Journeys with Autism

For my entire life, I have searched for a sense of belonging—for a social group, or a job, or an organization, or a community in which I could feel at home. When I first realized that I had Asperger’s, I figured that it was time to give up on the whole idea. Why bother looking for something I could never have? It felt a little surreal to stop searching, but it was also strangely liberating.

Six months later, my need to belong is resurfacing, and it scares me. I have such a strange history when it comes to fitting into groups, a history that I don’t want to repeat. I’ve been reflecting on how to redefine belonging, and I’ve been getting glimmers of how a new sense of belonging might feel. But before I set out on that road, I need to look back and see what didn’t work.

Like many Aspies, I’ve had plenty of mishaps, disappointments, inexplicable dead ends, and moments that I still cringe to remember. But even more perplexing are the times in which I became part of a group, and seemed to make a great success of it, only to leave in a state of outrage and burnout.

My first such experience happened in graduate school. I started in a Ph.D. program in English at UC Berkeley with the aim of becoming an academic. I spent two years doing the required coursework, working as a teaching assistant, and passing the foreign language exams. My professors thought I showed promise, and with their help, I got invited to other UC campuses to attend conferences, lead seminars, and engage in this strange professional ritual called “networking.”

I didn’t know what networking was, but it sounded strangely like socializing, and that wasn’t good. I observed my fellow graduate students closely, however, and learned that networking involved a fair bit of listening intently to inebriated professors in mid-life crisis. Fortunately, none of the inebriated professors ever made an attempt to talk to me, because despite my desperate need to belong, I still carried my bullshit meter in plain view. It would be many years before I learned that a sensitive bullshit meter and professional networking do not mix.

Needless to say, I never did get the hang of networking. My attempts always felt a bit like trying to drive a car by gripping the steering wheel with my teeth. All in all, though, I said enough intelligent things to enough well-respected people that I felt certain I’d find a position as a hugely overworked professor in a place I didn’t want to live. For us, this was success.

In my third year, I began studying for my oral exams. I was to sit in a room with a group of professors, who would ask me a series of complicated and misleading questions, and I would have to come up with clever and knowledgeable answers. For the entire duration of the ordeal, I would not be able to use a pen or a pencil to jot down my thoughts, nor would I have any time for reflection. The whole idea was a bit daunting, but I was still young enough and eager enough to have powered through it if I’d wanted to.

But I didn’t want to. I studied for about half the exams before I decided to write a Master’s thesis as quickly as possible and get the hell out of there.

Why did I leave? There are so many reasons. But they all add up to one thing: My mind and body went into rebellion against the competitive mind games that made up a large part of my academic experience.

It wasn’t just the fact that otherwise self-respecting young women competed for the attention of drunken middle-aged academics. It was the fact that our professors consistently refused to acknowledge our presence in the hallways. It was the fact that every paper we wrote about the great works of literature consisted of a) smugly demolishing the ideas of some hapless academic who wasn’t there to defend himself and b) replacing those ideas, in exceedingly dense prose, with the most bizarre interpretations imaginable.

But by far, the worst competitive mind game consisted of reading, discussing, and applying the work of a group of postmodern nutcases philosophers who came up with a form of certifiable insanity critical theory called deconstructionism. I don’t know whether graduate students are still subjected to this fascist nihilistic propaganda philosophy, but back in the 1980s, it was all the rage. You could not hope for a job in a swamp in Alabama without being able to speak deconstructionism fluently and spar with your fellow academics.

The basic ideas are very simple:

1. Any attempt to create meaning is by its very nature totalitarian, patriarchal, and oppressive.
2. The way to cure humankind of its thirst for meaning is to write absolute fucking gibberish intricately complex prose and force people to read it until they lose their minds become enlightened.

The following is an example. (Don’t try to understand it. Just kind of let it wash over you.)

There are thus two interpretations of interpretation, of structure, of sign, of freeplay.
The one seeks to decipher, dreams of deciphering, a truth or an origin which is free
from freeplay and from the order of the sign, and lives like an exile the necessity of interpretation. The other, which is no longer turned towards the origin, affirms
freeplay and tries to pass beyond man and humanism, the name man being the
name of that being who, throughout the history of metaphysics or of ontheology—
in other words, though the history of all his history—has dreamed of full presence,
the reassuring foundation, the origin and the end of the game. (Jacques Derrida,
Structure, Sign, and Play in the Human Sciences, 925-926)

I don’t know what it means either, but I had to read and make use of hundreds of pages of this mind-numbing garbage theoretical discourse throughout graduate school because everybody said it was so brilliant.

But I knew it wasn’t brilliant. In fact, I knew that it was worse than useless. I knew that emptying life of meaning only creates a vacuum. And then you get fascism. You get Hitler, and Mussolini, and trains that run on time but end up at the crematoria. I used to rail about it to anyone and everyone I encountered. All the time.

As you can imagine, this is the part where my sense of belonging began to wear very thin. Most of my fellow graduate students listened to my rants with bemused expressions and said things like, “Yeah, wow, you take all this stuff so seriously. Excuse me, but I need to go read some more Derrida and fall into a chasm of utter hopelessness.”

There’s no explaining people. But when Time Magazine published an article revealing that a deconstructionist named Paul de Man had written virulent anti-Semitic propaganda for the Nazis in Belgium, I felt thoroughly vindicated. While everyone else was studying diligently for their oral exams, I sat with my feet up on a table, waving the article around, shouting, “You see, you see? Fascism!”

Exit graduate school. Some things just aren’t meant to be.

© 2009 by Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg