The Long Silence, Part 2: Confessing Secrets

As my last post illustrated, I kept a lot hidden from my parents. I could tell Dad a little, but there was still a limit to his ability to understand me. As for my mother, forget it. Over the past few years I have slowly begun to tell them about the emotional and mental turmoil I experienced as a teenager, especially in terms of trying to navigate crushes. It is not much different than the coming-out process that LGBTQ people go through, confessing feelings and thoughts that most people think are "wrong". Even today it is still awkward telling my parents about things that I had kept from them for so long, because I am so used to being told that my feelings are "wrong" and that my actions are "immature." This operant conditioning is a result of what I heard in my formative years, over and over again: I was too old to be a tomboy and that I should like typically feminine clothes; that I should have crushes, but not so intensely; I shouldn't feel devastated if someone hurts me, because I probably brought it on myself or am just misinterpreting them... and so forth.

This blog post has two confessions about the summer of 1998, when I was in the CIT program at Camp Negev. On the first day, the head staff broke the shocking news to me that I was not allowed to work with the kids. I also developed a crush on one of the counselors, Omri. Although the summer was mostly good, both of these aforementioned circumstances caused me a lot of stress. When I was hit with the bombshell that I was not going to get to work with kids until possibly 2nd session (and fortunately they did let me work with them 2nd session), they essentially had told me, "You made your bed, now sleep in it." Had I made some really stupid mistakes in the past that they were right to be concerned about? Yes. Did I have some growing up to do? You betcha. But both then and now I felt their concerns were hypocritical because these people were guilty of their own appalling inappropriateness: smoking weed on camp premises, leaving kids alone in cabins, yelling at kids who were a little "different"... But just imagine the stress I felt, with little sympathy from most of the staff. In fact, I was expected to repress any frustrations I felt and keep a Wendy Wright smile plastered on my face. How could anybody be expected to work under that kind of pressure?

This is where the secrets come in. Mom, Dad, I have something to tell you. Two somethings, actually. I vaguely alluded to the second one at the end of the summer of 1998, but I refused to elaborate because I knew I would be lectured about how I couldn't blow up and I had to keep my cool... even under that horrible pressure. Now you will finally know these secrets, and I'm sure by now you've figured it out: The Monster visited me that summer, twice as a matter of fact.

The Monster's First Session Visit:

During first session, I did the math and figured out that the only reason that I even got into the CIT program was because my friend and mentor, Jonas (who that summer was working at one of Negev's sister camps in upstate New York), persuaded the staff to let me in. One day, Jonas came to camp to visit with the sister camp he was working at. As soon as I saw him, I ran and practically jumped him as I gave him a hug. I said, "It's so good to see you!" Then I said to him, "I figured it out-- you talked them into letting me in." Jonas gave a non-committal shrug and laughed awkwardly.

And then the pieces fell abruptly into place. Think we Aspies can't read between the lines? I concluded then that I had misunderstood-- Jonas didn't fight to get me into camp, but rather he made sure I didn't get to work with kids. When I realized what had happened, I felt shocked and horrified, and that my friend had stabbed me in the back. This was the guy who I thought understood me and who was always there for me, only to betray me in one of the worst possible ways. In short, I felt humiliated. I said, "Wait a second. You didn't want me to work with kids. Some friend you are!" And I stormed off.

I tried to keep the tears in because I knew I couldn't be visibly upset-- after all, mature people don't have emotions, right (yes, dear, that was sarcasm-- you see the ridiculous standards people held me to?)? But one of my counselors could see that I was upset and forced it out of me. I cried and screamed because I was in such horrible pain. She tried to calm me down, but neither she nor anybody else understood what this was doing to me. They just saw the superficial behavior of having an emotional outburst, not the devastating buildup that had led to it, with my realization about Jonas being the catalyst.

