Odd Girl Out

by Laura James

  ‘The other side of the coin is when someone seems too intense to the girl with autism. This is why I see autism almost splitting into two groups. There’s the extrovert intense, what I call the Italian drivers. They don’t read the signals and they get upset because it’s not working. And there are the introverted, withdrawn, shy types. In other words, it’s the person choosing solitude or being alone, or being highly motivated to socialize, but very upset when it doesn’t work.’

  The fear ahead of any commitment comes, I think, from an all-consuming worry that, whatever this new thing is coming into my life, it will stop me from being able to pursue my special interests. It will take up too much space in my head. That it will add a new layer of somebody else’s routine into my life. That it will be jagged and jarring and will want more than I am able to give.

  I have felt this in every relationship I have ever had. Emotions fall into only two camps: the ones that feel good and the ones that feel bad. Mainly they stay in their rightful places, attached, and don’t move. Thinking about money feels bad. Reading books feels good. In the case of relationships they can veer from making me feel good to making me feel bad. Other people are so confusing, so again I strive for neutral.

  Yesterday I googled The Boy and got nothing. He has disappeared into thin air. Then later, when I couldn’t sleep, I wondered if somehow I had imagined him. I messaged an old friend from that time and asked if she knew what had become of him.

  ‘God knows,’ she replied. ‘And good riddance. He was trouble.’

  I don’t believe autistic girls and women deliberately seek out ‘bad boys’, but I do think we might not be as equipped as neurotypical women when it comes to spotting men who might let us down or reading the signs of a relationship.

  I asked Tony Attwood. He confirmed that Aspies often lack the insight needed to make sound decisions about relationships.

  ‘People with Asperger’s,’ he said, ‘are often not very good at character judgement. They don’t spot predators. My concern is the high level of date-rape Aspie women experience and abusive relationships. In part it’s because of low self-esteem and not realizing that this person’s character is actually toxic.’

  I asked him if it could also be because we don’t quite understand what love should feel like, and so confuse it with other things, such as drama. Or that we come across a boy who seems in pain and we want to make it better, without realizing that this is not the basis for love.

  He said: ‘Yes, girls may think, I can fix him. I can make him better. As you say, they see it as him having a problem, but that’s all right. They’ll fix it. Realizing they can’t and that this isn’t a healthy relationship is not something they’ll often recognize for themselves. It often comes from those helping them or from other Aspie women, who will say, I’ve been in some terrible situations, please don’t follow my path.’

  I recognize so much of myself in his words. I know I take people at face value and am unable to read between the lines, so will become close to individuals others would run a mile from. I have often wondered if I experience love in a way that is different from others.

  Tony Attwood believes this may be so. ‘Another emotion that needs to be explored and understood is love,’ he told me. ‘What is it? Do people with Asperger’s understand and express it in the way that neurotypicals expect? Neurotypicals will have an expectation of how love should be expressed and that may be difficult for the person with Asperger’s. I think of it as love languages. Often love by someone with Asperger’s is expressed through practical deeds rather than words and gestures of affection.’

  I’m often surprised when a situation spins out of control. I have begun many relationships with men that I understood to be completely platonic, later to discover that they read things very differently. I can be intense at the start of a friendship. I love to learn new things and new people may have knowledge and experiences I haven’t come across before. I get excited about new facts and that excitement can be contagious.

  My social style is easy, fun, and, above all else, different. I have learned that men can find this attractive and confusing. I’m a quick communicator. I can’t easily leave a text or email or call unanswered. I perhaps seem more intensely involved in the friendship than I actually am.

  This leads to a mismatch in expectations. I think we’re exploring a new friendship, one I naturally imagine will be doomed to failure. He, on the other hand, will often imagine this intensity is the sign of something more. I have been caught out by this a number of times. Tim often warns me when he sees it coming. He calls each of them my latest scrape.

