Trautism

I cherished being good as a kid, so I had every intention of delaying sex until marriage. It wasn’t even a question; I knew waiting was right for me and firmly believed it’s what God wanted for my future family. But when I realized my trajectory would take me to a very different place, I felt powerless to avert the disaster. 

Now I can see how ignorance and desperation clouded my judgement as I became a teenager. While many kids struggle to find their place in middle school, my quest had a uniquely potent and frantic energy to it, fueled by the breakdown of my family and the intensity of my undiagnosed autism and ADHD. I’d never been a popular kid despite my love and excitement for pretty much everyone I met, and suddenly I found myself chronically alone, even at home. 

My sister, older by two years, served as a nearly constant playmate as we grew up but had become increasingly distant since her first whiffs of puberty. As she embraced the Seattle grunge culture of the ‘90s, the cracks between us became a gulf. Not only did our family move out of the two-bedroom apartment where she and I had shared a bedroom during my first year of middle school, which was sixth grade, but she spontaneously dyed her long, beautiful light brown hair to black and began wearing massively oversized t-shirts and ragged, absurdly baggy jeans. And once our family rented a single family house, she had the freedom to withdraw to her own space. My sister would spend almost all her time at home in solitude, either blasting angsty, alternative rock music or practicing instruments for bands at school.

Even though we had intelligent and loving parents, they had some troubles and generally followed a hands-off style for raising us. Running a small business out of our home had required much of their time and attention during our elementary school years, especially once my mom also started juggling outside employment. And when their company finally failed, our family’s bankruptcy – coupled with my mom’s cancer diagnosis within two years – elicited their extensive physical absences from the home, plus a significant uptick in their emotional unavailability. My dad moved away to find work, and my mom logged longer and longer hours at her job in the next city over, sometimes staying through the night for press deadlines or picking up weekend side work like cleaning houses.

Since foreclosing on our family home had required us to downgrade to older neighborhoods on the other side of town, and we didn’t maintain consistent contact with the few extended family members we had, moving cost us our fragile net of community support. No more housesitting, cul-de-sac barbecues, or fireworks on the beach. Our family’s social activities were almost entirely reduced to hanging out with my mom’s best friend. She was the mother of my sister’s bestie, so the moms would usually sit at her dining room table talking over wine while the older girls disappeared into their own world, and I watched shows like Ren & Stimpy by myself (or with a pet, if I was lucky). And instead of playing in the woods and riding bikes with our neighbors as I did when I was younger, my standard afterschool activity became walking solo to the local gas station to unknowingly damage my health and aggravate my autism and ADHD symptoms by consuming processed junk like Airheads, Laffy Taffys, and slurpees.

My other interests mostly involved reading and collectibles, but I clearly needed my own people, or at least a person, who resonated with me. I’d watched my sister keep the same best friend close to her since 3rd grade, and my mom still had a nearly lifelong friend from high school on the west coast in addition to her local winebibber. Sadly, though, my efforts at friendship had largely been clumsy, unstable, and fleeting. Nuances that other girls knew implicitly needed to be explicitly explained to me, and nobody was doing that. Neither my sister nor I had learned much social etiquette or how to manage our big emotions in constructive ways, but she and her friend just clicked. Just like our moms clicked, especially as the friend got divorced and my mom practically became a single parent when my dad relocated. I wanted to click with someone too. Badly.

With my impatience and loneliness growing – and I can see now, as a reflection of the “black and white” thinking so common with autism – I began to oscillate between being “good” and “bad” as I tested the waters to see where I fit in. I still felt strongly drawn to Christianity and the other happy, successful people my dad called “yuppies” and “pukes,” but I regularly got rejected by them. I already didn’t have the money to dress well or smell nice; I didn’t have the knowledge or coaching to act right; and then, despite getting straight As and being in the gifted program as a kid, my grades had begun to plummet amid all our domestic turbulence, robbing me of seemingly the only worthwhile commodity I’d possessed. 

