Somebody Somewhere (24 page)

I believed what my eyes told me and my eyes told me my reflection did not look away. I could recite the physics of reflection but this couldn't cancel out the logic of perception and so the two never came together.

“I've never seen it look away,” I said. “If it looks away, how come I can't see it?” “Where are your eyes when you look away?” Kerry asked. “Looking away,” I replied. “What would you use to see if the reflection was looking away?” she went on. “My eyes, of course,” I replied.

Back we went again and again, around and around in an argument of mental mathematics that I couldn't quite grasp. Each time I got to the second step, I had lost its connection with the first. I got the meaning of each sentence but there was something more than addition happening here and I wasn't grasping it. Eventually, with a bit of gesture and role playing and observation of what happened with her in the mirror, I took it on faith that Kerry was right.

I went home and stood before the mirror. I took my hands away and touched them together. “Warm hands,” I said out loud. Then I stepped to the side so that I was facing the wall. “This is what other people see you doing,” I said out loud to myself. I could hardly believe it, and it hurt.

The Millers' daughter, Jessy, was saying goodnight. I studied her as if she were a bug under glass. It was somewhere between babyhood and adulthood that I had lost some pieces. She was a simplified version of an adult. Maybe by watching her I would find what the pieces were.

“Goodnight, mum,” she said, and hugged her mother. “Goodnight, dad,” she said, and hugged her father. “Goodnight, Donna,” she said to me, waving, aware that I didn't take well to being touched and was certainly not spontaneously responsive.

I watched the ease with which she had hugged her parents. I watched the expression on her face as she hugged them. What she did was not just for image, or for acceptance. It was not out of insecurity to make sure they would still like her. She was not scared. She did not seem to be doing it just because it was a pattern and a routine. There was something happening for her that affected not her expression but the change in her expression. What she did had come from feelings, and the change in her expression seemed like a dialogue between her and her parents. She was talking through touch.

She had felt something, acted upon it, gotten feedback, and expressed the way this changed or built upon her feelings. I reflected on what had generally been my one-dimensional expression in response to touch when cut off from self and emotions. There had been no change in response. There was no dialogue. Touch, for me, had always been a one-word sentence with a one-word answer that fell upon deaf ears, and a performance to hide what was missing.

I was moved by what I saw. I could understand it and I could begin to understand the difference between what I had known and what this girl had. I now knew why I wanted to understand touch.

This type of touch had nothing at all to do with the other uses touch had been put to throughout my life. It was not the antithesis of closeness and the invalidation of it. It was a way of breaking isolation and showing people you felt something for them. The concept of touch now both haunted me from behind and beckoned me forward.

August 1991

Dr. Marek,

…I am scared about the direction of things I'm learning. I didn't mind learning how to explain or better understand my problems. I could manage to stop ignoring them and think about them within myself. I could even cope with explaining them to you and then to other people. But with all of these things, I could still keep people “out there.”

I was getting closer to others mentally and even beginning to try to have more respect and consideration for their emotions and to listen more and talk on their topics, but dealing with my social or touch problems in a practical way, while it makes sense (I know I can work through it in theory only so much), is the most frightening of the lot.

That I have appeared to be social or allowed people to touch me in some of the later years leading up to the book never helped me because I never acknowledged that it was me or even that the body going through the experiences belonged to me.

Now that sounds really mad, but when I was alone I blocked out all recognition of this so I didn't have to experience it with any awareness of a self and certainly not with any attachment to others or consideration for them as people (I really hated and mistrusted almost all of them most of the time and thought that a smile was a wall to hide behind, just like a body).

I think “my world's” end began at the outside of my body. Anyway, now I am accepting that the outside of my body is attached to the rest, and it all belongs to me (which is where I was before people taught me to cut off so they could touch me—they didn't know they taught me that, though).

Anyway, I thought about what you said about pushing myself as opposed to being pushed overwhelmingly so that you feel dead. It must have been delusion because it is a real fact that every person—autistic or not, whether they feel like it or not
—exists
in the same basic way: one
subjective
person.

