me to do. And unless that’s possible with people who are safe, I hate myself. Because the world hates me. Why wouldn’t I hate myself when I’m told at all times that whatever I do isn’t enough and is also too much?