(Note: There is additional content in the audio that is NOT in the below as when reading, other thoughts occurred and where thus included, prefaced with ‘editorial addendum’ and an end cap of some few minutes on acknowledging privilege and an intention of keeping those voiceless many included as I can.)
I’m watching other humans talking about their journey to autistic diagnosis and/or individual acceptance of autistic identity, but when I attempt to do the same, I find I’m stuck in a rut of needing to actively refactor my herstory and much of that work requires a mind space that I have not been able to actively cultivate lately.
So I’ve decided the best way is to just keep putting my lived experience out here and augment as needed with ‘what I did not know then, but now do’ as I can until it once more flows without impediment in my psychological and mental space.
This is a LOT more work than it may appear to be and, if you read here at all regularly, you may note progress is quite slow. I think I cannot complete this work until grieving is largely complete and as that likely will eclipse my remaining days, I have to be kinder to myself. So I’m trying that, too.
[CONTENT WARNING: CSA, Abuse, Abandonment, Assault, Children’s Home, Homelessness, Institutionalization, Foster Care, Neglect, *ape, Trauma, and likely more I am forgetting to mention. If you ‘nope out’ here, I understand completely.]
I tend not to get ‘into the weeds’ because there’s so much to be processed and released that it keeps me from outlining this ‘map’ and general timeline. So I am working ‘top down’ at it as I can. This is a 150k foot view and misses a lot of detail (where that ACE 10/10 comes from). That said, there is some reference prior to age 13 and the reason it stops after age 13 is that its blurry; so many assaults, attacks, abuses, and violations of consent that it doesn’t seem to make sense to try and talk about them because it will blow up the timeline.
Someday, when I have a therapist I trust and maybe a co-author, I still hope to write this book; in that vein, this is my richest fodder.
I always knew I was different. The first time I realized it was when I was roughly four years old. A bird flew into the sliding glass door and broke its neck. I grieved the bird and carried it to my grandmother in tears. She slapped it out of my hands and admonished me that it was ‘dirty’ and ‘dangerous’ and ‘filled with mites. She asked me what I was thinking to handle it. She did not understand my grief and thought my behavior to be inappropriate. I was punished for caring about the bird, and for wanting to give it a funeral. My great-grandparents agreed.
When I was five, these same people abandoned me to a children’s home at which I lived for the next five years. There, too, it was clear early on that I was not like the other children. I was bullied and targeted for aggressive, often violent attacks. I was the ‘free throw’ of every other kid and many of the house parents targeted me as a convenient recipient for venting frustration and annoyance.
I was sexually attacked by both boys and girls, and two of the houseparents. I was shaken unconscious on several occasions by the visiting dentist, who liked to drill without anesthetics. When I told the other house parents, they accused me of making things up and again, I was punished. When I insisted through punishment, they brought a visiting psychiatrist to assess me. This man fondled me in the office, told the house parents and the managing office that I was making things up, and should be isolated so this ‘could become clear’.
They put me in the only single room within the cottage and things improved because access to me was now closely monitored. Naturally, the lack of recurrence was taken to ‘prove’ that I had been lying. All the same, the children’s home made a point of tracking down my father, who came in 1976 to take me with him; first to Franklin, Missouri and then, to Creve Coeur, Missouri.
By the end of my first year with him, I had been in children’s hospital twice. Then came the night he tried to kill my step-mother and I crawled out of my basement window room to beg the neighbors to call the police. They came, the step-mother denied everything because my father was holding a knife to her behind the door. The cops returned me into the home, despite my sobbing and begging to be taken away.
Within two weeks, I was again in children’s hospital. And this time, I did not return home, but to another children’s home on Olive Street Boulevard, near St. Louis, where I stayed for almost a year. My sister was placed in the home almost six months after I arrived there, and I was placed in two foster homes over this time period; the first saw me molested by a foster-family relative and the second foster was ended when I holed up in the bedroom they provided and refused to come out.
Throughout this time, all I knew was that no one really cared about me, only about making me conform, obey, and/or permit their directives. I also knew that they did not see me the way I saw and knew myself; so when the next round of psychiatric assessments arrived, I deliberately tanked them. “How many pounds in a ton?” I replied, “200”. I knew the answers, they knew I knew the answers, but I refused to engage because I also knew they were attempting to categorize and label me for still more directives that I had no say over… I was tired of humans who did not care about or for me, and were just trying to control my life for their own conveniences.
Finally, in frustration, the courts agreed to allow my father to regain custody of my sister and myself. The night I heard this news from my case worker, I broke into the phone room and called my paternal grandmother to inform her of all and conveyed clearly that, were we to be returned to him, I would very likely be murdered by him and then, who would protect my younger sister?
