MAKING SENSE OF THE STORIES WE TELL OURSELVES (ABOUT OURSELVES)

The other night I went to dinner with my husband and the one good friend I still have from my boarding school days. Calling her a friend from high school is a bit misleading though since we were never that close as teenagers and we only formed a stronger friendship after bumping into each other on the streets of Los Angeles a few years ago. But--unconventional journey aside—she knew me when I was 16 and she knows me now.

Over vegan food, we started reminiscing about those years and it came out that I had (briefly) been in a cool girl clique called the Fab Five made up of four other new juniors who had also arrived at Choate Rosemary Hall after two years of high school elsewhere. My husband, upon learning this fact I thought he already knew, grew (jokingly) irate. “You were in a cool girl clique?! You said you were a total weirdo with no friends!” he declared, thinking he had caught me in a lie. It was a similar sentiment to something my best friend had said a few days earlier while on a trip to Mexico with family and family friends. We were talking about my childhood issues, and she’d shared something along the lines of, “It’s always been hard for me to imagine you having bad social skills.”

Without further context, it probably appears that I have been holding onto a false narrative about my past. I paint myself as someone who had a hard time making and keeping friends despite my history as a “cool girl” (according to at least one person’s version of me) and my current ability to connect easily with people. Could it be that I simply had no sense of how people perceived me when I was growing up and I failed to see how much I was thriving?

I’m sure to some degree, this was true. It’s probably difficult to find a teenager or young adult who isn’t overly critical of themselves at times. But what my friends and husband were missing about my story is the pattern of finding community and then losing community. My issue was never getting friends. It was keeping them.

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It’s taken me a long time to make sense of why this was my pattern until I hit my mid/late 20’s. The evidence of bad relationship skills was vast. I went from being a part of the Fab Five to having to go home every weekend to hang out with my parents. I happily joined a sorority in college only to drop out three years later because I’d fallen out with my original group and had no one to go to events with. One of my best friends in my 20’s told me he wasn’t coming to my 30th birthday party and then never contacted me again. Since I was the common denominator in all this, it was easy to assume that I was unlikable and bad at friendship.

These painful experiences are partially why I have been so curious about getting an autism diagnosis. As I’ve written about before, people online love to tell me that in addition to having OCD, I appear to be autistic. And I’ll admit, it’s been somewhat comforting to lean into this potential diagnosis because it would allow me to rewrite the story of my childhood. Rather than being weird and off-putting with poor social skills, I could reinvent myself as someone who was simply misunderstood due to being on the spectrum. I could have a nice and tidy narrative about why I was the way I was. And as a writer and mental health advocate with a master’s in psychology, I know how appealing it is to have clear-cut stories about ourselves. It helps us make sense of am otherwise confusing and painful world and makes it easier to extend ourselves much needed kindness.

I shared this sentiment with my best friend during our conversation in Mexico and turned to ask my mom’s best friend what she thought about the possibility of me being autistic. Robin was a useful person to ask because in addition to having known me since I was five, she is also an accomplished trauma therapist. And in one of those rare, life-changing moments, her response completely transformed the narrative I now hold about my childhood and social struggles.

Robin told me that she didn’t think my social struggles were due to me being undiagnosed autistic. Instead, she said that my OCD and related mental health struggles (anxiety and bouts of depression) kept me so in my head that I likely missed developmental milestones. I wasn’t learning how to appropriately relate to people at the same pace as my peers because I was consumed with my own (mentally ill) thoughts.

This take, which I had never thought of before, made total sense to me. It also fit nicely with my somewhat recent understanding of how much my OCD had impacted my childhood friendships without me noticing it. (For example, my black and white thinking combined with my overly rigid sense of morality often led me to cut people off if they didn’t behave exactly how I thought they should.) It also aligned with how my inability to properly emotionally regulate created friction and difficulties with the people I cared about.

It turns out that I didn’t need an autism diagnosis to not blame myself for my social struggles. I simply needed a better understanding of my own mental health history to make sense of how I went from someone who couldn’t keep friends to the person I am today—a social butterfly who never has any issues whatsoever! Or, more accurately, a person who presents as someone who doesn’t seem like she was kicked out of every community she was a part of until she hit 27ish. My mental issues delayed my social skills but once I got a better handle on emotional regulation, the ability to live in nuance and not blurting out every offensive thought that comes into my head, I was able to become the type of friend that people want to keep around.

Reading this, you might be thinking, what is the big difference? Couldn’t I have offered myself the same self-compassion for my past without learning I was likely developmentally delayed? Yes and no. I haven’t judged myself for my issues growing up in a long time. But I have struggled to understand my own trajectory. I didn’t totally comprehend how I could have gone from being so bad at something to having a—dare I say—affinity for it. I couldn’t totally reconcile the person I was for so long with the person I am today. And that made me wonder if maybe, deep down, I was still the unlikable weirdo from childhood.

Now, however, I have a clearer sense of why my life has played out the way it has and it’s easier to finally shed this old image of myself as someone who will eventually and inevitably be rejected. It also helps me own my newfound social skills as an actual part of myself rather than some mask I am putting on to fool people. Most skills have to be learned and while I took a bit longer than others to pick them up, they are now firmly mine.

I’m sure this new narrative I have about myself oversimplifies things to some extent, but that’s what all narratives do. They force a jumble of factors and experiences into one coherent line. I’ll admit this can sometimes be to one’s own detriment because they allow you to ignore the things you don’t want to see. But for now, at least, I find comfort in making sense of this part of myself that has long craved a clear story.

xoxo,

Allison

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