Despite being aware of this slide, I kept trying, and apparently failing, to connect with popular, well-adjusted kids. In a rather embarrassing example, the daughter of a school staff member came over one afternoon to our home, now a rundown little bayou cottage. While I had the foresight to cool it off with the window air conditioning unit in the living room before she showed up, I’m sure it still reeked of our several cats and their litter boxes, and I otherwise didn’t know how to host her. She was not at all impressed with my pogs or bouncy ball collection, and she most definitely didn’t want to sit on my bedroom’s wooden floor as we rolled balls back and forth between our outstretched legs. We were seventh grade girls by then, so her disinterest is understandable. 

A more painful memory involves offering my early childhood best friend, a girl I’d known since we were six years old, a cigarette. I’d requested the drug from my sister in an effort to partake in what she and her friends were discovering, but she’d just left it in a bedstand drawer for me to experience by myself, so I kept it and later invited my friend to join me. As a smart, bubbly, and confident blonde gymnast, she did exactly as we were all taught to do when faced with peer pressure to do something dangerous or illegal: firmly decline and leave as quickly as possible. I’m sure she did the next part too, which was to tell her pretty, well-liked, and accomplished mother what I had done so they could make sure to stay away from me. I felt like such an idiot. And even more of an outcast. 

By comparison being friendly with boys proved nearly effortless, at least initially, but my early explorations with these “friendships” caused even more damage. On an overnight road trip to a Christian music festival, a boy classmate and I got too close. Gross, but what a novelty – both the experience itself and when the news spread like a plague across our youth group. The counselors ended up making a new rule about distance between boys and girls in nighttime settings. So not only did I end up trudging through the public shame of what I had personally done, but I had the added insult of having ruined non-scandalous cuddling for responsible teens who actually cared about each other and their futures. Ugh!

Negative developmental experiences like these, without mature and loving people available in my life to help me make sense of them, gave me the impression that I was not nearly as good of a person as I once believed I was. Maybe that’s why I wasn’t fitting in with the people I admired. And why else would I be making mistakes like this? If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, then it’s a duck, right? One of my science teachers affirmed this depressing train of thought by giving the class an unexpected lecture on what defines a person. His bottom line? “You are who other people think you are.” 

Fundamentally I knew my teacher was wrong – our intentions and other internal dynamics do matter, even if we get misunderstood by others – but functionally I knew he was right. Existence is a team sport, and our impressions of each other shape one another and our greater reality. And my reputation had begun to look permanently stained. Since it really felt like nobody saw me as good or worthy, how was it helping me to think otherwise? 

Regrettably I didn’t understand the power of the mind at that age, specifically how the way we talk to ourselves affects our feelings and behavior, and thus how others perceive us. And in the pre-internet days, sayings like “fake it ‘til you make it” and “I let my haters be my motivators” were not yet inspiring widespread encouragement to underdogs like me. Instead of being eager to prove everyone wrong, I subconsciously relied on them to tell me who I was. 

And while I agree with Anne Frank’s famous line about all humans being good at heart, fundamentally it means we can be good at heart and still do terrible things. So if nobody is inherently “bad” then what makes a “bad person” is just bad behavior… and my efforts at being “good” kept faltering. In addition to my poor grades and social mistakes, I’d failed to make the cheerleading squad and hadn’t distinguished myself in softball or any other meaningful way – but being bad was easy. The script was so much simpler to read and act out. And that’s all you had to do to be accepted by the other rejects of polite society. 

I fell into a group of friends, and we experimented with common drugs like alcohol, nicotine, and caffeine… and obviously acted like even bigger fools as a result. We attempted panhandling at a big box store once or twice; did a decent job of spontaneously dyeing our hair red in the sinks of a public bathroom; successfully snuck out a few nights; and even started trying to steal cheap tween jewelry from a store in the mall – but we promptly got shaken down by an astute clerk, and thankfully she acted so quickly it was before we could be found guilty. Altering our moods and cognition in unsupervised, coed settings like this contributed to other highly inappropriate behavior, including playing amped up versions of spin the bottle and truth or dare. We managed to not do anything too serious though… until some older boys came into our orbit. 

