3:11am November 12, 2014

You know how I talked about saying “I was 3” when I really meant “I was somewhere between 18 months and 5 years”?

Well I’ve done the same with place names, too.

You’ll often hear that I grew up in a particular suburb of San Jose.  The reality is that I only lived in that suburb for about two or three years of my life.

Then we moved to San Jose.  It was a pocket of San Jose almost entirely surrounded by that suburbu.  As such, our mailing address was in that suburb, but we voted in San Jose, and my brothers had a choice which high school to go to because the division between school districts went right through our house.  On street maps, we were always in San Jose, and I’ve even seen Google maps use strange convolutions like “San Jose, California, 95008” for addresses in that region.  (95008 is not a San Jose zip code, but there are people with that zip code in San Jose.)

So when I say I grew up in San Jose, I’m neither lying nor trying to make it easier for people who don’t know about Campbell, Cupertino, Sunnyvale, Saratoga, and all the other little towns around San Jose.

And when I say I was born in La Honda, same thing.  We didn’t ever live in La Honda.  La Honda was already too small to be a town.  But we actually lived outside the outskirts of La Honda, in a tiny settlement too small to even be what La Honda was.  People have heard of La Honda though, thanks to the dubious fame of Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters as chronicled in The Electrik Kool-Aid Acid Tes (hint: our little settlement was mentioned in that book, too, but exactly once), as well as Richard Allen Davis, the sadistic man who molested and killed a little girl after a long series of atrocious crimes against animals and humans.  My parents actually recognized him when they saw the Wanted poster.  Anyway it’s easier to say La Honda than explain where i really come from.

Meanwhile, when I moved to Isla Vista, I told people I was living in Santa Barbara, because more people have heard of Santa Barbara.

When I moved out on my own for good, I told people I was moving to Santa Cruz.  This was intentionally vague. I moved to Santa Cruz County.  Two separate small towns in the Santa Cruz area.  Never Santa Cruz proper.  And then one of the small towns I lived in was literally surrounded on all sides – all sides – by a larger town.  So lots of people who lived there referred to themselves as living in the larger town, mail addressed to one town could go to the other and vice versa without a hitch.

So don’t trust anyone but me to know the names of the towns I have lived in, grown up in, and moved to at different stages of my life.  But also don’t be surprised if I give you the same vague answers I give everyone. That’s just how I’m used to communicating.

I communicate the same way about time.  

As I mentioned in another post, there’s a time period between about 18 months and 5 years of age.  I generally refer to any and all times or stretches of time within that time period as “when I was 2,” “when I was 3,” or “when I was 4”.

I honestly think a lot of people do things like that.

But I’ve gotten in trouble with people before, for claiming different ages as when i was toilet-trained.

I was in diapers until I was five.  That much, as far as I have been told, is solid fact.  They had trouble finding preschools who would take me because of this.  (I think I went to preschool for two years, but I’m not sure.  At least, I went for two sessions of some indeterminate length, because I have two separate sets of school photos from preschool.)  I think they may have also had trouble about the toilet training thing when I was prescribed dance classes as physical therapy to avoid needing a leg brace.  I’m sure that changing diapers as late as they did was more than they signed up for, but then all of us kids were more than they signed up for in our own ways, so i don’t fret too much about it.

When I say I was “toilet trained at age 3”, and similar things, I am remembering being put on a potty chair and made to sit there and read until things I couldn’t feel came out of places in my body I couldn’t control, at which point I would be praised and rewarded.  I have no complaints about my toilet training practices.  But these memories take place between the 18 months to 5 year mark, so of course I’m going to say “age 3”, “age 2”, “age 4”, and so forth.  Whichever number happens to pop out first.

To make things even more confusing about toilet training?  Yes, I stopped wearing diapers when I was five.  But I remember peeing in my bed and on the floor of my room up until the age of twelve. (“Twelve”, in case you don’t know, covers an age range from 10.5-14, the early part of 14, anyway.)  I also remember having bowel accidents at the dinner table when I was eight.  (Eight can mean anything between 6.5-10.)  I remember, at the age of twelve (remember that’s a vague term for a vague time period), wondering how I was ever going to get married if I kept peeing on the rug and stuff like that.  So even though my diapers were gone, my toileting skills were not normal.  There was only a short period of my teens when I had absolutely zero bladder or bowel accidents.  After that, I started having them again, because autistic catatonia among other things.

And I may say I grew up in San Jose, or Campbell.  The truth is San Jose, but Campbell is not far off the mark either.  Campbell is the mailing address, San Jose is the physical address.  I consider San Jose the more “real” of the two, but I’ve been known to say either one.

As far as times go… often I don’t know the exact year, so I give a random year or age that something happened.  "1982" is my generic year for the same time period that gives you “2,” “3,” and “4” as common ages I’ll give out.

None of this is about deception.  All of it is about the vagueness of memory and language and location and time.  Oh and nothing in particular brought this on, I was just thinking about how the “I grew up in _________” question was so similar to the “I was toilet trained at age ___________” question, and how the mechanisms that brought about the answers to the questions are probably quite similar, cognitively and linguistically. 

I honestly don’t know if this is an autistic thing or if it’s just an approximation thing that most people do all the time. I wouldn’t be surprised by either. 

TL;DR:  When I give a certain age that something happened, or give a city that I lived in, it may be that I am giving an approximation.  Sometimes I have specific and important reasons for doing this (like not wanting people to know what exact town I live in) but most of the time, it just seems to be a weird way my brain handles questions about place and time.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   

6 notes