For a long time I passed as "normal." I had a wife, kids, car, a home, and a good job. Then, a divorce, a second marriage, another kid, more cars.
Normal, right?
I also had a profound secret--because my college years, which went on for a long time as I dropped in and out of different schools, were anything but normal. I spent them mostly alone.
But I didn't talk about that, to anyone. And because my life appeared "normal," nobody asked.
Until my wife, Rebecca, a bit tipsy after a date, asked about my college girlfriends. I felt, instantly, as if I were plummeting down a dark, deep elevator shaft. I had no college girlfriends, at least not in any normal sense. A handful of spectacular young women tried to befriend me, and we did fine while they were in front of me, but I could never seem to hold on to them for more than days or weeks. I fell into an instant, dark depression, made worse by all the years I had successfully avoided talking about the truth of my life as a young man--even with Rebecca.
From that moment on my life as a young man began to bother me more and more. I went home and thought about each of the young women I describe in my book. I felt I had wasted the best years of my life. I blamed myself for having been so alone. I hated myself for it. I felt utterly ashamed.
So finally, after another five or ten years, I got myself to a therapist.
I liked that first therapist. I spent days before my first appointment carefully scripting a full disclosure of my life and times. I did a good job rehearsing. I poured it all out in the first session, brilliantly, flawlessly, beginning to end. At one of the next sessions I arrived laughing, because I realized that I had left Chuck Berry out of my brilliant soliloquy. I brought a 200 page manuscript as a visual aid. A few years earlier I had written a memoir about my fixation on the man! She took it home to read a bit. But though she now had all the evidence anyone should need this classically trained psychologist was never going to see that I am autistic. She was looking for trauma and abandonment and avoidance to explain my solitary life.
Luckily, Covid intervened and I stopped seeing her. I tried again a few years later, with a new psychologist. It took the new person ten minutes. She sent me home from my first session with with a book on neurodivergence.
The rest of my diagnosis took four or five weeks. I spent hours online, at the library, and doing whatever else I could think of to understand what it means to be autistic.
What a blessing. For the first time my entire life, including my "college years," made perfect sense.
And instead of blaming myself, I began to applaud myself for having made the best of a tough situation. I also saw the many lucky breaks I'd had that helped me find my own small successes in life: a dysfunctional but loving family with built in playmates; a wonderful, tiny high school; three years in a foreign culture that didn't notice my quirks or differences; an accidental career that allowed me to use all of my autistic talents and charms; a mentor and champion who supported me in the workplace; and above all, a loving wife and family who accept me despite my quirks and perhaps in part because of them.
