Portrait of an Autist, pt. 1

Growing up, I didn’t know I was autistic. I didn’t get my diagnosis until I was 34. It was an enormous relief, to be honest. My whole life I had felt like there were things I was missing out on, things other people understood intuitively that I just didn’t get at all. Upon discovering I was autistic, and doing some reading about what all that might entail, whole sections of my life suddenly made more sense. This is a story about one of those moments that became more clear in retrospect.

After some rather embarrassing confusions at the public elementary school I went to (apparently Bring Your Pet to School Day means bring a living pet), my parents transferred me to a small private school. Here there were more embarrassing moments, like the time I wet myself because I didn’t know I was allowed to leave class to go to the bathroom, but the much smaller student body meant I was getting more direct attention from the teachers, which made things better.

In fourth grade, a boy who I had gone to preschool with transferred in from public school. He was so worldly, so wise. He taught me all manner of curse words, which I pretended I already knew, and he introduced me to the concept of dating: if you liked a girl, you could just ask her to be your girlfriend.

As I mentioned, we had a very small class. I had a crush on the cutest girl in our class, so starting next year in fifth grade, I began asking her to be my girlfriend. Not having courage, I went the classic route of the note: will you be my girlfriend? Check one, yes/no. She checked no. I would write again a month or two later, when she was whatever my infatuated mind interpreted as slightly more friendly. Still no. Always no. Circled, checked, underlined, once with an asterisk, which I thought was a little excessive.

One day, however, she wrote in a third option, maybe, and she checked that. I was ecstatic, like happy little kid eating ice cream on a hot day, ecstatic. Not that I like ice cream, but whatever. I wrote her three more notes that afternoon, until finally, yes. She said yes. I had a girlfriend. My first girlfriend ever.

I didn’t have a great deal to draw on when it came to knowing how to be a boyfriend. We didn’t have cable tv, I didn’t read those types of books, my parents and older sister hadn’t shared any wisdom with me. I went off a couple movies I’d seen and set myself to being the best boyfriend I could be.

I stole flowers from our neighbor’s garden and clutched them tightly as I peddled to school on my Schwinn. I had a Schwinn, a red one, the same color as a Jeep I would get a decade later. The flowers were beat up by the wind and had dirt clumped at the bottom where I’d torn them out of the ground, but she seemed pleased by them. I dragged desks together for us to sit together at lunch. I pushed her on the swing at recess.

I hadn’t been introduced to the magic of the make out, yet (thank you eighth grade church camp), so we didn’t really do much, physically. I tried to hold her hand once, and that felt awkward and glorious and left me practically giddy with excitement.

I thought she was happy. I thought things were going well. I was so naive.

After a little over a week of this, the boy I thought of as a friend approached me at lunch. I told him he couldn’t stay because my girlfriend was going to be joining me to sit at that desk. He smiled and sat down anyway.

“She isn’t going to be joining you, Ryan,” he said, “In fact she isn’t even your girlfriend. She and I have been dating for three months now. I just thought it was funny that you didn’t seem to know and asked her out, so I told her to say yes and pretend to be your girlfriend. I can’t believe you really thought you two were dating.”

He laughed. Others in the classroom laughed. They’d known. Everyone had known. Except me, blithely pretending to be dating the cutest girl in our class.

“Yeah, I know,” I’d said after too long of a moment trying not to cry, “I was just playing along.”

He didn’t believe me. He just laughed again and left to go eat lunch with his girlfriend. I ducked my head and tried to ignore the kids still chuckling over my embarrassment. I didn’t talk to anyone for the next month, but kids need to interact with other kids, so I did eventually start trying to interact with the people I still wanted to think of as my friends, including the boy who was dating the girl I liked. In fact, we stayed ‘friends’ for years. He was my first roommate when I went to college.

In retrospect, picking up on social cues was something I just wasn’t equipped to do. I learned not to blame myself for not figuring it out, but only decades later, as an adult. Growing up, I always just thought moments like that were my fault for being stupid when it came to people. Getting my diagnosis liberated me from those feelings of failure and shame, let me learn to appreciate my strengths without beating myself up for my shortcomings.