I can hear people without repeating them to myself now (“understand,” sorry, not “hear”). I survived that. I have even been curious enough about it to want to listen a lot now. The frightening things may well be just like that. Not easy, but you are right,
I can see by my example that the pattern is that they get easier and keep getting easier and easier until it is just plain old living.

I think this letter is what people call psychotic. I think people get locked up if they think like this. I think you know I am very, very sane and that I'm only crazy when “the world” gets too close. Now I'm going to be sane in that world and wide awake at the same time if it kills me, because I have got nothing to lose and everything to gain.

I thought to send this letter to you because then you will understand how those doors work better and because it is not just me that my words may help, but other stuck people who could have half a chance if they found as many tricks to get the words out as I have. The words are not enough but if you send them to someone else they can be the best place to start (but to the right people and not to the wrong ones).

Thank you,

      Donna Williams.

—

“Can I touch you?” I asked Kerry. “Of course,” she said. It was not the same as being able to touch people with the feeling that they and you were objects or that you, in fact, were not present as yourself. I not only logically knew Kerry was not just a thing, I also felt it in my feelings. I now knew my own body belonged to and was part of me and was not an object either and I understood what touch was for. I reached out and quickly touched her sleeve as though she were a tarantula.

I grabbed Kerry's sleeve and shook it. Her hand moved and I laughed. “What do you feel?” I asked, touching her arm through her sleeve. “You are touching my arm,” she said. Just like the strategy of detaching Theo Marek's hallway from his house and making it disconnected from the rest of the world, I had always felt it was safe to touch people's clothing because it was not them.

—

People were inside of their clothes. My clothes, too, were my suit of armor. If people touched my jacket, I could always think, Ha, ha, they didn't touch me. This had been a useful strategy and had helped me survive things like public transport.

What I saw was basically all there was. I saw a sleeve. I saw no arm. Putting together the knowledge that there was an arm inside of the sleeve and that touching the sleeve was touching the arm did not happen automatically. There was the first part and there was the second part and I accepted both but did not combine them to come up with a conclusion. By the time I got to the second part, I had lost track of the first, each part stored separately.

I accepted that I was in fact touching Kerry's arm even though it defied my perception. I had to accept that if I had done this, then I could touch her arm without her sleeve.

—

After several visits I finally touched Kerry's hand, treating her more and more as though she was not poisonous. Then, one day, I grabbed her sleeve and held her hand upright. I put my own hand against her hand as I had always done in the mirror. “Mirror hands,” I said, my eyes fixed upon the hands held together out in front of me. I looked from Kerry's eyes to the hands, from the hands to the eyes, connecting her as a whole self. Kerry smiled gently, with watery eyes, and I got into the car and left in a hurry.

On the way home I thought about how touch doesn't just happen any more than abuse ever did. Touch was something done by people for different reasons, sometimes bad, sometimes good. This time it was for good reasons.

—

My appointment with Theo Marek had come around. I would survive touching his hand now. I could pass the exam. But, to my surprise, there was none. It seemed he had decided it had all been a bit much for me. That's fine with me, I thought. Give me time, and I will pass with flying colors.

—

Sitting at the Millers' table, I felt like the only albatross around for miles. I felt alone. “Can I do something?” I asked Mrs. Miller. “Promise me that you won't react or do anything back.” She was used to me by now and was familiar with my sort of logic and what sometimes appeared to be my unreasonableness. “Okay,” she said.

I reached out and quickly touched her arm, not as someone's arm,
but for closeness. It was an action that said, “I trust you” and spoke not of a “can” but of a “want.” It was the emotional language of touch.

“Give me five!” said Mr. Miller, shoving his big hand out in front of me. I had obviously gotten over my aversion to touch as far as he could see. “No,” I said firmly, feeling imposed upon and invaded. He was yet another man larger than myself initiating touch and expecting me to mirror it and prove my “normality.” I didn't need to gain acceptance. What's more, I needed to learn to tell people no when something didn't feel right.

