“My friendships mean everything to me and the thought of having to do all that awful socializing to make new ones fills me with dread.” – “Can You See Me?” by Libby Scott and Rebecca Westcott, p. 153
As I’m reading this book, about an 11-year-old Autistic girl navigating her new middle school, one persistent thought is that accepting myself as Autistic after 50, and realizing how much of my life experiences have been shaped by a perception that I was “weird” and “broken” but not realizing how, and how I could have managed and navigated better had I known, it’s exhausting.
I obviously can’t build a time machine and go back and tell my younger self, and even if I could, the world was different then. Understanding of Autism has changed so radically in the last few decades. And I don’t know what my parents or teachers even knew because another part of that world was that Things Were Kept ™ from children. By “kept” I mean that the adults think they were protecting children but in reality they were keeping things secret.
The Great America that certain people these days wants to make was a covert one: Secrets were hidden. One of the most popular books during my tween years was about children who were literally kept hidden in the attic, an apt social metaphor for the era.
Anyway, it would have certainly helped if I’d known about Autism of a form other than that depicted in “Rain Man” much earlier in my life. I’m hardly dead; I surely have another twenty years, maybe thirty. But I feel like I’ve woken up most of the way through a marathon and have a lot of catching up to do.
It’s time I started, no?