Tumblr as therapy journal personal post again. Completely unedited. Posted far more to make myself feel better, than for anyone else's benefit.
A couple of weeks ago, one of my coworkers came to me to talk about her son. I think I wrote a bit about her on here before – she works with me where we help the special needs kids in a school. She also has a son who’s autistic, in a different school. Her son is… I know functioning labels are problematic, but sometimes they’re useful. Her son is higher functioning than the students we work in our jobs (one of my students is nonverbal and not toilet trained and has a severe intellectual disability, and functioning labels have problems but it can be useful to have a term to differentiate someone like her from someone like me, in contexts where it’s relevant), lower functioning than I am currently, but very similar, in terms of overall functioning, to where I was at his age. For whatever those terms mean, I was much lower functioning, compared to other typical people my age, as a kid than I am as an adult.
I remember feeling that, when I was young. The last few years of elementary school, all three years of middle school, and the first bit of high school were the worst. Those were the years after I got old enough so that social hierarchies had started to develop among my peers, but it was before I started to get out of my own head and make friends.
There were seven or so years in the middle there that were fucking awful. I had no friends, but it was more than that. I had no ability to communicate with people. I spent years and years convinced that anything I might say, anything I might do, would be an horrible violation of some written or unwritten rule. I thought of the world as an obstacle course with hurdles that everyone could see but me; I just had to tiptoe around an hope I wouldn’t hit any. And I know that’s not an uncommon feeling, especially among pre-teen kids, that I’m the only person who never received an instruction manual for life. But not everyone has their parents taking them to doctors because the teacher called them to say she regularly goes entire school days without speaking to another human (even when the teacher asks her a question and she just stares in silence until the teacher moves on), but she will just wander around the schoolyard alone, muttering to herself under her breath and waving her hands around until the bell rings. Just as an example. That’s just one example that I once found in a document on my mother’s computer, of notes she’d made from a phone call with my school. I’d not realized, until seeing those notes, that people had noticed when I did this. I’d thought I’d somehow made myself invisible.
I got better, as I got older, at being invisible. By grade seven I’d figured out how to avoid the school yard entirely, and I hid in the locker area for all of recess. This was obviously against the rules, one kid staying inside by herself without supervision, and now that I work in a school, quite a bit of my job is ensuring that no student slips through the cracks in supervision. But I’m always a hypocrite when I get kids in trouble for that, because when I was twelve years old, I had incredibly elaborate plans, all recorded in my notebooks, about where the exits to the locker area were, what escape route to take if someone came in through any entrance, where to go hide on the lower level until the coast was clear. I also, as I recall, filled notebooks with stats on the number of tiles on the locker area’s ceiling, the patterns of squares on the floor, the number of lockers in each row, the types of locks on them.
Looking back, I think there’s a decent chance the teachers knew I was hiding in there, and just let me stay because there were enough adults in the area for it to be safe, and it was easier than fighting with me. I remember thinking, at the time, that I was doing a great job of fooling all the school staff into believing I was a normal, functioning person. Until I found the folder on my mom’s computer with all the notes she kept for my doctors, and it was clear that everyone was tracking whatever the hell was going on with me. There’s an irony there, maybe. As a kid, I felt like I was scientist, here to observe this complex and inscrutable world, to crack the code of social fabric and understand all those rules that were obvious to everyone else yet hidden from me. I was taking careful notes on everything from what people wore (so I could know how to dress like a normal person – though I never actually wore anything but oversized jeans and t-shirts), to what people said (I had pages and pages of exact words of other people’s conversations), to the number of lockers in a room. Anything could be important, I thought. I was so naturally far behind everyone else in terms of understanding the world, I had to be strategic and tactical in order to keep up. That folder on my mother’s computer (that I definitely wasn’t supposed to open, but I did as part of my childhood obsession with gathering every scrap of information I could find) also contained a letter she’d written to her parents, in which she said “I think [my name] thinks the whole world is a science experiment created just for her.”
In reality, obviously, while I thought I was an invisible background observer, there were teachers and parents and school psychologists and non-school psychologists and guidance counselors all observing me and trying to figure out why I didn’t just tell anyone what was going on with me. Not knowing that I couldn’t tell them this, because that might be breaking a social rule. I couldn’t start socializing until I’d gathered every piece of information in the world, and put them all together so I could read their message and understand how to do it without fucking up.
A few years ago, I was going through stuff in my parents’ basement, and I found several old folders of documents from my middle schools years, when I was seeing all these doctors (I got diagnosed with anxiety at age 7, OCD at 11, and finally autism at 14). There was one report by a school psychologist that reported that I was borderline unresponsive when he interviewed me, but when he asked me if I was happy, I said yes. When asked if I had friends, I said yes, despite the fact that all observations from parents and teachers said otherwise. He wrote that there might be an intellectual delay, because I seemed completely unaware that there was a problem, or of why he wanted to see me.
