Yesterday, I sat down to talk to a fellow that I went to high school with. One thing that
struck me was how few friends we had in common, despite a large number of common
interests, now. The seeds of those interests were present in high school; how
could we have been strangers? It made me think about the person I was, way back
in the dark ages.
In high school,
I was a product of my childhood, and my childhood filled with fear. I was
always afraid as a child and this fear still filled me, even in high school. My
father, a wonderful dad to me, was also a violent drunk to my mother. I never
knew which man he was going to be, when he came home. I looked forward to
seeing him after work but he scared the crap out of me. And I was afraid of
other people because I’ve always had a hard time recognizing anyone. In addition
to mild prosopagnosia, to this day, even though my vision has been corrected with
glasses for most of my life, I don’t recognize facial features unless the
lighting is perfect (like on a stage). When someone approaches me, I only see
the outline of their figure and how they walk, not what their face looks like. Think
about how you feel when a stranger approaches you – to me, everyone approaching
is a stranger. It’s human nature to be afraid of strangers; they’re scary. I
was always afraid.
Then there were
the social issues of high school. I had gone to elementary school in Granby, a very
small town adjacent to a military base – the kids in my school were either “townies”
or “new kids.” I was a “townie.” The new kids were almost always the children
of air force officers. They were interesting because of all of the other places
where they had lived and our teachers encouraged us to be friendly. I had lots
of friends who were either townies or military kids, but this all changed when
my mother and siblings moved from the spacious house that my parents had built on
a multi-acre lot to an apartment in Amherst.
When I started
junior high school, I was a “new kid” in a college town. In Amherst, literally
next door to Granby, the social order was completely different. The junior and
senior high school served three neighboring towns, but they didn’t serve Granby,
where I had gone to elementary school. Kids in Amherst were either from “old”
families or somehow associated with one of the colleges. The “new kids” were
almost always the children of students or professors. The children of students
were assumed to be transient and not worth becoming friends with, while the
children of professors were incorporated as they would be encountered by other
faculty kids at faculty family functions. And both faculty kids and “old family”
kids had gone to elementary school together. I moved to Amherst because my
parents had divorced and my mother started grad school, so I was assumed to be
a transient (and not worth getting to know). To validate our student status, we
had moved to an apartment complex that, essentially, only served students and
student families. Faculty families, even visiting faculty, lived in houses, not
apartments. The fact that we moved to a house the following year was
irrelevant.
Since I don’t
recognize people, I had a very hard time making friends in Amherst, as I
entered seventh grade. In fact, our apartment wasn’t ready until October 1, so
we had commuted from Granby for that first month. My best friend from Granby had
also moved to Amherst (a few months before me), so I had one friend at school but we didn't have any classes together. I made a
few more friends once I joined the AV club. Eventually, I made a few more our of all of
the students that I shared classes with, but I had a very small circle for the entire five
and a half years. I missed the second half of my senior year because I
graduated early – my mother remarried and moved to Canada between my junior
and senior years and I moved in with neighbors that had had a foster child
before me for the four months it took me to finish my requirements, then I had gone
to Canada, too. Kids in the high school never noticed my absence.I returned to Amherst to start college.
So, it wasn’t surprising
that we had few friends in common. I had been, for the most part, invisible in
high school, with my tiny circle of friends. This fellow had been a part of a more
popular crowd – not the one that included the most popular kids but a “better” and
larger circle than mine. My geeky friends felt like pariahs in the school and were never a part
of the high school social scene, unlike Mark and his friends.
I enjoyed our
chat but noticed that I had changed a lot since high school. I’m not afraid all
of the time. I can talk to people. Some of my social abilities were the result
of simple maturation that hadn’t happened prior to my completing high school,
while others were laboriously acquired in college and during adulthood. Some finally developed as
a result of my finally accepting my ASD. In any case, I could talk to this man who was
a stranger to me but with whom I had a lot of memories in common. It was nice.
