We've Been Here All Along: Autistics Over 35 Speak Out in Poetry and Prose. Rachel Inc. Cohen-Rottenberg
that someday I would have to do something other than assemble another ad-hoc team. Someday, in the unseen and distant future, I would be a grownup.
But not now. Not yet. I had a game to play.
When I did think about becoming a grownup, my fantasies centered almost exclusively around baseball. I wasn’t just planning to become the first woman to play for the Red Sox. There was more — much more. I would lead the team to victory in the World Series by pitching a perfect game.
Every night, before I went to sleep, I rehearsed the entire scenario. Dressed like a boy, my long hair hidden under my Red Sox cap, I’d take the mound for Game 7. Inning after inning, no one on the opposing team would hit a ball out of the infield. Nor would I give up a single walk.
As the innings ticked by, the suspense would increase. By the top of the ninth inning, a hush would come over the crowd. When I finally struck out the last batter, I’d take off my cap, throw it into the air, let my hair come down, and show the world that I was really a girl. Pandemonium would ensue. The other players would carry me off the field on their shoulders to the roar of an amazed and grateful public.
My interior life was quite rich.
While things did not turn out quite as I’d planned, baseball gave me many gifts that might otherwise have eluded me.
The sensory experience itself was a joy. I loved the smell of a new leather glove, the sound of the bat meeting the ball, and the feeling of the dirt as I slid into home. When I played baseball, my senses gave me great delight and a sense of accomplishment.
Playing baseball also relieved me of the pressure of socializing with words. Instead of hanging around on the playground conversing, I could run and move and shout. Freed from the onus of having to stand still in a group and search for the social nuances that eluded me, I could be aggressive, loud, and tough. In a baseball game, I was never awkward. I knew just what to say and what to do. When I yelled, “He can’t hit! Strike him out!” no one looked at me strangely. I was part of something.
Of course, my tomboy days did not last as long as I’d hoped. Decades have come and gone since then, and with them, many struggles. Yet when I look back on my girlhood, I can feel the sense of pride, strength, and possibility that were mine when I wore my baseball glove and took to the field.
In those moments, being “other” was not a bad thing. Being “other,” in fact, was wonderful.
Ethan Davidson
Ethan Davidson is 48 years old and lives in San Francisco. His writing has appeared in various publications. He has been aware of his Asperger’s for eight years.
Language-Type Asperger’s: A Way with Words or Words in the Way?
While not officially diagnosed, I believe that I am on the autism spectrum. I also believe that the same is true of my parents.
My father was a semi-famous science fiction and fantasy writer, known to all of his friends as quite eccentric. He was a prolific writer, an even more prolific reader, and admired by all who knew him as highly intelligent. But he was never able to get a college degree, or hold a regular job, or maintain a relationship, or make a good living from his writing. In his later years, despite his wit and sense of humor, he became depressed and irritable.
He talked to himself, as do I.
My mother, though less famous, was similar in many ways. Their short marriage in the early 1960s produced a few written collaborations, a lifelong friendship, and me.
After my parents’ divorce, my mother remarried — a marriage that has survived.
From an early age, I was a thoughtful but peculiar little kid. I spent lunch and recess during first grade digging a hole — the same hole. Other kids joined me at first, and then moved on. I didn’t care. My mastery of spelling, handwriting, math, and sports was poor, though I had good skills in the areas of reading and writing. I was bullied, and in the sixth grade, I remember leaving my physical education class, where I was supposed to be learning football, to lie on the concrete and see how close I could get a seagull to come to me. I was a comic book fan until age 12, when I started reading the books from my mother’s college literature class and became an avid reader.
At the same age, I started quarreling with my parents, using intoxicants, and becoming fascinated with religion, studying seven of them at once. While I grappled with Western and Eastern theologies, my grades remained poor. As is normally the case when grades and intelligence level don’t match, I was blamed for not trying.
The next six years were completely chaotic. Between the ages of twelve and eighteen, I never lived anywhere for more than six months. When I was not bouncing back and forth between my parents, who were totally nomadic, I joined a cult, lived on a commune, wandered all over Belize and Guatemala, and lived with punk rockers in the slums of San Francisco. I attended only about two years of high school. By 17, my drug use had reached the injection stage. At 18, back with my mother and stepfather, I contracted hepatitis C and was kicked out of the house.
What to do with an adult like me? Two possible plans were laid out. I would try to get SSI. If that failed, I would join the Navy. Thankfully, I got SSI.
At that time, my psychologist might have saved my life by seeing that I had a learning disability. She diagnosed me with motor skills dyspraxia (poor motor skills) and a personality disorder. In retrospect, I believe that the personality disorder was not there. But the motor skills dyspraxia definitely was.
I have other quirks that cannot be fully explained by motor skills dyspraxia, dysgraphia (poor handwriting), or dyscalculia (poor math skills). I talk to myself. I become fascinated with certain topics and talk about them at great length. I don’t like to make eye contact, but I also stare at people — so much so that they become angry, and I don’t always know that I am doing it. I repeat what people say. I hold expressions on my face without realizing it, and I am puzzled by the reactions of other people.
I got married, entered college, got divorced, got off intoxicants, joined 12-step programs, and earned a bachelor’s degree in English literature. Then I got another bachelor’s degree in social work and eventually got four certificates. I attended a total of ten years of college, quite in contrast to my two years of high school. But my core strengths and weaknesses remained the same.
In the 1990s, I entered another intensely explorative phase in my life, keeping company with anarchists, pagans, and sado-masochists. Anywhere that people were weird was the place for me. Anywhere that people rejected society’s norms, anywhere that they didn’t start a conversation with “What do you do for a living?” was the place for me. To this day, while I’ve done a lot of volunteer work and casual labor, I’ve never held a “real job” for more than a few months.
At the start of the millennium, however, I found myself lonely and depressed, and I decided that I needed to take my spirituality in a different direction. Buddhism was the next step for me, and I started going on frequent meditation retreats.
In 2003, at the age of 41, I entered a sixty-day silent Vipassana retreat.
I knew that it would be difficult for me, and I knew I had to do it. It was difficult for me because it required that I feel the sensations in my body. My body was the last place I wanted to be.
For the first four weeks, I met regularly with two teachers, and they told me to stick with the physical sensations of my breath. After two breaths, my mind was wandering. After four weeks, the teachers changed, and I met with two other teachers. They said that if I couldn’t stay with my breath, I should try to notice the sensations in other parts of my body. I reported that there were none.
I was telling the truth. Sitting in the chair, I could not feel a thing. Nothing was happening. In the S&M dungeons, I could feel the floggers, the cat of nine tails, the canes, the clamps, the hot