I want to preface this story with a caveat for people who know me IRL that I am not cross-posting it to any of my social media accounts and ask that this story not be shared on Facebook.
My identity on Twitter is less known, so I may tweet a link to this via my “nameless” Twitter feed, but for reasons that I won’t get into here, I’d rather keep this diary semi-anon for now. Maybe that makes me a coward, but I simply don’t have the emotional bandwidth to put my full self behind the boofdah guise “out there” right now.
Thanks in advance - boof
In early 2018, after a day-long psych evaluation from my psychologist at the time, I received a diagnosis I had not initially expected: Autism Spectrum Disorder, Requiring Support, Without Accompanying Intellectual/Language Impairment.
My psychologist had recommended that I undergo the psych evaluation, one of which I had not had previously since I was three or four years old, as a tool for her to analyze tangible data to make such a diagnosis. She was the first therapist I had seen aside from my psychopharmacologist who was also a doctor, and I had the impression that she was more data-driven than LMHCs with whom I’d sought therapy previously.
After completing the psych eval, I dreaded receiving the results. I’d long known that I’d had (and had received earlier diagnoses of) depression and anxiety, but after decades of receiving all manner of mental health counseling, feared that I’d had something more serious that had gone undetected--something akin to psychosis, like schizophrenia, that could have terrible impacts on my personal and professional life and livelihood.
Being diagnosed with autism was the last thing I expected. My psychologist quietly explained to me that she suspected I’d had the condition all my life, but due to my being intelligent and reasonably friendly, my being on the spectrum had gone persistently under the radar. She reassured me that I was on the more mild, Asperger’s end of the spectrum, being “high-performing” enough to have gained a reasonably successful, upwardly mobile profession as a quality-assurance editor and to have also built a loving relationship with a good, kind-hearted husband and raised two children with him that we had adopted.
She added that my earlier diagnoses of depression and anxiety were residual, corollary effects of having struggled for nearly a lifetime with personal relationships and navigating the complexities of social skills with little to no real support for the undiagnosed developmental disability of which I wasn’t even aware, had never even suspected. Given that I was older (48 at the time of my diagnosis), common public knowledge about Asperger’s syndrome when I was a child and teenager in the 1970s and ‘80s was scant, and the tools to build social skills while considering the added difficulties of Asperger’s were either not available or not given to me.
When I was growing up, I was “socially awkward,” I was “weird,” I was “different,” I was “overly sensitive,” I was “quiet,” I was “eccentric”--and I was bullied for and socially shunned as a result of what and who I was. Because my own family felt these things about me, I didn’t even feel safe in my own home or among my own relatives, and thus grew to resent them and resent myself. It took me a failed first marriage, a few failed educational and vocational aspirations, and most of my twenties and thirties struggling through finding my own identity and becoming even a little bit--but not ever completely--comfortable in my own skin. I count myself fortunate that I met my now-husband, who I’m convinced is one of the most loving and good-hearted people on the planet, and who accepted my diagnosis with nothing but love and a more than a little matter-of-fact good humor.
For many reasons that I won’t get into here, and that would easily take a much longer Daily Kos entry to write, I have not yet disclosed my diagnosis to my parents, sister, or anyone else in my extended family. My husband, sons, sister-in-law, and a handful of very close friends and colleagues are all who know about and accept my diagnosis. I haven’t even told my manager, because as much as I respect and admire her as a professional leader, I don’t want her in any way to doubt or second-guess my abilities or expertise. I am very competent and well-respected in my position at work and don’t want to put any obstacles in the way of what is a good career. I’m lucky that my company is inclusive and respectful of people with all types of disabilities, but...I’m simply not ready to share this information publicly.
So why, then, the second, seemingly-unrelated sentence in this story’s title? Why does the prospect of the U.S. turning into an autocracy scare me?
As I wrote in a much-earlier Daily Kos diary many years ago, I earned my Bachelor’s degree from a very conservative university, Texas A&M, which many Texans even today know has a heavy conservative and evangelical population. Even the Catholic churches around the university had an Evangelical bent. In the late Eighties and early Nineties at Texas A&M, it was the “in” thing to be a Christian. And not just a Christian who goes to church every once in a while to celebrate holidays, weddings, and baptisms and to grieve at funerals, but an “on-fire” Christian. “She’s on fire for the Lord,” was frequently heard around the cafeteria table and in dorm hallways, followed by approving murmurs from other older teenagers and young adults. I remember going to dances, hangouts, and other retreats where young men would tell their “courageous” accounts of burning all of their secular CDs and tapes and replacing them with recordings of Christian pop artists like David Meece, Amy Grant, Stryper, Steven Curtis Chapman, and other artists you’d hear on the Christian stations back then.