That made me furious, when I read it as an adult. Because I remember that interview. I was 13 years old, I’d just started high school, I got called into the school psychologist’s office. I remember feeling like I was under attack, and in my head, that was very literal. I used to have this elaborate metaphor that I’d use in my mind at times like that, where I’d feel like someone was trying to batter down my defences, to… I can’t articulate what I thought the goal of their attack was, and I don’t think I understood it at the time. I just knew that I spent all this time desperately trying to pretend to be a normal person, and this guy was throwing grenades against the fortress that I used to hide my lack of normalcy, and I had to lock down and close my eyes and get through while sustaining as little damage as possible. I realize this metaphor sounds melodramatic, but that’s the exact way I thought about it at the time, and I was thirteen years old. A highly dramatic age.
Looking back, I know I can’t have been that good at lying to the school psychologist. I was a thirteen-year-old who managed to mutter the word “yes” when asked if I was happy and refused to say anything else for the whole meeting. I realize that it’s unfair and passive-aggressive if you say “I’m okay” when you’re not really okay, and you expect people to read your mind, realize that you’re not really okay. But I think it’s fair to expect some amount of that if you’re only 13, and you’re talking to a professional psychologist. Surely he could have done a little mind-reading, not just taken a child’s “yes I’m fine” at face value. Concluded that I’m hiding something, rather than concluding that I was too stupid to know I had a problem.
Anyway. What was I talking about, again? Oh yeah, my coworker and her autistic son. She came to me, two weeks ago, and told me that she’d had a call from his school about disturbing comment he’d made, that he was depressed and not functioning well. He didn’t have friends, he always seemed so deep in his head that no one could reach him. When confronted by teachers, he’d shut down, and when pressed, he said that he’s an introvert and no one likes introverts and he’s autistic and there’s a stigma about that, and because of that, no one will ever like him. That’s when they called his mom.
She told me this, and said I’m more experienced in the field of autism support than she is, and I’ve got a university education in the field that she doesn’t, and she wanted my opinion, as a professional, on what to do here. I struggled to answer because I was struggling not to cry, and told her that obviously I can’t give professional advice on the case of a kid I’ve never met. She asked what my advice would be as a friend, and I got choked up and said I chose a career this field because I never want to leave a kid alone in that situation, and I wish I had the magic formula to solve it.
That is why I chose this job. I remember being twelve years old, filling my notebooks with information about the social world and theories about how I could enter it, and telling myself that if I ever did break into that world, I’d come back for everyone else who was stuck on their own the way I’d been. Because one thing I could see was that if someone was starting from being “part of the real world”, they could reach me far more easily than I could reach them. When a kid who had friends showed me a small act of kindness (like agreeing to work with me on a class project because I was the only person with no partner, even though I knew it was always out of pity because they wanted to work with their own friends), that made me unbelievably happy for ages; the effect on me was greater than the effort it took them. So, I reasoned, if I had the power of being a real and functioning person, I could go around putting in that effort and having disproportionate positive effects. I’d find every lonely kid on playgrounds and save them.
And I have helped a lot of kids – some in my current job and my previous jobs in disability support, though I know that by far the greatest difference I’ve made was in my years as a coach. I’ve made a difference for many people and I’m proud of that. But I’ve also gotten emotionally invested in a lot of people whom I’ve completely failed to save, and I’ve never learned how to be okay with that.
I didn’t know what to tell my coworker about her son. I wanted to sit him down and tell him how the world works, that he’s allowed in it, that I know when you’re twelve years old the social hierarchies of your classroom seem like the most important thing, but it’s okay and people will love you. But I don’t know this kid, and I can’t save him just by giving his mother advice.
I’ve told my coworker before that I’ve got an autism diagnosis (one when I was 14, and I got an adult one last year at age 34), and when she asked me about her son, I told her that I was in a similar situation at his age, and I did eventually grow up and figure things out, and I believe her son is capable of that too. She asked me how I grew through that, and I told her that honestly, I got into high school and joined a wrestling team. That’s what turned my entire life around – not that that specific solution is likely to be right for her son, but maybe he needs to find something like that, something he’s passionate about.
She asked me why this helped, and I thought about that for a bit, and then articulated things I hadn’t put into words for many years, if ever, about why the wrestling team was what I needed. I said that when I was in class, I felt like I was a different species from my peers, so different that I had to study them like Jane Goodall (except that I think I’m the gorilla in this analogy). I had to shut myself down so that I’d never say anything out of line, never do anything out of line. I was constantly aware of a hundred social rules that I had to actively struggle to follow, a hundred more than I had no hope of following so I just actively broke them and felt constant shame about that, and a thousand additional rules where I didn’t even know what they were, but I knew they existed and I knew I was probably breaking them.
At wrestling practice, none of this mattered. There were no social rules, because nothing we’re doing makes sense. No one has to be quiet or small or still. Pacing back and forth a lot and muttering under your breath is, like, the least weird thing anyone in the room is doing at a given time. Everyone looks weird, because we’re wearing sweaty gym clothes and rolling around a mat in each other’s sweat. The first goal is always what is the most practical way to score a point, and no one cares how you look when you do it. No one cares if you do it with enough social graces, if you’re dressed properly, if you’re making a normal facial expression, if you say the right thing in the right tone at the right volume. No one cares if you’re a boy or a girl – we all train together. No one cares about the social rules because we’re all breaking them just by being there. In the real world, you’re not supposed to do any of the things we do at wrestling practice.
