Many autistic people don’t go through infantile amnesia the same way their neurotypical peers do. I have many very early childhood memories. I think the earliest one I can vividly recall is being bathed in our kitchen sink. I can remember the difference in temperature between the part of my body that was in the warm water and the part that was not. There was a small container hung on a nail that usually contained books of matches, but my mom had emptied it and let me play with it in the water. When I looked up, I could see the bare fluorescent light that you normally couldn’t see from the other side of the woodworking that spanned above the sink. It’s a calm memory except for the flickering of the fluorescent light. I confirmed it was an accurate recollection with my mom.

I remember playing with our first dog outside on a hill, wearing diapers and still not great at the whole upright thing. The dog moved in close to me and just gently tapped me with its nose, causing me to fall backwards onto my diapered butt. Don’t ask me why I still remember that. Then there was the time I was trapped in a car seat at a family holiday. My jokester uncle was blowing raspberries on my stomach. I hadn’t started talking yet, but I remember screaming in my head, trying to get him to stop because it tickled so much. In that memory, I can describe the general layout of the relative’s house who invited us over, even though they remodeled the house when I was young and it was quite different.

Getting up to a more normal timeline of memories, I remember the first few days of starting kindergarten. I was terrified. I didn’t understand why things were changing, and I just wanted to go back to my room and my things and my mom. My mom told me how hard it was to drop me off at school at first, and I remember that I could tell the other kids seemed much more okay with our plight than I did. To this day, I still struggle with being comfortable outside the safe zone of my own room. I never went to camp as a kid and I called my mom to pick me up from more than one sleepover at a friend’s place because I would get homesick close to bedtime.

In school, I did well. I wasn’t overly late to start verbalizing and I loved to read and the school part of school came naturally to me. The socializing part did not, but I was somehow making it work. I had a vivid imagination and I would invent worlds and characters that me and other kids could play in. That even helped me develop some friendships, and I was lucky I gravitated toward kids who happened to be just a little more like me.

I could definitely tell something about me was different, though. I had a hard time socializing with kids my age, and found it easier to talk to adults or much older kids. After school, I would hang out with a couple of boys who were much older than me, playing video games and dreaming up treehouses to build. At school I found myself mostly hanging out with girls who seemed to be nicer and more willing to play pretend with me. I got really into writing and would often wish I could skip recess and just talk to my teacher about my writing portfolio, but I never got up the courage because I didn’t know if the teacher would think it was weird or not.

When I switched schools in second grade, I remember being terrified of having to talk to a bunch of people I didn’t know. The first day at my new school started with all the kids gathering in the gym. There were no bleachers to sit on or any real structure I remember that first day. I just remember feeling overwhelmed but having a script. I went up to anyone I noticed might look somewhat friendly and repeated the same line to each one. “Hi. I’m the new kid here. Do you want to be friends?” It was definitely something more in place in a sitcom than real life, but it was what I had rehearsed and I thankfully didn’t realize how odd I seemed to most of them. I remember a lot of strange looks. No one took me up on my offer that day.

I got a lot of my education about what was or was not weird behavior from sitcoms on TV. Shows like Step by Step, Family Matters, and Boy Meets World became my bible for how people were supposed to look and act. I would not only watch these shows, but STUDY them. I knew something was “strange” about me, so I wanted to do my best to blend in through what I learned from the silver screen. I would try to emulate the main characters who seemed to have success with their peers. I tried out some of the jokes, but my parents were less than impressed with that sitcom style of humor coming out of their son’s mouth toward them. I especially related to characters in shows who were adopted or an alien from outer space because I always felt that otherness myself and a yearning to understand where I came from better.

When we finally got a computer that connected to the World Wide Web, I was in the middle of grade school and felt more and more confused about existence and why I seemed different. I wanted people to like me, and I wanted to be doing the “correct” things, but I could tell that some of the things I did seemed to annoy others and I didn’t know why. I started researching how to be normal on my computer and any book that might help at the school library (Although my favorite book there was one about gemstones that I constantly checked out). I’d look up things like “How to maintain eye contact” and “How to make friends” or “How to make small talk”. Of course, at the time, I thought everyone did this or already learned this at some point, and for some reason, I had just missed the memo. There was a lot of feeling like I had missed the memo. So I would research it. Luckily human behavior was one of my special interests.

