by Laura James
I felt it when I was very young, but it grew so much stronger once I got to high school. Teenage years are hard for most of us, but throw autism into the mix and it gets so much more confusing. At the very time we are learning about ourselves, we suddenly have to confront the fact we are different from most of our peers.
The girls at school seemed to have had a secret briefing that informed them of exactly how to behave. When they huddled together in the playground, the conversations bounced without missing a beat from boys to cherry mint lip-gloss. From future careers as fashion designers, journalists, models or something in TV to upcoming exams and parties at the weekend. They touched each other easily, too, applying mascara to each other’s lashes, creating intricate French plaits, linking arms as they walked across the playground, and hugging when someone was in tears over a failed romance or an impossible exam question.
They spent their weekends at each other’s houses in Laura Ashley bedrooms, listening to mix tapes on portable stereos in neon pink or custard yellow. They recorded the Top 40 from the radio religiously every week and edited out the songs they didn’t like. They bought albums and taped them for each other, practised calligraphy until they had decorated their school rough books with intricate black, swirly writing more appropriate for a historical document or wedding invitation.
I wanted so much to be part of that and, although I did sometimes get invited along, I was never quite in the middle of a group. I was always on the edge, always getting it slightly wrong, never quite feeling part of things. I was on the outside looking in on these female friendship groups. I was the last to be called when a party was being planned or some incredible gossip was available to be shared, an afterthought. I didn’t have that one special friend the others seemed to. I drifted in and out. I wasn’t hated, but I wasn’t loved.
One of the things school taught me is that although most grown-ups tell you they want you to be truthful, they don’t. They want a sanitized version of the truth. One that has been nicely cleaned up. One that works for them. They don’t want you to lie outright about where you have been and what you have been doing, but they also don’t want the unfiltered truth that exists within the minds of teens, or other adults, come to that.
Once, in an English class, we were asked to write the story of our parents’ first meeting. We were meant to go home and interview them. The others wrote stories of parents meeting at dances, in offices, at the homes of friends, at university. Some stories were deadly dull. Some were sweet and others downright funny. The boys fared worst and, when asked to read them aloud, they blushed and shuffled around on the spot. They spoke to their shoes and the rest of us could barely hear.
I forgot to interview my parents, so wrote my piece on the way to school, sitting on a bench in the park I would cut through on my walk. The frost on the wood was stinging the backs of my bare legs. Instead of writing about my adoptive parents, I wrote about my biological parents, the ones who had brought me into the world.
You had the temerity
To ask to make love to me
On a rug by the fire
As we lay
You lied to the liar
Later, sated,
You wrapped yourself
In my oatmeal linen sheet
You offered conversation
I declined.
They didn’t know what to make of me at school and I didn’t know how to make it right. I tried so hard to fit in and be what the teachers wanted me to be, but each time I flunked an assignment it took me further away somehow.
Things could have been different had I gone to a school which understood autism. Sarah Wild is head teacher of Limpsfield Grange, a residential school in Surrey for girls with communication and interaction difficulties, including autism.
When I told her the story of my poem and the lack of understanding with which it was met, she said: ‘That’s such a shame – it’s a really creative response to an open question. One of the gifts of being on the spectrum is that the connections you can make are totally different. If you’re neurotypical and interested, they’re mind-blowing. Often I can’t even see what leaps someone has taken to get to that point.
‘When you look at it from this perspective, you can start seeing autism as an advantage, because we need people to think differently otherwise we’ll never make any evolutionary leaps. Sometimes people on the spectrum can think so far outside the box that it’s really important.’
I’m not sure I was ever praised at school for thinking differently and didn’t have a strong sense of belonging. Being raised as Jewish helped somewhat; we were expected to stay within our religious group and not exclude anyone within it. Our parents knew each other well. They tried to ensure no girl was left out.
There was a casual anti-Semitism at my school, which occasionally bubbled up and became nasty. Swastikas were drawn on people’s lockers, along with anti-Semitic slogans. Fights broke out between the Jewish and non-Jewish boys. There was always a sense that something worse might happen, but it didn’t. It simmered under the surface and it was what forced the girls to include me.
I was envious of the girls who bridged the gap between the Jews and the non-Jews. Debbie was most successful at this. She was tiny and incredibly cute in a naughty way. She said the things no one else dared to; to teachers, to bullies, to boys. She looked a bit like Kylie Minogue. At twenty she moved to Australia and has been there ever since.
Debbie had a quality I longed for. She was fearless and she was never bullied. I used to think this was because she had an older sister at our school, but I realize now it was because she simply wouldn’t allow anyone to put her in that position. She would show from the off that she couldn’t be intimidated. She was too hard a challenge. The bully would wander off and find an easier target. Someone like me.
I had my group of friends, but there was always a barrier between us. We couldn’t connect. I knew it was my fault. Even when I briefly had a best friend, Natasha, it didn’t work out. She was too needy for me. I felt subsumed by her, drowned out and confused by the intensity of what she wanted from me. She expected me to spend all my free time with her and didn’t like it if I saw any of the other girls alone.
She thought we should have lunch together every day and walk to and from school together. She expected us to spend Saturday nights together and to sleep over at each other’s house, not leaving until just before bedtime on Sunday evening. I needed much more alone time than is usual for a teenage girl. She needed no time alone. We were both only children and yet we had completely conflicting needs.
She became jealous if I spent time with anyone else and would try to start arguments. I found it frightening and confusing. She was bright and funny, though, and we could sit in her bedroom and giggle about nothing for hours. Once we went to see the film Endless Love and her mother misheard the title, thinking it was called In This Glove. We found it hilarious. We laughed for a week.
We would pore over teen magazines like Patches. We’d watch Top of the Pops. She was sure she was going to marry George Michael. I wasn’t sure marriage was for me. I fantasized about living alone, although even then I didn’t think it would ever be possible. We’d paint each other’s nails and try to concoct reasons why our parents should give us extra freedoms. We became close when we were twelve and by Natasha’s thirteenth birthday we were allowed to go out together until 8 p.m., as long as one of our parents picked us up.
By the time we were fourteen we had more or less gone our separate ways. I occasionally went to under-eighteen nights at clubs like Busby’s on Charing Cross Road and the Wag Club in Wardour Street, which I found loud and overwhelming and quite dull, as it transpired I didn’t really understand how to dance.
The other girls from school were less needy and, although often I felt I didn’t quite fit with them, I never felt consumed in the way I had with Natasha, who would frequently storm off in a huff for no obvious reason. I missed her, though, and we became friends again later, although the
friendship followed a similar pattern and once again we fell out. The divorce from my first husband clashed with her wedding and she felt I was somehow trying to steal her thunder. For years I believed it was all my fault. In hindsight, I can see it was a clash of needs; mine to have space and hers to feel connected.
Teenage life was difficult in so many ways. Our days were mapped out for us and there was no respite. School, activities, homework, food – everything – had to be crammed into the waking hours, which back then were between 7.30 a.m. and 9 p.m. Where was the time for me to daydream, to think, to read and to be alone? When could I just be me? I like set routines, but I need to be in control of them. Then, I was required to go from one thing I hated to the next. Being unable to understand my emotions, I wouldn’t recognize when I was becoming overwhelmed, when I was close to burnout or melting or shutting down.
When I was fourteen my parents got a dog. It was a crossbreed, rescued from a shelter. It was named Brandy, which made me wince every time I had to say it out loud. But he was at least five years old, so it seemed unfair to foist another name on him. He smelled dreadful, made weird snuffling noises and was aggressive to strangers, but he gave me the perfect escape. Whenever I needed to be alone in my thoughts I was able to walk him. I would pull on my Converse high-tops, pop on my Walkman headphones, grab the lead, call the dog, slam the front door and walk out into my own world.
I have always had intense interests. They could be described as obsessions, but many autistic people feel this is a negative word with bad connotations. They prefer the term special interests. I don’t mind obsessions – it’s how they can feel to me, all consuming. Others have suffered at the hands of professionals who have tried to curb their special interests and stop them from taking refuge in them. So I can see why it is contentious.
My teenage special interests included Audrey Hepburn films, dog breeds, clothes, make-up and books. Reading has been a lifelong special interest. In a good week I can read at least four books. In my teenage years I could read from the moment I got up to the minute I went to bed. I would find somewhere cosy to sit and not move until my book was finished. I would forget to eat or drink, I would ignore the phone if it rang, I would forget about the homework I was meant to be doing. Everything would drift away and it would be just me and the words on the page.
Autistic special interests are often also a safety net. Being able to escape into something we love protects us from the harsh and confusing outside world. In girls, these interests are often not that different from those of their peers. It’s important to note that it isn’t the subject that’s unusual, it’s the fervour with which the interest is pursued. I read the same books as the other girls, but also more obscure titles. I went through a phase of reading everything Nancy Mitford had written, even though her books were not fashionable at the time.
The obsession peaked when I discovered Jilly Cooper’s books. Lots of my friends read them too. They didn’t, though, read the same one twenty times over, beginning again as soon as they finished. They couldn’t name every character and answer questions that would stump a Mastermind contestant.
Special interests generally cause more problems for those around them than for the autistic person. I talked of little else to my friends than the plot of Jilly’s latest book and could argue for hours about their literary merit and why they shouldn’t be called bonkbusters. My friends read them and then passed them on to someone else in our group. I could never even contemplate lending one of them and still, more than thirty years on, I know exactly where every copy is in my house.
I like to read books about people who inhabit a landscape I understand. Most of the fiction I read is set in England and the characters live lives not dissimilar to mine. I read them because I am fascinated by people, but need the context of a world I understand. A book set in Iran or Syria would take me too far out of my comfort zone and I would find it challenging rather than cushioning. I don’t like books where people suffer in a realistic way, or where there are real world problems that have no understandable solution. I need to know that all will work out OK in the end. I read a lot of self-improvement books too, hoping to find a way to fix the things in my life I find overwhelming. So far I have never managed to stick to a plan.
