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Jun8
Life as a Child on this Strange, Strange Planet
9 CommentsWhen I was six years old, I made my first friend. Her name was Debbie, and she lived across the street from my house. We were the same age and immediately bonded over riding our bicycles together. I’d like to be able to say that we had an idyllic time, but the other neighborhood kids made sure to initiate us into the harsh realities of living on planet Earth.
There were some older boys at the end of the block who liked throwing sticks at our tires. I couldn’t understand why. What kind of fun is that? I figured that whatever their reasons for this absurd game, they’d get sick of it after awhile. So Debbie and I just kept going around the block, gamely riding through the gauntlet of flying sticks, until it was time to go home for dinner.
But the game continued, day after day, and showed no signs of stopping. I began to feel frightened—frightened not by the boys, but by my inability to understand what they were doing. When I told my parents what was happening, they became upset and told me that the boys were trying to knock us off our bikes. When I heard that, it was hard for me to fathom. It was the first time I’d ever experienced another child being cruel to me, and it just made no sense.
I am still that way today. I have been through so much cruelty in my life, and yet, any kind of cruelty shocks me. In fact, the shock is worse each time. The revulsion I feel is physical.
There was another boy who liked to scare me while I was riding my bike. He would stand out in the street and say “Stop in the name of the law!” So I stopped. Why? Because he said so. Literal me. I wasn’t any better at understanding deception than I was at understanding cruelty. I just took him at his word.
Once I’d stopped, he’d say “Can I see your license, please?” When I told him I didn’t have one, he’d say, “Well, then the police will come and throw you in jail!” I’d be so scared that I’d run into the house, shaking.
The game went on for a few weeks before my mother figured out a solution. She got a key chain with a replica of a small license plate and told me, “Next time he stops you, show him this.” So I did. And it worked. He never bothered me again. I was quite pleased.
But I still don’t understand. I don’t understand any of it. I’ve heard every explanation in the book, but I’ll never be able to feel inside me why someone would try to knock a six-year-old kid off a bike, just for fun.
© 2009 by Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg
9 Responses to “Life as a Child on this Strange, Strange Planet”
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Jennifer June 8th, 2009 at 3:29 pm
It doesn’t make sense. I’ll never understand it either.
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I can really identify with this too. I never understood why someone I have never seen before would go out of their way to be so darn nasty. Me, if I don’t like someone, I just stay away from them, total avoidance. I tell my (quite probably NT) kids to do likewise. If someone did something bad to me, I could maybe understand doing something back. But that’s a reason. Doing mean stuff “just because”… nope, does not compute.
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It really is quite simple. Many people find pleasure in being more powerful than others and if any of them has succeeded you would have been temporarily powerless. In my opinion it is a variant of sadism.
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Power and control. Boys try to achieve it by knocking other kids down. Girls try to achieve it by way of destroying another girl’s emotional well-being. Most NT kids find their place on the hierarchy, and mostly accept it. People on the spectrum are rarely aware of the social hierarchy, much less our position on it. Personally, I think socially constructed hierarchies are ridiculous, petty, and a pathetic waste of time. It results in hen-pecking, bullying, and just plain caveman-like behavior from people that should be civilized.
So, I don’t get it either. And it disturbs me equally as much.
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Yea. Never made sense to me either.
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John Dale Lyons June 8th, 2009 at 7:20 pm
When I was a kid, I became hysterical because one of my mother’s friends was fired. I thought they meant they set her on fire! Studying literature, especially poetry, has taken me beyond the literal into the richness of language, but I am still too literal in social situations. Sometimes I wonder if there’s intelligent life on this “strange planet.”
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LizzieK8 June 9th, 2009 at 7:29 am
The comments above are explanations but they still don’t make sense, are not logical. I guess a reason is all we’ll ever have.
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Cecily June 20th, 2009 at 4:58 am
I can only speak for myself, and the times I inflicted cruelty upon my brothers or upon smaller kids was because I was bullied and manipulated by my smarter NT classmates, and I wanted SOMEONE to feel how I felt. I had no friends in elementary school, I was merely tolerated.
I also hung out with this weird girl who was very anti-male and filled my head with ideas of how girls are better than boys and we should be mean to them… so I acted like a bitch towards my brothers and all the boys in my class because I thought that was what you were supposed to do. I also think I used verbal cruelty to keep the other kids at arm’s length because they totally confused me all the time and left me feeling overwhelmingly ashamed of myself for reasons I could feel but couldn’t cognitively put together. -
Hi Cecily, thank you so much for your honest and insightful reply. I am now remembering a time when I was cruel to my brother because I was so hurt and overwhelmed by our parents and by life in general. I apologized to him later on in our lives, wondering whether he even remembered. He said he definitely remembered, so I was glad that we were able to talk it over.
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