Autism in Heels: The Untold Story of a Female Life on the Spectrum

by Jennifer O'Toole

And though I was usually the one to suggest lunch (the best way to be included, I’d learned), I never actually got to join in.

What behaviors might we, gals, employ that looked different enough to avoid professional notice but might actually be serving the same purpose?

The beauty of order. The reliability of fact. People are changeable. Unpredictable. Facts, though, are sturdy. A display of pleasure without anxiety.

Only living people who have, well, quacked the quack or honked the honk can truly add texture or depth, scope or dimension, insight or accuracy to lists of regurgitated clichés.

Just as I’d felt hope slip from my grasp—I was given the greatest gift no one expects to want: the words “You do have Asperger’s.” Everything else stopped. And for me, real life began.

“Autistic” is a neurological, not pathological, profile—a constellation of highly attuned cognitive and sensory skills that happens to come packaged along with some equally exquisitely particular challenges.

Years ago, a reporter asked Ginger Rogers if she found it hard keeping up with Fred Astaire. With a coy smile, she answered him simply. “Not really. After all, I did everything he did. Only backwards and in high heels.”

For some of us, to paraphrase the musical Rent, being part of an “us” instead of a “them” is the stuff of dreams and miracles.

We copy popular peers and read scores of biographies and psychology and sociology books, building theses out of therapy.

If we don’t camouflage well, we tend to find ourselves ridiculed, shamed, ostracized, or abused. If we do camouflage well, we can disguise ourselves right out of identification, not to mention out of the compassion, resources, and insight diagnosis can bring. Instead, our misunderstandings are misread. Our intentions mistaken. We are vulnerable to the presumptions we’ve allowed others to make about us about our abilities to discern friend from foe and predator from lover, about how much direction we really do need,

There are few things as tragic as when we tacitly agree to the notion that our unchangeable truth is somehow invalid. Less than. Broken. Wrong. That pretending is necessary for professional opportunity or personal acceptance. I’ve done it a million times in ways large and small, and I can tell you this: trying to hide in plain sight is frustrating, disorienting, isolating—an exhausting game of (only possible) short-term gains in exchange for very-certain long-term exclusion. When we agree to play, we not only hide and cast doubt upon our experiences. We’ve willingly participated in the invalidation of ourselves. And when you have invalidated yourself, there is no limit to what you will allow others to do. Tell the Stories:

This!

When we feel either understimulated or overstimulated, we physically cannot reason, listen, or think about anything else. We can’t just ignore it. We can’t learn. We can’t be spontaneous or fun. We can’t rationalize well. And we can’t hear others’ needs, let alone be certain we understand our own. It’s like trying to see your own reflection in a pot of boiling water. Nothing is clear. No one has to teach parents