Maybe it would have happened anyway, but woefully it was my mom who connected me with this older crew. She knew I’d been lonely and probably thought she was building a bridge between her estranged daughters when she agreed to let me tag along on an outing with my sister, her boyfriend, and his two friends. But the act opened a channel between these guys and us younger girls. I was entering eighth grade, and my sister was a sophomore. 

She had recently started dating a boy slightly older than her who ran around with two other guys: one a little younger than him, more like 16 years old, and one who was older and well into his first year of legal adulthood. After visiting my sister at our house for a bit, they all left to go to a 24-hour diner – but the older one ran back from the street and asked my mom if I could go with them. I literally jumped at the invitation, and my sweet, trusting, and accommodating mother agreed with little hesitation. 

However it turns out that while we both thought everyone in the car had been on board with the idea of including me, that was not correct. I could see the bewildered fury on my sister’s face as I trotted back with him and hopped in the back of the two-door hooptie. She regularly acted displeased with me, though, and the exhilaration at being included thrust me forward without question or comment. 

It didn’t take long for me to start quietly dating the younger friend. He smoked regularly, and I marveled at how accurately “kissing an ashtray” described some of the sensations of our makeout sessions. I didn’t mind much, though, finding it more interesting than offensive. I’m sure it helped that I’d discovered enjoyment in our interactions that I had not felt before, and we managed to accomplish it without doing anything that would make me feel ashamed. 

Before much more time had passed, my girlfriends and these older boys got all mixed up. At a hangout where I was absent (having been grounded for skipping a football game in order to host a gathering at my house), real hookups happened – including between my guy and one of my allegedly close friends. Horrified by the betrayal but intrigued by the power of their actions, I realized I’d entered a very adult game I knew nothing about. But I ended up approaching it as my sister and I would handle new Nintendo games when we were little… rip open the package, pop in the cartridge, and figure it out as we go along, printed instructions be damned.

So I’d had my first kiss and gotten my first period in the year or so prior, and now kids close to me were behaving in ways reserved for people in movies or marriage. It was intoxicatingly terrifying, but what could I do? I didn’t know anyone who could help me handle it effectively. Recently a classmate and I had reported to a school counselor that a mutual friend had expressed suicidal thoughts and brought a knife to school. Due to zero-tolerance policies, the troubled girl got expelled nearly instantly, creating even more problems for her and her family. 

My dad was known to be unreasonably harsh as well, but at one point I tried talking to my mom about my concerns. I botched the pitch though, and just asked if I could be put on birth control. I could’ve been trying to invite a bigger conversation, but she just asked if I was sexually active. When I said no, she did too. “You’re too young,” she said. And that was the end of our talk. She was a very kind and caring woman, so she probably would’ve dug deeper if she hadn’t been sick and so chronically overburdened. 

Even though I didn’t want to grow up too quickly, articulating my inner world was clearly difficult for me, and I’d seen how speaking up could bring unfair consequences anyway. Plus diverting from the path would mean losing my only friends. I remember crying at night to the thumping, haunting tunes of Urge Overkill’s “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon,” from the movie Pulp Fiction. 

Ironically I can now understand it’s a song about a woman finding the agency to make a decision about her love life… but back then I couldn’t understand the quickly-sung parts of the song that explain the context, and again there was no handy internet yet to look up the lyrics, so it was just the foreboding vibe that stuck with my 13-year-old self. The song’s title, which doubles as the dramatic first line, prophesied a future for me that I really didn’t like. But my bed felt like a hapless raft on a rushing river, rapidly heading towards a steep waterfall with no means of its own propulsion or navigation. 

Unfortunately, I didn’t think through on my own what I could reasonably do to proverbially have my cake and eat it too (i.e., continue hanging out with my friends but identify and enforce personal boundaries to keep myself safe). I was just too young, too overwhelmed; so much of life had changed so drastically, so quickly. In retrospect, I can see that I didn’t want to be left out of what my friends had started doing, out of fear that would drive us apart. Another contributing factor is that the intense, autistic over-achiever in me didn’t know how to do things half-way, even if they were things I didn’t want to do – and perhaps especially when it was something I didn’t want to do, so I could hurry up and be done with it. I’m now aware of a pattern of self-abandonment as well, subconsciously building a belief structure that I didn’t matter, that I wasn’t allowed to want, as if I was just a pawn or an NPC. I personally could find great joy in very little, so maybe my role in life was to go with the flow and help other people be happier too. 

And making guys happy is straightforward, I’d seen my mom demonstrate it all my life: be nice, do what he wants. So even though we weren’t dating, and despite not liking him romantically, I ended up surrendering my virginity to a guy five years older than me one afternoon. We were drinking beer and smoking weed together, but while I was not in a position to properly consent, I’d been cognizant enough to make sure he wore protection – yet I spent the next several weeks scared senseless that I could be pregnant. And after a particularly tough night when my Catholic guilt prompted my mind’s eye to see God strike me with a giant lightning bolt, I’d spend the next several years convinced I had HIV. Because I’d started hearing rumors that this guy had a heroin habit too, and I had no way to know if that was true. Now 30 years later, typing out “total nightmare” doesn’t come close to capturing the insanity that enveloped me.

Let’s try “muted high-pitched screeching in a sea of dense, paralyzing fog.” I’d already been spiraling in pain, fear, and confusion, and that heinous act and its potentially dreadful consequences detached me from myself. It seemed to cement my status as untouchable to anyone with self-respect or a decent future. Who is that girl? How could she ever lead a normal life now? If she’d been unworthy before, then these horrid mistakes must’ve made her truly, irredeemably worthless. 

That’s certainly how I acted for a while anyway, with such thoughts creating a snowballing effect in my external reality. And this high price I paid for perceived acceptance played directly into my suicide attempt less than a year later, as my parents made plans for our family to move to Virginia. But if I lived in a new city, I’d have to start all over again finding a new group of friends, and I had seen how that went for me. I most definitely didn’t want to risk randomly sleeping with someone again. It had almost felt like a gang initiation… I did a big thing once, it was awful, and then I just wanted to roll around with my homies. Except they weren’t my homies. I’d mostly entrenched myself with people whose values and interests I didn’t really appreciate, and then I got yanked away from them anyway when my family moved several states away after my hospitalizations. 

Living in a new part of the country could have been a fresh start for me, but there was no hiding the truth from my peers. While I didn’t feel or act very upset – largely thanks to the Prozac I had been prescribed, but probably also due to the shock of having done such provocative things and then getting my life completely upended – I’d blabber about what I had done when new classmates asked why I moved there or what my life had been like back in Florida. Oversharing is classic with both autism and trauma, and I’m sure I doled out some serious whoppers. 

Fortunately, though, my new school was huge and in a very metropolitan area, so my history wasn’t nearly as scandalous as I had feared. Naturally the popular kids still weren’t clamoring to be my friends, but there were other options. This large, unbelievably diverse, and much more sophisticated student population offered many alternatives to the extremes of “good kids” and “bad kids” that I had interpreted in my small hometown. Instead of that rigid dichotomy from the past, I saw countless shades of gray. I still ended up encountering some challenging situations, but overall I found my way well enough through high school. 

Sometimes I still wonder why nobody constructively intervened in my life as a young person (besides the obvious answer that it was my path, which is worth noting but is not particularly insightful for considering how the mechanics of that path has played out). Nobody intervened with my sister either, except for a mildly rebuffed school counselor. Were members of our community just “minding their own business”? Our family had always been rather strange, so it’s possible we weren’t considered a “good family” so nobody expected anything good from us, and I didn’t know I had the power to push past such judgments. Besides, falling on hard times is uniquely repellant for even the most gregarious and well-connected people. 

A kind and involved community could have helped me so much though. I just needed some form of more consistent acceptance and support – and probably some guidance on accepting myself as well. It had started to seem like I didn’t matter enough for anyone to really pay attention to until I started misbehaving, but then I got attention I realized I didn’t want. This series of events stranded me in a strange, barren land of thinking I wasn’t good for anything else, but not wanting to be the person I was acting like, and also not knowing how to be any different.