That was a big part of it, but there’s also the physical aspect. I told my co-worker that we can see it in the kids we work with at our school, the autistic kids (mainly low-functioning kids – lower functioning that I was, even at age 12). Look how much they love have physical pressure on them, how they will grab hold of the play structure and pull back against it, how they’ll press into us and manoeuvre so we’re pressing them back. The actual sport of wrestling is propriosensory heaven for an autistic kid who craves that push-pull. I sleep with a weighted blanket because I can’t relax without something borderline crushing me.
This is why autistic kids (and adults) often love wrestling, it’s also why we’re often naturally good at it. I was a natural at it when I first started, and it was the first time I’d ever been a natural at anything. The first time I’d been good at anything. In my classes, I barely got by, academically. In gym class, I was always last. The slowest runner, the worst player, no hand-eye coordination. My mom put me in some team sports when I was a kid, I was awful at them. And socially, I felt like I was years behind my peers. I always had this sense that I could never compete (figuratively) successfully at anything, if I were placed on a level playing field with other kids my own age. This was true in sports, but also, all my peers were competing for friends (because the middle school playground is a fucking battleground), and I had no shot.
At wrestling, I was good! I was actually better than some other kids, even kids my own age and my own size, even on a figuratively level playing field. My first wrestling tournament was in December 2004, when I’d just started grade 9. I was in the novice division, only for kids who were in their first year in the sport. There were seven girls in my category, I had three matches, I won them all and had a gold medal. I remember physically vibrating from how utterly surreal it felt, when they gave me my medal. Feeling lightheaded and like I wasn’t really there, because this couldn’t happen, because I couldn’t be as good as someone else.
And then my life turned around. I made friends on the team, because I didn’t have to be scared of them, because I could hang out with these people as equals, as though we were all human being who were made of the same type of stuff. I made friends at school too, but only because the team changed my perspective on the nature of who I was. And eventually, I grew out of it. “It” in this instance is obviously not autism – I checked last year with an adult assessment, and I’ve still got that. But I grew out of believing I could never be a real person.
I didn’t explain all of this to my coworker, but I explained a bunch of it. She told me she wants to bring him out to a practice. I said – that’s not what I meant, it won’t work exactly the same way for everyone, I just meant that he should find something like that. She had me send her my team’s website, and said she’d show it to her son. A few days later, she told me he’d looked at it, he liked the look of it, he wanted to try it.
What I didn’t tell my coworker is that I quit that team several years ago. That sport was the main thing in my life from age 14 to age 30, as a competitive athlete and then coach, and I held onto it for the first couple of years of my 30s, as COVID shut down the world and everyone’s perspective changed. In 2023, I slowly, painfully, let go of it. I did this for many reasons, as the larger sport has so many fucked up things in a toxic culture that I’d almost forgotten the beautiful reasons I’d started it, I’d got sick of banging my head against the wall of bullshit, I decided it was time to move on.
I’d love to say I’m at peace with that decision, several years later, but of course I’m not, I’ve got a lot of complicated feelings about it still. And yet, I had to meet this kid. So I told her that if she brought him out on Saturday morning, I’d come that practice and help him out.
I did. I showed up to a practice for the first time in 3 years, I was so nervous, it felt so weird. I was scared that it would feel utterly alien after so long, and it did a bit, at first. But there were familiar touchstones, like the smell of the latex in the mats, and the way the push-pull feels when I got into it. The kid showed up, and he was nervous too, he told me he doesn’t do this sport. I told him I’ll help him. I showed him some moves. He was absolutely a natural. Much, much better than most kids are on their first day – he just had the right instincts, moved the right way, did good things even when I didn’t show him.
By the end of practice, he was jumping up and down with excitement about how much fun it was and how pleased he was that he was good at this. He asked me, “When can I come back?” I told him he should come back soon. A few days later, my coworker told me that he’d asked, “When can I see [my name] again?” She asked who he meant, as he doesn’t know anyone by that name. He said, “You know, your friend. The one you work with. When can I see her and go back to the practice?”
I’m not sure what the point of this post was, except that I’ve been on a waiting list for therapy for a couple of months now and haven’t got off that list, and this blog is basically my adult version of those notebooks I used to keep as a kid, and I have many feelings about this that I wanted to write down. It was good to be back. I’m not going to rejoin the sport as the main thing in my life the way it used to be – I couldn’t do that even if I wanted to, as I’m about to leave the country this summer, to a country where wrestling barely exists. But it made me feel many things to be able to go back and remember why I started. And maybe imagine, at some point, healing my very tumultuous relationship with the sport that did save my life once.
Anyway, that was just me using this comedy blog as therapy/a journal; regularly scheduled on-theme posts shall resume shortly. I’ll watch that new Sam Campbell TV thing soon, I’m sure I’ll have shit to say about that.
