Perhaps it’s because I know that feeling too well. The extreme isolation. The inability to connect with peers. The moment when you push the world away, accepting that it will never accept you. The crushing sadness that comes when you want to give up and you hang your head because it seems nothing you do will ever matter, ever make a difference. 

I frequently wrote in mirror images. I didn’t do it to be defiant. In fact, I have no memory of it being a conscious act at all. It’s simply the way my brain works. I set the words down on paper as instructed, but when my dad checked my homework at night it often made him apoplectic.

The publishing world is not kind or accommodating to people like me, people on the spectrum who struggle to navigate the neurotypical world and form meaningful connections with others.

Ever since I can remember, I have disliked  comedy. Maybe ‘dislike’ is too strong of a word. Perhaps ‘indifferent’ is better.  I find movies that are categorized as comedy either boring or frustrating because I perceive them too literally and the plots tend to irritate me. Stand up comedians make me feel as if I am lost in a crowd, trapped in a maze designed by the chaos of words that confound me.

I am part of a lost generation of autistic women, girls who never really fit in socially but functioned well enough in school to be overlooked. Girls who could perform academically, even if they struggled to make friends. Girls who were labeled as being shy because making eye contact and conversations were difficult.

Why am I bold and brazen when it comes to embracing one identity, but sheepish and borderline embarrassed when it comes to the other?

I didn’t want to be seen. I didn’t want to be noticed. If I could have made myself invisible I would have—I still would—because it’s the act of being seen that made me self conscious. A byproduct of being noticed was that I couldn’t just be. Others observed my awkwardness, my mistakes, my differences, and they commented on them.

I stepped away from my original lesson plan and invited my students into my very messy, confused, neurodivergent brain. I may have multiple graduate degrees, a book to my name, and an unquenchable desire to read, but that doesn’t mean reading is easy. I still struggle.