A Girl, Autism, and The Great Overtake
Life lessons I learned as a high school outcast
Being a young girl with autism wasn’t complex. With friends, I only needed someone to sit on the other end of the seesaw, kick the soccer ball back to me, or hand me their fives in Go Fish. It was easy. There were no emotions. We shared the same goal of having fun all day, every day until the street lights came on.
Not that I ever had a lot of friends. But the ones I did have were easy to be around. Probably because they were mostly boys, so there wasn’t much chatter going on anyway. Our only social rule was to play nice and not make anyone run home crying. That would get parents involved, and that’s a headache we didn’t need.
As a kid, friends didn’t want anything more from conversations. There were no unwritten rules, nothing hidden below the surface, and no subtext to conversations. I didn’t have to decipher what they actually meant if they said, “I don’t feel good. I can’t come out today.”
But it all drastically changed somewhere in my early teens, around the middle of 8th grade. Like Wile E. Coyote, they suddenly passed me up at supersonic speed and left me in their dust. At the time, I had no clue how pivotal this event in my life would become.
I had been the precocious kid who, in terms of…
