Introduction:
As I unpack more understandings about how undiagnosed autism, and undiagnosed ADHD, determined my fate, my early life especially, I see my past, and my present, through a new lens. The landscape is shifting, and the movement is disorienting, but in a good way. Mostly it’s liberating. Actually, it’s completely liberating. So far not a down side to it.
I wrote the first draft of this autobiographical piece about eight years ago. I knew when I wrote it that I was autistic, though I hadn’t been diagnosed yet. It was through writing it, and some others as well, that I began to see just how “wondrously and fearfully made” I am. As are you. Maybe some of you will see some part of you in some part of me. Thank you to those who have already written me privately to say so. There are few of you, so far, but I appreciate your reaching out.
As a child I was a shoe destroyer. The arches of my feet were so high my ankles caved in, as if in longing for each other. The leather on the inside walls of a new pair of shoes would, within a few weeks of meeting my feet, be flattened to the ground, leaving no protection, no boundary between inside and outside. Shiny, new, and upright in the shoe store, after I’d worn them a few weeks, any pair of shoes looked like road kill. Though I didn’t know that until one day in seventh grade.
Sitting in the back row of science class, legs safely hidden beneath the sanctuary of the desk, I slid my feet out of my penny loafers in one smooth backward glide. When school was over, it would be necessary to sequester my entire body under a bower of green branches, in the farthest section of our family’s backyard. There I could let my face soften and my mind surrender to nothingness, after a day of too muchness. A classroom offered no such refuge, but under the desk my feet were free to emerge.
And then something called my eyes downward. Maybe it was the same inner awareness that had the power to make them suddenly rivet in the direction of a particular rock, or the lone flower. But those were things of power and beauty, not like this! This was horrifying. I was seeing the loafers, really seeing them, as others must. Twin, beat up, down in the heel, flattened out animal carcasses. A dead giveaway. Everyone would know what I looked like inside, once they caught a glimpse of them. Maybe everyone had already! Horrified, I shoved my toes back in and pushed my feet back under the desk as far as they would go.
Mom had always said there was something wrong with me. Well, maybe not said it, not in those exact words, but peered at me strangely, as if I were a microbe swimming in a viscous fluid on a slide under a microscope. I just don’t understand how you think, she’d say. When you were little you even had your own language.
Also, she thought I was a lazybones, because she had to argue with me to get me to help her out in the kitchen. And now these shoes. They were the evidence. I was lazy. A loafer. And worst of all, the insides of the shoes matched my insides.
I didn’t move my feet inside the penny loafers for the rest of class. It was too easy to fall into old habits. I would have to stay very awake to keep from sliding my feet back out of them, unconsciously. I’d been reading about the unconscious in Dad’s Psychology Today magazines. Apparently there was a vast, dark inner space inside of each of us in which shadowy objects hurtled about, and which sometimes, for no apparent reason, penetrated the mind’s sound barrier. Whereupon they exploded into an idea. This had captivated me. The unconscious as infinite space, yet at the same time contained within my finite cranium!
Up front the teacher was lecturing the class on something. I paid no attention, only grabbed onto one word that interested me. Inertia. Why did that word jump out at me? Only half listening to the teacher’s explanation, I reached for its texture, searched for its colors and scent, but couldn’t locate them. The word felt like a clue to something, the answer to some puzzle. Maybe, I thought, it was the feeling of how there was no stopping the speed of life or the direction it took. Maybe it was how colors and smells disappeared once your life started moving faster, until all that remained was motion itself. Inertia must be about how the past pushed you down a fast moving river and you no longer had any choice about how to act, or who to be, or even what happened to you in the future. That was how life felt like now. But if that were so, how could there also be a vast unconscious full of surprises?
At home that night I knew my first order of business was to come up with a plan to correct the sloth of the penny loafers. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. That had been a captivating sentence in science class once, so I’d stored it away. And now here it was! Rising up from the unconscious where it had been stored! Running downstairs I hoisted Dad’s gigantic Oxford English Dictionary onto my hip and carried it up to my room. If I shoved the offending inner panels of the shoes back towards the other side, and dropped the OED onto them, and left them that way overnight, and then took the OED off in the morning, they’d probably spring up and be right where they should be.
