5:57am January 8, 2012

“We need and deserve families who can see us and value us for ourselves, not families whose vision of us is obscured by the ghosts of children who never lived.”

—

I was going to say in my response to the last quote I posted from the same article: I’ve gone through large portions of my life where at least some of the people around me fervently wished I was someone else. And it felt exactly like I was competing with a ghost. Only the ghost was of someone who never existed.

This became especially true once my development underwent what to others seemed like a sudden shift, in adolescence. Things that used to be hard but possible became less possible. Things that used to be impossible but fakeable became less fakeable. And things that had always been my true talents, became more prominent.

Some people responded to this with “I want the old you back.” What this actually meant was they had envisioned a developmental path for me that never existed. They wanted me to continue on that path. And even as I got older, they still had this imaginary person in their heads who was who I would have been if my development had taken the path they wanted.

At any rate, this was a time when I most needed people to tell me I was okay no matter who I turned out to be. That I could have a life as who I was, not just if I somehow turned into the ghost that everyone had in their heads. Instead, I mostly got two messages: Stay who you are and you’ll be institutionalized indefinitely. Become the ghost and you’ll be living independently by your twenties. The latter was intended to be a message of hope. But I knew deep down that it would never happen, so instead it became a disturbing ultimatum of despair.

These days my family seems to have quit dreaming about that ghost. And I have dropped from my life anyone who wouldn’t quit dreaming about her. My family now sees who I am as the person they most want to know. And when my father visited shortly before his 70th birthday this year, just as he was leaving, I got the feeling there was something that had worried him about me, that he no longer feels the need to worry about. And like if he ever didn’t accept some things about me, he does now absolutely.

Meanwhile I try to envision a world where autistic children undergoing the somewhat rare (but these days beginning to be well-studied) changes I went through as an adolescent, won’t be competing with ghosts anymore. But it’s hard to imagine that in a world where even children not undergoing those changes often have to deal with the ghost of the “normal” child that people used to be able to pretend they were going to have.

Notes: