The Grand Unified Theory of Me
By: Karawynn Long
Tags: Autism, Mental Health, Psychology, Women, Actuallyautistic

Once upon a time there was a very little girl.

She taught herself to read when she was two and three, and reading was her singular passion. Her preschool teachers would often have the little girl take over story time, reading picture books aloud to the whole class. By the time she started kindergarten, she was reading chapter books.

She was an only child, and she spent most of her time alone. She didn’t have any friends at her preschool, but she did play sometimes with the little girl of the same age who lived across the street. Once kindergarten started, though, the other little girl (who went to a different school) didn’t want to play with her anymore.

She had lots of toys — stuffed animals (which she liked) and baby dolls (which she didn’t like, except for the one with long hair she could comb and braid), a toy house with little people that were just pegs with heads, a big box of off-brand legos … later a plastic farm set with horses and cows and even little birds that would sit on the fences, and an erector set with a real electric motor.

She liked the legos and the erector set, but her favorite thing for a long time was to take all the farm animals out of their barn and set up an elaborate scene — always in the exact same way. She never made up stories or pretended that her animals or dolls were talking; she just lined things up in a row, or created little scenes. Even years later, when she got a giant Barbie house with dolls and furniture, she would dress the dolls in the clothes she liked best, and arrange the furniture very precisely, and that was all.

The little girl was at war with her own clothes, or maybe she was at war with her skin. Polyester anything would cause her to cry. The only kind of lace she could stand was cotton eyelet; anything else was a scratchy terror. She would rather wear her shirts inside out than feel a tag against her neck, and she could spend half an hour twisting one sock around, trying to find a way where the seam didn’t bother her quite so much.

Food was a constant problem for her also. Lots of things tasted bad, and even more things felt wrong in her mouth. And smells — chocolate made her nauseous; women’s perfume gave her a headache.

Everything was too strong and too much, including her own emotions. She had very little sense of the position of her body, so she bumped into things a lot. She was scared of balls flying at her, so was terrible at almost every kind of sports.

The little girl was smart — it was the one good thing she knew about herself, the one thing she was ever praised for — and even though the school immediately sent her up a grade for reading and math, she was still bored and distracted. Some of her teachers responded by giving her extra novels to read, or special research projects (this is why at the age of seven she could recite an inordinate number of facts about crickets). Other teachers thought she was disruptive and disrespectful, and punished her for reading instead of paying attention during class.

Novels and stories were her escape, a way for her to be less miserable by being somewhere, someone else. Yet despite her love of reading, language arts was her least-favorite subject, because — except for spelling — ‘good’ was so subjective. She liked math the best, because it always had a single right answer. She was a perfectionist who hated ever being wrong, or doing things that she wasn’t good at.

She didn’t like doing classwork in a group, in part because she needed everything to be perfect, and the other kids usually wouldn’t listen to her or didn’t want to follow her instructions. Besides that, other kids often bullied and made fun of her. She learned early that fighting back only got her punished, so she just stayed apart as much as possible.

Her experience taught her that people were mostly cruel. This included her own parents, who almost daily would hit her, kick her, and beat her with belts or wooden boards. Her mother also twisted reality around until the little girl was terrified that she was crazy, called her hateful names, and forced her to do humiliating things. Like the time when she was around nine or ten and her mother — angry at the way the girl kept running her thumbnail across her lips — made her suck her thumb for the next several hours, even in public.

The little girl decided that she hated people and wished she were grown up already so she wouldn’t have to be around them at all. She loved animals, though, especially dogs. For years, she read every book about dogs she could find, both fiction and not.

She thought about being a veterinarian, but was pretty sure that it would make her too sad. Instead at the age of nine she carefully planned her future career as a dog breeder (beagles were her favorite), poring over library books about everything from dog genetics to kennel construction. She was devastated when all the books cautioned that breeding was only viable as a hobby, because you could never make enough money to live on. (This was only the first of many times she would run into that problem.)

All in all, she was much happier on her own. She taught herself things from books: chess moves, perspective drawing. She could amuse herself all day long, if she had an interesting outdoor space. She played with bugs, chased butterflies, climbed trees and watched hummingbirds drink from flowers.

Her favorite times were summers spent with her grandparents. Not the pair of grandparents who lived in a small town; at their house she had to stay inside, often without even any books (although even there it was a relief not being hurt all the time). But the other two sets of grandparents lived in the country, and the girl spent her days with horses and dogs, chasing lizards and trying to figure out where the barn cat was hiding her litter of kittens.

Relatives were never easy for her— even the ones who didn’t hit and humiliate. It wasn’t that she couldn’t love people, just that she never understood why she was supposed to love people automatically because they were related. And she hated the way she was forced to offer hugs and endure touching from people with whom she felt no connection. But when she did love someone, she loved them with her whole heart.

This was the little girl’s story, until she was thirteen and not quite so little anymore, and she decided to change everything.