Eleven: The promise (and illusion) of the fresh start
Does autism explain my desire to “reset”?
In the fifteen years between my 19th and 34th birthdays, I moved to a different state eight times. The first one was to go to college - that one I think is completely typical of middle class Americans, especially those from smaller towns. There is a normal desire to escape the confines of where you grew up and explore a new environment. This is what so much twentieth century literature by American men is about. The kind of books that high school boys love. I thought of it as a chance to start over, to leave behind whatever reputation I had that resulted in my social alienation. To separate from the awkwardness of trying to hang out with people who didn’t want me around, of tagging along with a group of tight knit friends who would tolerate me, but also made it clear to me that I wasn’t really part of the group.
Within six weeks of arriving at my large, urban university I was making plans for another fresh start at a different school, filling out applications for transfer admission to small, rural, liberal arts colleges on the other side of the country. The social alienation in college was even more isolating than in high school. I was placed in an off campus apartment because the dorms were full. I had three roommates, all of whom were nice enough but none of whom I could relate to, or talk to, or want to be around. I didn’t know what to do, where or how to eat, where to go, how to talk to other people, how to participate in the things that other people did. The university was a big football school. I hated football. It was also a big fraternity school. I hated the idea of fraternities, and from what I could see of their members, I hated them too. If this is where I was supposed to “start over” I must have been doing it wrong. I needed to try again, I thought, I needed another fresh start, but this time I would pick a better spot to do it from and have more success.
Even though things changed for me in the Spring semester, I had already made plans to leave. That summer, back at home, working at a coffee shop, I really did have a fresh start. I pretended to be someone I wasn’t - and it worked. I made friends, I hung out with people in a way that felt like I was hanging out with them rather than next to them. I kissed a girl for the first time, at age 20. But summers are short. In August I packed up to go to my new school for another fresh start. Now that I had some practice, I thought, I could be more successful. When I set foot at my new school, in the beautiful rolling hills of rural New England, I was filled with optimism and excitement. I played the character that seemed to work so well over the summer, thinking that things would start falling into place. I introduced myself to the other people in the hall of my dorm. They ignored me. I tried to join the intramural frisbee team. I was terrible. I sat with other people in the dining hall. They got up and left shortly after I said hello.
After a few weeks I began to realize that it wasn’t working; the person that I learned how to be in order to make friends back home wasn’t fitting in here. I didn’t really like the person I was pretending to be anyway, so I decided to try being myself. That’s when things got worse. My journals of those years are filled with the brooding thoughts of an isolated young man, questioning my interactions with others, trying to figure out why it was so hard, and ultimately falling deeply into an abstract internal quagmire.
When college was coming to an end, it was time for another fresh start. I didn’t know what to do or where to do it. I had no direction. I decided to apply for jobs as a teaching assistant in posh private schools up and down the East Coast. Why? Because it was a job that didn’t require any special skills and was suitable for a liberal arts major. The pay was terrible, which felt like what I expected of my working life. My plan was simple: apply to a bunch of schools and, if I got a job, I would move there to do that job. That way I didn’t have to make a decision, and I would have a reason to go wherever I went. The plan worked perfectly in the sense that I only got one offer. I would move to Washington, D.C., where I would earn $15,000 to spend a year with a group of wealthy second graders, who’s lives I couldn’t even begin to imagine.
I didn’t quite realize that the salary I would be earning would not be enough to pay for rent in D.C., especially when you add the student loan payments on top of it. A month before graduation, an acquaintance asked me what my plans were. I told him I was moving to D.C. and his eyes opened widely. It turns out he was also moving to D.C., and also going to be working a job that didn’t pay enough to cover the rent. Of course, he was doing an apprenticeship at a well regarded non-profit organization before going to an Ivy League law school, and he had a trust fund at his disposal, but he seemed committed to living like a poor person for a year and asked me to be his roommate. I felt relieved, but also apprehensive at the idea of having a roommate. Not feeling like I had a choice, I said yes.
