Right before the pandemic struck the East Coast of Australia at the speed of a retiree disembarking from a cruise ship, I had a breakthrough in therapy. It came off the back of a conversation with an old best friend from Primary School who had gotten in touch. We’d been reminiscing over instagram DMs, dredging up a long repressed past, apologising back and forth for all the shit things we did to each other.
Ameera* apologised for dumping me from our friend group in the seventh grade. And I apologised for being a true cunt later that week, failing to stand up for her against our racist PE teacher, who told her to “walk off” an asthma attack she was having out on the softball pitch on a 45 degree celsius day. The shitty thing I did to her seems a lot worse than what she did to me, because it is. It’s one of the biggest regrets of my life. Not because she didn’t have plenty of people around her to step up and help, but because one of those people should’ve been me, and it wasn’t.
Then she told me that she felt the same way about me throughout our entire 6 years of friendship. She said that she wished she had stood up for me more at school, especially against our teachers.
It was at this point in the therapy session that I burst into open sobs. For a long time I’d convinced myself that nobody remembered the way I was treated at school. I thought I’d exaggerated the experiences in my head, and never once expected someone to bring it up on Instagram 20 or so years later.
At the start of every school year, up to year seven, I was gifted with a new teacher and a new opportunity to be treated like a human being. And, for some of those years at least, I was. I had wonderful teachers who talked to me at eye level, gave me space when I needed it, and even let me go outside when I was, well, I didn’t have the vocabulary back then to articulate what I was doing, and my doctors didn’t seem to have a clue, but I guess now they would call it ‘stimming’, which is making bodily movements that help comfort and soothe a person at times of distress.
Kids would kick at my chair, tease me, or do hack impressions to a smattering of unearned laughter. The good teachers made them stop.
But there were other teachers, who absolutely didn’t. One of them, the worst one, had a system. If I started making “distracting movements”, a designated student was allowed to take the chair from underneath me, forcing me to hit the floor. She picked a new student every day. I spent a lot of time on the floor at school, when everyone else was sitting at a desk. A kid told me about someone who had their chair pulled out from under them, hit their tail bone, and had their spine shoot up through their brain. My quads got a serious work out after that story.
This is all probably going to make you feel sorry for me, and sure - go off. But you should also know that I’m a fairly attractive woman with a wildly enviable career and enough free time to write a newsletter - so don’t feel too sorry for me. We all need to keep some pity for ourselves.
Ameera wrote my childhood traumas back to me in chunky paragraphs on a social media platform designed to express these things through dog filter selfies alone. Her apology came out of nowhere, I didn’t know that I was someone who ever needed to be defended or protected, I didn’t realise that I was being targeted and abused by people who should have been helping me. When it was happening, I thought it was what I deserved. I thought I’d done something wrong. And when I moved schools, and finally managed to stop myself stimming, I didn’t really think about it at all.
I read Ameera’s message back to my Psychiatrist and then looked up at him and said, ‘OK, I believe you now.’
He’d diagnosed me a year ago with Autism Spectrum Disorder, the type people describe as ‘High Functioning’ or sometimes call Aspergers - which is never going to stop sounding like Ass-Burgers to me, so I’m glad that’s changed.
I still struggle to understand the diagnosis myself, so I won’t attempt to define it here - except to say, it’s not what I thought it was, and unless you have it, it’s probably not what you think it is, either.
About 6 months into reckoning with the possibility of having ASD, I mentioned the diagnosis to a friend in passing and they snapped back that it was ‘impossible’, that I have ‘too much empathy’. So I puffed up my chest and marched back into my Psychiatrist’s office to tell him “I’m too empathetic to have ASD”. I was quickly shuffled out of said office with a stack of research that shows empathy is actually found to be “excessive” in a lot of girls and women with ASD, and that one of our main problems is that we struggle to distinguish between somebody else’s pain and our own.
So, that was a fun lesson in Autism, and in humility.
My diagnosis happened at about the same time Comedian Hannah Gadsby came out as a person with ASD, and my first thought was, well, I’m nothing like her. Except that we’re both socially awkward introverts, who enjoy a spot of comedy, and have a tendency to fixate on very particular arts based subjects; but she’s into the Renaissance and I’m more an Impressionist gal - it’s like chalk and cheese.
The main thing I’ve struggled with — and perhaps this is the source of my denial — is that I can’t really do anything with this diagnosis. There’s no pill. There’s no cure. There’s no 8 step plan to making myself ‘normal’. I’m just a person who is now hyper-aware of the anti-vaxx movement, and the fact that many friends of mine think having ASD means that I have no empathy. Me! The woman who cried at the end of Demolition Man because I was so proud of Sylvester Stallone for finally finding his place in a strange future that had rejected everything about who he was.
But accepting the diagnosis has made me more conscious of how it affects my relationships with the people around me, especially when I tell them exactly what I’m thinking and they react poorly to what I say. Whereas before I would tear my hair out trying to decode their adverse reaction and pinpoint its source, now I think - oh, I probably shouldn’t have said that out loud.
For me, socialising while having ASD is like that feeling of standing in a group at a loud party, and only tuning into the conversation at the exact moment the group turns and asks “what do you think?” It’s somewhat overwhelming to be expected to know what everyone else wants to hear at all times. I’m always playing catch-up, but I have been doing so for a very long time now, so I’m both exhausted and really good at it.
Experts call this ‘masking’, but I hate that term because it sounds like ‘lying’, and I’m a terrible liar. It’s more like hoping I’m right; that I’m laughing when I’m supposed to be laughing, or showing sympathy when I’m supposed to be sad. I feel all of these things, just sometimes I feel them too much, or I feel them later, when I’ve had a chance to process what just happened.
I’ll never use my ASD as an excuse for behaving like an ass-burger, but the realisation that the way I perceive other people can be totally disconnected from how they really are genuinely frightens me. That day on the soft-ball field in year 7, it took me a number of very precious minutes to process that our PE teacher didn’t have Ameera’s best interests at heart, and even longer to understand that she was targeting my ex-best friend because Ameera was a young Muslim girl, and not just because our teacher was having a ‘bad day’.
I always thought that my tendency to assume the best of people was one of my greatest assets. I’m by no means stupid (I hope that’s clear through my continued use of ‘ass’ puns), but I really did believe for most of my life, based on no evidence whatsoever, that other people - and especially shitty teachers, apparently - were well-intentioned purely because I was well-intentioned. I couldn’t distinguish between their feelings and my own.
Girls and women with ASD are more prone to being exploited, abused, coerced and assaulted, partially because we’re more likely to think other people are just like us. That’s something that rings true for me, but, in this moment, in the current state of the world, it isn’t the main thing I worry about as a person with ASD.
I worry far more about how my judgement affects other people, people who are more vulnerable than I am, people in shittier situations, who don’t have the luxury of processing their bullshit at midnight on an irregularly distributed personal newsletter.
In case you missed the analogy, I don’t think this is a problem unique to people with ASD. We all have roadblocks, and we all have a tendency to build empathy through our commonalities and biases, rather than through what people show us of themselves. I’ve been trying lately to step back and get the fullest picture I can of a person. It’s been tough. I mean, I’m still coming to terms with the realisation that in Demolition Man, Sylvester Stallone plays a cop who gets off on beating the shit out of Black men during the LA Riots.
But, you know, I’m working on it.
*name changed to protect identity.
My kid is on the spectrum. We call it ass burgers too :)
thank you for writing this, it's beautiful, l hope you're ok. l feel l sort of understand you about the empathy and 'l shouldn't say that' lm older and some times think fuck it lv had enough shit for one day!!! hahahah