Somebody Somewhere (13 page)

I was afraid people would see I wasn't keeping up so I tuned in to key words and tried to find things to comment on. I was the verbal equivalent of a dyslexic person who carries a newspaper but complains that she's misplaced her reading glasses. I had always tried to fit others' expectations but I didn't know why they had them in the first place and it never occurred to me to ask.

I felt damned annoyed at this brainstorming. Without affect it was an interrogation where someone asked you what you thought or felt about what they'd said. Nine times out of ten I had neither felt nor thought anything.

I
arrived at my latest appointment with Dr. Marek. “Am I being unrealistic to think of being a teacher?” I asked. “A bit,” he said.

My life had always been an obstacle course. I recognized most of my obstacles but I lived around them and in spite of them. I never saw them as some unpassable wall. Perhaps that's the sign of an optimist.

If I couldn't hear with meaning, I could always comment on the things around me or create my own topic. If I couldn't make social chitchat, I could always talk shop, flick through books, act busy, and appear super-conscientious. I could focus on picking out key words and play word association games with them in a way that passed for agreement and conversation. If I didn't understand someone's behavior or feelings, I could hide my anxiety at being confused and lost, express nothing, and appear calm and unaffected. If I read a story and had no idea what it was about, I could assume an air of authority and secrecy and meet every question with another question, deflect everything.
If the noise was too loud, too variable, or too high-pitched, I could stuff my ears with cotton wool or earplugs. If the lights were too bright, I could assume the uncomfortable role of an eccentric and put on dark glasses indoors. If people asked me what I wanted, thought, felt, or liked, I could appear generous and reasonable by putting the question back on them. If I was expected to go into an unfamiliar place, I could suddenly remember other things I had to get done, I could need to go to the toilet, get sidetracked, or fail to hear or take personally the invitation. If I was offered a lift, I could say I preferred to walk. If I was offered a present, I could say I didn't like to receive them. There were many things I couldn't combat but I had a bag full of strategies that made me look good trying.

A
woman from the class sat quietly watching me chase an airborne dandelion gone to seed. “Donna, you're different, aren't you?” she asked. “I guess so,” I said. “Just how different are you?” she asked with an air of secrecy, her head cocked to the side. “Put it this way,” I replied, “I'm a culture looking for a place to happen.”

It was the end of a very noisy class. The room had no windows, and the sound bounced off the walls. I had just come from another classroom where I had been tortured by sharp white fluorescent light, which made reflections bounce off everything. It made the room race busily in a constant state of change. Light and shadow dancing on people's faces as they spoke turned the scene into an animated cartoon.

Now, in this noisy classroom, I felt I was standing at the meeting point of several long tunnels. Blah-blah-blah echoed, bouncing noise wall to wall. I looked at the cheerful, placid faces of the others; clearly I was the freak.

I had to go to the toilet. I couldn't stand it here any longer. My stress level was so high I was like a cat about to spring. The lecturer who regularly took the class in this room was a jolly smiling bouncy
woman with a very high-pitched voice, just the kind of voice that sent me through the roof and set my nerves on edge.

We were reaching the end of the first term and the lecturer announced the school placements for the first teaching round, where we'd actually teach children. Anita was standing next to me at the lecturer's desk. “You two have placements at the same school,” she informed us.

Suddenly something flew around my shoulder and sat there, like some fast-moving cat. Glad to find she would be with someone familiar, Anita had flung a “friendly” arm around me. I grabbed the thing from my shoulder like unwelcome slime and threw it down. Anita's arm returned like a boomerang come home. I sprang back and glared at Anita, solemnly regaining my composure. Like a spitting cat I announced, “I'm not a touchy-feely person.” Anita stood there dumbstruck.

My lack of social skills had its consequences.

Anita and Jan, another classmate, began to talk to me less and less. I was seated between them. When everyone in the class was asked to form a pair with the person next to them, Jan turned to Anita, who was sitting on the other side of me. “Come on,” she said to Anita, “we're a pair.” I sat there in the middle like the Invisible Man as the rest of the class formed pairs. As in primary school and high school, I was left to become the dregs…one of the leftovers with social leprosy left for the teacher to pair off.

