26: Does being autistic explain why I’m missing from my high school yearbook?
Revisiting my reunion with new context
In 2015, which in some ways feels like it was just yesterday, but which I’m shocked to contemplate was actually seven years ago, my wife and I I went to my 20 year high school reunion. I hadn’t been back to my hometown in more than a decade, and I hadn’t been in touch with almost anybody from high school since - well, since high school. It was a revelatory experience for me.
My memories of high school are clouded and selective. I was generally unhappy - intensely and deeply unhappy. I was constantly confused and perplexed by my peers, feeling inferior to them in so many ways, but eventually rejecting most of them as “stupid people” that I wanted nothing to do with (it was a coping mechanism, I believe, to handle the feelings of rejection I felt but didn’t acknowledge). At different points during the stretched out timescale of high school, when each year was a large percentage of the total life I had lived, and thus felt impossibly long, I appended myself to different groups of friends to avoid the stigma that came with being alone. There was the large group of girls from childhood. Then the drama kids, who were equally “out there” as I was, but who at least had each other. Then finally the punk rock kids, who felt authentic and kind to me in ways that I couldn’t comprehend (they tolerated my presence without argument most of the time).
At the reunion, I was happy and nostalgic to see several women from the “group of girls”, and there was one person from the punk rockers who was delightful to reconnect with. Most of the drama kids skipped the runion, but a couple of them made it and it was fun to see them. I was going back to this group as a fully formed person, who had learned how to communicate with others and build lasting relationships - a skill I lacked during high school.
There were many familiar faces, but many more unfamiliar ones. I met more people for the first time that night than I think I ever met during the four years I went to school with them. When I introduced my wife, I had to introduce myself as well. Over and over again I would say hello to someone who would ask, “You were in the class of 1995? Really?” Yes, I would say, really. I began to realize that almost all of the people I had memories of were actually people I knew before high school. They were my friends from elementary school, where I had been less alienated and insecure. I reconnected with some of these childhood friends and found myself asking in disbelief, “Wait, we were also in high school together?” I remembered so many people from fifth and sixth grade but had no recollection of them in high school whatsoever.
Somebody had a copy of the yearbook from our senior year, and they were asking if anyone wanted it. I recalled at that moment that I had never bought a yearbook. I said that I didn’t have one and people looked at me in disbelief. “Take it!” they said, handing it to me. I took it, gladly, happy to have the chance to discover this trove of memories for the first time. The reunion moved from the restaurant where it started to a festival down the road, to a bar in the fanciest hotel in town. We stayed out late, drinking and talking, laughing. I had a good time. I was there - fully participating with people I had only felt on the periphery of in my earlier life.
The next morning I woke up early and took my journal and the yearbook out to the garden of the hotel where we were staying. During my childhood, the building the hotel was in had been a senior living center. Before that, it was the town hospital. I was born there in 1976, just a couple years before the hospital moved to a larger, more modern facility on the edge of town. The idea that I was actually born in the hotel where I was now staying for my 20 year high school reunion was mind boggling to me. Another non-memory that I knew to be true but that I had no first hand experience of.
I flipped through the yearbook to find my picture. On the page with my name, amid rows of smiling, acneed faces with ‘90s hairstyles and lots of orthodontic devices, was an empty square where my face should have been. I flipped to the index and found my name. Other names had many page numbers listed next to them, but mine just had the one - indicating the page where my mugshot should have been but wasn’t.
A flood of emotions hit me as I sat on the garden bench. That familiar sense of rejection and exclusion. The feeling of not being wanted, of being on the outside, of being marginalized and unable to break through. All those terrible feelings of high school, that I had been happily suppressing the night before, came rushing back. At first I was upset. How could they exclude me from the yearbook? But as I sat and thought about it, more memories came. A slow realization and sense of acknowledgment came over me. It wasn’t that I had been excluded, or that the cool kids on the yearbook staff had maliciously deleted my picture. I wasn’t in the yearbook because I had meticulously and intentionally avoided it.
I didn’t show up for picture day. I ignored the letters in my locker asking me to submit a photo. I declined to participate in any group photos that might somehow find their way into the hands of the yearbook people, and I avoided any activities that would be spotlighted on the yearbook pages. I wasn’t a member of any clubs, I didn’t play any sports, I didn’t go to any school events - in high school I avoided everything and everyone as much as possible. Which, of course, explains not only why my photo was missing from the yearbook, but also why so many people had met me for the first time the night before. This is how I wanted it, I realized. This was by my own design.