The next morning I had to pry the limp leather up from where it appeared to be stuck to the inside of the shoes, just so I could slide my feet into them. My calculus had failed. The shoes were now unmanageably awkward to walk in, the confused leather wedging itself under my instep as I descended the stairs for breakfast. I would have to be very careful when I got to school that day so as not to stumble over my own two feet. Klutz, weirdo, knobby knees.
I would also, I decided, have to make Mom buy me a new pair of shoes. That was the only solution. We kids were each allowed three pairs of shoes at a time. One for church, one for school, and sneakers for gym and riding bikes after school. Because I had just finished a growth spurt, and because Mom worried about what it was that was wrong with me, and because I could sometimes use the invisible, undefined, unspoken problem of what was wrong with me to get what I wanted, I knew I could assemble the necessary arguments to convince her to drive me downtown to buy a new pair of shoes. A little ahead of schedule.
It worked. After we’d made our purchase I took the shiny size eight brown loafers out of their box and sat them on my dresser. I stood before them, staring. I never looked people in the eye, only inanimate objects and small living things. I had read in Psychology Today that honest human beings looked other human beings directly in the eye. The ones who didn’t had something to hide. I knew I would have to practice staring at people the same way I was staring at the shoes right now. I would have to do this soon, and unrelentingly, because it was important to be an honest person, but also because something about the idea of staring people in the eye made me feel stronger. It might, in fact, be the best method for how to change me, in the way I most needed to be changed. But the problem of how not to have shoes that looked like what was wrong with me, must be solved first.
I bent my neck forward until my nose pressed against the shoe leather, and there I sniffed the fresh animal scent of Mary Lennox’s moors, Dickon’s fox den, heather grass, all my favorite things about my favorite book, The Secret Garden.
But the freshness of this new shoe leather was going to go away. And too fast. This pair would be exposed, just like the last pair was. How could it not happen? It was the way of inertia, of life itself.
I knew what I had to do now. If the shoes themselves could not be trained, I would be. I would train myself to walk the way other people did. I must pay such close attention, every second of the day, that my ankles never slopped stupidly into the middle. I must not be lazy, not about my feet, not anymore. I must keep every molecule in my body awake. It was as if Mary Lennox, protagonist of The Secret Garden, was herself speaking inside of me now, in that imperious British voice that had once commanded Ayahs inside the family compound in India.
Locker Number 82. Two boys body slam me, one on the left, one on the right. The one on the left slamming my shoulder, the one on the right bouncing his own shoulder off my back, then spinning 360 degrees in his black high top Converses, hissing into the back of my skull queer, queer. My heart pounds, and then some kind of chemical spurts into my veins making my brain spin out and my eyes go oddly out of focus.
I can’t see. I twirl the combination lock, going too many times past the right number, having to start all over again. Again, a third time. Finally I open the metal door and review the textbooks I’ve covered with brown A&P bags. Social Studies, Science, Math, are written on the covers in black magic marker.
I never take these books home. In fact, I never study at all. I believe I should be able to learn the material simply by listening in class and letting the words wash over me. They should sink down into my brain then, where surely there was soil for them to take root. And then, someday, they would poke back up like the spring crocuses Mary Lennox discovered in the garden. It should be natural, learning. I should be able to know, the way the crocuses did.
That this faith was unfounded, that I rarely paid the necessary attention that might have allowed information to penetrate my gray matter, that my mind wandered like a homeless person, that my report cards were erratic, sometimes A, sometimes a C, in the same subject, were merely vague worries rocking back and forth in the vast unconscious layers of my mind, like the religious in endless prayer.
“Did you do your best,” Dad would ask me, after reviewing a bad report card. This was a question that completely puzzled me. What did it mean to do my best? What was my best? Clearly the answer was supposed to be “yes,” so that was the answer I gave. “Well then,” he’d say, “that’s all we ask of you.”
