by Mary Hrovat
When I was a child, my parents saw that I was shy and didn’t make friends easily. It didn’t help that we moved several times when I was very young; I went to four different schools for kindergarten through eighth grade. (I got my high school diploma by home study.) And back then, no one would have guessed that an odd, quiet, anxious little girl might be autistic.
My mother tried to engage me in activities of the type that might draw a shy child out of her shell. For example, she signed me up for Brownies when I was in second grade. Unfortunately, this well-meaning attempt felt almost like a punishment to me. I’d been learning how to get by in the classroom without attracting much attention (luckily, school work came easily to me), but I didn’t know how to behave in what was essentially a social club. I was miserable.
I knew well before second grade that I was different from other people. Because I was so young when I learned this, and I was the only one like me that I knew, I thought there was something wrong with me. I disliked things that children were supposed to love: the circus (too crowded, too loud and confusing), cartoons (they moved too fast and were too silly). I preferred familiar settings and warmed up to new people or places very slowly. I didn’t roll with the punches; I became anxious when I wasn’t sure what was going to happen next or what was expected of me. I liked to be quiet and observe the world rather than participating. I would have loved to share my observations with someone—little things I noticed about the snails in the back yard or the patterns of clouds in the sky. But no one else, not even other children, seemed all that interested. I could sense, in many contexts, that I was expected to adapt, or at least appear to adapt, to the things that made me uncomfortable. I was often lonely and confused. Read more »