M
y auntie arrived at the Millers' farm. I had not seen much of her over the years. She had always been very fond of me.

She was a gentle person who was physically affectionate toward the people she was close to. Over the years she had tried hard to relate to me and bring me out of my shell, despite my distant behavior.

I was picking gum-nuts from the gum tree outside my window. The patterns in them were fascinating and I wanted to put them along my window sill. My auntie picked some, too. Her hand touched mine accidentally and instinctively I pulled away. “Sorry,” she said. This time, so was I.

I picked more gum-nuts and handed her one. My hand brushed hers and I did not pull away. I looked at her and smiled.

We sat down at the table. She was telling me something. I looked at her hand sitting across the table. I reached across and took it, looked at it briefly, and held it. My auntie cried uncontrollably. “All your life I've been waiting for this,” she said. It had taken me twenty-seven years, but I had been able to show her directly and without prompting that I had understood and appreciated her.

A whole world seemed to be opening up to me. My roots settled into this new soil and I named this “belonging.” My branches grew
outward wildly to meet the light around me and I named this “sharing.” I blossomed and named this “the freed expression of my true self.”

I realized how dry the old soil had been and how stagnant the uncirculated air around me had been in my controlled world. I realized how seldom I had truly seen the sun beyond the darkness in which I had been growing as best I could, stunted and distorted. And yet for every inch of celebration, there was equal remorse.

August 1991

To Theo Marek,

I realized when I wrote my book that I'd left many casualties of my war against “the world.” I never really felt as remorseful about it, though, as now. At least now I really know remorse. Remorse is not nice. I guess it's only a good thing to know so that you can make a decision to either drown in it or to be sure you'll never ever add to it again.

I realize with much bigger impact now why others have been far sadder about my story than I have been. I never really understood their feelings as much as now. I never acknowledged mine so much as now—the events, yes; the feelings, no. I now know it took real feelings and that feelings hurt, especially when they meet a brick wall.

It's like I understand what love is now. It used to be a weapon people had to hurt me. I realize they hurt for me like I'm hurting for me now. I think I'm hurting for me and all of them now. I never realized the value of what they tried to give me. I never realized they weren't trying to hurt me by trying to teach me to change or by showing me how to try. I rejected friends overnight because I couldn't understand. I did worse: I looked at them without any recognition, or with hatred, and they never knew why. Can you imagine the guilt now that I understand? The only consolation I have for the guilt is that I am truly sorry and that I really didn't understand.

I can see that the conversations that are my best efforts have gross holes in them and this is the best I've ever done. Yet the people who attempted to be ongoing friends accepted and accepted until I rejected them blatantly for their acceptance. I was so
arrogant in my ignorance. I thought what they had to offer or say had no relevance, and I couldn't listen as anything more than an act of tolerance, I could only hear sometimes. I played with their words like objects and made people turn up the emotional volume of their words to try to reach me until I burned them out. I can truly see how monsters don't mean to be monsters.

Inside my head I am screaming
I'm sorry
, but I can't forgive myself because I have twenty-seven years crumbling down on my head. Twenty-seven years I want to make up for by beginning with what I owe to myself.

I saw Terry's face (a friend from early childhood) after she read the book. She truly expressed in her face alone how far I had yet to go. She felt hurt for me. My auntie, too. Both of them happy for me but so hurt that I finally knew. I saw it in their faces, and Mr. Reynolds's face, too (my old elementary school teacher), and I could understand these expressions now. I even understood the Millers' dog's expression when I pushed it away.

I understood what hurt looks like and that it is not an empty look. I was blind to them before. It really hurts to feel their hurt.

It hurts even more to feel it and still not be able to be touched, because now I know why they wanted to hug me. People hug people when they are hurt.

…That's it,

      Donna.