My time in D.C. was strange and abstract. I found adjusting to life outside the structure of school to be confounding. I was close to Georgetown and took to spending my free time pretending to be a student in the Georgetown University library. Being in a college library, still able to pass as a student, felt comforting and purposeful. I spent hours reading deeply into Native American death rituals. I don’t know how I became interested in this topic, but I was completely obsessed, finding more and more fascinating narratives by Indigenous elders, in many cases written down or recorded by white academic anthropologists (it would be many more years before I would come to appreciate the myriad of ways that the Indigenous people of America have been so unjustly and inhumanely treated by white people). I was sort of pretending to be a Ph.D. student conducting research for a dissertation. It was fascinating, and a good distraction, and a way to pass the time (I now realize this is an example of what people call an autistic special interest).
Spending hours in the library also helped me stay away from my apartment and avoid contact with my roommate. I knew having a roommate would be hard, but I didn’t realize the extent to which I would find it intolerable. Just weeks had passed before we started communicating only by notes left for each other on the kitchen table. It pains me to think about how awful mine were, about how badly I treated my roommate, and about how hard it was for me to share space with another human. I objected to everything he did - in my mind even his act of inhaling oxygen from the room was an infringement on my space. I didn’t realize until years later that he was trying to be friends with me.
My job at the school was quite enjoyable, for the most part, but not completely fulfilling (I wrote a little about it in this post). I started “moonlighting” as a freelance writer for a website in New York. I had discovered the ease of interacting with people online, and how much more effective I was at that than in the real world. (It was still the early days of the internet, when most people didn’t have access in their homes, except through arduously slow dial up connections.)
My time in D.C. ended after nine months with me having an extended meltdown, getting offered a job at the website I was writing for in New York, abandoning my position with the second graders, and ghosting my roommate. I broke the lease, broke my employment contract, packed what I could carry on the train, and left the rest of my stuff in the apartment for my roommate to deal with. I didn’t even say goodbye to my roommate or my coworkers. At the school, they planned a goodbye party for me. I didn’t show up. They mailed me a binder filled with goodbye notes that the children had written. They would have presented it to me at the party if I had been there. Somehow, it didn't occur to me until many years later how awful I was to everyone who had been so kind to me. When it was happening, when I was doing the actions, it just felt like I was doing the logical thing, making the only decision that was viable for me. I didn’t think at all about the impact my actions had on others. I didn’t understand the feelings I was having, or the feelings others probably had about me. A year later, I reached out to one of the teachers I had been friendly with during my time at the school to say hello. I sent a nice note as if nothing had happened. She wrote back saying she was still upset that I left without saying goodbye. Only then did I start to reflect on my behavior.
Now I look back and wonder, does my autism explain my past behavior? I feel like it must in some way. My repeated challenges finding my place, feeling at home, fitting in. My desire to start over by abruptly leaving for someplace new, where nobody knew me and I could try to have a fresh start as a new person. My lack of comprehension of my own feelings and how my behavior impacted them. My inability to understand social cues and the subtext of my interactions with other people, or my complete obliviousness to social and professional expectations and norms of behavior. Essentially, my challenges understanding how the world around me worked, repeatedly drove me to try again in a new place where maybe things would be different this time. But, of course, things were never different. It would just be a matter of time - perhaps weeks, perhaps months, until the friction of my new environment would become unbearable for me, and (I imagined) for the people around me.
New York would last less than two years. There would be several more “fresh starts” after that - more new cities, new jobs, new attempts at friendship, many ending just as abruptly as my time in D.C. had come to an end. Another decade would pass before I really started to do deep self reflection. And another decade after that before I would learn I am autistic. It was my journey of self reflection, before being diagnosed, and the self-acceptance that came with that journey, that led me to reach a more sustainable rhythm in my life. I stopped doing the things that I felt I should do, and focused more on doing the things that felt right to me. At the same time, I developed a more conscientious approach to relating with others, learning how to put the needs of others before my own, even if it didn’t occur to me to do so, or even if I didn’t understand those needs or why they were important.
From time to time, I still think about starting over, about moving to a new place where I imagine the problems of my current life don’t exist. But those are just passing thoughts now, not calls to action that are driven by a desperation to escape. I know that starting over isn’t really possible because, in the words of my mom, I take myself wherever I go.
Eleven: The promise (and illusion) of the fresh start
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