I was born with a social scar, a tag below my face that spoke for me. Before I could speak, it was evident: I wasn’t going to be a normal kid. A door would slam in my face, and I wouldn’t flinch. I could be screamed at or talked to for hours, but the only response I would exude would come out in the form of a Linkin Park song.
I remember the day I realized I was different. I was pulled out from my Pre-K class to be moved into a higher class because “I was smart." I sat in a room full of students a year ahead of me and my teacher asked us all what we wanted to be when we grew up.
It wasn’t my answer that defined me. It was simple, I said I wanted to be a pediatrician.
What defined me was what followed.
I began to beg my mother to read her anatomy text books. I begged for a computer game where I could explore the human body, and I spent my free time reading Reader’s Digest health collumns. I was obsessed.
It happened like that with everything. I loved things like Spanish radio and ice skating. I even had a stuffed cat that I still to this day have issues believing she wasn’t real.
Making friends was probably the hardest part. I could never tell if I was the butt of the joke; constantly second guessing if the people around me actually liked me. Because honestly, I couldn’t tell.
I remember the day I finally realized how sarcasm worked. It was well into my sophomore year of high school and my adolescent boyfriend stared me in the face and said, “I hate you." I knew that wasn’t true, but I stood there half frozen in time until his expression went soft and he realized that I simply didn’t get it. He had to break sarcasm down for me into terms of inflection, expression, and context clues.
Imagine never getting it.
Imagine that everyone around you is bilingual, speaking with their bodies and their minds simultaneously. The two languages mix flawlessly into a social dialect, and every single person understands how they intertwine without ever speaking a word about it. Now imagine only speaking one of those languages. Imagine losing entire sentences in translation, entire emotions in translation. That suffocating frustration is what it is like to have Aspergers.
I'm not saying that I haven't developed phenomenal social skills for my affliction, what I'm saying is that I worked for it. People fought for me because they could see the light in my eyes and the talent hiding behind it. I had mentors who noticed I was kind of weird, but didn't care. I had peers who loved me regardless, and I had a family who I swear to god doesn't get enough credit for how adept I've become.
What I'm really asking you, the reader of this article, is to be more understanding of us. Be more patient with your fellow neighbor, and take a second to realize that not everyone gets it.
We all have these little lenses we see the world through, mine just happen to be polarized.