As I sat on that garden bench, in the beautiful courtyard of the hotel, which used to be the hospital where I had been born, I didn’t yet know that I had been autistic the whole time. I opened my journal and began to write, coming to the conclusion that I lived my life not to experience things but to get things over with. High school, and then college, were things that I had to endure to get somewhere else, not experiences to enjoy. Encounters with other people were painful moments of awkward self consciousness and fear, not opportunities to connect, and share, and exchange ideas and emotions.
And I knew, even as these realizations came to me, that I still approached life in the same way. Every day at work was something to get through. Trips - even vacations that were meant to be fun - felt like inconvenient slogs, albeit punctuated with moments of true enjoyment (mostly involving alcohol). Vacations overall felt like a chore that I would rather skip altogether, but which, if I had to do them, I wanted to get through as quickly and painlessly as possible. It’s not that I didn’t have fun in moments, it’s not that I didn’t enjoy myself - but the way I approached every pending action was (and probably still is) as a task master wanting to check the thing off the list and put it behind me. When I’m facing the arduous parts of a vacation - getting to the airport, getting through the airport, enduring the plane ride - it’s hard for me to remember that we’re doing this for fun.
Before I discovered alcohol, this tendency turned me inward. While I was avoiding my high school experience, not wanting to go out and “do things” with other people, I would spend large amounts of time on my own. I worked on projects, created music, made videos, watched movies, listened to music, read books, drew pictures. There was a lot of great stuff going on in my head, but I didn’t see the point in participating in the rituals of high school. At the reunion, experiencing the fun and enjoyment of connecting with people I hadn’t seen in so long, I started to get it. For many of those people, they had remained friends. Their shared experiences in high school were the foundation of their shared experiences as young adults, as young professionals, as new parents. They had community with one another. I didn’t have that - I had memories of small periods of time spent with different groups in different places before I moved on, disappeared, or found a new place to explore.
At the time, this realization felt somewhat depressing to me. As if I had been “doing it wrong” the whole time, living my life in a flawed way that set me up for unhappiness or loneliness. But then I looked around at how great my life was (I had just married an incredible woman, I had an amazing job, I loved my adopted city), and I decided not to fall into that trap of regret and second guessing. But the experience did awaken in me a glimmer of how “normal people” lived their lives.
This is what I wrote in my journal:
“What I miss most about [my hometown] is the physical place. The sense of peace and familiarity that comes from walking the streets, watching the sun rise, sitting on a bench downtown. Memories of shops, cafes, landscapes, trails. Things that don’t require reservations, money, or dialog. Things that don’t ask of you, but just accept you, or your presence, in the place. I know I have trouble interpreting my past, even while I eagerly push things into it. I strive to end experiences and move on, then look back and wonder why I didn’t participate more fully. I don’t know why I do this. But this is how I choose to live - day after day.”
Reading that journal entry from 2015, I see I was experiencing a good sense of self-acceptance at that time rather than beating myself up for not being somebody else. That was refreshing to see, and something I still struggle with. Six years later I would be diagnosed as autistic. Adding that information as new context to my reflections of high school seems to offer a lot of explanations. I wasn’t doing anything “wrong” in high school, and neither were all the people I referred to in those days as “stupid people”. We were all just following our instincts and trying to live life in a way that made sense to us. I’m sure none of us were totally happy all the time, or totally miserable all the time. We all had coping mechanisms, but those mechanisms looked very different for me than for others. I'm sure there were others like me, but because of our natures we would never discover each other (and if we had we probably wouldn’t have liked each other).
In the years following high school, I would slowly learn how to be a “normal person”. Revelation after revelation would cause me to look back at what a strange kid I had been and laugh. Now, in light of my diagnosis, I realize I’ve spent the last 20 years learning how to “mask”, how to pretend to be a normal person. But I’m still myself deep down. I’m still sorting through how to think about all this - masking in many ways has made my life much more accessible and enjoyable, allowing me to be in community with people in ways that I couldn’t have been as a teenager and young adult. At the same time, I miss the creativity, freedom, and sense of wonder that I used to steep in. It doesn’t have to be one way or the other, though. I have tools now that I didn’t have access to before, and those tools enable me to thrive in many contexts. I’m just trying to incorporate more of the person I’ve covered up back into my daily life (without retreating to the periphery where I used to spend all my time).