“We're off to the cafe,” announced someone in a drifting cloud of people. “Yes,” I replied and waited to be invited. They didn't ask if I was coming. Why were they doing this? Why were they telling me they were going but not inviting me? Were they showing off how they were all friends going off together? Was I supposed to assume I was meant to come along?

The Diploma of Education course was not an easy one to hide in. I was afraid people would see I was on my own all the time. During breaks I walked continuously or hung about behind the closed doors
of the stairwell. If I heard someone coming I'd start walking again, looking like I was going somewhere. I didn't want anyone to know I was alone. Mostly I didn't want to know I was alone.

May 1991

Theo Marek,

…Why don't I know to follow groups outside of class? I noticed that we all got along and at first I went off to lunch with groups from my class who made me feel included. Then they seemed to drift off without me.

In theory I know people often say things that are meant to subtly invite me to come along but people I know outside of the university know they have to make this very overt for me or I just take it as part of the conversation.

I realize there are times I don't want to go off with groups from my class but I think part of this attitude is fear. Another part is defensiveness because I don't understand the cues and get left out, so I say I don't want to be with them. They do like me and when they see me outside (when I happen to drift past people in my class) they call me over. I understand that and then I join them but I am finding myself increasingly left out and I am sure they think this is my choice (which is only half-true). This makes it even harder for me.

I am sure this is why I needed the characters before. They were so over the top that people were always entertained and often
followed
me (even if there was very little me in the me they followed). This hurts my feelings a lot because now I'm being me and I don't get as clear cues from people as when they were surprised and captivated before. This is better now for the quality of the friendships but my ability to get the cues is poor. How can I work on this except by telling them?—which I don't want. I want to be equal.

Once I sit with them, sometimes I can talk well but because I don't follow their topics I either am quiet or I direct people's cues to talk (nicely, but I know this is not what others do, and still I can't work out what they
do
do. They have no system—unlike in class).

I guess that is language, but socially I have a lot of problems with
this when it is not coming from me. Can you help me with this because I am slowly accepting that I
want
to make
real
friendships and it hurts that I can't get past step one?

That's it,

      Donna.

In the math class, it wasn't hard to realize my math level was pretty basic.

The lecturer was discussing whole numbers, integers, prime numbers, divisibility, and a whole lot of other blah-blah-blah as he drew numbers on the board. He wrote the figure twelve. “Who can tell me what that is?” he asked. People had already noticed I had trouble keeping up in this class and I was proud when I felt sure I had the answer to something.

My mouth was in gear before my hand even went up. I called out the answer. “It's a twelve.” The class roared with laughter. Carol would have laughed and pretended it was deliberate comedy. I felt myself sink into my chair and shrink a few inches. I wasn't stupid. By the time he got around to asking the question, I had lost the context I needed to answer it.

I stood looking over the shoulder of someone constructing something out of a long cardboard roll. “See these rings around here,” he said, referring to the rings encircling the cardboard cylinder. “You can tell how old this is by the number of rings around it.” It seemed logical. Cardboard came from trees and you could tell the age of a tree from the number of rings running through the trunk. There were four rings around the cardboard tube. It was four years old.

Five minutes later my mind was still mulling it over. Something didn't quite fit. Then it all sunk in. “You bastard,” I said to the guy who had told me. “I was only joking,” he replied. The others with him tried not to laugh.

Kerry, one of my classmates, offered to help me with math. She came to my place. I ferried her very quickly through my apartment to the chairs outside in the back. She sat waiting to make conversation. I stood feeling embarrassed there wasn't one.

I had given up on long dogmatic ramblings and comical wordplays. I wasn't sure what else there was to use. Eventually I told her why I wasn't so good at getting to know people through conversation. I told her about my book and how I found it difficult to be in the course.

“I already knew you were different,” she said. She had read a lot about autistic children and already thought I was like them. I wondered if my background was part of the reason it had taken me twenty-five years to find out why I was like I was. If I'd had an educated family that read something besides murder novels and tabloid newspapers, perhaps I would have learned about it as part of general knowledge. Perhaps some of it was just timing. Until I actually had met someone else who was like me, I hadn't realized that my “quirks” and “difficulties” were anything other than my mad, bad, or sad personality.