Nothing Wrong With Me

View this piece on The Globe and Mail.

“There’s nothing wrong with you.”

It sounded more like an accusation than a reassurance. I had asked Dad to dig up some old report cards and notes Mom had made about my milestones as a toddler. They’re things a psychologist asks for when performing an autism assessment.

I never used the word “autism” with dad. I’m certain what little he knew about it was laced with stigma, so I said I was getting some tests done. I think he had some idea what was really happening, though. After all, he had a front-row seat to my strange childhood. But he probably dismissed the exercise as some psychological fishing expedition and felt the need to douse it with cold water.

The diagnosis came back as autism. I felt relief, but no surprise. I always knew there was something different about me, but never had a word for it. Finally, I knew the name for this part of me. I wasn’t deficient, broken or less than anyone else. I was just different.

That didn’t make the stigma disappear; I had plenty of reminders. Whenever someone blurted out a variation of “I’m not autistic” to signal their IQ or emotional fluency. Every time someone asked if I was a robot. Or all the times I was told I’m too intense, too blunt, too emotionally flat. Too different.

I buried the diagnosis for years. I didn’t want to be judged, labelled or diminished. I kept trying to act normal, trying to be like everyone else and cover up the gaps when I failed. You can get very good at playing a role, especially if you practice the part daily for 53 years. But every time I thought I was finally passing as normal, autism had other plans.

Like the time I couldn’t read my boss’s reactions and ended up unemployed. The years spent alone because I was clueless about social interactions. All the people I annoyed by being blunt because I didn’t know any better. No matter how much I tried to act normal, I could never quite pull off the act, but I kept trying.

You can run from yourself for a very long time. Some people run their whole lives. It took a trip to Pride Toronto to make me finally stop running.

I’d been before, but had really only paid attention to the street vendors. This time I found myself on Church Street before the vendors had opened, and for the first time I really started paying attention to the people around me and how happy they were. I saw so many happy faces, I didn’t know how I had never picked up on them before.

So many people just seemed glad to be themselves, walking around, holding hands, laughing and chatting with strangers, and I thought, “I wish I could be myself that way.”

Then I remembered I’m not eight years old being bullied at recess. No one’s trying to beat me up for being weird. No one’s calling me a freak. It’s okay to be different, because it’s 2024, not 1979. Today it’s supposed to be okay to love differently, to look different, to sound different, to be different.

It’s also okay to think differently.

I don’t wish I weren’t on the autism spectrum. It’s as much a part of me as my toes or sense of humour, not some unfortunate bug in the system. It’s part of a complete package: if you remove one part of the system, you change the whole thing. That system made me smart enough to get into Mensa, the high-IQ society. It made me a scholarship student, a playwright, an essayist, a husband and all the things I am. If you remove autism, you change the whole system and then I’m not the same person.

Maybe that would finally make me normal. But I don’t really yearn to be normal anymore. All I want is to stop running from myself and maybe get a little acceptance from the world. There will always be people who judge you because of your differences: how you look, how you sound, how you think … But at a certain point, you either stop caring so much, or you spend a lifetime trying to be something you’re not.

The other reason to speak my truth now is the hope that doing so chips away at the wall of indifference, ignorance and intolerance that still exists. Maybe this essay can make it a little bit safer for other people to be different.

Ultimately, I wish I could reach myself as a kid. I’d tell Mark he’s different, and it’s going to be a rocky road, but he’s okay. I’d tell him he’ll learn how people work and how to fit in when he wants to. But I’d want him to know he doesn’t need to fit in and he doesn’t need to change himself, because he’s not deficient, broken or less than anyone else.

Because there’s nothing wrong with me.