  I am, though, subconsciously hungry for more social interaction than I naturally have in my life. It is always at a slightly superficial level. Because I find neurotypical women slightly frightening, most new relationships I form tend to be with men. They are easier to read and more straightforward. They don’t feel slighted by my directness or my inability to commit to plans. I think that because of this I have often in the past ignored Tim’s warnings.

  As for The Boy, I think he had a lot of issues and didn’t have the emotional maturity to know how to treat any girl, let alone one like me. Nothing ever happened between us, but he remained my obsession for four or five years. Even now I can be transported back to those days by a Jam song playing on the radio or the sight of a red, vintage rugby shirt.

  Looking back now, I believe that by obsessing about someone unsuitable I protected myself from having to have a real relationship and having to deal with all the confusion that that would have brought with it. I had the odd boyfriend, but they rarely lasted.

  Would I like to go back to my teenage years, knowing what I know now? God, yes! A million times yes. I would love to do it all again with the knowledge of my autism and the skills I have built up in the intervening years. Would I want to experience again the same emotions I did then? I’m not sure. I find emotions – my own and other people’s – scary and overwhelming.

  On an intellectual level I understand that getting close to someone is a scary experience that will invariably lead to doubts and fears, but being aware of the other person’s feelings can be truly bewildering.

  When I talk to Tim about this he says: ‘I think you’re autistically missing the point. Most people find getting close to someone can be exciting, intimate, unique, warm, reassuring, companionable, safe, secure, precious and so on. The point is, you don’t and I’d love to understand why.’

  I want to give him an answer, but I don’t know how. Why are some people scared of spiders and others unmoved?

  The Boy, I think, was also a useful distraction from the torment that was school. I was impossible to teach. I had scraped through primary school, which was quite progressive and focused more on creativity than exams. At high school I couldn’t learn the things they were trying to teach me. I would sit in a class looking at equations on the blackboard that simply made no sense to me. They were a different language, one not recognized by the operating system that drives my autism.

  My brain would cloud over when slides of water tables appeared on the screen in geography and I would struggle to understand even the most basic maths. English was OK. I enjoyed the reading side of it and I liked writing, but I couldn’t grasp the basics of grammar and spelling, with which I still struggle.

  I went to a sprawling and chaotic comprehensive school, a forbidding red-brick building with a central hub and huts that looked as if they were made from cardboard peppering the grounds. It was the backdrop to an assault on my senses for eight hours each day. The collective hum of children’s voices multiplied and became a large bassy rumble I could feel in my chest. The sound of school chairs scraping against the floor and desk lids slamming was magnified and felt like an act of violence. I had a plummy accent. One that stood out. I spoke differently from the other girls and that – and my weird behaviour – made others not in my friendship group suspicious of me.

  There was little outright hostility; they just avoided co
ntact or wouldn’t choose me for a team. When we did spend time together the atmosphere seemed scratchier, less comfortable. There were more misunderstandings and a feeling that we all wanted the encounter to be over quickly.

  My primary school had been cosy and cosseting. I didn’t make friends, but I really didn’t mind. We were always being assigned partners or put into groups for activities, so I don’t think the teachers really noticed. At break times I would sit alone reading a book. If a teacher tried to get me to join in with the skipping games, I would find an excuse not to. I thought everyone saw life as an obstacle course to be carefully navigated.

  High school held new terrors every day. It was then that I realized not everyone experienced the world in the same way as me. It was my first understanding of cognitive dissonance. I was more intelligent than most of my classmates, so why could I not understand the work being set for me? My exercise books were a mess. Ink smudged with tears of frustration and sweat from my fingers as I tried to make sense of the problem laid out in the accompanying textbook.

  While I didn’t learn much at school, it was during my teenage years I learned about hiding my differences and blending in. I would watch girls and copy their mannerisms closely. The way they dressed, the music they listened to, the magazines they read. I would study their likes and dislikes and try to make them my own. I’m not sure, when I look back, what was authentically me and what was borrowed.

