Somebody Somewhere (20 page)

“Y
ou are one of the family,” said Mr. Miller at the dinner table. Shock waves hit me like a punch in the stomach. I got up from the table and walked to the window. “Do you have a dustcloth,” I asked, scratching at a mark.

The word “family” was a verbal guarantee of ongoing contact, which for me was a social and emotional prison. I couldn't grow with someone observing my growth before even I had been able to become comfortable in my awareness of it.

“Don't say that word,” I told Mr. Miller. “What word?” asked Mr. Miller. “Family,” I replied. My fear fell on deaf ears. The only perspective they seemed to understand was that of negative reaction to past experience. I tried to tell them it had nothing to do with this.

I stared at my knife and fork as I sat at the Millers' dinner table. The barrage of new lessons felt like knives and forks I allowed them to dig into me with. I had armed them and like a masochist I had gone back for more and more. I had accepted that whether I liked this or not, I needed it. Motivation in the absence of want was one of the legacies of my family background, where fear was shown to be irrelevant to choice—thank God.

I squirmed in my seat at the creeping feeling within me in reaction to other people. It wasn't fear and that surprised me. It was a niggling feeling that connected my mind and emotions. It was a feeling that was against “my world” law. It was curiosity about other people.

The Millers' words poured onto my ears and the meaning began to fall out of them more and more. The Millers slowed down and tried to speak more clearly, but my hearing began to intensify as I headed for self-initiated sensory torture at the hands of my friends
because
I was curious enough and interested enough to tune in.

Mr. Miller saw that I was squinting and that I had covered the ear nearest him. “Do you have cotton wool?” he asked. “I'm sick of being a freak who has to put cotton wool in her ears!” I shouted. “I'm sick of wearing dark glasses indoors just so I can stay calm enough to understand!” This was the price I was meant to pay to stand being there without the deadening defense of breaking into characters.

I was sick to death of my attention wandering onto the reflection of every element of light and color, the tracing of every patterned shape, and the vibration of noise as it bounced off the walls. I used to love it. It had always come to rescue me and take me away from an incomprehensible world, where, once having given up fighting for meaning, my senses would stop torturing me as they climbed down from overload to an entertaining, secure, and hypnotic level of hyper. This was the beautiful side of autism. This was the sanctuary of the prison.

“M
y world” of objects dead around my feet, the people-world was showing me a world I couldn't have. I damned it for showing me that it, too, had a type of beauty. I damned it for being enticing and unattainable. I damned others for having it.

I now acknowledged that it was not closed out by choice but by disposition. I was driven to want it like someone who finds her true home but finds she's been locked out. As I had once been committed to keeping the world at a distance, I now became obsessively committed to smashing that glass, not for conformity but for belonging.

I accepted how much I wanted this world and blossomed with emotion. I thought about the Mareks and the Millers, feeling the compulsion to reject, destroy, and run. Each time I was with them, it was as though it were the last and I fought the compulsions. I knew I couldn't bear to watch everyone fade away again.

I now knew that my war had perpetuated the delusion that I had rejected “the world,” when, in fact I was powerless to hold it. The distinction between “my world” and “the world” implied that I had a choice to be in “the world” or not. The realization that autism stole this choice from me became the linchpin for the final shattering truce that would bring my world-under-glass crumbling to the ground. I learned that there never was and never had been a “my world.”

Most of my “my world” strategies were designed to tell me I was
not there, in order to lessen the load. Torn down the middle, one part of me fought desperately for air and the other part said, breathe. Who needs to breathe when you don't have lungs?

I talked myself through self-denial. I talked myself through the tremors that signaled the Big Black Nothingness. I talked myself through the fear of the foreignness of my own voice talking with a me choosing the words. I told myself where I was going. I told myself the hard part was only short-term and temporary. When I couldn't understand my own reassurances, I drew them.

I
grabbed for the paper and pencils, and just as I had drawn concepts for myself, I asked others to speak my language as a bridge to my learning theirs with meaning and connections.

I knocked on the Millers' door armed with pencils and paper. “I want you to show me emotions,” I said.

In the mathematics of people, I was at a stage equivalent to basic counting, and addition and subtraction of one-digit numbers. Unfortunately the Millers found it very hard to break down the mathematics of people. They were beginning with the equivalent of algebra and logarithms in teaching someone who was a social retard. Oh God, I had come to the class but the teachers had only half the teaching aids. So much for Santa sacks and magic wands. Shit, all of this
and
I have to teach the teachers how to teach me.

“Are you two angry?” I asked the Millers. “No, we're not angry,” came the reply. Their voices got fast and went up and got louder. Were they lying? Why couldn't they admit they were angry most of the time?

Out came the paper and pencils. They showed me that all the actions I interpreted as “angry” could also mean “busy,” “tired,” “anxious,” “emphatic,” or “excited.” None of these meant “angry.”

In lines and diagrams, I saw the angry scale, the happy scale, and the sad scale. They marked the greater or lesser variations of them
along the lines: tired, busy, flustered, agitated, annoyed, angry, and furious. They tried to show me how each might look on a face or be mirrored in actions.

I was the one who was angry! You mean to say I have spent twenty-seven years responding to two-thirds of people's behavior as though they are angry and they probably never were? I thought.

It began to dawn on me how often my expectations might have tipped the scales from tired to angry just because I expected it. It occurred to me how so many years of miscomprehension had helped justify my war against “the world” and my fear of it.

Yet the anger could go nowhere. I couldn't blame other people. They had learned these things automatically. They could not have imagined that I would need to learn them formally because they were not like me. They could not have imagined I required a far more constructive expression of their so-called empathy than the charitable save-the-world martyr routines they sometimes went through; tolerant people are those who “put up with.”

I thought about what saves us from being consumed by ever-climbing agitation. When someone experiences anger, it is the reassurance of closeness and security or the expression of happiness that counterbalances it so the anger doesn't consume them. I found closeness suffocating and invasive; its expression negated any reciprocal feelings of closeness within me. Fear of touch, and the irritation of emotionally charged intonation meant that the ways people expressed reassurance totally undermined my own security, which depended fully on predictability and distance. How could I have a normal level of constructive anger when their misguided, well-intentioned reassurances merely stoked the fire of my defenses?

E
very day after school I raced into the Millers' house to check the fax machine. Letters and faxes from foreign literary agents and publishers arrived each day. I was about to be flung by the heels into
the world of business where I was the business. “Are these people my friends?” I asked Mr. Miller. “No, they are not friends,” said Mrs. Miller. I went berserk. The Millers seemed like lunatics. Take me to a sane place please, I thought.