They said I’d never talk. Now they pay me to do it.
When the experts said no, I made yes my ambition. Just about anyone can.
In the ’90s, a top psychiatrist sat my parents down and handed them some tissues. I’m told his exact words were, “Your son has autism. Go home and cry.”
Back then, the diagnosticians were pessimistic. Funny thing about pessimism, we use it to protect ourselves. When you expect nothing, everything is a blessing. Maybe that’s why they prepared everyone for the worst.
Chances were I would never talk. I could expect to live alone and not develop relationships. Well, except with my parents. I’d depend on them until the day I went to live in a nursing home.
And that would be the responsible way to handle me. The Internet buzzes with stories of impulsive parents who have a younger sibling and raise them to one day take care of the low functioning autistic kid.
I was still a child when we started rebelling against that grim future. I was raised like any kid, but with intervention sessions and speech therapy. Around others I was the weird kid, so weird I didn’t know I was the weird kid. I wasn’t happy, but I had a feeling that I was capable of more.
See, when you exclude a kid, they’ll pick up on it fast.
I grew up rural, where not so long ago kids with special needs stayed hidden at home or went to foster parents. My community was a giant disrepair of cracks for kids to fall through, into a gigantic too-hard basket. So apart from a few incredible, underfund teachers, most of the people responsible for me ignored me.
And I knew what they were doing. Seeing that you’ve been excluded is a survival instinct.
Looking back, I understand why so many excluded kids turn into bitter and dangerous people — when the world tells them they don’t belong, that they’re a different species, they believe the world. And why not? If the system lets you down at an impressionable age, that leaves a mark.
And believing you don’t belong to the human race goes both ways. Human means same. Homo sapiens means similar (to us) and intelligent. And if everyone around you treat you as not quite human, they can’t be human to you. You dehumanise them. It’s one little piece of what makes a childhood behavioural disorder.
But here’s where it became my strength. I got to see the world with objective eyes. I saw the kids, teachers, parents, grown-ups around me respecting each other. There it was:
I needed respect. I needed to be equal if my life was going to be worth living. I couldn’t let them look down on me.
I was seven now. Everything I wanted to be when I grew up involved communicating, that thing I dreamed of getting right. I wanted to be a comedian, a writer, a ventriloquist. I was all about the humanities, because damn it, I would be human.
But I was a kid trying to learn communication in a country town. The writers’ guild were uncomfortable with a kid in meetings, so they kicked me out. I practised making jokes, but the jokes you learn in the country aren’t for polite company. The jokes are powerful because they hurt people if you use them in the wrong place, which I did.
The people who were uncomfortable around me while I learned to socialise are my heroes. They gave me more tolerance than they had to, the kind of patience that gets you scolded by friends for humouring a hurtful person. But they hung in and so did I. It’s human nature to be nice when someone’s trying to be better. If you’re learning to socialise, this instinct could save you.
Soon the exhaustion caused me to drop out of school. Well, I enjoyed school, but my presence in that too-hard basket started getting too heavy for the school. They encouraged me to leave.
As a dropout I spent all my time writing, reading manuals about conversation and taking to others. Funny thing about preparing to impress others, which I still regularly see: The more effort a performer puts in, the more nervous they become. I spent so much time learning to make a good impression that I became agoraphobic.
Then I passed the talent hump that people like Peter Thiel [1] talk about. Most of us give up just before we’ve succeeded. Just before you develop the talent you need to shine, it’s normal to have nothing but rejection in your life.
And then, people started paying attention. They praised my writing, laughed at my jokes, and when I slipped up and said the wrong thing they went on tolerating me.
Soon I moved to the city. I thrived in the spoken word scene, and quickly learned that every artist was just like me. There was no hole for the type of peg they’d become.
In my early 20s, magazines started paying me to write. Then online publications. Then performance gigs around town. No one had heard of me, but I had the energy they wanted.
The best part of all this was shortly before my first feature. I was 22, calling my heart out at an open mic night. That night’s feature performer came up and gave me the $50 they’d paid him. He said it should go to new talent.
I didn’t have the right words to thank him, so I spent it on a writer’s directory.
What did I learn?
Many things.
1)
Whether it’s comedy, poetry, music or whatever bizarre screaming patchwork you bring onto a stage, people want one thing: To see themselves in the performer. They want humanity.
And that goes for everyone, everywhere. We need our species to value us.
2)
A few days ago I was voted onto the board of a nonprofit that takes care of poets. I sit with one of my old professors and some of the first performers I really looked up to. And I think maybe there’s someone in the same process I was, who I can encourage by publicly succeeding, and most of all by being patient with them.
3)
I’ve also learned that our brains change radically when we change our environment. My agoraphobia is gone. I walk outside and I feel safe. When I started teaching myself things like body language and intonation, I couldn’t imagine doing it comfortably. If I could see what was waiting for me, I would’ve made it here sooner.
Socrates pushed his pupils to learn what their bodies could do — he believed that without that lesson, they’d wasted their lives. His star pupil Plato was a champion wrestler.
4)
I’m a visual person. That’s why I picture myself in impossibly cushy places another 25 years from now. Maybe at the top of a skyscraper or a mountain, maybe secretly writing bestsellers under a fake name, maybe with a bronze statue of myself in the most inconvenient part of an inner city train station. That was everyone has to put up with my legacy.
When you’re young and misplaced, fear does you no good. We need to prime our minds for love and freedom, so that we can chase those things. Where we can, we need to move away from what disables us:
Not our conditions, but the idea that we can’t make it.
When we talk about neural conditions like mine, you don’t know for sure what you can or will achieve. I’ve overshot my expectations so far. I was meant to be funny, good with people and respected. Now I’m a respected writer with friends everywhere I go.
There’s a saying: Aim for the moon and you’ll land among the stars. It works on a lot of levels. Compared to one star, one gas giant, the moon is puny.
The only right way to do things is your way, and to constantly figure out what that is. Because it changes based on your outer — and inner — environment.
And you have to maintain that mindset like every other part of your body. Feed it right or it’ll go away.
There’s always more work to do.
I often think back to how we used to diagnose autism, the way we set up parents for pessimism. I wonder how many great future voices they told this. How many got the chance to accept themselves before society told them not to?
Well, a huge number of us rebel against the pessimism and win. My friends on the Spectrum have real lives and real relationships.
Every one of us disagreed with the experts at some point, and now we give our far more pragmatic prognoses. Potentially, when they’re young and haven’t shown their range, an autistic kid can be anything. Especially if you help them find a place in the outside world.
I don’t know whether it was human nature or desperation that made us say no to that grim diagnosis. But for us, it’s a privilege just being able to talk. We are not leaving this world without learning what our bodies can do. Back when the label was ugly, we broke out of it and made something of ourselves.
This isn’t even a big tale of triumph. Most of us live good lives even if we have to struggle. This is a normal story, and it’s happening all around you.
If you like that, check out more from Disspoken:
Why antivaxxers still exist (and how we can stop them doing harm)
How to get outside (of your social anxiety)
Footnotes:
[1] Zero to One by Peter Thiel