Needless to say, I’d long had a hard time “fitting in” with the crowd, even when I was in college. I guess I’m more comfortable with it in my old age and understand the reasons now, but back then, I was like a lot of young people in that I just wanted to fit in and be accepted, be liked, be someone whom people were happy to be around. However, I was horribly shy and socially awkward and had a hard time making and keeping good friends. I went to college long, long before I was diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome, and even in the Nineties, being on the spectrum except for the far extreme of autism requiring institutionalization (such as Dustin Hoffman’s character in Rainman) was not very well understood.
So I tried to “get” God. Without having a clear career or even academic direction in mind, I clung to the Church and the religious life fervently. I guess I should count myself lucky that I didn’t fall into drugs or other forms of abuse that took place in more secular colleges, but my addiction to religion and the people around me was harmful enough. I was privileged enough that I could fall back into the luxury of such petty pursuits—I made the grade well enough to earn a scholarship, but other than that, I was clueless as to what I was going to do after college ended. So I sought solace and belonging in the Young Life religious communities of College Station, Texas.
What I learned in these religious communities: Jesus loves everyone unconditionally, but only if you love him back just as fervently. Everyone is a child of God and is worthy of love and acceptance, but only if you do what the community says and like what the community says you should like. Only if you “rely not on your own understanding,” but submit to the word of God and to the belief system of the people around you, without ever asking any questions.
Unluckily for me, I asked questions. It was the only time I didn’t feel shy or awkward, and had a mind of my own and could say out loud what I thought and felt. People didn’t like it if you asked too many questions. There were things about the Church—things about the practices and the faith—that just didn’t sit well with me, and I needed so much to find answers. More than figuring out what the hell I was going to do after college for, like, a job, I needed to figure out where I fit in the world, and where I fit in “God’s community.” And so I wasn’t accepted by these Christians who supposedly believed everyone was worthy of love and acceptance.
After I graduated, I attended a Catholic retreat, hoping to find community with like-minded people after so much struggling to find answers, but felt rebuffed. I felt stares when I piped up an opinion, I felt shunning when I raised doubt, like why couldn’t women be priests? At the end of the retreat, feeling like I had nowhere to go and no one to turn to, I cried in my car, feeling so lost. I felt like God didn’t want me there, if there even was a God, and I was starting to doubt that, too. I was engaged to be married to a young man whom I was secretly having doubts about marrying, but eventually felt like he was the only one I could turn to for acceptance and love, so entered an ill-fated marriage that would implode five years later.
That was thirty years ago.
I look at the Evangelical community from a distance now, and it seems worse—even less accepting and less loving. In the mid-Aughts, I watched as the Evangelical community stood behind a President whose administration sent thousands of our servicemen and women to their deaths in a war that didn’t need to be fought, that green-lighted the torture of human beings in repeatedly failed attempts to get information about terrorism, that imprisoned people indefinitely without a system of justice, and all because they didn’t want to see gay people marry the ones they loved.
Today, I watch as the Evangelical community stands behind a now former President who has allied himself with dictators, separated mothers and fathers from their own children at our Southern border, disregarded a global pandemic in the hopes of ginning up our economy to win re-election, rallied right-wing militias to commit acts of terrorism and insurrection as well as provoke violence at peaceful protests in the wake of systemic racial injustice—all because they fear Christianity is “going away” and they needed their strongman to force it upon anyone in this “free country” who doesn’t subscribe to their right-wing, backwards brand of fundamentalism.
I may not practice Christianity any longer, but it was my understanding that the standard-bearer of the religion welcomed the stranger, healed the sick, lifted up the poor and downtrodden, spent time with the sinners to lead them to understanding with peace and love—not with force, brutality, and cruelty. I see Christians stand behind Trump even now, denying his November defeat, propping him up as their Golden Calf, and I get sick to my stomach. This evil man perverted this new iteration of “Christianity” into a mean, soulless, cruel-hearted, self-serving, and hurtful religion that I want no part of.
I think back to those times when I was a very young woman--where I wanted so desperately to “fit in,” so much that I’d put on the mantle of Fundamentalist piety to get in the good graces of the theocratic in-crowd. If I hadn’t had the presence of mind to question, to challenge this mentality--if I’d just “gone along to get along”--might I, too, have fallen prey to the misinformation and the delusions and the hatefulness of the Trumpist “Christian” movement? I thank whichever deity is or isn’t out in the universe that I did not take that path.
If democracy is dismantled, as we’re seeing now in states like Texas and Arizona and Georgia and my current residence of Florida, will a theocratic form of authoritarianism take over? If so, I won’t want to be “fitting in” with the “in crowd.” I am fortunate to have built a good marriage and family life, a stable career with a decent income, and a productive, meaningful life. I count myself extremely lucky in the disability community to have overcome many challenges that, due to lack of support or opportunities, other people have tragically not been able to overcome.
If an authoritarian form of government takes hold of our country and decides who is worthy of living freely and who is “lesser than,” I will not be wanting to fit in--I will fight back.
Yet I am still so very afraid for our future as a nation.