Helena Mary Cole

When I was in my first year of Bible College, there was a young man on campus named Tom. He’d been around for at least a year or two already. A lot of people talked about Tom, and not in a good way. “You’ll never guess what Tom said yesterday – it was the most ridiculous faux-pas. I gave Tom such a lecture on why he shouldn’t have said that. Tom is so hopeless when it comes to knowing what he should and shouldn’t say. You just wouldn’t believe it.” Or something to that effect, with variations.

The number of complaints that I heard about Tom added up quickly. And that was how I knew, “Okay, I guess Tom isn’t cool. But I never would have known that if everybody hadn’t told me.” I almost never talked to Tom myself, but I’d been around him and I honestly had no idea what everyone’s problem with him was. I knew that some people were taking it upon themselves to pull him aside and lecture him – I remember actually seeing this happen once. I don’t remember who it was, but one of the guys literally pulled him over to a bench to sit down and give him a talking-to about his social behaviour.

Now, people on campus were already complaining about me in a slightly different way. Things were said in my hearing that I (much later) figured out implied: people didn’t understand me; it was weird that I was so often silent; they couldn’t figure out what to do with someone who never said anything at social gatherings; what was the deal with me? Why couldn’t I just join in and talk? Why did I have to behave like such a social pariah? Did I not want to fit in or something?

It wasn’t always so subtle, either. One of the most social young women on campus came into my dorm room one day, seemingly on purpose to say, “Oh, look, there she is – Silent Woman.” I don’t remember how the rest of the conversation went, but this opening statement was enough to drown my ability to reply. If I could have that moment back right now, I’d be able to say, “I’m autistic, and that means my brain gets too overwhelmed in most social situations to be able to talk.” At the time what could I say? I didn’t know why I was silent so often, and I’d been trying to change that with no success for years already.

But as I’ve said, there are autistic people who become silent in social situations and there are autistic people who talk in spite of their social blindness. I never got to know Tom very well, and so it’s not appropriate for me to say “he’s autistic” in any sort of definitive way. If he had a diagnosis, I never heard about it. But it could very well be that he’s on the spectrum. Not knowing what’s appropriate to say in a social context, to such a degree that other people actually pull you aside to tell you so… That’s a significant indicator. I did end up sitting next to Tom on a bus once, and based on the fact that he talked to me (someone he barely knew) extensively about his feelings of grief after his grandmother died, I can say he did sometimes overshare. Another common autistic trait. So it could be that he is. I don’t know for sure, but these things are consistent with autism (Tom is not his real name).

If I ever find out he is autistic, that would certainly justify the suspicion I had back then that Tom and I had all the same social problems, only I was the quieter version. I had this instinct that he and I somehow had things in common, except that where he said all the wrong things, I was desperately trying avoid doing the same by remaining silent.

And I’ll tell you something else, if people on campus wanted me to talk more, they could have started by laying off Tom, because what they were doing to him was absolutely terrifying from my perspective. I would never have been able to handle that kind of constant criticism. They were inspiring me to keep even quieter and try to go unnoticed even more than I already was.

Part of me certainly is saying all this because I’d like to see the kids from those years at that Bible College to be brought to an accurate understanding of what they did to Tom. I feel more indignant over that than I do over the criticism that came my way from them. I’d like people to stop picking on autistic people for being autistic. And this is exactly what that looks like.

When I was in high school, my friend (and when I say “my friend,” I mean the one friend I had in high school, with whom I ate lunch every day and stuck by pretty constantly when we weren’t in class) was often tormented by a group of guys who had also gone to her previous school. Every time she and I walked by them (they liked to sit around on the side of the hall in certain corridors), they would shout explicit, inappropriate things about how they were going to have sex with her next weekend (in ruder language than that), etc. I didn’t know what to do about it, for her sake. We were both scared to walk past them, and avoided them whenever possible. Then one day, we had a school assembly about sexual harassment, and that day was the first I realized, “Those guys are sexually harassing my friend.” Up till then I hadn’t had that vocabulary to express this reality. But guess what? From that day on, she never had trouble with them again. Those guys had probably never thought of what they were doing as sexual harassment. I’m sure they knew full well it was mean-spirited, but putting those words on it changed things. That school assembly shed light on what they were doing, called it what it was, and that had the happy effect of causing them to cut it out immediately.

And now, here I am, saying, look, if you think you’ve never picked on an autistic person for being autistic, you may have already done so. Call it what it is, repent, and amend your behaviour in the future. If you’d like to do penance for it, go to reconciliation. 🙂 And if it’s in your power, the person you picked on would appreciate an apology, I’m sure.

So, I’m not saying these things merely to whine about how I or anyone else was picked on unjustly – everyone gets picked on for something or other. I simply want such things to stop happening, or at least be reduced. And it might never stop if people are never given vocabulary for and awareness of their hurtful behaviour.

To be clear, I loved my four years at Bible College. They are a highlight of my life. As time went on, and people got to know my ways a little better, especially the female friends I was making in dorm (dorm living is excellent for autistic people), people were still somewhat mystified by me, but for the most part, I was known to be kind-hearted if socially awkward. But it’s also true that when I first arrived on campus, that was the one time in my life when I felt the most intensely judged for my autistic traits. And I didn’t like it. It stung quite a lot. Again, I’d like my kids, along with the entire next generation of autistic people, to be spared that to some degree. My kids will at least have the advantage of being diagnosed, but I also don’t think it should be on them to explain to everyone they meet that they’re autistic.

Autism awareness is just so, so important. The more people realize we’re not all like Rain Man, the more they’re taught to recognize autistic behaviour when they encounter it, the more likely they’ll be to quietly think to themselves, “Maybe that person is autistic” and extend them a little courtesy and understanding without even having to talk about it.

Wouldn’t that be nice?