The Big Open-Ended Question: On Loving and Accepting My Asperger’s
By Magenta Ranero
The words always stood out ominously: “Tell me about yourself.”
Any time I met potential new friends or went on a date or had a job interview, that’s when I’d get into trouble. Sooner or later, there would be the big open-ended question. Sooner or later I’d have to talk about myself.
I would try and start off by listing and explaining my interests, and then after a while I might say, “Well, I’m a little awkward.” If I were drunk, maybe I would be a little more daring and say, “I’m bad at socializing.” But even if that went over well—and I was constantly afraid of the day it didn’t, the inevitable day when what I hoped would come off as endearing would backfire—I might want to say more, but feel profoundly afraid of doing so.
I always felt the constant spectre of the unsaid, of wanting but not knowing how to disclose who I really am. I can’t quite pinpoint the exact moment when I started feeling uncomfortable with who I was; I guess it’s when I realized that simple friendship and even just talking to people was hard for me. I couldn’t tell you at what point I diverged from the rest of the people on my Facebook feed, when they all started getting photographed at pool parties and baby showers that I wasn’t invited to, while I posted selfies and funny subway ads. It is common knowledge that making friends can become harder as you get older and are forced to find your own group – when you’re not at school among your peers, all day, every day. I am aware that I’m not the only person who gets anxious and sad when thinking about her social life (or lack thereof). But for me, much of the anxiety and sadness stems from the feeling that all of this is beyond my control.
I have what used to be called Asperger’s syndrome, before it got folded into autism spectrum disorder. I was always that person who was a little offbeat, talked to herself, and couldn’t read social cues. Oddly enough, this didn’t cause much trouble when I was young. Making friends wasn’t hard – I had a best friend, as well as a general group of friends, and got invited to all the necessary sleepovers and birthday parties. If anyone thought I was weird, no one showed it, but then I probably wouldn’t have been able to notice even if they had.
In middle and high school, though, everything changed. Suddenly my differences became painfully obvious. I still cried in class and had difficulty controlling my emotions, not realizing that the older you got, the more unacceptable that was. Because I had trouble reading social cues, I didn’t clearly understand social boundaries. I became known for obsessively calling boys I liked, which got me in trouble with their parents and earned me a reputation as someone who was “creepy” and “intense.” As time went on and this caused me more pain and embarrassment, I became more and more ashamed and reluctant to tell people about my Asperger’s. My parents were clueless when it came to raising a child on the spectrum and had no interest in learning, so their way of dealing was basically to not discuss it at all and treat meetings with my case manager and school psychologist as major inconveniences.
When I actually did succeed in befriending someone who understood me, I would think, Maybe I am normal. Maybe I can do this. But it was always just a matter of time before I violated some unspoken rule or said something wrong, and then I would lose both that friend and that feeling of comfort and camaraderie and normalcy. I spent prom weekend by myself in a hotel room at the Jersey shore, watching movies on my computer and eating pizza. By the time I graduated from high school, I was deeply unhappy and suffering from crushing social anxiety, wishing I could become anything, anyone other than myself.
I hoped things would change in college, and they did, but not in the way I expected. I joined a few Asperger’s support groups, as well as the website Wrong Planet. At first I was happy to find a community of people much like me. But after a while, something began to bother me. At the time there were very few women on the site and in the groups, so I got more than a few romantic overtures from male members. I also noticed that a lot of the members seemed to be in STEM fields and very into traditionally “nerdy” things, and as an English major who was barely passing her statistics class — in part because she went to art museums and ska concerts too often — I couldn’t entirely relate. But what was really going on, what I couldn’t acknowledge until years later, was that I was embarrassed by my Asperger’s. Years of painful interactions and loneliness had made me vastly uncomfortable with that part of myself. When I joined the site and support groups and was confronted with people who were comfortable with their autism—some of whom were proud of who they were—I just couldn’t face it. I was so deep in pain and had been made to feel so ashamed that I would have given anything to make it all go away. Reading their posts and talking with other people on the spectrum brought so many feelings and thoughts I had tried to bury to the surface. I couldn’t deal with it at the time, and so I left...
Read the full letter at The Toast.
http://the-toast.net/2015/07/09/on-loving-and-accepting-my-aspergers/
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