All About Us

Photo: Vanessa Bucceri / Unsplash

This week on Twitter, #Neurodivergent was trending for me, which isn’t a big surprise, as I’ve spent many years of my life writing on that subject and have a wide circle of acquaintances with personal interest in it.

It is one of those hashtags that makes you hesitate, wondering whether the click will reveal something delightful and true or more bullshit and bigotry. But seeing it also reminded me of an episode in my life, almost 20 years ago, that alerted me to my own place in the neurodivergent universe.

I’ve spent a lifetime being anything but neurotypical (I’m still not sure if I know anyone who is, but I understand broadly what people mean by that). As what the parsers of Victorian literature would probably call the “odd woman,” I have had my share of negative experiences related to how my brain works and my behavior. In my mind, in a neutral sense, my experiences have been a long string of social learnings, beginning from when I was very young and continuing to today.

My feeling of oddity didn’t take on recognizable contours until I was in my 30s, but I was aware of not fitting in at least from age 6, just as I emerged from my insular family circle into the world of public school. It was easy to tell because my peers made me very aware of it. My social ineptitude and lack of interpersonal insight led to considerable childhood misery that included intense stress and anxiety, along with depression and suicidal ideation from a very young age and repeated sentimental listenings to Simon and Garfunkel’s “I Am a Rock.”

As is common with people in such circumstances, I found myself by junior high in a small group of wayward youth, struggling to fit in with them because the people who were outwardly more like me in other ways — academic orientation among them — would have nothing to do with me.

I was explicitly told that I was viewed as an extreme weirdo, someone untouchable even with a “10-foot-pole” (that’s a quote). With typical obliviousness, I ran for a student council seat in eighth grade, intent on doing some good for the school and not realizing that, well, popularity would be important to achieving my goals. When I stood before the entire school assembled in the gym to give my speech, it was like something out of an ’80s teen movie: I was roundly booed (others were, too. This wasn’t a place that emphasized kindness). I gave the speech anyway, unsure about what else to do. My greatest triumph from those years is that I learned how to box as a form of self-defense and avoided arrest.

My parents, in a hyperreaction to get me away from the wayward youth, opted to send me to boarding school my freshman year, when I was 13 — a very emotionally immature 13. My 13-year-old self was a mass of contradictions, like most at that age, but I was even more extreme, unable to read people, unable to tell when they were mocking me until it was too late. These vulnerabilities were irresistible to the teenage girls around me, and that year was an immersion experience in being the target of extreme bullying. Instead of being mostly physical, as it had been for years, this time it was mental and emotional.

To escape some of this onslaught, I wandered alone in the wilds behind the school, read books I liked instead of doing my homework, and once again fell in with a group that could never be described as well behaved. All the time, I endured systematic, methodically cruel mental and emotional torture from many of the girls around me. Accused of theft repeatedly, mocked for poverty, my origins, my clothes, and my attempts to fit in, and belittled for every physical feature on my body (one particularly cruel epithet combined ridicule of my smile and my breasts), I could go nowhere on the campus without feeling like I was tiptoeing through a viper pit, like any second, I’d be mercilessly envenomated.

That boarding school year sounds like a mistake, but in hindsight, I think it had its uses. What better way for an inept child like me to learn about social interactions among my peers than to be immersed in those interactions every hour of every day? Was I good at it? Nope. But I came out of those 9 months with an arsenal of information about how people my age thought and behaved, what drove their interactions with each other and with me, how to function among them. I’d learned that my way of association was to use social algorithms, the if-then constructs of small-talk social exchanges that I still use today. I still think of those girls in that school and how much they taught me, often by being cruel. As an adult, I don’t hold that against them even though I cannot smooth away the scars, and I reap what I can from the lessons.

I still collect my algorithms, watching people exchange small talk, picking up tips and adding in bits and pieces to existing ones. If we get past small talk, I’ll take the risk of being just genuinely me, doing one of two things: listening sincerely and intently and asking many questions (which I do a lot) or talking too much, probably being overly loud or overly enthusiastic or overly sweary. But those more superficial exchanges that come from a place of social niceties rather than being born from the gut? Algorithms.

People have commented to me about my behaviors throughout my life. I’ve got a decades-long reputation for being … candid. People say things like, “Why don’t you tell us what you really think, Emily?” I’ve blurted out some honest observation at the wrong time and put my metaphorical foot in it. My friends and family know how I feel about hugs (and no, I don’t think it’s funny if someone knows that about me and then gives me a big, long bear hug. Not funny at all). And I’ve heard about my flat affect, including from total strangers who drive me up the wall by saying, “Smile! It can’t be that bad!” when all I’m doing is walking through the mall. Which, by the way, is kind of that bad, but that’s not why I’m not smiling. I won’t even get started on my feelings about crowds, lights, noise, or Disneyland.

Then one day, shortly after I started my postdoc in my mid-30s, a resident who was doing research in the lab met me for the first time. It was a urology lab, and we were working with bladders and penises, as one does. I was in a state of high excitement because I’d just had a hilarious exchange with a postdoc from Brazil who was saying the word “urine” to me in Portuguese and somehow, I couldn’t understand the cognate. So he and I were rather hysterical by the time she showed up, having finally comprehended each other.

I tend to get sort of…edgy looking…when in the midst of high hilarity about something that interests me. She took one look at me and said, “Hmmm. There’s something here, isn’t there. You’ve got something. What is it? ADHD? Something.” I must have had that look in my eye, that slightly manic laugh over the word “urina,” and she picked up on it immediately. She, of course, must have had a “little something,” too, as that was pretty much the first thing she said to me.

But her comment was like a lightbulb click in my mind, suddenly illuminating a lifetime of social experiences that now took shape as Something. I’ve never sought to have my Something named in part because I already know its names, and in part because the time such labels might have helped me was long past. It was simply useful and somewhat of a relief to know that it was there, recognizable for people paying attention.

In the end, we all have “a little something.” Some of us have more Something than others. I don’t know what the privileges are of someone who’s less Something and more neurotypical because I’ve never been that way. Forty or fifty years ago, I might have benefited from having my “something” labeled, maybe, if people had understood the label and used it to understand me.

As for me today? The labels I use are the ones that fit my current roles: journalist, writer, editor, scientist, teacher, parent, life partner, child, sibling, and friend. Considering my past, considering my social struggles and my presentation as the Odd Woman, my ability to bear each of those labels is an enormous privilege and occasional surprise to me. And that is something.