Applying what I learned, and kept on learning, allowed me to do well in school and always have at least a few friends. I started looking people in the eye. Well, not really, but I learned to focus on someone’s brow or other detail when I couldn’t do eyes. I couldn’t always tell why a joke was supposed to be funny, but I could tell if it was and when it was based on other people. That and laughter is contagious anyway, so it isn’t so hard to laugh when other people are. I researched how to be a good listener, which took a lot of practice but made a lot of the other social skills a lot easier once I learned how to listen better. And I even got really into face reading and studied the universal microexpressions that people make when they feel a certain way.

I was naturally quick, so I didn’t struggle with academics. In fact, the opposite was true in that I would often get quite bored. At one point, there was talk about moving me up a grade, but my mom was worried about that. I ended up being placed in a gifted and talented program that ran alongside my normal school week. We would do extra projects and talk about more advanced topics and were allowed to study the things we wanted. I was very into the Titanic for a while. I still have my binder that has all my findings about it.

So that’s kinda what I started thinking about my strangeness. I was just gifted and talented, and my quirks were just a result of my not knowing enough or maybe just a side effect of being so gifted. I still didn’t know so I still didn’t stop researching, but for the most part others considered this to be the solution. I used the information I was getting to mask any abnormal behaviors I could and kept sailing. Through middle school and into high school. At this point, my family got back into church, and I became very devoted to our non-denominational Christian faith. That’s a whole other buncha posts. I ultimately decided to homeschool myself for the last three years of my high school education.

After a gap year, I went to college at a nearby university (At this point no longer in church). I studied theatre, but I also never quit studying human behavior. I considered majoring in psychology. Looking back I probably should have haha. By now, I was much better at socializing and had gotten through the weird years of puberty when I had a lot to learn. I could make friends organically and rehearsed scripts were only for specifically stressful encounters. I was sometimes better with people than others because I had learned to read faces and was able to anticipate how others felt. My mask of normalcy felt very natural to me after all this time. I still didn’t get a lot of the jokes and was still much more interested in more esoteric subjects of conversation.

I had always had a special bond with my niece. She had a lot of difficulties at birth and I was there to help with her a lot when I was younger. The doctors also said that she was likely autistic I remembered, but nothing was really ever done about that for her; instead, they focused on the other health problems that were present. I became more and more curious about that as I got older, and in college I got my hands on a copy of Dr. Tony Atwell’s The Complete Guide to Asperger’s Syndrome. I wanted to see if there were signs she was autistic and how that might be affecting her since no one else had looked into it.

What I found ended up changing my life. Reading an early section on early childhood for high-functioning autism, I burst into tears. Every sentence was describing all the confusing nooks and crannies of my childhood. All the things I hadn’t understood and why. It talked about how I learned to socialize and make friends, how I performed at school, and what the world seemed like for me. Sensory processing issues explained so much! I had always felt so other and I was! Just not an alien or anything like that. I wasn’t crazy. My niece also had all the signs of someone with autism.

It would be another two or three years before I would be seen by a professional who agreed with my self-diagnosis. Now that I was more confident, it was around that time that I began to talk to my niece more about autism. There weren’t any resources for adults with autism where I lived at the time. At least none that I could find after a lot of digging. So I relied on my trusty research once again, along with my knack for putting it together, and kept finding out more and more about autism, and continued learning how to be better at socializing.

After college, I moved and was able to get more help through therapists, psychologists, and psychiatrists. I got used to hearing, “I really don’t think you have autism,” from a professional when meeting them for the first time. “Just give me a few minutes to explain,” I would say, and sure enough, they always come around. I have a lot of masking strategies that can cover up my autism even to those who are trained to spot it, and I daresay I’m far from alone. It’s something that happens when you’re diagnosed later in life and you’ve already learned to mask for so many years.

Since then, while it’s not always been easy, I’ve been able to get treatment. I found a good psychiatrist and now I’m on medication that helps me think more productively and helps regulate my mood so I don’t start to go into meltdown territory easily. I’m on other medication to help deal with anxiety and depression that arose over time, and that I’m having a really hard time shaking off. I see a therapist weekly or biweekly as I can, which really helps me keep perspective and reminds me how far I’ve come. I go to the gym. I still research all the time, although my interests have grown and my internet is much faster now than when I was a kid, which is certainly a boon. I could have looked up so much Titanic info with this speed back then.