Liane Holliday Willey - Pretending to be Normal

I was aware that college would bring many changes in my life.

I knew the geographies and academics and amount of responsibilities and kinds of challenges would be different, but I never gave thought to how different the social life would be. I had no way of knowing that AS left me without an intrinsic awareness of what it means to make and keep friends, to fit in and mold, to work cooperatively and effectively with others. Most people who come from supportive families learn to jump from their childhood to their young adulthood as if they are on a trampoline. They have the neurological balance to be buoyant and carefree, so that as they move through their experiences they can bounce here and there, making mistakes along the way with the certain confidence that they will be given an opportunity to land on their trampoline and bounce right back up to begin again. People struggling with Asperger’s often find there is no trampoline to catch them as they fall, no soft and pliable cushion to propel them back to the beginning for a new and improved, better prepared jump. AS makes it difficult to learn from where you have been. It makes it difficult to generalize and problem solve. Without a built-in springboard to catch you as you fall and encourage you to try again, Asperger’s people often find they fall to the hard ground, damaged and broken. I remember too many times during my college years when I did just that.

I must have thought the people I would meet in college would fall into my life just like those from my hometown did. But what I never included in my grasp for understanding was the fact that my hometown was more than a group of randomly placed people. It was a group of cohesive friends who had learned, over the course of a good many years, to accept one another for all our quirks and idiosyncrasies. I gave no thought to the possibility that I would move to school and end up any differently than I had ever been, a well-received young woman with some strong academic skills and the respect of my peers. I had no way of knowing college students would be so cruel to those who did not fit in the circle of their normal.

The spring before my freshman year was to start, I began to get recruitment letters from a variety of social and academic sorority organizations, no doubt because of my high academic marks. I took no real interest in the letters, other than to think to myself how odd it was that people so often choose to live and work in groups or packs of people. I had no intention of joining any group, other than as a casual member who would follow the line just as I always had, when I wanted to or felt I needed to. For the most part, I was interested in finding a few friends mostly out of curiosity, but also because I felt certain that once in the big world, I would find someone like me. Someone who shivered in crowds and closed their ears to noise. Someone else who could get lost in their own backyard. Someone who only wanted to go to the library or ride bikes with me every now and then. I just knew college would be a liberating experience that held no absolutes and no single files. I had a suspicion the members of sororities and most organizations were too much like lemmings for me, but I never begrudged them their existence or their lifestyle. I never knew how important memberships were. I thought I would find a friend or two without any kind of membership card. I underestimated the significance of belonging.

I did not expect much from my social life at college. I did not need much. I was accustomed to defining friendship in very simplistic terms. To me, friends were people I enjoyed passing a few minutes or a few hours with. I may not have known their names, but I did know their faces and a few of their interests and usually a thing or two about their routines. For instance, if I ran into the same girl every day on my way to class and if I knew she was interested in a speech communications degree and from the same part of the state I was from, I considered her to be a friend. Never a best friend or someone I felt compelled to do things with, but none the less, someone I could smile at or talk to for a few minutes on the way to class. Maybe even someone to go to the library with or eat dinner with. I did not need anything more, and I never really expected anything more. At first, this seemed to be all other freshman needed or expected, too. But as the first semester moved on, I seemed to be left behind. I noticed groups forming and all of them without me. I noticed people who I thought reminded me of people I had gotten along with from home, but they did not seem to notice me.

Soon, I found that my smiles were unreturned, my steps were never followed and my phone was never called. Soon, I saw I was invisible. On one level, this did not bother me. I liked my time alone and my personal space. But, day in and day out, rejection began to lay heavy on my shoulders most likely because I did not understand why I was being excluded. To choose to be left out is one thing, but to be locked out, is quite another. A smile and a few minutes of conversation used to be enough to make a friend, and for the life of me, I could not figure out when or why this had stopped being the rule.

By the second semester, I began to feel too detached, too close to lonely. It made me very angry to learn this. I had always known I did not think like other people and I had plenty of moments in the past when my differences kept me isolated and oddly desolate, but I knew how to fix those problems. I would just go to school the following day and talk to the person I sat next to and within no time, I would feel much better. I could not do that in college, no one would let me. I hated the fact that people were getting to me like this. I hated the influence others were beginning to have on my life. This was not like me. I had never cared before.

I wonder now, if my AS was beginning to fade then. If my sudden exposure to a world of change was somehow responsible for making me come face to face with the variances that altered the way I saw things, the way I thought. Without the protective attention of my childhood friends and family, I was bound to fall flat on my face. Perhaps this is what I needed to do. If I had not fallen, I might never have discovered how to nurture the parts of me that needed enriching… I might never have discovered how lucky I was to live in a kaleidoscope world…

I was beginning to see that I might never find my place in the big world, but I could not fathom why or what to do about it. I decided I would do the one thing I knew guaranteed a college student their rite of passage. I decided to join a campus social organization.

As luck would have it, a friend of mine from home invited me to try out for his fraternity’s Little Sisters program. I think he knew I was drowning before his very eyes and he was trying as best he could to help me survive. I also think he knew that, by then, there was not a great deal he could do for me. Still, he was very sweet and kind and made all the arrangements for me to meet him at his fraternity house where I would begin the first stage of try outs. I went along with the idea, even though the entire concept upset my sensibilities, leaving me to feel like a toy high on a shelf who winds down each night with the wish that some caring soul will soon take pity and come to the rescue. I remember preparing for the event. I remember walking into town to find a dress, milling around amidst the confusion that always struck me in busy stores. Nothing looked good to me, nothing seemed to fit right and no matter what I put on, nothing hid the ten pounds I had gained. I ended up purchasing a dull grey dress with burgundy trim that made me look more like a school teacher than a college student. No matter, I thought. The important thing was, I had found something to wear beyond my daily outfit of choice. A pair of overalls and a man’s flannel shirt.