I pull out the texts I will need as props for the three classes before lunch and turn to face the long, loud, crowded, linoleum hallway. I prepare myself to hear nothing, see nothing, say nothing, feel nothing as I walk down it. My body has long since taught itself to telescope inward, so that the too muchness of sound, light, and especially the infinite particles of information that are encoded into each and every one of the hundreds of faces rushing around me, can be funneled away.
When we lived in the Bronx, I had, for six years, peered out from the elevated subway when Mom took us into Manhattan, watching steel girders swing across vast empty spaces, one at a time, dangling, rocking, swaying, from the rigid lifted arm of cranes. And from our car, our various cars over the years, a little red Rambler, a pink Studebaker, a white Pontiac station wagon, I’d noted the progress of the construction of new overpasses, how the massive, seemly solid forms were not in fact solid all the way through. That the smooth outsides concealed thin, vertical steel bars within. Quivering, tensile clumps of what looked like pick-up-sticks were first laid in place, to eventually become secrets, hidden inside the ungiving concrete. Something about this had seemed deeply symbolic to me.
Rebar, I now know is what those thin strands are called. Rebar provides resistance, so that the concrete can breathe. Rebar is what keeps the concrete from cracking.
I, the I that was me in seventh grade, instinctively knew she had to become rebar, held together by an invisible network of radiating, vibrating steel. Steel and infinite tiny pockets of empty space must work together inside of her to hold the weight of being. So she takes off down the school hallway on the outermost bones of her feet, like a car riding on its wheel rims. That, as it turns out, is crazy exhilarating. Fear and wonder being in close relation.
I love that young me I watch careening down the halls of Central Junior High School, like an old jalopy. She is teaching herself how to survive, how to (eventually) fit in, sort of. How to (eventually) evade detection.
That night, up in her room, I imagine that she sets her brand new loafers out for display, because I still do that with new shoes. She puts them on the floor next to the bed, about a foot apart, climbs up on the mattress, gathers her knees into her elbows, and peeks over the jutting outcrops and down at the shoes. Day one of the great science experiment has been a success. No cave-ins!
The next day, same ritual in the school hallway.
Check-in with foot bones.
Gather self up.
Barrel down the hall at the speed of light.
Come home.
Put shoes on the same spot on the floor.
Inspect them.
Same the next day.
And the next.
Miracle of miracles, the inner edges of the shoes remain intact and upright, night after night. And morning after morning a second inspection reveals they haven’t fallen apart while she lay dreaming.
Then, one day, she wakes up to realize she hasn’t checked on the condition of her shoes in months. And she’s been wearing them every day! Oh no! She’s tried to create a new habit, and she’s failed. How long have I been walking around in yet another pair of disgusting shoes? Has everyone else noticed but me?
The loafers are in the closet where she’s so carelessly tossed them the night before. She pushes out her breath, snorts rage and fear from her nose like a horse. She is afraid to look, but it must be done, her inner Mary Lennox tells her. She hauls them out. Places them on the floor in front of the dresser. Staring straight down she examines the curvature of leather, both the inside and the outside edges. It has worked! The shoes are normal. After months! I’ve done it! I’ve re-trained my feet! Peering closer, she stares more severely at the shoes, just to be certain.
I imagine she glimpses just the tiniest bit of give on the inside panels, where the high arches of her feet rise well above the leather bottoms. I imagine her thinking, my feet must have given in a time or two, gotten lazy here or there.
Staring at those bits of weakness, of softness, at that tiny evidence of rest, of surrender, what does she feel? Is it sadness? Is it tenderness for the soft animal of her body? Does she think she’s lost a part of herself? Was that when she began to “camouflage”? To “mask?” I think so.
And, at the same time, didn’t she begin to build a bridge between herself and the world? One foot at a time? I think so.
For that I send my love, and gratitude, back to her.
And to the One who made us all.
Closing Prayer
from Psalm 139
For you created my inmost being;
You knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
Your works are wonderful,
I know that full well.
My frame was not hidden from you
when I was made in the secret place,
When I was woven together in the depths of the earth.