In my teens I would sit outside cafes on the King’s Road or in Hampstead flicking through the latest Jilly Cooper release, devouring every word. Not just because they were thrilling, pacey and addictive, but because I thought they offered a blueprint for how people behaved. I genuinely believed that if I could just be more like a Jilly Cooper character, I would be a normal person.
Sitting at a table on the pavement – usually with hair moussed into curled perfection and wearing my favourite stripy, three-quarter-length trousers and an oversized white T-shirt – I tried to learn how to behave around other people. How not to be seen as odd. I genuinely read Jilly Cooper as you would read an instruction manual for a washing machine. I thought I would find all the answers to life within those pages.
Jilly taught me about human behaviour, but she also taught me to appreciate poetry and to use it as a balm when things are uncertain. Since reading Rivals, in which one of the characters works on a biography of W. B. Yeats, I have often escaped into the yellowing pages of a favourite anthology of poetry whenever I have felt overwhelmed by confusing emotions.
For Tony Attwood, this special interest is evidence of someone trying to learn how to navigate her world. He told me: ‘This is you trying to understand people, and what I find in girls – in comparison to boys – is that they are much more intelligent and creative in trying to resolve the challenges they face.
‘That can include the use of imagination. Sometimes it’s science fiction, sometimes it’s witches and wizards. Sometimes it’s being a journalist. Sometimes it’s being a person who has an appreciation and knowledge, for example, of Shakespeare, who understands the nature of Shakespeare and becomes an academic in that area.’
Like many teenage girls I obsessed about love. I was enchanted by a broody, moody boy who seemed only intermittently to notice my existence. He had everything I then believed a boy should have. Irish roots, blue eyes with long lashes, a sneer that could make one freeze and a detachment that acted like catnip to my teenage self. He was The Boy.
I would spend hours getting ready to casually bump into him. We’d go back to his house, where he would studiously ignore me while we sat on his bed listening to Bob Dylan or Pink Floyd. I would eventually uncurl myself from where I had been sitting, my leg brushing against his, and then wander downstairs to make milky instant coffee for us both. Invariably his mother would be in the kitchen, sitting at a shiny, circular, white table, reading a novel. I adored her and I think she felt a kindness for me that was rooted in the knowledge that The Boy, her only child, had this devastating effect on me.
If I close my eyes I can imagine myself back there, cradling a mug of steaming Nescafé, gazing at The Boy and quickly looking away if he happened to glance in my direction. His room was big, with leafy William Morris wallpaper and the lingering scent of half-smoked joints. His TV was always on with the sound muted. We would lie on the bed together, but not together, not touching, almost pretending the other wasn’t there, gazing at the screen while loud music played.
We watched Margaret Thatcher, her head always slightly tilted, striking miners and their exhausted wives. Riot-weary policemen, shiny game show hosts in colourful suits. We watched families eating supper, ads for gravy granules shot in a kitchen not unlike the one downstairs. Glitzy American soaps and sometimes things that made no sense at all as they were silently relayed into the room to a backdrop of Dylan, The Doors, and Hendrix.
An hour before my father was due to pick me up, I would begin to count down the minutes, glancing obsessively at my chunky pink watch. My eyes would go from TV screen, to my watch, to The Boy. I would will him to kiss me. I believed that if I thought about it hard enough it would somehow pop up in his head and he would lean over, ta
ke my face in his hands, and his mouth would find mine.
More often than not he would instead languidly half fall off the bed to grab a textbook and lazily recite Latin verbs. I am not good at reading people, and to this day I have no idea if he was ever aware of my longing.
Once, we went to France on a whim. Me, him and a few other boys. We bought a cheap camera and took pictures of ourselves in rural train stations as we tried to find our way to Le Touquet. After too much wine, sunshine and laughing, he leaned over and kissed my cheek. Whoever was holding the camera snapped at just that moment and the picture made its way into my teenage diary, along with the train tickets and the ring pull from a can of French lemonade he bought me.
Had The Boy ever asked me out, things would have been very different. I would have freaked out. The evenings in his bedroom were as much as I could cope with. I got comfortable with the feeling of longing, but if that feeling had been reciprocated I would have panicked hard.
It’s a pattern I have repeated through my life. Notice someone or something. Believe I want it. Pursue it. Land it. Enjoy the feeling of having it for a moment. Panic. Panic. Panic. It is an all-consuming fear. When I am heading for a relationship, a new job, parenthood, gym membership, a new friendship, or anything that requires commitment I feel as if I may somehow become subsumed. That my life will be somehow forever changed. That I will have to stop being the whole me and instead become part of something else.
Tony Attwood recognizes this behaviour. He tells me: ‘Girls can sometimes make friends but not keep them, because of the intensity problem. Because either she hardly ever contacts her friend or she sends her twenty texts a day and, when the friendship ends, she feels betrayed and can be very black and white in her thinking.