I tried to find Jonas again but he was nowhere around. Turned out he was taking his kids tubing on the Delaware, so I had to wait for him to get back. When he finally did get back, we sat and talked. It turned out that I was right the first time-- he had fought to get me into camp because he knew it would damn near kill me if I couldn't go to camp that summer. And while I may have jumped the gun about him making sure I didn't get to work with kids, it wasn't entirely unfounded. He agreed with them that I wasn't ready yet. After he explained this to me, I felt somewhat better. But of course I was still hurt that for months he and others had known I was not going to get to work with kids and that I didn't know until the first day of camp. I was still very upset that he had kept this from me for several months. But the bombshell? He thought I had known. He thought the camp director had told me months ago.

I also told Jonas that I didn't like one of my counselors-- we'll call him David-- and that I got the feeling he didn't like me and had no sympathy for me. Jonas, naively, said that David cared about me-- cared about me so much that he had driven down to the river to tell Jonas what was going on with me. Sorry, I call bullshit on that one. David had had it in for me then. He was nasty to me on several occasions, and I don't think by driving to the tubing site to talk to Jonas he wanted to do anything except rat on me.

So there you go. The first visit from The Monster. And of course nobody forgot it, and it was just another mark on my Chalkboard of Mistakes that prevented them from hiring me as a counselor the following summer.

The Monster's Second Session Visit

Mom and Dad, you probably don't remember this. But I had vaguely alluded to getting "a little upset" on a three-day, twenty-mile-hike camping trip during second session. I refused to elaborate, and you kept unsuccessfully trying to force it out of me. This is what happened:

The night before we had left for the camping trip, I was in the shower... OK, I admit it; I was just standing in the girls' shower because I knew that my crush, Omri, was showering with some guys on the boys' side (it was a bathhouse-- girls' and boys' showers were separated by a wall). So of course I hoped to accidentally/on purpose run into him when he came outside. What happened? I overheard my name being dropped a few times. When Omri came out of the shower, I asked him what was said. He said that he and others had said that they were tired of hearing me "bitching", complaining about things. In some cases some things that I had said as a joke were misinterpreted as me complaining-- and sadly that still goes on with me today.

 Omri and I had a very tense talk, and I knew that he was done with me and that he was tired with me (another note-- it wasn't that I couldn't  pick up on these cues, it was more that I didn't know what the fuck to do with them!) and that with only a week of camp left I still had a lot to do to prove that I could come back as a counselor the following summer. I went to bed that night, crushed that Omri was tired of me and crushed that my chances of being hired as a counselor the following summer were essentially zero. I may have been given kids to work with 2nd session, but I knew damn well I wasn't out of the woods yet.

The next day I was very quiet until I confronted one of my close guy friends who had been in the shower the night before when my name was dropped. He said that someone had made a passing reference to me "bitching", but my friend also had told others that I wasn't given enough credit for the good things I did for the campers I was in charge of and that people seemed to only notice my mistakes. Would have been nice had Omri told me about that part.

The rest of the day, walking mile after mile, was quite a bit tense for me. That evening, as we set up camp, I accidentally knocked over a box of cereal, its contents spilling on the ground. The other CITs who were around said, "Julie!" Of course it was probably a momentary thing, something they would have laughed about ten minutes later. But I was like a soda bottle that had been shaken over and over, with finally someone taking the cap off. I snapped. My emotions, which had to be put on the back burner in the name of "maturity", spilled out along with that cereal. Another visit from the monster, screaming, crying... I hurled someone's flashlight across the clearing, and the damned thing broke (fortunately its owner forgave me-- the kids in my group were generally very accepting and nice and understanding towards me). My counselor-- the one I liked, not David the Dickhead-- was trying to calm me down, just as she did first session when the incident with Jonas happened. But I was in hysterics. I was hurting because Omri wasn't my friend. I was hurting because I couldn't be a counselor. And I knew that my outburst was the nail in the coffin, and that I absolutely wouldn't get hired the following summer. I was right.

Nobody, nobody, nobody understood how devastating it was to have strong feelings for someone only for them to want nothing to do with you. Nobody could understand the confusion I felt that things had turned out like this after Omri had treated me like a friend in the beginning of the summer. Nobody understood how hard things in life were for me that everybody took for granted.

And back then nobody knew the name for my condition. I was simply a "behavior problem" and I was "immature". My visits from the Monster were seen by others not as overwhelming frustration that I could no longer keep bottled up, but as childish temper tantrums. Needless to say, these two incidents were the most cited when Camp Negev explained why they wouldn't hire me as a counselor.

Nobody understood me, and I didn't even understand it myself. So Mom and Dad, why would have I told you about these things back then?

What I Knew Part II: A Lot More Than You Think!

My previous blog post talked about the perception of people with Asperger's as gullible and how, if anything, I was more vigilant than most people need to be. The thing is, I knew and understood a lot more than many people (including my own parents, of course) gave me credit for, and I don't just mean in the realm of knowing when I was being manipulated.

Looking back, it seems that adults thought of me as so detached from reality, almost as if they saw me as a goldfish swimming aimlessly through a bowl and repeatedly hitting my head on the side. It seemed that they thought that I didn't know that I was hitting my head, let alone know that most goldfish don't do this. But I knew. I knew and understood much more than they realized. And despite what they thought, I was very aware that I was different.

By the time I was eleven, I had some vague idea that I was being looked at, that something was going on behind my back, that adults were talking about me. I was well aware that my parents thought there was something psychologically wrong with me. So around that time when I started seeing a psychologist, Dr. Klein (not his real name), I knew I had a lot to be suspicious of. My mother usually talked with Dr. Klein alone for five minutes before my session started. But one day she was in there for almost the entire hour that was supposed to be mine. After I realized that a long time had passed, I knew that something was going on, that they were talking about me. I did what any suspicious eleven-year-old would do: I sat outside the door and eavesdropped. 

I remember Mom saying in exasperation, "She doesn't tell me what she wants." I knew exactly what she was referring to. One day (maybe the same day; I don't remember) before school I was looking for my bra. I had just started "developing", so needing a bra was a new and embarrassing thing for me. Like any adolescent girl, I didn't want my father to hear me talking about it. I found my mother and whispered, "I need my bra." She couldn't hear me. "What?" she had asked in a very loud voice. "My bra," I whispered again.  She still didn't hear me. She kept talking more and more loudly. Not wanting Dad to overhear, in a normal voice I said something like, "My... you know." Mom didn't figure it out. So there she was that afternoon, telling Dr. Klein that for some reason something was preventing me from communicating a simple request. The fact that it hadn't occurred to Mom or Dr. Klein that I would eavesdrop and the fact that Mom couldn't figure out that I had been trying to tell her without Dad overhearing that I was looking for my bra speaks volumes: It shows just how little adults thought I knew and understood. 

Around the same time, I had started drawing violent Addams Family cartoons. I knew not to draw violent pictures in school. But Mom forbade me from drawing them at all because for some reason she was inordinately convinced that I was indeed drawing them in school. Of course I knew at age eleven that there were certain activities appropriate for different contexts! I may have had trouble with some of these, but not all of them as my parents thought.

When I was turning eighteen, I was friends with a girl, Jenna (not her real name), who was fooling around with Wicca. When Mom found out, she yelled at me to stay away from her. Recently I got back in touch with Jenna (as detailed in "Why Do You Keep Dredging These Things Up"?) and I mentioned the Wicca incident to my parents. Neither of my parents remember the incident or even who Jenna was. Mom said that she was likely scared that I would join a cult (I do remember this being the case; Dad and I had had a conversation shortly after the incident). I recall feeling insulted that Mom would think I would be stupid enough to do something like that. When I brought up the incident a few weeks ago, Mom mentioned that I was a "kid with problems" and that was why she had reacted the way she did. I was a month shy of my eighteenth birthday at the time. Of course I knew that cults were dangerous! The Heaven's Gate suicide had happened a little over a year before, and I remember thinking that it was horrible and that it was amazing how easily people could be indoctrinated. And my parents knew that I had had these thoughts because we'd talked about it at the time (the absurdity of thinking that trying out Wicca is a direct pathway to a cult is another tangent I won't get into here). 

I often missed social cues, but I was also better at reading between the lines than many people gave me credit for. In the summer of 1998, when I was seventeen and in the C. I. T. program at Camp Negev, my counselors told me on the first day that they were not letting me work with kids. When I asked why, they said that they wanted me to do "a special job". Suspicious that there was something else going on, I forced it out of them. "It" was that they were not comfortable letting me work with kids. Did they really think I wasn't going to know that there was something they weren't telling me? Did they really not think I would force it out of them? Throughout the day, I was quite upset and went to one of the head staff about it. When I asked her why I was being kept from the kids, she told me that people "had concerns". But I had had enough experience to know that someone telling me that they "had concerns" was a euphemism for something more serious. I had enough experience to know that it could mean, "You're weird", "We see you as a problem," "We don't want you here", or all of the above and more. Long before that, I knew when people were keeping something from me, or not telling me the entire story. "Forcing it out of them" is something I have long since had down to an art. Why wouldn't I, if experience taught me that a lot went on about me behind closed doors?

The Summer of 1998

The summer of 1998 doesn't seem like sixteen years ago. I'm not sure how long ago it seems, but it does not seem like sixteen years ago. I suppose what it comes down to was that it was a huge turning point in my life in terms of how I understood myself, the world, and in my place in it.

In June of 1998, just a few weeks before leaving for what (unknown to me) would be my final summer at Camp Negev, I made a huge discovery. Or, that is, I thought I did. After years of wondering what it was about me that was so different, wondering why I was always off in "my own world" and why I got obsessed with movies as well as any guy I had a crush on, I literally woke up one morning and thought to myself, "I have Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder." At the time, it was the closest I could come to labeling myself. Asperger's Syndrome was barely known at the time, and not having heard of it, OCD seemed like the only logical explanation. After a couple years, I realized that wasn't it (and, of course, I didn't know what it was). I compare my experience to that  of many transgender people, who have not yet heard the term "transgender", initially misidentifying themselves as gay. Kim Pearson, of Trans Youth Family Allies, calls this mislabeling "in the absence of reflection." The mother of an FTM transgender child, in an interview she talked about her son initially coming out as a lesbian "in the absence of reflection." In other words, her child looked out into the world and didn't see any examples of himself. He felt masculine and thought, "Masculine females are lesbians. That must be what I am." But that label never felt right to him. It was only when he heard the term "transgender" that everything finally began to make sense to him; he realized that he was actually a boy trapped in a girl's body. In my case, I looked out into the world, didn't see examples of myself, and thought, "People who get obsessed with things have OCD. That must be what I have." 

Although the OCD label proved to ultimately be wrong, the attempt at diagnosing myself that summer made me aware of something: some people are simply HARDWIRED DIFFERENTLY. This had never occurred to me before in my life. I realized, "If I'm hardwired differently and I know this, I can understand myself better." I came to Camp Negev that summer fully ready to not only embrace this understanding but also to be the best C.I.T. I could be-- at age 17, it was time for me to enter the C.I.T. program at camp. As it turned out, however, camp wasn't ready for me to take this next step. It turned out that the only reason that I got accepted to the program was because my counselor friend and mentor, Jonas, demanded that the camp accept me, which they were originally not going to do. I was allowed to be there, but they would not let me work with kids. For the first time, I realized, "They won't let me work with kids. It's not because I'm a malicious person or someone who would hurt the kids, but it's because I'm hardwired differently and they don't understand me." 

The other C.I.T.s, however, had known me already for three years and did understand me. Most of them thought the whole thing was unfair. The camp director told me I could work with kids second session (halfway through the summer) if I proved able to work with them. Do you sense a Catch-22 here? How could I possibly prove myself if they didn't want me near the kids? In fact, I recall constantly referencing Catch-22 throughout that summer. I was given kids second session, but apparently only after director and some other counselors were up until 3:00 A.M. discussing it. 

It was around this time that I began to be disillusioned with the social politics of Camp Negev and also see a greater hypocrisy in the world. I could have understood the concerns of the counselors and the director if most people on staff were responsible, caring counselors. But they weren't. Most of them simply worked at camp to be with their friends. I was appalled by some of their conduct. Many of them left their kids alone in the cabins and went off to the staff lounge to smoke weed. Some of them were nasty to the kids. I found this hypocritical at a camp that specifically preached social justice. In fact, during second session when I was at a staff meeting, a group of counselors was talking about an eleven-year-old kid with four-doses-of-Ritalin-per-day ADHD. They said that he was a horrible kid, that he was hopeless, and that he deliberately misbehaved. I did not take this lying down. I told the counselors that the kid was just that-- a kid. He was a kid with ADHD and, thinking of my own epiphany at the beginning of the summer, one who was hardwired differently. I tried to explain that to them but they just laughed at me. What made this even more disgusting was that the meeting was in a cabin cubby and some of the kids were in the next room. I warned the counselors that the kids might be listening. I know I would have at age eleven. Throughout the summer, many of these same counselors were very short with this kid who, as far as I could see, was well-meaning and not malicious. I remember thinking, "I hope when it's his turn to be a C.I.T. in 2004 he doesn't have to go through what I'm going through" (fortunately, years later I learned that he got into the C.I.T. program with no trouble).

From that summer I also took away another lesson that still resonates: It's not what your intentions are, or even what your actions are. It's about how well you cover up any mistakes that you make. Let's use the metaphor of getting caught with your pants down. Socially savvy people get caught not just with their pants down, but peeing or pooping on the floor, masturbating, you name it. They laugh, wipe their hands off, and pull up their pants. No big deal. As someone with Asperger's, when my metaphorical pants fell down (accidentally, of course) at camp, I could not pull them back up with the kind of finesse that the others could. To them, it looked like I committed a serious infraction. This is metaphor of course, but in terms of what actually happened? It was okay for these counselors to go off and smoke weed instead of watching the kids, or to browbeat a kid with ADHD because that was a socially acceptable thing to do. But if I tripped and fell and reflexively said, "Oh, shit!" when a kid was within earshot? Forget it. The whole universe collapsed on itself and within an hour everyone at camp knew and I was read as an unstable person who shouldn't be near kids. Never mind that these kids really liked me. I recall one fellow C.I.T. commenting that she was impressed by how much initiative I took in terms of spending time with the kids.

I should mention that since 1998, Camp Negev (not its real name) has changed drastically and the leadership is much better. It is no longer acceptable to leave the kids unattended or to smoke weed at the camp. As I understand it, it was in or around 2002 when some serious changes began to take place. I couldn't tell you exactly when it happened, because I could not get hired as a counselor. Further down the line I learned that there is Asperger's awareness training that takes place during orientation. However, since 1998 I have still seen this dynamic of "getting caught with one's pants down" in the real world. If anybody besides me gets caught screwing up, no big deal. It's an isolated incident. If I do? People read way too much into it and what my intentions are and what it means about me. In some cases, this type of misunderstanding has gotten me fired from jobs. 

And finally, one thing I began to notice in the summer of 1998 that sticks with me to this day is that when I think a situation is going downhill or that something is going on regarding me that I'm not aware of, I'm usually right. I may have had difficulty with social cues, but during the summer of 1998 I picked up on subtle cues that led me to correctly believe that people were scrutinizing me beyond the superficial (ie beyond "prove that you can work with kids"). I knew very clearly when they said one thing and all I was hearing was the tip of the iceberg. "We have some concerns." There was a time when I would have read that as, "We have some concerns." In fact, I think many people would. But ever since 1998, that word has been more loaded for me. "Concerns" means, "You are a problem and we are watching every move you make. And everything you do is subject to microscopic examination." Beyond this example, I can't articulate exactly what I mean. But I've seen it a number of times since then. I have had to learn to read more deeply into things than most people, because they don't have a history of social failure.

Despite everything, the summer of 1998 was overall a fun, memorable summer for me. But I still won't forget the frustration I felt in certain situations. And because of the lessons I took away from it that are still relevant, it does not seem as long ago as it should.