Helena Mary Cole

In my second year of Bible College, I chose to go on student exchange, to study for a semester at a similar Christian College in the port city of Klaipeda, Lithuania. In fact, it was the first liberal arts college to open in the former Soviet Union. This was in the mid-1990’s. Education in that part of the world consisted of listening to the professor, figuring out what they had already concluded about the subject, and then regurgitating that. You got a better grade the better you could repeat back the prof’s views. A liberal arts education, on the other hand, means that students research the subject, come to their own conclusion, and then submit that for grading. This new liberal arts college was a big deal over there.

It was an exciting time to spend a semester in Lithuania. I loved every minute of that experience.

I already said in a past post that seeking cross-cultural living is common for an undiagnosed autistic person. I’ve also hinted at the deep feelings of hurt that can arise from a childhood and adolescence of being socially rejected by one’s home culture. What I found in Lithuania was the social acceptance I’d been starved of most of my life, and therefore, when I left Lithuania at the end of the semester, a strong and surprisingly vehement desire to go back someday rose up in me. This was entire possible, and the shape of what going back would look like was already set before. The College in Lithuania mostly hires North American volunteers, and they always need teachers for the evening English language courses they offer to the community. So, I eventually did that, after I graduated from university.

To recap a little, the reason why cross-cultural living often works out well for autistic people is because the foreign culture already expects you to be different, a little not-what-they-expect, and the language barrier can easily take the blame for whatever autistic communication difficulties might arise. As an exotic foreigner, and a person with whom everybody wants to practise their English, that autistic person, who had so much trouble fitting in back home, is likely to enjoy a popularity they’ve never experienced before. There’s also an automatic in with the local community of ex-pats, who often come from various countries all over the world, and so tolerance for differences among them is also quite high. If you are fundamentally different for whatever reason (in this case, having an autistic brain), the place to thrive is the place where differences are readily forgiven. Enter cross-cultural living.

There are also some things specifically about Lithuanian culture that lent itself well to my autistic traits. For example, Lithuania had just lived through a few generations of tyrannical oppression, when you never knew who you could trust and who you couldn’t. Therefore, you didn’t just buddy up with just anyone who happened to cross your path. Any new person you came across had to earn your trust before anything like friendship could arise between you. This meant that small talk with strangers was not a common practice. I didn’t even have to smile at anyone I didn’t know while I was living there. North American culture frowns on that deeply and calls it “unfriendly” and “anti-social.” But autistic people struggle with small talk. The trouble is, small talk could be sincere or it could be a lot of empty chit-chat, and an autistic person is not good at telling the difference. This makes us nervous. Also, talking costs us a lot of energy. It costs everyone energy, but it costs the autistic population significantly more. As I’ve made clear in earlier posts, we don’t like to spend that amount of energy on talk that means nothing. You can see how the idea of not having to talk to someone unless you sincerely want to get to know that person would be appealing to someone like me.

The slow way in which friendships develop over there was also very appealing to me. Being equally unskilled at guessing people’s motives (is this person really my friend or am I just being played? This is yet another guessing game that often leaves autistic people pretty badly burned), we need time to observe and test out what a new acquaintance is like. Because there’s often a gap between something happening or something being said and an autistic person being able to read and understand the implications, the extra time to hang back and merely observe the person is extremely helpful. The fact that Lithuanians (at least this was true back then – I haven’t been there in over twenty years so who knows how far Western influence has seeped in) already operated that way made me feel like a square peg finally finding a fit.

Much of the anxiety I experienced back home disappeared, thanks to social expectations becoming simpler and clearer, and so I flourished socially. I hardly recognized myself. The young woman praying not to bump into anyone she knew at the bus stop became the girl who spied someone she knew across the movie theatre lobby and, having gone unnoticed by the person, approached them in order to have a catch-up. I used to say to myself, “I wondered all my life why I didn’t fit in and finally I know it’s because I hadn’t been to Lithuania yet.”