  Teenage Me – Summer 1984

  We’ve spent much of the summer on the King’s Road, my friends and me – sometimes in a big group, at other times in pairs. Sometimes I come here alone. These are my favourite times. I like that I can do what I want and I don’t need to think about talking. I can look in the shops I want to, or I can drink milky coffee at a table on the street while reading a book. I think I like books more than people.

  There are two reasons we spend time here. Everyone is completely enchanted by the 1960s and for some reason they all think most of the decade happened roughly halfway between Sloane Square and World’s End. I want to know why they think this, but don’t want to look stupid by asking, so I don’t.

  I think it has something to do with Mick Jagger and, possibly, a lion. I’m not sure whether the lion was actually with Mick Jagger, or whether one or both of them lived on the King’s Road. To be totally honest, I’m a little bit hazy about who Mick Jagger is, although I do think he’s been in a band, or maybe a film.

  The second reason is My Old Dutch. It is, everyone agrees, the best restaurant in all of London and on a good day we manage to eat two whole pancakes each. One savoury; one sweet. I always have cheese and mushroom and then maple syrup and ice cream.

  I find food difficult, which annoys my parents a lot. My friends talk about it too and I know they think I’m anorexic. I went to the library and got a book called Solitaire, which is written by an anorexic girl. I don’t recognize myself in her description, but I know I can only eat food I really like, which is why pancakes are good. Sometimes we go to Maxwell’s for burgers or Pizza Hut for pizza, which I like less. Sometimes the food feels funny in my mouth and I have to spit it into a tissue. Sometimes people see me do it and I know they talk about me afterwards.

  At home I hide food in tissues or take margarine tubs to the table, so I can put food in them when my parents aren’t looking. Mummy made me go to see Dr Newman to talk about food and not eating. He said she should try to let me eat what I want. I tell her I want to be a vegetarian, but I still eat meat when I am out.

  This summer there has been a restlessness, an impatience. Not necessarily a sense that something is about to happen; more a feeling of desperation that it will and a fear that it might not. I think we all feel it a bit, maybe except Sheryl, who seems so much like a proper grown-up. We never talk about it, though, and the feeling isn’t given a name.

  We are fifteen, at least most of us are. Claire is sixteen and this – plus the fact that she has an eighteen-year-old brother called Jono, who looks like an actor – makes her the de facto leader of our group.

  Claire’s house, which is two bus rides away (we are scattered across London), is one of our favourite places to be. Having put in eighteen years, her parents now seem tired of child rearing and are longing for an empty nest. Buoyed by the success of having kept one child alive to legal adulthood, they have a seriously laid-back attitude to rearing the younger ones. So laid-back they have moved to the top floor of the four-storey townhouse, locked the door and rarely come down.

  They are unusual parents, more concerned with each other than with their children. They seem genuinely in love, something Claire finds mildly disgusting and the rest of us rather intriguing.

  The father, Paul, endlessly paints the mother, Viv, often with her naked and draped across a chaise longue. This means she has to spend a lot of time ‘sitting’ for him, which in turn means she is rarely around to keep an eye on us.

  We spend most of our time in a semi-derelict orangery in the garden. Many of the windowpanes are either missing or broken, but the glass still intact is thin, almost like sugar glass, and the cream wrought-iron mouldings are intricate and beautiful.

  ‘Majestic in its ruin,’ Lara says one day. ‘It is the epitome of faded grandeur.’

  ‘And there was me thinking it was just our smoking den,’ Claire laughs, taking a packet of Sobranie Cocktail cigarettes out of the back pocket of her jeans.

  Liv sits down on the orangery floor, puts a cigarette in her mouth and lights a match. She is wearing a sugary pink lipstick, which leaves a stain on the filter. She puffs valiantly, but the cigarette has lit unevenly and is burning faster along one side.

  Lara rolls her eyes. ‘Give it to me,’ she says, leaning over and plucking it from Liv’s mouth.

