Is It Ableism? Part 8: Immaturity or "The Blog Post Where I Have a Meltdown"

Links to previous installments in this series:

Part 1: Revisiting the Dark Ages

Part 2: Obvious Definitions of Ableism

Part 3: Defining Disability

Part 4: Internalized Ableism

Part 5: Is "Overcoming" Worth It?

Part 6: Accommodation 

Part 7: Infantilization

In my last post, I discussed the fine line between accommodation and infantilization. Infantilization is just a symptom of the bigger picture of how many of us are viewed, and that can be summed up in the word "immature."

Many of us who came of age before the 21st century grew up hearing the word "immature", to describe them (and let's be real, some autistic kids growing up today likely do too). And many people, myself included, are sick to death of it. Fortunately, I rarely hear it these days, but I strongly suspect that's more to do with rigorous training in "overcoming" coupled with an accident of nature as to just what my autism profile looks like than improved understanding on the part of neurotypicals in my life.

Right now I can hear someone saying, "Oh, well if their social skills are underdeveloped, isn't it right to call them immature?" 

Oh, my God, where do I even start? 

Maybe it would be fine if not for the baggage that the word carries and the fact that people usually use it to reprimand others. Let me elucidate with an analogy: Would you ever call someone with an intellectual disability "stupid"? No, you wouldn't, and most people would consider you an asshole if you did. Why? Because it is not a neutral descriptor for people with intellectual disabilities, but rather a crass, dismissive word with a lot of baggage. When people use the word "stupid" these days, they use it for someone with average or above average intelligence who is acting willfully ignorant or foolish. For example, you might call an adult "stupid" for running a red light. You might call a teenager "stupid" for trying cocaine. You might call your neighbor "stupid" for saying that homosexuality is a mental illness. But when you do so, you are reprimanding them; the understanding is inherent that these people should have known better. In fact, it's certain that they did know better but didn't care. 

To call someone with an intellectual disability "stupid" dismisses the very real cognitive limitations that are beyond their control for a variety of complex neurobiological reasons. It also carries the implication that they somehow made themselves that way and don't deserve to be treated with respect. In fact, I think it would be ableist to call someone with an intellectual disability "stupid." At the very least, it's tactless.

I would like to present the argument that the same could be said about the word "immature" for autistic people. Before I continue, I want to emphasize that I don't want to be the "word police" and insist that anybody who uses the word "immature" is guilty of ableism. It's this kind of orthodoxy that I want to avoid. Let's just consider and discuss the issue.

"Immature" is used in a similar manner as "stupid," to reprimand someone for an attitude or action when they certainly knew better. We might call a teenager "immature" for playing video games in his room during a family gathering. We might call an adult "immature" for changing the channel to a football game without asking the others who were watching a movie if it was okay to do so. We might call a ten-year-old child "immature" for screaming and throwing things because her parents wouldn't buy the American Girl doll they promised her for her birthday. In the case of neurotypical people engaging in such behaviors, it is probably safe to say that these were the behaviors of someone acting entitled or selfish, and it would be okay to use the word "immature" to reprimand them.

However, an autistic person could do these exact same things for very different reasons. The teenager playing video games in his room during a family gathering might be trying to get away from the overwhelming crowd and loud noises. The adult who changed the channel to a football game might have missed the cue that everyone else was engaged in the movie. And yes, the ten-year-old girl's reaction to not getting a doll she wanted can also be the result of something more complex than Veruca Salt-style selfishness and entitlement. In fact, her behavior that people might be quick to label "immature" is not a temper tantrum, but what is known in the world of autism as a meltdown. Before you, dear reader, accuse me of getting into semantics, let me explain the critical difference between a temper tantrum and a meltdown. They are indeed very different, even if they look the same on a superficial level.

A temper tantrum is something that young children do to manipulate a situation and get what they want. A neurotypical child might throw a temper tantrum when her parents won't buy her the doll she wanted, and she hopes her actions will make them yield to her demands; she is very much in control of her behavior, at least to a degree. After several firm "no"s and, hell, a half hour to calm down, she'll forget about it and go on with her life. 

A meltdown, on the other hand, is the result of being so overwhelmed by strong emotions, of a brain that experiences life more intensely than its neurotypical counterparts, that the person loses control. While it might be difficult to appreciate why a ten-year-old girl could experience such strong emotions about a doll, let me remind you that we on the spectrum have a propensity to fixate (which, unfortunately, many people also see as a sign of immaturity instead of different neurological makeup). This hypothetical girl has spent the month leading up to her birthday thinking about the doll literally nonstop, something that neurotypical children-- even younger neurotypical children-- generally don't do. When she eventually learns that her parents can't afford to shell out $145 for it, she does not experience a simple disappointment that most kids would feel but something much more intense, a feeling of genuine devastation. She is not angry at her parents for not catering to her whims, but angry at the situation. She is angry at the fact that something she invested so much of her emotional energy in is not coming to fruition. She may even know that her reaction is irrational and also be angry at herself for caring so much about something that she knows other kids her age wouldn't give a second thought about. After having her meltdown, she may even feel ashamed for her behavior but feel helpless for having been unable to control it. Imagine, then, after experiencing all these complex thought patterns and self-criticisms, when people around her dismiss her behavior as "immature" and also use the word to describe the sum total of who she is.

Autistic people --kids and adults-- can have meltdowns for a variety of reasons. One catalyst I commonly hear about is sensory overload, such as a barrage of loud noises that feel intolerably loud to them. I am not someone with sensory sensitivities, and this was never an issue for me. What triggered my meltdowns growing up and into my twenties (and today, albeit very rarely, and usually around my family where I let my guard down, and these meltdowns are usually in response to old wounds being reopened) was often the result of anxiety that accumulated over the course of hours, days, or sometimes several weeks. The anxiety could be related to trying to make friends in large groups as well as not understanding social situations and not feeling understood in turn. A series of these situations that added to my anxiety often culminated in a meltdown, triggered by something fairly minor. But what people didn't understand was that I was not reacting to that minor thing. It was as if there was a raw, exposed nerve that got brushed one too many times. I wasn't reacting to one thing, but a series of things. It was the end result of me trying to keep my stratospheric anxiety contained. 

I would always feel deep shame and embarrassment as well as a sense of failure for not being able to prevent the meltdown. What made matters worse were people's reactions and assessments of what they witnessed. Dad often angrily commented, "You need to learn to control your temper!" and sometimes even implied that I was acting on a whim. Other adults labeled my meltdowns as "emotional outbursts" or "temper tantrums" for not getting my way. 

The worst part was how people usually dismissed my behavior as "immature" and, by extension, invalidated my emotions, no matter how many different ways I tried explaining myself. I felt like parents, teachers, camp counselors, and others were summing up a reaction to a series of complicated emotions as the whim of someone who refused to handle not getting her way, or who refused to handle common life stressors. When dismissing me as "immature", they were blind to the reality of the complex, intense thoughts that led to the meltdown as well as the complex, intense thoughts that went through my head with promises to myself to control them in the future. Often, I spent copious amounts of time in my head trying to think up strategies to curb future meltdowns. Unfortunately, they rarely worked and only delayed the inevitable. In some ways, the more I tried to control the meltdowns, the worse they became when they finally happened. Why? It was another bit of pressure society put on me that only added to my anxiety, anxiety I felt I was rarely allowed to express. I also felt that people thought I had no idea how I was perceived when these meltdowns happened. Because, hey, I was "immature" and therefore beyond clueless as to how this behavior appeared to others, right? 

Wrong. Of course I knew!

In a story that I related here, when I was eighteen years old I was thrown out of an art class for a fairly minor meltdown, in which in frustration I said "shut up" in response to a teacher's annoying laugh (I meant to say it under my breath; my utterance wasn't intended for her to hear). When my parents picked me up, they were angry with the teacher. But they also told me that a teacher shouldn't have to expect to deal with such behavior from an eighteen-year-old.

I think a good argument could be made that somebody in the 21st century dismissing a meltdown as "immature" or saying that a teacher shouldn't have to expect certain types of behavior of people in a certain age bracket (at least when talking about autistic people) is a form of ableism. Returning to my earlier analogy, I feel that it is ableist to call a kid who struggles intensely with math as "stupid" and it would be pretty lousy to tell the kid, "No teacher should have to expect to go over times tables with a twelfth grader when he should have learned them in third grade." Once again, I don't want to propose this labeling as a form of "orthodoxy" (which I see too much of on Facebook and in social justice circles), but as a discussion worth having and a concept worth thinking about. 

I do, however, feel that this form of dismissing autistic people's emotions, no matter how unusual, is not only a form of ableism but also what some of us in the community have come to call "unintentional gaslighting." And yes, that will be the topic for the next blog post.

Frustration, Anxiety, and Tension Part 2: A Witch's Brew of All Three

In my previous post, I discussed the way frustration, anxiety, and tension can mount as you try hard to better yourself, only to be dismissively told that you're not trying. But what happens when these demons overwhelm you and you end up doing something stupid and get into even more trouble than before?

One particular incident happened to me at age eighteen, on a Saturday morning in 1998 during my senior year of high school. I was taking a figure drawing class at a local university, and during that time in my life, I was dealing with a lot and my anxiety was like a raw exposed nerve.

First, I had just finished what would’ve been my final summer at Camp Negev. I had been in the C.I.T. program that summer, and it was clear that I would not be hired as a counselor the following year. Camp was the only place I’d ever felt comfortable, and it was being taken from me. This was coupled with knowing I would not be allowed to go on the gap-year Israel program affiliated with camp. Triple that with the stress of getting ready to apply to art school to study animation. It was becoming apparent from looking at the other students’ work that they were much better than me. Did I even have a chance of getting accepted to art school? That was quadrupled with the constant feeling that my parents didn’t understand me and didn’t support who I was. Even if not their intent, they often made me feel I had to change.

What many people didn’t understand was that I was thinking about these issues constantly, as if a little bug were in my ear whispering harsh criticisms to me: “You can’t draw well enough.” “You’re a horrible person and nobody at camp wants you back.” “You can’t spend a year in Israel because there’s something wrong with you and you aren’t fit to be around normal people.” “You’re not feminine enough and you should have outgrown that tomboy stage years ago if you want anybody to accept you.”

To make matters worse, I noticed early on that the teacher of the figure drawing class did not seem to like me, often talking to me in a condescending manner. I don’t remember specifics, but I do recall that I was trying to convince myself it was just my imagination. After all, my own parents often commented that I "misinterpreted" and "read too deeply into things"-- even when I knew damn well what I was looking at. One day when I was in the bathroom, a girl from the class commented, “I don’t like the way the teacher talks to you.” At least there I felt validated, that this wasn't my imagination. I was also glad to know that somebody was on my side.

As time went on, it was becoming increasingly clear that the teacher not only didn't like me but genuinely disliked me. I watched in resentment as she got along well with the other kids and really seemed to like them. They also seemed to like her, often laughing together like old friends. Her loud, boisterous laugh got on my nerves, as if it were rubbing in my face how the others could get along with her and I couldn’t because there was something wrong with me. What indeed was wrong with me, I wondered, that made her feel that she didn't have to be nice to me? Once, she even chastised me for arriving two minutes late for the 10:00 class. A week or two later, she assured another student who apologized for arriving at 10:07 that "seven minutes is no big deal."

At some point during the semester, something happened that made the teacher take me into the hallway in frustration. Unfortunately, I don’t remember what it was, but I am confident that if I found a record of the incident somewhere, it would come right back to me. We had a tense conversation that ended in some kind of truce, for lack of a better term. At some point during the discussion I mentioned that other teachers I’d had in other classes at the school liked me.

But the dynamic between us did not improve.

In the second-to-last week of class, I was particularly on edge, the raw exposed nerve particularly irritable from the accumulating tension over the past few months. The teacher did her signature laugh when talking to one of my classmates. For some reason, it was at that particular moment that I had reached my limit. I whispered, “Aw, shut up!” At least, I had meant to whisper it, but I accidentally said it loud enough for her to hear.

The teacher yelled, “Excuse me? Who did you just tell to shut up?”

The room fell silent, all eyes on the teacher and me.

In a panic, I stammered, “Nobody. Myself.” The teacher grabbed me by the wrist like I was an unruly child and pulled me into the hallway. Eyes narrowed into slits, she leaned forward, inches from my face. She yelled at me about every imperfection I had: speaking out of turn, getting openly frustrated with my artwork, not always following directions (I guess she thought this was intentional). At one point, she said, "I have tried putting myself in your shoes. I realize that there is something wrong with you." She also said, “You are going to fuck yourself over if you think you can go through life acting like this. I have had it with you. You make me feel like shit! Oh, you know all those other teachers who you said liked you? I’ve talked to all of them and they said they didn't like you. I have been pulling every string that I can to make sure you don’t go to this school.”

Humiliated from having heard my own self-criticism come out of another person, I sheepishly said, “My teachers in high school like me.” Her response was an even more exaggerated version of her signature laugh, as if it were the most ridiculous thing she had ever heard-- how could anybody like me? Then she told me I could come back into the room and work but I wasn’t allowed to talk to her. She said if I had questions to ask the other students.

Needless to say, I only went back to get my things. Then, I found a payphone and called my parents who, thankfully, had cell phones back then. They were at a restaurant with a friend. Just as their food arrived, they got my call and had to leave to pick me up. When I found out this information, I thought to myself, "God, my parents can't even have breakfast without me fucking things up. What is wrong with me?"

My parents arrived, and I waited outside with my mother while my father went in to talk to the teacher.

When Dad came back outside, he told Mom and me about the conversation he'd had with the teacher. He said that as soon as the teacher realized that the guy who came into the room was my father, she sent her students on break and vigorously shook his hand with both of hers, obviously knowing that she was in trouble. Then, when my dad called her out on saying that she was going to make sure I didn’t go to the school, she said, “Oh I just mean if she comes I’ll make sure she gets more psychological support.” Dad said, “I’m her father and I’ll be the one to decide what psychological support she needs, not you.”

In a desperate attempt to explain the situation to my parents, amid tears I said, "It's my OCD!", invoking my recent (and ultimately incorrect) self-diagnosis of obsessive-compulsive disorder to explain why I had the issues that I did. Dad shook his head and said, "No. This is just another case of you saying the first thing that pops into your head." On the car ride home, Mom told me that what I had done was inappropriate and that I needed "to learn to behave appropriately." It frustrated me that my parents seemed to think I was acting like this because I wanted to.

Don't get me wrong-- my parents were pretty pissed off at the teacher, but at the time they failed to grasp the reality of situations like the above. I had tried so many times over the years to explain that outbursts like these were the end result of trying to contain myself and the unbelievable anxiety I felt, but they never seemed to get it. Aside from the autism spectrum being mostly unknown, concepts like "chronic anxiety" were not topics of mainstream discussion. "Anxiety" was understood to be a momentary discomfort, not something that engulfed your entire life. I didn't even use the word "anxiety" to explain myself; rather, I often invoked a rush of adrenaline and the fight-or-flight response associated with it. I only even knew what these things were because Dad once told me about something he had read about them in college.

Years later, I found some notes Dad had taken when he called the school the following Monday to talk to the director of the Saturday program. Apparently the other teachers hadn't wanted me in their classes either.

This incident happened almost twenty-three years ago, and this type of issue that I had is largely under control. But the memory still hurts sometimes. It hurts because this was not the case of a teacher who was mean to everybody else also being mean to me. And the message that I got from the incident was one that I continued to get well into my adult life: That I am just "too much". I've been long expected to understand that I have had this kind of profound and negative effect on people that violates them in horrendous ways, and that their extreme reactions, while not ideal, are understandable under the circumstances. In fact, despite how upset my parents were with the teacher, they actually urged me to go back for the final class-- which I had no intention of doing-- because in doing so I would convey the message that I wanted to be "mature". That carries the implication that my teacher's response, while wrong, was not egregious. And no, I did not go back.

It also hurts because when I discussed this incident in autism groups in Facebook and asked if anybody had similar stories, all the "similar" stories I got were ones involving them as elementary school kids missing directions or crying in class only to get indignant hell from a teacher. None of them were stories about them in high school getting in trouble, let alone for saying something stupid. I suppose it's possible that they're just not writing about them because they're too embarrassed. But I get the impression that many of them learned early on that if they just shut up they would stay out of trouble. I don't know if it means that I was exceptionally bad at masking, that it was actually a sign that I was mentally stronger, a combination of the two, or neither.

I realize that we as a society have come lightyears since the '90s and that if this had happened today, there is a good possibility that the teacher would have been fired on the spot. But unfortunately, I was a teenager in the '90s and I have this story in my knapsack. It still hurts, and it's still confusing.

I still have the same self-doubts sometimes.