Awesome Disabled

(Folks, fair warning: this article took a dark turn when I was writing it. There’s some serious stuff here, although there’s a lot of talk about Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen as well. I’d love for you to stay, but I understand if you want to click off, or take it in parts.)

When I was eight years old, I went with my family to go see Mary Kate & Ashley Olsen in a mall. We were Full House fans, and my sister and I enjoyed watching Mary Kate and Ashley videos. My mom bundled all four of us and battled through the parking lot congestion. We made it inside the mall, but it took a while before we found where they were. They were in one of those old-school labyrinthine department stores. By the time we arrived at the magical gathering place, we were disappointed to learn that Mary Kate and Ashley had left. We were frustrated and annoyed, but we were all desperate for the bathroom since we hadn’t stopped for a pee stop on our way toward the famous pair.

I could tell my mom was frustrated, even though she didn’t tell us that she was frustrated. She found the nearest employee and barked a request for the location of the bathroom. We went into the bathroom and paused when we saw two men standing by the sinks. It’s the girls’ bathroom, dudes. But needs must, so we carried on. It took us a few moments to realize that Mary Kate and Ashley were in the bathroom! They were peeing into the same toilets we were (so to speak– not the exact same, but like the same porcelain and same water and same flusher). I got a glimpse of them as I washed my hands. Those two dudes stuck pretty close to them, so I didn’t see much. The twins looked exactly like they did on TV, but they were much shorter than I thought they would be.

I don’t know whether the bathroom was supposed to be blocked off for their access? Maybe my mother’s bark and many small children in tow frightened the employee and they gave up the secret destination. Maybe they assumed the Olsens would be done.

In any case. It was a fun and random celebrity encounter, and it makes a great “Two Lies and One Truth” story. Or is to “Two Truths and One Lie?” Either way, it works well. It was exciting to see a person IRL that I see on a screen every week, and that thrill has stuck with me. Something else stuck with me– a profound truth that I hadn’t realized until that day.

This is normal for them. It was normal for these young humans to have giant men shuffling them around, shooing away the masses of people constantly crowding in. And then when they need a pee break, the area is cleared for them. It was normal for them to have two men standing by the sinks while they pee. Then, when they’re done, it’s normal for those men to shuffle them out of the bathroom, and presumably, out of the building. They might not even have had their parents with them.

They wouldn’t have been able to just, like, go outside and play. To fool around in the mud, or make elaborate neighborhood games on the long summer days. Virtually any social encounter with peers would have to be mediated by adults, because almost every child on earth knew who they were.

It’s a huge mind-effer.

But then it got way weirder to think about. As difficult as it was for me to imagine this childhood, they would have an equal difficulty imagining my childhood. And neither of us has any idea what we’re missing.

It’s something that everyone, of every neurotype, has to recon with at some point. Everything that you take for granted about life, based on the very specific experiences of your childhood, is almost completely arbitrary, and mostly false.

I’ve had to have a double-realization about my childhood. The first realization was the “childhood’s end” consciousness, and the second was that, in many ways, I was a spectator to my own childhood

I was punished by my parents for not doing what’s expected, so I learned real fast not to let the ’tism show. (Of course, this was three decades before I knew I was autistic, so I had absolutely no framework for understanding it.) I would let it out only when I was alone-alone (which was rare, because there were six people in a tiny house).

Of course, we know now that this is called masking— when people change their presentation or behavior in order to fit in with what’s expected of them. As you can imagine, near-constant masking took a massive toll on my mind and body. I felt constantly fatigued and overwhelmed.

The problem with masking to this degree is that I was the only one that knows the secret. I have a full-access backstage pass to the show. But no one else knows it even is a show. I would lay in bed at the end of the day, my nervous system so wired that it was impossible to relax. After 20 or 30 minutes of desperately hoping to fall asleep, but hopelessly awake, I would whack the back of my head on the headboard. Hard. Over and over until I fell asleep. For years, this was the only way I knew to fall asleep. The mask had been so soldered onto my face that when I took it off, blood poured from my face as my body collapsed to the stage once the performance was over.

Of course, I can say all of this, and it sounds really tragic. I know it sounds tragic when I tell people and they act like I said something tragic. But it doesn’t feel tragic to me. To me, it feels normal. Like the Olsens in the bathroom with the CIA men. I have a hard time accessing a feeling of sadness about my prior self, because of the overwhelming normalness of it for me.

As an adult, I have slowly come to realize how unusual my childhood was. I now know that the massive weight of masking was wreaking havoc on my nervous system– my GI health was awful and my mental health was tanking.

It’s hard when you don’t know a mask is a mask. You think it’s your face, and the pain is the cost of being alive. This was, to me, the second realization of my childhood. Yes, my experiences in childhood were foreign to everyone who’s not me. Also, my childhood experiences were foreign to me, because they could never really properly be coded as memories due to the weight of masking on my nervous system.

I have started the process of rebuilding my childhood memories from nothing. All I have of my childhood memories are disparate scraps– the way the sunlight shone through a window, or tracing the patterns of the linoleum floor with my finger. I have some specific memories, but I don’t know how much my brain has patchwork-quilted them together.

Memories of seeing glimpses of Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen in a public bathroom is a safe place for me to start. It’s important to remember that there were moments of joy in my childhood, and memories that still exist for me. It’s important to me to remember that I’m not a shadowed embodiment of my past, but an actual living human being in the present. And that present is pretty great.