Fourteen: Autism and acting
Being diagnosed autistic has helped me realize how much of my life has been spent pretending to be someone else
I met my old friend Gary for breakfast when I was in New York for a visit, a few years after I had moved away. Gary was more than thirty years older than me, the father of a college friend. He’d given me my first real job, and mentored me through a foundational and transformational period of my young adult life. I liked being around him and his partner, Brad. They were some among the few “grown ups” I’d met who seemed to have fun, to be happy, and to be not just accepting but embracing of quirky young people who hadn’t yet found themselves (at 23, I didn’t yet think of myself as a grown up). I hung around Gary and Brad all the time my first year in NYC. They employed me, but also took me out to dinner, bought me drinks, made me feel like I belonged. It was an amazing and overpowering feeling. I craved their energy and attention the same way I craved the alcohol that we consumed in copious amounts (in those days, five or six gin and tonics was a starting point for an evening).
Now here we were, me and Gary, just a couple years later meeting for breakfast in a nondescript midtown diner - the kind of place that is open 24 hours a day, serves terrible coffee, and has a laminated menu with more pages than anyone could possibly read, and where everything is less than ten dollars. In my previous life, when I was under Gary’s tutelage, we never would have eaten in a place like this, and we never would have met for breakfast. We’d be meeting in some dark and exciting bar for cocktails, then move on to delicious wine and fancy food at some high end Italian place, sharing stories and making fun of “normal people” with increasing amounts of laughter and abandon as the night went on. But those days were over. Gary had agreed to meet me, but only had time for breakfast, and suggested this place. I poked around at my fruit salad as he ate his eggs, bacon, and toast with noticeably loud chomping sounds.
“We were talking about you the other day,” he said, still chewing. “We were trying to figure out what happened.” I looked at him expressionlessly, unsure of where he might be going. “For about nine months, you were this amazing beacon of blossoming young energy - laughing, having fun all the time, wanting to go out, to dance, to liberate yourself from the confines that had held you back your whole life.” He slurped from his cup of black coffee while still chewing. “And then you met this girl. And, it’s like, you went right back into the shell that you had just started to emerge from. It’s like you came out of the proverbial closet and had a blast for nine months and then turned around and went right back in.” My expressionless face burned with embarrassment. I could feel the redness seeping into my cheeks. I couldn’t deny what he was saying. I couldn’t explain it, or justify it, either. He needed to get this out, to explain his feelings and rationalization of our past relationship, and I felt I needed to let him. “And so Clara asked Francis,” he continued, referring to his children, and taking a bite of sausage, “What was he like in college? Francis shrugged and said you were quiet, mostly solitary, kept to yourself, hung out in the library, and spent a lot of time in the company of a woman that you were in love with (unrequited, apparently).” As he chewed his sausage, and swallowed, I felt stuck. “‘So’, Clara says, ‘why is anybody surprised? It sounds like he went back to being the same person he was in college.’ And that’s when it hit me. I had a realization. The person you are now is the real you. When you moved to New York, you were pretending to be somebody you weren’t.” He swallowed his last bites, put his fork and knife down on his plate, and pushed it forward on the table. He had a kind of smug look of confidence in his eyes. He was always confident, that was part of what attracted me to him, and part of his success - he was always sure of himself and gave you the sense he had the answers.
I stared at him, taking in the implications of what he was saying. It felt like he was accusing me of something, as if I had committed a crime and thought I had gotten away with it, but now he was presenting me with the damning evidence, clearly establishing my guilt. He seemed to feel wronged by me. The warm embrace that I used to feel in his presence was replaced by a cold indifference. And I couldn’t blame him. He had a good point. I was clearly living a different life now that I had been when I met him, and I had been living a different life before that, and a different life before that. It never occurred to me before that I was misrepresenting myself, or committing some kind of fraud. I didn’t see myself as a conman, taking on a persona to lure victims into becoming friends with me, only to abandon them when I got tired of playing this particular character. Is that what it seemed like to him? That I had been maliciously pretending to be someone that he and Brad would want to become friends with, for my own personal gain, and that I ended the “con” when it stopped being fun or when I stopped feeling like it would benefit me in some way? I couldn’t comprehend what I was feeling, or what he was really saying. All I could do was agree. He had figured me out - probably more than I had figured myself out.
The bill came. In the past, Gary would have snatched it up and handed his credit card to the waiter before I had a chance to even pretend to reach for my wallet. He never even looked at the amount, and I was always amazed that anyone could have such wealth that they could eat out night after night in New York City never even looking at how much it cost. But that was then. Now he eyed the bill carefully, sliding it towards the middle of the table. “How about we split it,” he said. I nodded, taking out my wallet. On the sidewalk, in the particular stank air of midtown, with the spring sun bringing a slight warmth to the otherwise chilly early Spring day, we said goodbye for the last time. It was awkward, trying to navigate the proper gesture as if we were a former couple meeting to exchange a few items left in one another’s apartments after breaking up.
That was nearly twenty years ago. I’ve never forgotten that day, but I’ve also never really understood it - neither the implications of what he was saying or the way I felt about it. Only now, with the revelation of my autism diagnosis is it starting to make sense to me. Gary was right that I had been pretending to be someone else in the nine exciting months I had spent with him and Brad. But he was wrong in thinking that the person I had become afterwards was the “real” me. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was still pretending. I went from pretending to be one person, to pretending to be another person, continually in search of the persona that I could adopt that would ease my path. It usually involved latching myself to another person (or a group) and trying to become someone I thought they would find appealing. It wasn’t conscious, but I wanted to be with people who could help me. Be my partner, perhaps, or give me a job, or just spend time with me, make me feel like I had friends, like I was part of a group. In high school it was first the drama kids, then the straight edge punk rock kids. In college it was the film majors first, then the international students (in each case there was also a particular person at the center of my gaze, someone I would fall in love with hopelessly and awkwardly). I wanted acceptance, but also stability. I wanted predictability and permanence, and would adjust my personality to try to match myself with someone who might be able to provide it, not realizing that if I was adjusting my personality to try to make someone like me, it was destined to be unsustainable.
With Gary it was the promise of friendship and employment - what could be better than having a boss who was also a close friend? But when the market crashed in March of 2000, the company went under, and the ensuing stress was too much for any of us to bear. We didn’t have a strong enough foundation to endure the collapse. And so I latched onto a woman and tried to become the person she wanted me to be. She was smart, had done pre-med in college, and was headed for medical school. She could bring me stability and certainty, and that was worth whatever part of myself I had to change to win her approval. She yelled at me sometimes, and judged me harshly, but I took those moments as learning opportunities to improve my personality and behavior (which I knew needed to be improved). When she was open to the idea of me following her to the midwest to attend medical school, I didn’t hesitate.
All this time, I didn’t have any sense of what I actually wanted, or what my feelings really were. I didn’t have preferences that I could articulate. I was just trying to make it through the turmoil of daily existence - the noise, the stress, the anxiety, the confusion, the swirls of bright colors and light. I continually searched for clues to tell me what I should be doing - where I should live, what my role should be, what degree I should get, what I should eat, how much I should exercise, what clothes I should wear, and where I should buy them, what music I should listen to, what words I should say or not say, what books I should read, and which ones I should like or not like. Most of all, I was searching for someone who could make decisions for me, who could tell me what to do, because I could never form an opinion strong enough to make a decision for myself. I liked the music that the people I thought were “cool” liked. I thought food tasted good if someone else said it tasted good first.I thought a glass of wine was good if someone wealthy served it to me, and I thought it was bad if someone said it only cost three dollars at the convenience store. Without a forcing factor, or a guiding hand, I wouldn’t do anything, go anywhere, try for something, become someone. Without someone choosing for me, I would just wake up in the morning, go for a walk, procure food, take a nap, write in my journal, or write my endless novel, take photographs, read books, and draw pictures. I would find a job that would provide enough for me to pay the rent in a cheap apartment and to eat, and that’s all. I would never apply for a job that required skills or that listed qualifications other than basic literacy, access to reliable transportation, and ability to be on time.
And so, while my girlfriend went to med school, and all the people we hung around were training to become doctors and lawyers, I was working for a direct care non-profit, spending time with autistic adults. I read to them, I took them on outings, I fed them, I helped them go to the bathroom, I helped them feed scraps of paper into the shredder (that was the “work” the organization paid them sub minimum wages to do). Looking back, I wonder if I felt a bond with these folks, if I felt more like myself in their company. Most of them were older, from a time when an autistic child would be cast off by their family, sentenced to life in a state hospital for the “feeble minded” with no chance of escape, until the institutions were shut down in the late 1990s. I loved that job. I loved the people, I loved the fact that I wasn’t responsible for anything except keeping these folks company while I was with them.
My coworkers were either like me (liberal arts grads who couldn’t find, or were avoiding, a “real job”), or they were very different (working class folks who didn’t graduate high school and never aspired to anything more than a job at a fast food restaurant, for whom this work was a huge step up). During the hours I spent at this job, I felt comfortable and content. The way the day was structured worked for me in the same way it worked for the participants (that’s what we called the people we served). I was comforted by the predictable routine and easy tasks, the gentle flow of the day, the satisfaction of feeling like I was accomplishing something, even if what I was accomplishing was imperceptible to anyone else. And in my free time, which was truly free and which there was plenty of, I would explore the city with my camera, write stories, and sit in coffee shops for hours. It was wonderful.
But, when you are carrying debt from attending a fancy college, and when you are surrounded by people who are spending their time preparing for lucrative and elite careers, working a job that requires no skills and has no career path, while deriving fulfilment from amateurish creative work, has its limits. Going to cocktail parties with law students and med students, and answering the question, “what do you do?”, became more and more embarrassing each time I did it. I started to feel shame for not doing more with my life, and my girlfriend fed that shame, stoking it. I feared that if I didn’t find an ambition, she would leave me; I had to become someone worthy of her companionship.
I felt the need to have a plan, to desire something more, but I didn’t know what it could be. I always thought of myself as an artist, so I tried applying to art school. I was rejected, quite forcefully (my rejection letter was preceded by an email from the school’s dean, essentially saying that my work was so bad it was insulting to real artists). Then I thought perhaps I should become a teacher and I tried to apply to education programs, but somehow my expensive liberal arts degree didn’t cover the required prerequisites. Same for the school of social work and every other graduate program I thought I might be suited for.
Finally, my older brother, a computer programmer, convinced me to teach myself how to code. I decided to give it a try, and despite my formidable self doubt, I found I took to it and quite enjoyed it. This was the relatively early days of the internet, when “coding” was still simple and straightforward. This was the time when you could work through a couple of “html for dummies” books and then call yourself a web designer. Learning about computers - a set of skills that was employable - was the beginning of a major transition for me. For the next twenty years I would leave behind writing, stop taking photographs, stop drawing pictures, stop almost every creative pursuit I had, and instead work for a corporation, “developing myself” more and more to be successful as a corporate citizen.
Becoming successful in the world of corporate tech was a long process of slowly learning how to be somebody else. I learned to dress differently, to talk differently, to socialize differently. I learned how to pretend to be interested in things that I couldn’t comprehend and didn’t find interesting at all. I learned the formula for success and was good at it, continuously doing what I could intuit was expected or desired, and continuously being rewarded. The cycle of rewards (money, promotions, accolades, more money) was satisfying, and the material comfort made it easy to overlook, or suppress, what I was giving up. And, of course, alcohol made everything seem more enjoyable.
And now I have my diagnosis. Now I can more clearly see why I was content with my previous, simple life, and how much I’ve worked to pretend to be someone I’m not to find the success and belonging that I have found in the corporate world. It hasn’t been bad - I’ve met some wonderful people, had fun, and received rewards that give me freedom and comfort. But my diagnosis is giving me the strength to stop pretending, to be OK with myself, and to do what I feel more comfortable and happy doing, rather than what I think I should do to be successful in the judgment of others.