It's a big deal, at the age of 65, to learn that you're autistic--a big enough deal that you might write a book about it. I found out, almost by accident, during my first visit to a young psychologist. Ten minutes into the visit she asked if I liked to read. Yes, I told her. Non-fiction? Anything, everything.
"Well, I have a book I'd like to lend you."
The book was Divergent Mind: Thriving in a World that wasn't Designed for You, by Jenara Nerenberg. I took it home and began my journey. Here's an excerpt from the book about that first visit.
6. My Second Attempt at Therapy
Once again I have chosen almost at random—or maybe this time magic has intervened. I have made several efforts to find a therapist, but with so many people distraught about Covid no one is taking new patients. I will eventually learn that this particular person had an opening because she had taken time off to be with her daughter and is rebuilding her practice.
I spend the days before our first session preparing: walking, talking to myself, relearning, revising, and rehearsing my life story. I figure I will do what I did last time—until I show up, and my plan falls apart.
It’s my first visit. Icy roads add to my nervousness. She has sent an email telling me to “take a seat in the waiting room” when I arrive. I can do that. The waiting room is broken into two adjacent areas with a handful of chairs in each part, and I take a seat by the front doors.
At the appointed hour my new therapist walks into the other part of the room, pauses for part of a second to look at the empty chair in front of her, then turns and walks over to me. We are both wearing masks.
“Peter?” she asks.
“Yes,” I say, and begin to stand up. She’s a lot younger than I am, probably half my age.
“You weren’t where I expected you to be!” She points to the empty chair. “I thought you would be over there.”
I am never brilliant with small talk but now I’m flummoxed. I am the only person in the waiting area and 15 feet from “over there.”
I follow as she walks silently to her office and points me to a small couch. Now my own expectations go unfulfilled. I’ve prepared myself for a certain amount of chit chat, maybe about the icy weather, maybe the earlier snow, or maybe a meaningless question about whether I had trouble finding the place, but there is none. We have evidently used up our stores of small talk on my seating choice.
Although I don’t know it yet, this awkwardness on both sides bodes well. It is a sign that I have come to the right place, that I am with the right person.
I fall onto the very center of the little couch and lean towards an armrest that is too far away. I wind up at a forty-five-degree angle. I am making the first impression of a crazy person, which, given her profession, is perhaps not surprising. After all, I am here to talk about my crazy life—but it’s not the first impression I planned.
I pull myself up to a more dignified vertical and we begin. I have come with the firm intent to repeat the well-rehearsed story of my life to this new person, as I did with the last. She even knows this plan, because in my initial email I foolishly shared the “candy store” comment of the previous therapist. I promised good stories. But my plan sputters immediately into chaos. I jabber out bits and pieces. I breathe oddly. I talk about my current clingy depression. I talk about my painfully alone college years. I try to say something about the crazily alcoholic but loving home I grew up in. My voice warbles. I blame my ragged breath and speech on the mask I am wearing. She smiles and says, “It’s okay. It happens. Just talk.”
And within minutes, she begins ushering me gently towards an entirely new understanding of who I am—a unified theory of me that explains almost everything.
She doesn’t tell me during our first session, but she has seen something, and I know this because at one point she talks aloud to herself, laughing a bit and shaking her head, saying, “It’s not even a firm diagnosis yet!”
I’m listening and wondering, “What? What’s not a firm diagnosis?”
Ten or fifteen minutes into our first session she says, “Do you like to read?”
“I do.”
“Do you like nonfiction?”
“Anything. Everything.”
“Oh good!” she says. “I’m thinking of a book you might like. It focuses on women, but you’ll be able to see past that.”
This is exactly what I have been hoping for—a book that will help me understand who I am and why I am that way. Because I have known most of my life that I am different.
And then she asks the big question.
“Do you know the term ‘neurodiversity?’”
I do not—so she reaches back to a word I had used to describe my relationship with Rebecca. “We like each other and love each other and support each other despite our quirks,” I told her.
She smiled. She smiles again now.
“It means ‘quirky.’ Neurodivergent people are people whose brains are wired differently from most people. Not badly, just differently. We see the world differently from most people.”
We? Have I heard this properly? At any rate, I like it. I’ve known all my life I am wired differently, that I see things differently, that I’ve lived differently, and even lawyered differently. I’m proud of it. I can’t wait to learn how and why.
As I’m getting ready to go she loans me a copy of the book—a volume so new and fresh it makes me nervous. I hurt the books I read. I spindle, fold, and mutilate. I cart them on long walks to read in bits and pieces from any dry bench. They wind up with arched spines and ragged pages spotted with drops of coffee and wine. But I take the book home, protecting it from the winter elements, and immediately sit down in my customary spot (I have two) to gingerly open it and read.
I am immediately and stunningly disappointed. She hasn’t understood me at all.
(Peter O'Neil is the author of My So-Called Disorder: Autism, Exploding Trucks, and the Big Daddy of Rock and Roll, available on bookshop.org, barnseandnoble.com, amazon.com, or on order from your local bookstore.)
