Everyone Else is Doing This, Right? Right?!
No, actually, everyone was not, in fact, doing this.
I am, by most clinical measures, a functional adult. Well, to the general public. I think. I homeschool my children, I run a household (...debatable, now that I think about it…) and I maintain what I am told is a warm and engaging personality. What I have not previously disclosed is that I am currently hiding behind a tree at a homeschool co-op, and I have been here for eleven minutes, and I have no intention of leaving.
A while back, I was having a conversation with my daughter about someone (who someone is I definitely cannot remember, akin to how I can’t remember what I am doing while I am walking to do the thing, but I can detail a conversation from 1987), and I said “I think they might be on the spectrum”. To which my daughter informed me that apparently, this is a common assessment I generally make about many people. I just never did take the time to notice that maybe I fall into the same category. Which in my case means I spent forty-something years assuming everyone else was also doing all of the things that I obsessively do, and then one day I stumbled upon a high-masking autism with ADHD in women YouTube video, and felt very offended. I texted my husband the video without context. I think he felt a little nervous to respond. He finally did. “Um, this is you”. Yeah, it is. I don’t know if I felt vindicated or like never leaving the house again. Knowing me, probably both.
What I have spent the better part of four decades being is very, very good at seeming normal. So good, in fact, that I fooled everyone including myself. Or maybe everyone else caught on a long time ago and I finally caught up last year. Who knows. My entire personality, it turns out, is largely a sophisticated compensation system, a kind of internal customer service representative who intercepts my actual responses before they reach the public and replaces them with ones that won’t alarm anyone. She has been on shift since approximately 1983.
This self-recognition explained a great deal. The way I replay conversations from 2009 with the grim focus of a federal investigator. Not just what I said — though yes, I am still mortified, thank you — but what I should have said, what I could have said, what a normal person would have said, ranked and catalogued and occasionally rehearsed aloud in the shower in case the situation ever comes up again. Of course, while breaking out in Broadway fashion song.
This might explain the tree.
To an outside observer, a grown woman standing behind a large oak at my children’s homeschool co-op might appear to be having some kind of episode. I prefer to think of it as strategic positioning. The tree means I cannot be approached from behind. It also significantly reduces the angle from which I can be approached from the front, which means I have effectively reduced the probability of an unexpected social interaction by roughly sixty percent. Is this a perfect system? No. Is it better than standing in the open like some kind of social ambush victim? Absolutely yes.
I like people. I want friends. The kind of friend who has low expectations and doesn’t get offended if you forget her birthday for the umpteenth time and understands that if you don’t text back, it doesn’t mean I don’t love you. I have simply developed a nervous system that treats the approach of a friendly acquaintance with the same physiological urgency it reserves for, say, a car pulling out in front of me on the highway. The desire and the dread exist simultaneously, which means I spend a lot of time wanting connection very badly from a distance of approximately thirty feet, behind a tree, pretending to look at my phone. Kinda like when my husband says we have to go to an event and I changed outfits thirty times and say I am not going all the way up to the door, and then my real specialty kicks in: I morph into the social butterfly. Metamorphosis is apparently very exhausting. It takes me a week to recover.
Then there is the food situation, which is a whole situation.
For reasons I prefer not to examine too closely, I have to eat the same thing every day. Same meal, same time, same general arrangement on the plate. This is not a preference so much as a biological imperative. Variety is not the spice of life. Variety is a threat.
The system works beautifully until, somewhere around week six, my nervous system decides without warning that the food is now disgusting. Not merely unappealing. Disgusting. The smell. The texture. The very concept. I have looked a perfectly reasonable chicken breast in the eye and felt genuine betrayal. We had an arrangement. The audacity.
When this happens I switch to crackers and begin the process again.
I have, more than once, genuinely wished that someone would invent a complete daily nutrition capsule so that food as a category could simply be retired. One capsule. Full nutrition. No textures, no decision fatigue, no negotiation. This vision sustained me for several weeks until I remembered that I also cannot tolerate the sensation of swallowing capsules. I have googled, with complete sincerity, whether it is possible to survive without eating anything ever. The internet was not helpful. I have not forgiven it.
I should probably also mention the animals.
I cannot pass a stray without intervention. A dog loose on the side of the road is not someone else’s problem, it is a crisis requiring my immediate personal involvement and also probably a foster arrangement for the next six to eight weeks. I am aware this is a pattern. I have made my peace with it. What I have not made my peace with is the fact that I also genuinely, sincerely need a baby cow. I have needed one for some time. The case I have built for this is extensive and I feel it is largely airtight. My husband disagrees.
I also need chickens.
I do not particularly like chickens. They are, if I’m being honest, a little revolting — the feet, the jerky movements, the general air of barely-contained chaos. And yet. The need persists. This is, I recognize, not entirely rational. I have chosen to see it as evidence of a generous spirit rather than a consistency problem.
Speaking of patterns…
I see them everywhere. In the grain of a wooden table. In the structure of a conversation that doesn’t quite add up. In the organizational logic of a national scandal that everyone else seems to be treating as surprising. I am rarely surprised. I identified the shape of the thing a long time ago and have been waiting, with dwindling patience, for everyone else to catch up.
This extends to movies. I know the ending. I know the good guy is actually the bad guy. I know the twist, the betrayal, the reveal. I know it early, fifteen minutes in, sometimes less. And I spend the remaining hour and forty-five minutes watching everyone else process information I have already filed and cross-referenced. Movies are less “entertainment” for me and more “extended confirmation.” I do not say this to be insufferable. I say it because I spent decades assuming everyone else was seeing what I was seeing and simply being very polite about it.
Turns out, they weren’t seeing it. I find this quite disorienting.
Here is what I have come to understand, at forty-something, having spent most of my life performing normalcy with the commitment of a professional actress in a very long-running show: the quirks some call particular, a lot, or a whole thing — they are, most of them, just the human nervous system doing its best with varying degrees of factory calibration.
Some of us came with the sensitivity set higher. Some of us need the routine and the same lunch and the same socks and a tree with adequate coverage. Some of us are right now rehearsing a conversation from 2009 that we cannot let go of, because the nervous system filed it under unresolved and has not yet been persuaded to close the tab. Some of us have already solved the mystery, and we are sitting quietly in the theater, waiting for the credits, wondering why no one else seems to notice that it was obviously the business partner from the beginning.
We are simply running a slightly different operating system — one that comes with extraordinary features, a few significant known bugs, an urgent need for a baby cow, and chickens we didn’t ask for but apparently require.
I am doing just fine. Everything is fine.
The tree is very comfortable.