Maturity, Autism, and Normalcy

It seems that, though most people don't realize it, the word "maturity" is used as a catchall term for a lot of different qualities that (are said to) become more common among any given group as its members grow older. Some I have. Some I don't.

I've graduated from high school and now I'm looking to leave for college in the fall, but I'm not sure I'm "mature" enough to survive there. I don't even know if I was really "mature" enough for high school, for all I managed to graduate. Believe you me, it took a lot of help for me to get this far, and now a lot of the support I've had to get here is dissolving while I still need it. It's going to be a struggle, and all the more so because I'm slow and I still haven't recovered from a rather traumatic, well... the past six years, really, ever since I first started secondary school.


Compounding the problem was the fact that I was also too mature for high school. Like most teenagers, I spent a lot of high school trying to figure out the answer to the question, "Who am I?" Unfortunately, a lot of the answers I found led me to conclusions that my classmates couldn't even seem to comprehend. I have never gone a single year in my memory without being the target of at least one major bullying incident, and by the time I finished high school I realized that it was because I was so obviously different from everyone else.


I am autistic, and ever since I discovered as much I have been struggling with how much to own the label. It does make me different, in demonstrable ways. I would rather be proud of my strengths than ashamed by the challenges that come with them, but even owning the name "autistic" too much makes me a target to the ignorant and a problem for my friends. But it's my life, built in, not something I can just turn off because I'm bothering someone. It's not the only thing in my life, but I can't ever get away from it even if I don't talk about it. Is it more mature to speak up, like my uncle (technically first cousin once removed) does in being part of an autistic self-advocacy protest group, or to stay quiet and let it just be the background of my life like most of my friends wish I would?


Sometimes even I forget I'm autistic. I believe the things that people say, about how I can do everything that everyone else can, that I'm no different, that I'm capable of anything. I don't look different. I've been forcibly and unpleasantly taught to observe the basics of "acting normal" that don't come nearly so naturally to me as to others. So I push myself to keep up with everyone else, but then I discover every time that I can't always do that. I'm truly good at gathering and memorizing information, but really only on the topics that are meaningful and important to me, and so I'm characterized as "lazy" because it's hard for me to force myself to fill my head with things I don't care about when there's something just one tangent away that's on a topic I have a passion for. And that's part of what my form of autism is: Hans Asperger, the doctor for whom my Asperger's Syndrome is named, characterized the children he studied as "little professors" because each had a deep and thorough knowledge about their own subjects of interest to the exclusion of most else. And I'm not good at socializing with strangers when I don't have someone I'm comfortable with around to make it easier. That's the part that's hit me lately: when too much is happening at once, I go into sensory overload until I can get away to calm down.


No, I'm not normal. And I just have to live with it. That's a form of maturity, too:


God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Amen.