Last weekend, I attended my 25th high school reunion, held at a restaurant in my hometown.
I heard from my classmates about teachers of ours who have passed, I learned that I am not the only one who remembers the "Garbage Song" from our Earth Day assembly in sixth grade, and in a moment rife with mixed emotions (which I also mentioned in a previous post), I saw my former best friend for the first time in twelve years.
But what moved me more than anything else was talking to one of my classmates about her autistic daughter.
At the start of our conversation, she was describing some of her daughter's sensory challenges, and I asked, "Is she on the spectrum?"
To which the answer was a nonchalant, "Yes."
It was both the immediacy and the openness of that response that nearly brought me to my knees. It was the understanding with which my classmate spoke, as if autism was simply a recognized, accepted part of who her daughter is--without apology, without explanation.
And as she talked about the supports her daughter uses to manage those sensory needs, I could feel a pain in my chest. A sadness, a grief, the relief of magenta-soaked gauze for 10, 11, 12-year-old and all the teens me. A girl who went to bed every night of high school hoping to wake up as someone else, or not at all. Who remembers one of her recently deceased teachers staring down at her halfway through failing eleventh grade Chem class and coldly muttering, "Leave and don't come back."
Whatever it was that held on, whatever gave my autistic hands fine motor coordination enough to cling to those tenuous threads of life, sustained me. Let me live long enough to sit in that teal-cushioned alcove on a Saturday night and hear this woman say the word "autism" with shape and definition. With meaning. With purpose.
I wanted to tell my classmate that our whole conversation felt like the embrace that my neurodivergent teenage self always wanted, long arms around my shoulders, the unmistakable creak of bones under the weight of being seen. I wanted to tell her what a gift it is that she is now doing this for her own child, and that she is the best mother that her daughter could possibly have.
As I've processed our conversation over the last week, I have wanted to cry for the young girl I was. For the sorrow of the past, the clarity of the present, and the promise of the future. Tears change meaning as the hands on a clock, ticking, ticking, ticking away from one place and steadily ahead to another. Slouching not toward Bethlehem or Shangri-La but instead an imperfectly perfect world where every autistic person can be accepted, loved, heard, and seen.
Where one day it won't feel strange to wear ill-fitting yet undeniably cute red heels and sit and drink and laugh with familiar strangers 25 years after graduating in the same class.
A high school reunion is so many things. Seeing the newest versions of once recognizable faces, retracing memories shared and unshared alike. And having a conversation with my classmate on a topic so well-worn and yet entirely new at the same time that didn't just reunite the two of us.
It reunited me with a still-healing part of myself.
