The Freak in Me

Her little hands clasped around the plastic pink headband, sweat forming on her palms, griping it tight like a shield against unwanted attention.

“Who thinks Mary Kate is too stupid to go on to the second grade?” Mrs. Rechner was a shrill woman, built like a witches broom with striking silver hair and a style of fashion reserved for the Sunday church pew. She ran her classroom like a well oiled machine, an assembly line of perfect little girls and boys. If any child were to step out of line, there were no limits to her cruelty and ability to enact control at any cost. That cost for me was the rest of my childhood as every single student, including those I thought were my friends, raised their hands after the teacher to that question.

I was overstimulated and had a bit of a melt down where I locked myself in the classroom bathroom. I had Aspergers, even if I didn’t know or understand what that was yet. Stupid couldn’t be further from the truth. I was tested as having a genius IQ, I just didn’t know how to socially express myself or make sense of the stimuli around me.

What that teacher did that day was treat me as a freak so that every day afterwards children and their developing minds saw it fit to exclude me from social participation. While I had friends outside of school, inside school things were very different. By the tenth grade I just decided to stop going until my parents got me into a new school where I would graduate and go on to college where I would maintain close to a perfect GPA.

Childhood wasn’t all bad. I had the opportunity to teach myself how to express my emotions through art, where I learned that I had special abilities. While I don’t remember it, my Gen-X cousins would often brag about me drawing my own coloring books at around three. By five years old I was composing piano pieces despite a lack of formal lessons. I taught myself to read at barely three years old. By the time I was 14 I was doing book reports on War & Peace in the 8th grade and comparing it to the class politics and wars of the era. I was recommended for advanced placement classes in high school but I never got there because the bullies wouldn’t let me academically succeed.

There has always been this brewing resentment beneath my fear of rejection. A lot of that is born out of not getting the opportunity I felt I deserved because of my abilities and talents. I admit I was an awkward kid. I was also funny and well liked by those who were not taught by their first grade teacher to mark me with a scarlet letter; a scarlet F for Freak.

As a young adult I tried to blunt the freak in me through alcohol. Without alcohol I was just the freak who had no self confidence. With alcohol, I was the savant who deserved all the accolades without any effort! Booze allowed me to let down my guard, and heck if everyone else around me was pissed what the fuck did it matter if I was too? It mattered very much when that false confidence shattered professional and personal opportunities that still haunt me to this day.

At some point I had enough of my own shit-bird behavior. I wasn’t going to allow my Aspergers to define me, or to allow me to continue to feel lost and a victim of my own circumstances. I made a conscious decision to learn how to live a successful life in spite of my brain working differently. How could I better learn to be self aware, but also develop the consciousness for others needs as well? How could I learn to better manage things which overstimulate me? Today I am sober, self aware and incredibly considerate, not only of my own behavior, but of others needs. I made the conscious effort to not be defined by my disability, to lead a happy and health life independent of all the hardships I have experienced.

I am not a freak. But there is a freak in me. That freak is the incredible talents and abilities I possess. It’s the way I can pick up an instrument and immediately play it without training. It’s the way I feel and respond to music that allows me the extraordinary ability to compose it. It’s the way I see and experience colors and the three-dimensional world around me, translating that into artwork. It’s the ability to read something once and digest it. It’s the ability to hear language and comprehend and emulate accent. It’s the talent for words and writing which compel me to have something to say, to explore the world around me in the way I see it. It’s in completing my complex software architecture work in half the time as my neurotypical colleagues because of my brain’s processing power. It’s knowing that in anything I set my mind to do I can do it because of extraordinary intellectual ability. That freak in me is a savant. It’s not arrogant to say and acknowledge what is simply true.

So I am proud of the freak in me, because thanks to it my potential is in fact limitless. I have so much to offer, and feel like I am the best and most complete version of myself. I don’t need to explain myself to anyone nor do I ever need to bring up my Autism Spectrum Disorder because I have learned to control it to the point where it is barely evident to others if I don’t bring it up. I do not wish to be defined by my disability but by my abilities and abilities only. I am happy with who I am today, eccentricities and all. I know that I am someone who is kind, empathetic, funny, creative– a great friend and maybe one day a loving partner. I have so much to offer, and finally the real confidence to deliver.

And to that little girl of six years old, you’re not stupid. You’re special. Even if nobody can see it but you.