Winter on the Horizon | AuDHD Memoir CH 1.7

Previously: I move to Indiana at the age of thirteen and get my first tarot deck, then decide to put all my energy toward masking and achieving high school popularity. I accomplish this at great personal cost, suffer a sexual assault and careen into a second episode of autistic burnout. I rely on my special interests in dreams and the supernatural to restore me but don’t consciously understand what I’m doing or why.

In high school, I read a book called I Love the Person You Were Meant to Be by Martha Wiley Emmett. It was a story about the use of psychoanalysis in treating past trauma, and I found it fascinating.

I’ll talk about my trauma history a bit more in chapter three because that was when I first began to understand it. What I’ll say here is that I strongly identified with the main character in Emmet’s book and the trauma she had suffered.

As a result, I developed an interest in psychoanalysis. That Christmas my uncle gave me a book on Freudian psychology. I read it, but found it off-putting. So I moved on to the radical behaviorism of B. F. Skinner, wanting to believe, I think, that behavior like my own really could be changed.

When it came time to choose a college, I picked one that offered a degree in experimental psychology and made that my major. But the curriculum was not what I expected.

I was upset by the projects and the use of electric shock on helpless lab rats. When one of our instructors advocated using similar techniques on disturbed children, I knew experimental psychology, as it existed in the 1970s, wasn’t right for me.

Eventually, I started going back home on weekends. I partied with my old friends. I began to skip classes. Finally, it was too late to catch up. So I left college in my second semester and moved to California.

But that wasn’t right either.

I was looking for the California I’d seen when I visited my great-uncle as a child. I wanted hippies spread out across Haight-Ashbury like a field of exotic flowers. I wanted Led Zeppelin and a mountain of dreams. I wanted the California of my imagination.

Instead, I got bare mountains, constant petty crime, and endless traffic.

I stuck it out as long as I could, then took the long way back to the Appalachian Mountains of Northeast Pennsylvania to reconnect with my extended family.

And my expectations were high.

When I was a child, my grandparents’ farm had been a magical place. To me, the wide fields and green mountains and low-lying fog had an actual resonant vibration. And I had once told my cousins I would know the farm blind.

This was the home I had never had with my own parents. But when I got there, it was winter and all the magic was gone.

One day, sitting in the icy back bedroom that was mine whenever I visited, I wrote a poem that ended with the following.

I didn’t know what I was hungry for, but I knew I hadn’t found it yet. So I enrolled in an art program at a nearby community college and started to look for my own place.

I had just started calling on apartments when a crossed party line connected me to a number I hadn’t meant to call. As luck would have it, the man on the other end of the line had a unit to rent.

It seemed perfect. A big half-double in an old frame house not far from the college. It was on a hill, and the front porch faced the sunrise.

Most of the people who lived there had been connected to the mining industry up until its collapse. Some still spoke Welsh or Irish.

Tom was my new next-door neighbor. He was smart and funny and cute—what we used to call Black Irish—with thick dark hair and beautiful sea-green eyes.

He liked me, and I liked him back, but there was a problem. He was not my type.

My type rode motorcycles and got in fights and played in loud, mediocre bands. Tom didn’t do any of those things. He was kind and gentle and funny, the way people who are always a little outside of things are funny, and I understood that kind of humor.

But I didn’t understand why I liked him, and I refused to go along with something that did not make sense.

So I tried to keep my distance and in some ways did.

In others, I got close.

The first draft of the memoir is finished so I’m now posting new scenes once a month as I edit!

FYI: My relationship with Tom is the only romantic relationship I talk about in the memoir. The entire next chapter (called Miss Pennsylvania in the book) is about this relationship and I return to it later in the book. It was hard content to write and hard content to make public, but I can’t explain the turn my life took without it. Short of my fiction, it’s the best example I have of how different kinds of processing can cause issues in relationships, and in life.

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