When I was a young boy. No, we’re not doing MCR lyrics. When I was a lad, I was obsessed with Pokémon. I’m sure I was far from the only one, as it was a big craze at the time that never fully went away for many of us. But unfortunately for child me, I wasn’t allowed to play many games, and something as addictive as Pokémon was definitely off the menu. So what I did instead was create my own game with pen and paper. I’d build systems for what the chances were to find certain Pokémon, what it would take for them to level up and how battles and stats would play out. None of it was balanced of course, I was like 10 years old and even dumber than I am now, but I had a ton of fun designing all of it. I would have pages and pages of notes with recorded battles, rulesets and even my progress. I played this with a friend of mine who – if memory serves – would often get bored of it far quicker than I would.
When I was at home and didn’t have any friends over – surprisingly I had some pretty good friends when I was still a child, things didn’t start to go poorly for me until I was in my early teens – I would design my own boardgame relays. I would take several different board games and once you completed one of them, you would continue to the next one. I would of course play all of the turns myself. Surprisingly, I didn’t imagine any of them to be imaginary friends, I was content just acknowledging that I was playing all four “players” myself, but I would often pick one that I was secretly rooting for to give the game some tension. I was essentially playing against bots.
When I used to play with lego in the attic – we had a large closet in the attic and a slanted roof which made for the perfect corner for me to hide away in with my lego sets and just sprawl it over the floor with no regard for anyone else – I would often just do the same thing. I would build a house and then designate one of the rooms for storage. In this room I would meticulously store and organize all of the treasure – whichever blocks or smaller objects I thought looked nice – before hiding it away so none of the lego characters could get to it. I would inevitably get bored and play with the basketball lego set I had. Good times.
When I used to read books – and to an extent I still do this, but it feels more normal as an adult – I would make detailed lists of the series I wanted to read. I would go to the library to research which series there were, how many books there were in the series and then write down if the library had them or not and if I’ve read them yet. I would compile all of this information in a word document on a floppy disk. Yes, I’m old enough to have used those and I wonder if I were to bring one to work, the kids would still know what it was or just call it the “save icon”. Some of my favorite things to do were organizing all of that information.
So when I say that there were signs, I’m of course talking about autism. I didn’t get my autism diagnosis until I was 19 years old and I think there were two main reasons for this. The first one is the pushback I got from my childhood psychologist. My aunt knew a lot about mental health issues – at least for what people tended to know in the late 90s / early 2000s – so she rather early on told my mother that it might not be a bad idea to look into autism for me. A lot of my behavioral patterns fit with what was known about it at the time and my lack of social skills certainly made a good case for it too. Unfortunately for all of us, the psychologist I got at the time deemed me “not autistic, but just a little bit different”. My distrusting theory to this day is that she knew that an autism diagnosis would send me on to a specialist and lose her a client, but maybe that’s just me being bitter.
I think the second reason it took so long for me to get a diagnosis is the fact that I learned to be very good at masking. Obviously we now know that masking can be quite unhealthy for people since it takes a ton of energy out of us. For those who don’t know, masking is essentially the changing of your own behavior to fit the societal norms and fit in with the people around you. This does not address or solve any of the issues that people with autism might have but instead teaches them to just work really hard to conform and pretend they’re not uncomfortable doing so. It can lead to panic attacks and burnout if you’re not careful about it. I was really good at masking and really bad at understanding how much all of it was taking out of me. Thus I got to end up at home, depressed, suicidal, unemployed, no school, no future, no bitches. Okay maybe not that last one, I was surprisingly popular with girls when I was younger. Not that I had any idea how to behave once I got a girlfriend and these relationships would often not last very long, but it does give me some solace to know that the fact that I have been single for a long time is ultimately an active choice I’m making and not a lack of charisma. I’m not super harsh on myself these days and I am well aware that I’m an average looking lad with an acceptable personality. I’m really losing track of what I was talking about just to defend myself, this is kind of sad. But that dark period in my life ended up lasting quite long. Getting a diagnosis helped me slowly get onto the right path but as we talked about earlier this week, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy wasn’t nearly as effective as we had hoped.
In conclusion, I see a lot of children come into the school system where there are very clear signs that they don’t 100% fit the norm of our society. Obviously there is nothing wrong with that and if their different personality doesn’t hinder them in any way then why bother talking about it. But we also see a lot of children who struggle in the school system, can’t make friends as easily or don’t understand social norms in the way other people do. That doesn’t mean we should instantly put a label on them and lock them in a box, but I think it would be good if we continue to be open and accepting as a society, and try to help people get the necessary skill set to continue to be themselves, but do this in a way where they aren’t going against the grain so much that it ends up hurting them. I hope I’m not saying this in an insensitive way, but as an example, I constantly sing at home where I can fully take my mask off. If I were to do this at work, people would – understandably – hate it. It’s annoying when someone’s singing randomly and I wasn’t exactly a good singer. I had a kid last year who used to sing from time to time in the middle of class, almost as a way to find connection with the kids around him and it was not working. I felt bad for the kid, but what he was doing also wasn’t harmful for anyone but himself. At best it was annoying and although you shouldn’t be ashamed of the things you enjoy doing, and you definitely shouldn’t hide away your personality just to fit in, if you’re finding trouble connecting with your peers – and you do want to connect with your peers – then maybe it wouldn’t hurt to talk to someone who can help you find a middle ground between who you are on the inside and which parts of that you share with the people around you. I know I would have loved to have that skillset when I was younger, despite how much energy it sometimes costs. Until we have a society where everyone’s strange behavior is completely accepted, it’s healthiest for those of us who don’t always fit in to be aware of this and decide for ourselves how much we want to show the world and how much we keep to ourselves. Thanks for reading!