This resulted in my paternal grandmother convincing my maternal grandfather to use his airline benefit to see us returned to her care, several states away. The courts apparently agreed, and my father never wanted us to begin with, so all seemed to work out.
Except my grandmother never intended to keep us. She was facilitating a return to my mother with the state’s help. They located her and insisted she come and get us, threatening her with felony counts of child abandonment and endangerment if she did not.
Which is how my younger sister and I would up with a single, alcoholic parent. Within a year of our reunion with her, she kicked me out into the streets for throwing out her scotch. I was 13. I’ve been on my own since, until meeting my partner in 2010, and marrying them in 2016.
From 13 to 15, I was homeless and running with the local biker groups. I married for the first time the day after my 15th birthday, with my mother’s signed permission. By 17, I was divorced and had my son stolen from me, resulting in a seven year litigation cycle that ended when they failed to come up with any reason to have my rights terminated and instead, used my pregnancy to blackmail me into signing them away under threat of back child support (which they could not pursue while trying to get my rights terminated, but once they ran out of ways to try that, this immediately was their tactic).
It worked. I was already emotionally and financially broken from years of litigation and an unexpected but much desired pregnancy. It was an either/or situation and the deciding factor was my son tearfully telling me he had to get me to ‘answer questions’ or he would be punished for not getting those answers when he went home. I realized the only way he was going to have a peaceful life was if I wasn’t in it, because his father and the new girlfriend/fiance were willing to torment him just to try and get at me.
I gave him up thinking I could/would reconcile with him when he turned 18. But you don’t overcome over a decade of active poisoning, nor the inevitable (however unintended) belief that I didn’t care. I lost my son for love of him, and that’s something I do not think he will ever accept or understand.
I had my daughter with me for twelve years. Eleven of them were amazing, blissful even. But then the dot com bust, followed by the banking crisis, followed by 9/11, and my work and life imploded; resulting in the need to go on the road/travel for work. The year leading up to this was unstable and filled with crisis, including my daughter’s descent into depression and ultimately running away twice. While I had some help finding her and returning her home, I had no help in stabilizing work and finances, ultimately leading to this ‘last resort’ decision.
All furnishings except my daughter’s were given to my foster parents to sell at yard sale so they could send me the proceeds to help me rebuild in a new town and send my daughter to reunite with me. Instead, they kept the money and claimed I had ‘given’ them my entire household of furnishings. This resulted in my car being repossessed, loss of my living space, loss of my job, and homelessness.
Still, I persevered. By 2003, I had found work caring for a 98 year old woman in exchange for room and board. I arranged for my daughter to return to me, planning on moving us into our own space within the next year. But she rejected this and her father took her back to their home state rather than supporting me. This resulted in the ultimate alienation and estrangement of my daughter, which is now permanent. (Attempts to reconcile over 21 years finding only aloofness and distance and rejection from her, topped by exclusion from my grandchildren and, apparently, a falsified narrative painting me so horribly that I finally realized there will never be family counseling or reconciliation).
Throughout the preceding, I’ve struggled with companies abusing, exploiting, and terminating me over what I now know are my autistic differences and traits. Those stories are for another entry, another time. This post is mostly to outline at the highest level the profoundly chaotic reality that was the significant majority of my life to date.
I grieve all the things not present in the preceding. I do not know if I will live long enough to ‘run out of grief’. I grieve the ‘might-have-beens’ that are strung like glittering stars, ever out of my reach. I grieve the loss of careers and colleagues, family and friendships, and all the communities and comforts that I couldn’t conform or perform for well enough to be permitted to experience, let alone find and feel confidence or trust within.
I feel as if my story holds many insights and potential learning, but I cannot focus on single paths when, for me, it’s this giant web of connected facts, events, and failed relationships. This 150k foot post does not do the lived experience justice.
If even one of these strands had proven trustworthy, my entire life would have turned out differently.
The points of convergence, where lack of aid combines with lack of options, lack of supports, lack of care, lack of empathy, lack of reciprocity… just… utter lack – they are mapped in my head, worn paths of life’s map, regularly and well traveled by introspection, contemplation, and ever-deepening understanding.
I have many faults, I was and am not perfect, I did not always make the best choice, but I made the best choice available to me, and these outcomes are far more due to lack of access, opportunity, and equality.
Thus, nearly unilaterally not my fault; my life is simply an object lesson of how a human being drowns in the casually cruel ocean of hypocritical lip-service that masquerades as acceptance, acknowledgment, care, compassion, empathy, understanding, or support of human rights while actually or actively supporting none of it.