Now, I was just as autistic in Lithuania as I was back home. There was evidence of that from time to time. Even one of the first friends I ever made in my exchange student days told me there were things about me that she found “weird” at first. She thought I wasn’t interested in being friends when we first met. She never explained to me what “weird” meant, but I suspect my brain’s delay in processing spoken information was at play here. I didn’t used to be aware of this, but when I’m stressed, I leave odd little gaps in the conversation just from needing a few extra seconds for my brain to process and absorb what was just said. I can see how, if you’re not speaking your first language and may already be a little self-conscious about your English skills in front of a native speaker, these little gaps might be hard to understand. “Did I say something wrong?” she might have thought, “I don’t think I said anything weird – why is she acting like I did? Am I that bad at speaking English?” And of course, my non-verbal cues are atypical and can still be difficult to understand from a non-autistic perspective, even for a non-autistic person from a different country. But she forgave me for that in the long run.

As a second example, I can remember being dismayed at still being described as “quiet” by the Lithuanians I knew best. Later, but still in the wee 2000’s, when I got a job at an independent English school on the other side of Lithuania, in the capital city of Vilnius, my colleagues named me “the quietest” teacher on staff. At the staff Christmas party that year, every teacher was given a certificate that highlighted their most notable quality. When they handed me that certificate, it was almost as bad as being called Silent Woman all over again. I didn’t like the idea that I, who seemed to have found my place in the world and had come such a long way in the social realm, had barely advanced off that first square I’d been put on in my first year of Bible College in 1995.

But I’m writing all this because I want to make this clear: if you’re an undiagnosed autistic person, and you’ve never experienced “fitting in” all your life, and you don’t know why you’ve never fit in… When you think you’ve found that answer, you don’t let it go in a hurry. You just don’t, even if it’s the wrong answer. You don’t know that it’s wrong – in your mind, that answer really explains everything. And if that answer comes with any amount of social acceptance, you cling to it fiercely, like a starving dog snarling over the first bone it’s had in weeks. Nothing and nobody is getting in the way of that.

I had every intention of staying in Lithuania forever. If my life had gone the way I wanted in those days, I’d still be there, maybe slowly turning into a little old babushka, indistinguishable from the real Lithuanian babushkas. My rejection of my home culture was bitter and vehement. It was the product of all those years of being rejected by my home culture. I was clinging to an adopted country where the overall quality of life (at least at the time) was lower than it was at home. I didn’t care. Lithuania had been kind to me where Canada had been so hurtful.

My family did not understand it. My friends were supportive, seeing that I was happy in Lithuania. But if anyone wants to know what my years in Lithuania were all about this is it: my need to belong was finally being met. It is what it is, whether you frown on that or not. It’s a very human phenomenon: I was drawn towards a place where my sense of belonging was highest, and felt pushed away from the place where my sense of belonging had always been so scant. What would any of us do?

In February of 2003, I slipped on an icy sidewalk not far from my Vilnius apartment and broke my left fibula, down near the knob on the outer side of my ankle. Lithuania at that time was not at all friendly towards people with mobility issues. For example, elevators were not standard by any means, and even the trolleybus was not accessible to me on crutches (the stairs on them were numerous and narrow). This meant it was impractical for me to travel off-campus to teach English classes, something that was expected of teachers at the school where I worked. This limited me to on-campus classes, and I simply couldn’t work as many hours as before. Before the accident, I had been getting around on foot most of the time, so replacing that with taxi rides was a strain on my income. My medical insurance wasn’t going to help with my expenses. My life in Lithuania was over right then and there when I picked myself up off the icy sidewalk from that fall and felt the pain of that broken bone.

I came back home within the month, believing quite firmly that I was never going to fit in again in my life. I never dreamed that I’d discover, less than twenty years later, that the reason why I didn’t fit it was because I’m autistic. Amazingly, there is a place in Canada where I do fit in, and have fit in all along, and that is among autistic people. I never get tired of describing this as a miracle.

This is only one reason why late-diagnosed autistic people do not view their diagnosis as a tragedy, but rather celebrate it. As far as we’re concerned, getting diagnosed is overwhelmingly positive. It provides a desperately needed sense of belonging in the world, and helps alleviate a lifetime of emotional pain.

Getting married to Mr. Cole and starting a family naturally helped reconcile me to not being a Lithuanian babushka. But the sobering idea that living in Lithuania was, in fact, not solving anything, has also helped a lot. Sometimes I wonder if my guardian angel gave me a little push and made me slip and fall and break my leg. It’s not the first thing I want to ask him after I meet him in the afterlife, but it’s in the top three questions.

I didn’t know that Lithuania was not the answer to my lack of social acceptance, but God surely did. If I were still there, who knows if I’d know this about myself yet or not. It’s nice when things work out.