  Lara relights it and hands it back to Liv and takes one for herself before offering the packet around. The golden tips glint in the light. One cigarette is turned the wrong way round, and I reach to take it when my turn comes.

  ‘Not that one, Laura,’ Liv shrieks. ‘That’s my lucky one.’

  I pick up the box of matches and light first Lara’s, then Amanda’s and then go to light my own.

  ‘Stop! It’s unlucky to have the third light,’ Amanda squeals.

  The criticism stings. I feel a sharp pain at the back of my throat and tears coming. I swallow hard and draw on the cigarette. Will I ever get the hang of the rules everyone else seems to just instinctively know?

  The others are coughing a bit, but that doesn’t happen to me. I love it. It is as if my lungs have been waiting for this moment forever. The acrid taste and slight kick at the back of my throat feel welcome and strangely familiar. Maybe it was being driven to Cornwall in my parents’ car with them chain-smoking, the windows tightly shut.

  Jono’s girlfriend, Sylvie, wanders in barefoot, wearing one of his shirts. Her long legs are silky and brown. She is heaven and I so want to be her. At eighteen, her glamour is as unattainable to me as that of a movie star. She is holding a bottle of Malibu. She takes a swig, wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, and passes the bottle to Claire.

  ‘Want some?’

  Claire drinks from it and smiles. ‘Malibu always reminds me of Ibiza.’

  The bottle makes its way round and finally it is my turn. I take a large gulp and feel warmth spread through my veins.

  ‘Hey, don’t down it in one,’ Sylvie laughs, but kindly. ‘It can take a bit of getting used to.’

  The burning taste of coconut still in my mouth, I pass the bottle on to Liv and sit with my eyes closed, the sun hot on my bare legs. Sylvie is talking, but her words wash over me.

  ‘Jono’s taking me to Crazy Larry’s tonight,’ she says. ‘But Ben’s going to be there so I don’t know if I really want to go.’

  The bottle returns to me and I take another mouthful. This time, I hang on to it and take a second swig. Sylvie is still talking.

  ‘Last week he took ten ounces of hash with him and kept trying to rope us into helping him sell it.�
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  I’m feeling floaty and there is nothing in my mind but the sun and Sylvie’s slightly thin, flat voice. She bends over me.

  ‘Look, Laura’s asleep,’ she says, her long curly hair tickling my nose. She reaches over and takes a blanket from a bench and begins to tuck it under me.

  It is a perfect moment.

  No pain, no fear, no worrying about doing or saying the right thing. No thoughts of home or school, or The Boy, or being in trouble. Just the dappled sunshine and the feeling of nothingness.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  November 2015

  ‘Who in your life supports you?’ M asks at our second therapy session. We’re in a different room today. It’s larger, grander. There’s a partners’ desk at one end and the room looks like a film version of a lawyer’s office. M has pulled two chairs into the middle of the room and we sit facing each other.

  I think hard about the question. What does it feel like to be supported? I suppose one’s husband should be supportive, but what if I’m not able to allow anyone to do this for me? What if I am just not cut out for marriage and, if that’s the case, why have I married twice?

  I married for the first time when I was just twenty – to Michael, a couple of days after his twenty-second birthday. We were children, although we didn’t think so at the time. I was certainly too young and, looking back, I married for all the wrong reasons. I thought it would fix me or make me complete. I had failed at school and failed to settle into a job. I was too scared to travel, ill equipped and unqualified for university. I had no idea what I could do with my life. Marriage seemed like a good option. Surely that was something I could succeed at?

  A few months before the wedding, I had panicked and had tried to call it off. My parents were horrified. The invitations had gone out. Hats had been bought. And so, on that hot August day, I walked down the aisle hoping against hope that this was the thing that would save me.

  The day after the ceremony we left for our honeymoon. We would be spending three weeks travelling through France, alone together. I didn’t feel old enough. Part of me almost expected a grown-up to say they needed to accompany us.