Journeys with Autism

Last night, I did something that I should have known wouldn’t work. But because I’m still winding down from trying to impersonate an NT, I did it anyway. And today, I’m a bit of a wreck.

Do you want to know what I did? It will knock your socks off. Really. You’d better be sitting down for this one. I’m serious. If you fall over and bump your head on the floor, it’s not my problem.

Here’s what I did: I went out for dinner with my husband, my daughter, and one of her best friends.

That’s all. Really. There’s no more to it. The part of my brain that still thinks I’m neuro-typical says, “That’s all? That’s a mistake? What the hell is your problem?”

Fortunately, a great deal more of my brain understands that I’m autistic. Those parts of my brain are all acting in unison, saying, “Try and explain to the nice people who read your blog why going out for dinner with three other people was a serious lapse in judgment.” So I will.

Here’s how it went: I spent the day gardening yesterday, and I felt great. About 5:00 pm or so, my husband said, “Do you want to take the kids down the street and get some Thai food?”

I simultaneously thought, “No!” and “Yeah, that’d be great!” The reason it felt so great is that we all love Thai food, the restaurant is a short walk from our house, the people who run it are incredibly friendly, and the last time we went, they made special provisions for my inability to deal with lots of noise.

The last time, it was just Bob and me, and the place was very crowded. There were several small, adorable children, making several loud, repetitive, adorable, childlike noises, and after sitting at the table for a minute or so, I realized that I’d never make it through dinner in one piece. There is a quieter part of the restaurant, and Bob asked whether we might sit there. The response was that they don’t usually open up that space for dinner, but they understood that I couldn’t enjoy my meal otherwise, and they were gracious enough to seat us well away from the noise. We ended up having a very good time there, and we thanked them profusely for being flexible.

Yesterday, this lovely experience was in my mind when I said, “Yeah, that’d be great!” I figured that if things were noisy, we could just sit in a quieter part of the restaurant. I forgot about the part where sitting and talking with more than one person at a time is impossibly difficult.

Sitting with Bob is simple. It’s very little work. Sitting with Bob and Ashlynne is a bit harder, but because I know them well, and they respond to my need to slow a conversation down, it’s quite doable. Sitting with Bob and Ashlynne and her friend (who is a regular and welcome visitor to our house) is exponentially harder. And did I mention that Ashlynne and her friend are teenagers, and that like many neuro-typical teenagers, they talk very, very fast? Consider it mentioned.

So there we were, sitting at the table, and very quickly, I began to feel like the boring autistic person in the group. Everyone else was bright and chipper, and I was feeling like a dud because I couldn’t keep up. At that moment, it did cross my mind to leave, but that’s when the habit of pretending to be neuro-typical kicked in. And such a bad habit it is, too.

So, I stayed for the entire dinner. I tried to keep up. I asked questions. I made jokes. I responded to the things that other people said. And I tried very hard to mask the fact that I was getting disoriented and exhausted. Of course, I was keenly aware of what a strain it was. I was conscious that I was dissembling, and that my face was not reflecting the enervating effect of every word that was coming out of my mouth. The whole experience was very familiar, especially the part when the migraine started coming on. Somehow, the familiarity of the strain I was under made it that much harder to detach from the situation and get out of there.

And I really wanted to be there. I enjoy Ashlynne and her friend, and it was fun to watch them have a good time together. And yeah, okay, I didn’t leave because, goddammit, why should I? Why should I have to leave when everyone else is having so much fun?

When the girls finished their meals, they decided to go, so Bob and I got to sit alone for a little while. By that point, I was pretty much down for the count. As we were walking home, I told Bob that the whole thing was very, very hard for me, and that I probably shouldn’t try it again. It was difficult for me to translate the experience for him, so I finally said, “Suppose you had to get some cans down from a very high shelf, and that the best you could do for an entire hour was to jump, and never quiet make it, over and over and over, except that every now and then, you actually touch one of the cans, which makes you want to jump and try it again. That’s how it feels.”

He nearly shivered at the thought, and we talked a bit about the difficulties of autistic-to-neuro-typical translation. When we got home, I realized that it would really help me to show him Amanda Baggs’ In My Language video and look at her blog with him. And it did help. I wanted him to have more of a sense of the dissonance between how a person seems on the outside and what’s really going on inside. He was very taken with everything I showed him. He’s always been supportive, but her blog helped him understand more about how I work and how I feel.

So that was a very good outcome of the whole disaster.

Today, however, I’m paying for it. My bladder hurts. My neck aches. And despite having slept in for half the morning, I’m physically and emotionally exhausted. Fortunately, I can still write. Later on, I’ll get under my weighted blankets and rest.

© 2009 by Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg