Born in the Wrong Decade Part 3: The Naked Emperor

In the first and second installments of this series, I talked about the perverse level of awareness I had by the age of nine as to how different I was, particularly as it pertained to my focused interest in Back to the Future, and the pathologizing word "obsession" that was often associated with it. These posts illustrated that I was born in the wrong decade because of the lack of acceptance of brains that operate differently; even I didn't accept my own brain, and I made fitful and fruitless attempts to change it and hide my focused interests, which felt "wrong". Had I been born in the 21st century, I would have been spared this self-criticism, as well as criticism from the adults in my life. But what about my own differences that I didn't try to hide, ones that I continually asserted that I shouldn't have to hide? 

Let's segue a little bit: As a rabid fan of the Back to the Future series growing up, I eagerly anticipated the arrival of the 21st century, imagining a world of hoverboards, flying cars, and other advanced technology. Deep down, I didn't believe these particular things would be invented, but I anticipated some incredible technology that I couldn't wait to see. I wasn't disappointed; the me of the 1990s would have been thrilled to learn about the technological innovations of the 21st century, and the me of today is thrilled to witness it. But I don't associate the 21st century with advanced technology as much as I do with something else: a more open and accepting society, one in which people are owning up to their mental quirks that the social sin of thoughtcrime would have silenced them about in the 1990s and earlier. And, in contrast to my "thoughtcrime" about focused interests that I tried to hide, this "thoughtcrime" was something I didn't shut up about-- the thoughtcrime of rejecting the concept of expected gender norms.

As a gender-nonconforming girl in the '90s-- a tomboy, as was the common parlance-- I was expected by many of the adults in my life to be going through a "phase" that I would have to outgrow. Many movies of the era seemed to reflect this expectation: a 12-year-old tomboy gets her first crush on a boy, and by the end of the movie she looks, dresses, and acts more feminine; her sudden conformity a symbol of her maturity. Although I didn't question my mother's condemnation of the concept of "obsession", I vehemently questioned the orthodoxy of the concept of "tomboy" being a characteristic that I was expected to leave behind with the onset of adolescence. I also didn't understand why people even cared: I wasn't hurting anybody; why on earth should it matter to them if I dressed and acted more traditionally masculine than other girls? Sometimes my mother would comment that if I dressed and wore my hair a certain way, people wouldn't be able to tell if I was a boy or a girl. At least once, I said, "So the problem is people won't know what's in my pants? Why is it anybody's business? So they know if they can potentially reproduce with me?" And no, this isn't me retrospectively analyzing the situation as an adult. I was thinking and saying stuff like this by the time I was seventeen. Around then, I also said it shouldn't matter if a boy wants to wear a dress, which was seen as even more radical than the idea of a girl being a tomboy past the age of twelve. And, of course, all of these things that I said were dismissed by adults as the whims of a young, idealistic teenager, one who just didn't understand at all how the world worked. 

But guess what? I was just stating the obvious, that the emperor was naked.

Born in the wrong decade indeed! All these things I was vocal about and that fell largely on deaf ears are now talking points on the mainstream left, particularly as they pertain to transgender and nonbinary people. To suggest among your fellow liberals that being a tomboy at fifteen is a sign of "immaturity" won't go over very well today. Saying that your daughter should wear certain clothes so that people know that she's a girl? You would be laughed out of the room, after being told to get into the habit of asking people-- at the very least when you're not sure what gender they're presenting-- "What are your pronouns?" with the understanding that "they/them" could possibly be the correct answer to that question. 

After years of being told that, no, the emperor was not naked, and that I was the only one who thought that he was, more and more people are admitting that they, too, knew what they saw, but feared they were the only ones and so did not come forward about it. Today, hundreds of thousands-- if not millions-- of people are declaring the emperor naked, and others in their lives have to accept that, yes, he is. He's stark naked, and his nudity can be understood in many ways. It can be understood in the sense that you are someone who has weird focused interests-- or focused interests of any kind. It can be understood in the sense that you are gay, bisexual, transgender or gender nonconforming, or nonbinary. It can be understood in all of the above, or any other form of nonconformity. A lot more people than you realize always understood this.

Welcome to the 21st century. It's great to be here.

The emperor is naked.

Born in the Wrong Decade Part 1: Tears of a Baby Fan Geek

I have long told people that I was born in the wrong decade. 

I'd even go so far as to say the wrong century because, ideally, I wouldn't have been born any earlier than 2005.

Unfortunately, I was born in 1980, and the final two decades of my native century were not a welcoming era for autistic people, who were largely unidentified.

The world has come a long way since then, and the 21st century is far more enlightened. Today, autistic children of a variety of presentations are routinely identified, and adults who spent years thinking that they were "defective" are also able to find answers. I am one of those adults, diagnosed in spring of 2003 at age twenty-two.

I always knew there was something different about me, and between being a little kid and being a little kid in the 1980s, I didn't have the vocabulary or even the point of reference to describe what was somehow also excruciatingly clear. I constantly found myself feeling like I didn't belong, realizing that not only did people perceive me as "different" but also that my internal experiences diverged vastly from that of my family, my (few) friends, and my peers.

I began to realize with greater clarity just how unusual my internal experiences were when I was nine years old and saw the first two Back to the Future films for the first time, just after Back to the Future Part II was released. I saw both movies on the same day, and I was immediately hooked; it became my "focused interest"*. I was extremely fascinated with the idea of time travel, with the hoverboards in Part II, and with the wonderfully bizarre character of Doc Brown. Throughout my childhood, I had gotten very single-minded about other movies and television shows, so this was nothing new. But for some reason, my focus on Back to the Future was more intense than any I had ever experienced before. I recall the day after seeing the first two movies in the series that I wanted to watch them both again so badly that it practically hurt. It also saddened me somewhat that I would have to wait several months for Back to the Future Part II's release on video as well as the theatrical release of the already-promised Part III, a trailer for which was teased at the end of Part II. Although I was only nine, I knew that what I was experiencing was strange. I was aware that my parents and brother were no longer thinking about these movies and the fact that I was, let alone so intensely, was odd. It didn't take long before I began to feel like there was something wrong with me, and I quickly grew self-conscious about this unknown weird thing that was going on in my head. 

My self-consciousness about my focus on Back to the Future reached the point that I would break out into a sweat if I overheard someone talking about it. I was acutely aware, too, that this physiological reaction was abnormal. To this day, I don't know why it happened. When I tell people about this, I often end up saying, "I can't even explain it; it's like trying to describe what the 5th dimension looks like." However, my suspicion is that I felt like I had been "found out," for lack of a better way of putting it. The more this internal turmoil unfolded, the more I felt like I was harboring a shameful secret that I shouldn't reveal to anybody. I hate the word "obsession," but even then I didn't at least have that word to describe what I was feeling.

My self-consciousness about this Weird Thing in My Head reached a point where I was waging war against my own brain: One part of my brain "wanted" to think about, talk about -- and watch-- Back to the Future all the time, but another part of my brain said, "No, this isn't right. You need to hide this." Back then I managed to rarely bring it up in conversation, probably because my self-consciousness stopped me from doing so (This would sound strange to people who know me today, as I have since mostly stopped caring what people think, and talk openly about whatever interests me-- Back to the Future or otherwise-- no matter how intense the focused interest is.**). I ultimately made a compromise with the two conflicting parts of my brain: I would only watch movies in the Back to the Future series every three months. In my nine-year-old mind, that was infrequent enough not to arouse suspicion of my family, lest they think there was something wrong with me. Of course, three-month intervals seemed a lot longer to me than to other people, and my older brother had no problem drawing attention to this reality when walking in on me watching the films: "This again?" he'd quip with a pronounced roll of his eyes. 

After Back to the Future Part III at last arrived in theaters, I was once again in the position of having to wait several months for it to come out on video. The eventual video release was, unfortunately, on the weekend of the Bar Mitzvah of the son of a family friend. I recall asking my mother if we could rent the movie after the Bar Mitzvah. "We'll see," she had said. At the service and the party that followed, it was all I could think about. Once again, I was engaged in warfare with dueling mindsets: the one that wanted so badly to watch this movie again, and the one that was aware that I was at an important event and that wanting to leave was inappropriate. During the party, I asked Mom if we were going back to the house of the Bar Mitzvah boy's family. I felt that it was wrong to want to leave just to watch a movie, so when I repeatedly asked my mom if we were going back to the family's house-- we hadn't decided yet-- I made it sound like I wanted to go. I think part of me also wanted to convince myself that this was true. I also recall repeatedly finding one of my parents and asking what time it was so that I could have an idea of how long it would be until I could finally watch Back to the Future Part III again; I normally wore a watch, but as it was a digital sports watch, it was deemed too casual for this event.  

We did end up going back to the family's house after the Bar Mitzvah party. I was acutely aware of the passing time, knowing that the video store could close before we got home. I suppose by then I had surrendered to the whims of the part of my brain that I tried unsuccessfully to silence, because I told my parents I needed to get home and do my Sunday School homework for the next day. It wasn't entirely a lie; it wasn't done, but I rarely did my Sunday School homework anyway. My intent, of course, was to be able to go home and rent Back to the Future Part III. I think at some point one of my parents commented that I should have thought about that during the week. Eventually, I was frustrated that my ploy didn't work and wracked with guilt for lying to them-- I was also wracked with guilt about my hyperfocus. I've always hated lying, and I realized that I needed to confess my true motives. Following my mother upstairs (I have no recollection of why she was going up there), I told her the truth. She made a noise of disgust. Already ashamed of myself, I wasn't sure how to react, so I said, "You're angry?", but in a tone that made the question sound more like a statement. The next two seconds, where I looked aimlessly around the room, seemed much longer. Finally, she broke the awkward silence and said, "I'm disappointed. I can't believe you would give up someone's good time just for a movie." I was already self-conscious about my hyperfocus on Back to the Future, and hearing the disapproval from my own mother further cemented the idea in my head that it was wrong.

Keep in mind that I was nine and ten years old when I was going through all of this. Was my focus on Back to the Future a bit extreme? Sure. Was it out of the realm of some of the weird things kids do? Not if they're autistic. But I think the level of self-awareness and self-consciousness I felt about it-- especially to the point of the mental warfare and guilt coursing through my mind-- is unusual for a kid that age. I had absolutely no point of reference for what was going on, and, as all of this happened between 1989 and 1990, neither did my parents. Had I grown up in the 21st century, I could have avoided this inner turmoil, these feelings of having committed some protracted abstract thoughtcrime. In terms of the situation at the Bar Mitzvah, a parent raising an identified autistic kid today would have responded to my confession with something like, "I understand that you're disappointed. But you will watch the movie again. You just have to be patient. Let's make a family movie night of it next week and we'll all watch it together," rather than reprimanding me for something that, unbeknownst to my mother, I was trying in vain to control. A parent today might even say to the kid, "I know it's hard to wait, and I know that this gathering here might be overwhelming for you. Why don't you go off in another room and draw the characters, or write a story about them? Won't that be a fun thing to do before you can see the movie again?"

I would also like to point out that I think my mother might have been reacting to my confession with some level of unconscious bias. How many times do ten-year-old boys-- ten year old neurotypical boys-- complain about how boring some event is that their parents dragged them to and say they want to go home and play video games? I think that people expect girls, even little girls, to be sensitive to the needs of others in social situations. I feel like things such as focused interests typical of autistic people are largely more tolerated in boys, just as are social imperfections. It is true now, and it certainly was truer back then.

What it really comes down to is that I was an undiagnosed autistic who, like a lot of kids on the spectrum-- especially girls-- was in the process of growing up to be a fan geek. Just so there's no confusion, my distress over my focused interest in Back to the Future wasn't caused by the interest itself, or even its intensity, but rather by my own perception that it was wrong, which was compounded by people's reactions to me. Unfortunately, to this day I still am occasionally at the receiving end of aggressive and dismissive accusations to the tune of, "Julie, you're obsessed with that!", and my childhood self-consciousness resurfaces. Some people in my generation still don't yet understand the reality of what it is to be autistic and thus react with 20th century sensibilities.

I was truly born in the wrong decade, the wrong century. Even being born in 1990 instead of 1980 would've been an improvement in terms of the kind of childhood I would've had, but what a universe of difference it would've been had I been born in or around 2005. Experiences like mine are no longer unheard of, and are less frequently ones that people believe they have to feel shame about. In fact, thanks to the Internet, highly-focused autistic fan geeks regularly find each other online and have in-depth discussions about their favorite books, movies, and television shows. They post fan art, write fan fiction, and intensely debate how to interpret certain scenes of their favorite stories. Had I grown up in this more enlightened and open era, I would've been spared accusations-- from others and from my own tormented brain-- of what amounts to the absurd social sin of "thoughtcrime."

"Thoughtcrime" will be the subject of the next post in this series.

*I find the oft-used term, "special interest" for the subjects of intense focus of autistic people to be patronizing and infantilizing. I also abhor the word "obsession." I would like to propose the term "focused interest" as an alternative to both of these.

**Yes, I realize that I should be mindful about whether the other person is interested in talking about any of my focused interests, and if the person tells me that they aren't interested, I'm happy to change the subject.