It would be years before I would come to realize I did, and thought, many, many things that others apparently did not. When I was in high school, I was only beginning to see how peculiar my world was — not wrong or embarrassing or unessential — just peculiar and different. I was okay with that, then. I never minded standing aloof or apart from the crowd. I never felt lonely. My friends never pushed me aside, or forgot me, or kept themselves from me. People went about their business taking most things in stride.
My teenage memories are stuffed with good times and good people. Even when I start to remember something raw and ugly that might have tried to ravish me then, I am able to toss it off as a bad memory that had little effect on me. The experiences I had in high school prepared me for a bright future, for they gave me strength and insight and confidence to look at myself as an individual and not a parallel image. The only thing my close community of friends and teachers and counselors and mentors did not give me, the only thing they could not give me, was protection from the chill that would nearly undo me when I left them all behind.
3
Losing My Way
I do not want to write this chapter. It is uncomfortable for me to think back on my late teens and early twenties. Hindsight has taught me a few things about those years but it has not taken away the bad memories or the deep embarrassment.
The future is often blinding for eighteen-year-olds, blinding with unending brightness and possibility or blinding with a potential to scorch and burn. Which experience is met depends not just on the abilities or potential of the young person but so very much on the support friends, family members, guidance counselors, mentors, employers and continuing education specialists legitimately offer. This is especially true for those with any special need, even those whose needs are often invisible to the unknowing observer. In my case, I seemed destined for a future that was as bright as a star. My academic grades and high IQ scores put me on a college and graduate school course early in my high school years and by most standardized measures, there seemed to be no reason to suspect I could not handle the demands those goals would place on me. By the time I was ready to enter college, I had received an academic scholarship, admittance into every school I applied to and acceptance into every program I wanted to explore. Objectively speaking, there was no reason for anyone to suspect I needed special counseling or special tutoring or mentoring. I did not seem to need anything more than the typical college freshman needed — a stack of textbooks, a rigorous academic schedule and a dorm room to call home.
Appearances can be deceiving. Somewhere along the line, I became convinced that only large universities were worthwhile. In fact I was so convinced, I gave up the academic scholarship I had been offered by an excellent small private school and enrolled in my state’s major university instead.
This was my first mistake. The confusing, rambling, crowded and expansive campus assaulted my limited sense of direction, making it extremely difficult for me to find my way — literally and figuratively — around campus. I remember leaving a class totally unable to discern which way I needed to go in order to follow the most direct path to my next class. The crowds of students would fill the doorways and the halls, giving me little time to grab hold of my thoughts so that usually I would just follow the wave of students out of the buildings, as if I knew where I was going.
Once the crowd thinned, I would try to get my bearings. I would look for big landmarks like statues or unique pieces of architecture and then plot a visual map anchored by those sites. For example, I knew that when I left the building my Shakespeare class was in, I would come to either a fountain, a street or a parking lot. From there, I could stop and decide which direction I needed to go to make it to my speech communications class which was across the street and through the quadrangle. So, if I found I exited the building near the fountain, I would turn right and there would be the street, but if I had exited by the parking lot, I would turn left and then find the street. After that, I knew to follow the sidewalk toward the downtown area until I came to a set of stairs on the left which led me to the backdoor of the building I needed.
Once inside the buildings, I had a heck of a time finding my way around. Normally I had to rely on trial and error unless the interiors had their own landmarks — art work, display cases, unusual paint scheme — I could use as visual cues. Most of them did not, relying instead on the same plain beige walls dotted here and there by identical looking bulletin boards that did nothing to help me out. I would know enough to understand which floor I needed to be on, but once on that floor, I would have to wander up and down the halls until I found my room by the number etched above the frame of the door. This normally meant that by the time I found my class, I would be at least ten to fifteen minutes late, wet with nervous sweat and anxious from bone to bone. At first I would attend the class even though I was arriving so late. But I soon found it very uncomfortable to walk into a room in the middle of a professor’s lecture. I knew it was rude, I knew the professor thought it was rude and, worst of all, it made me feel hopelessly feeble minded. Sometimes, I would just sit in the hallways outside the class trying to listen in through the closed door. It was not long before I quit going to any class that I could not find within the ten minute period we had between the end of one class and the beginning of another.
I was aware I should have been attending every minute of my classes and yet, for one reason or another I did not. Though I was not to know it then, it seems obvious to me now that it was my AS behaviors which kept me from simple accomplishments like finding a classroom or sitting through a lecture. I was not simply a young college student interested in going through life at a casual pace without regards to outcomes and consequences. I think the person I used to be was unwittingly caught in a game of cat and mouse with AS. I was the scared mouse and my AS the unpredictable cat that would jump out at me when I least expected it and chase away any rational thought I might have been capable of. Time after time, I acted without giving one thought to the aftermath. I completely quit my biology class at mid-term, without one thought to the low grade I would surely get, the moment my professor set a formaldehyde soaked fetal pig in front me, because I could not tolerate the intensely invasive smell. I only sporadically attended my college algebra class, again without concern for my grade, because the instructor’s voice aggravated me beyond my limits. And I dropped out of one of my favorite dramatic arts classes because the room we met in was dark, musty, windowless and creepy — the kind of room that begs to be filled with old boxes of discards, not young students.