This subject has been on my mind for awhile.

I have always felt much younger than everyone else, even when I was a child amongst other children my own age. And now that I am chronologically a middle-aged adult, I still feel like a kid, as though I haven’t really grown up.

I first remember feeling very young at summer camp. At eleven, I was one of the oldest kids there, and yet, I didn’t feel as grown up as I perceived others to be. To this day, I remember each person in my age group very vividly. I especially remember two girls, Dawn and Monique, who seemed to be adults already. I knew that they weren’t. My mind kept telling me that they were just eleven, and yet they seemed to be much older than I would ever be. It wasn’t just that they were taller. It wasn’t just that they were pubescent. It wasn’t just that I was a tomboy and they were much more girl-identified. It was simply as though they were in a dimension that I couldn’t enter—and that I would never enter.

And it’s true. I’ve never really entered that dimension. That’s not a bad thing, by any means. It’s just a fact.

At summer camp, I don’t remember anyone being unkind or unfriendly to me. No one bullied me there, ever. In fact, I have a picture of my group, and I am smiling quite happily. It’s clear that I felt very safe and strong there. I remember that summer with a lot of fondness, because I had tons of fun. Feeling like the baby of the group was not a liability. It was simply something I experienced, along with swimming, archery, dressing up for costume parades, and singing in the daily all-camp talent show. I was still a kid, so not keeping up with the other kids didn’t particularly concern me yet. I noticed it, and I wondered about it, but that was all. I was still content in my own little world.

Then there was high school, and the feeling of neutrality wore off. As an adolescent, I got the feeling that I was growing younger while other people were growing older, and it upset me. To this day, I’m not sure how to define this feeling. I wouldn’t say I was perpetually immature. In many ways, I was more mature and more serious than my peers. I was dealing with a world of pain at home, I was surviving it with great resourcefulness, and I was continuing to function relatively well. If there is a word to describe how I felt inside, I think the closest word would be childlike. I was always childlike, always gullible, always without guile, and never able to really understand the kinds of games that people seemed to find necessary. I watched it all as though it were a movie and there were no part written for me to play. After awhile, I got tired of just observing. I started taking on the personae of other people and tried to play along as well as I could. But it wasn’t like having a part of my own. In fact, it wasn’t much fun at all.

I’ve grown up a lot since then. I’m a wife, a mom, a professional writer. And I’m less gullible now. I’ve lived and learned many thousands of times over. Of course, I still tend to believe the words that people say (because, after all, why in God’s name wouldn’t they say what they mean), but I am learning to wait for follow-through and not get all excited just because people say the right words. Well, okay, I do get all excited when people say the right words, but I’ve come to realize that words are not enough. I watched too many people throw them away like used-up Styrofoam cups. It’s a sacrilege, if you ask me.

But despite all this growth, all my realizations, all my experiences, I still see the world through the eyes of a child.

It’s who I am, and when I’m not feeling apologetic about it, I like it. A lot.

This childlike quality may account for why I miss the past so desperately. There is a part of me that has never really left childhood, or young adulthood, or any part of my past. It’s as though everyone I’ve ever known, all my life—my parents, my brother, my extended family, my ex-husband and his family–are all still right where I left them the last time I saw them. I know they aren’t. I know that time moves on and that people move with it. But there is a part of me that still looks at photographs of my childhood home and thinks that if I could just open that screen door at the top of the front steps, my brother will be right there ready to play, and my mother will be having coffee, and my father will be watching television downstairs. I really believe that it’s all still there, and that I’m still there. And then, I’m shocked when I find myself unable to get back there.

The mystics say that from the point of view of the Eternal, there is no past, present, and future, and that everything coexists simultaneously. To human beings, living in time and space, everything seems to pass in a linear fashion, and yet, I can’t help but feel that it really doesn’t. Perhaps this is a spiritual gift that autism has given me. I have to stand apart from a world in which people mature in a linear fashion because I’ve matured in a completely different fashion. And by standing apart, I’m able to see through the eyes of a child newly arrived on the earth—a child who knows that she has always existed even as she knows that there was a time before she was ever born.

© 2010 by Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg