Putting the Pieces Back
By Sahana Santhanam
When I was 12, I officially got diagnosed with autism during a mental assessment. I remember begging my mom if she would let me look at the assessment. When she told me that I had autism, I didn’t feel sad, just confused. I never thought I had autism because all the people on tv I had seen with it were different from me. They were all white, straight men, and I was none of those. But as I scrolled through websites detailing symptoms, I thought one thing: “This sounds like me.” I started thinking of behaviors I had always shown in a new light. Spinning around in circles wasn’t being weird; it was stimming. Focusing on one hobby obsessively and then dropping it wasn’t being lazy; it was having hyperfixations.
I started looking back at my memories of elementary school in Switzerland for the strange satisfaction of knowing that something that hadn’t made sense then made sense now. There was no satisfaction. I remembered bullies jeering at me, their words like knives stabbing 7-year-old me. When I went to teachers for help while my hope was slowly bleeding out, they asked me if it could have been because I was too aggressive and gave a slap on the wrist to the bullies while grilling me on my behavior. When all the hope for being treated well had bled out, it was replaced with acceptance. I thought, “Of course, I was bad because I was strange! I was a 7-year-old smiling through the pain and blaming myself for it.” As I looked back upon that time, I felt a sorrow that I had never felt before and a new kindred for the young person who tried their best and was hurt for it.
After that, I remembered patronization. The school I was in loved to talk about how it helped the poor, disaffected masses but never treated them as human beings. I remember civil rights leaders being demonized and Black Lives Matter being treated as a riot. Being white was normal and being Asian was not. It didn’t help that, with my autism, I was not the personality to be expected from an Asian. I was aggressive, loud, and passionate, and had weak social skills. So they set about trying to push that out of me. I was told to stay quiet and walk away when I was bullied even if going to the teachers didn’t help. My white peers isolated me and always acted like I couldn’t be both American and Indian. I was mocked and jeered at for not fitting the stereotype, and for being too loud for an Asian person. By then, I had already internalized that whatever happened was my fault. I was an 8-year-old who hated every part of my identity. And as I looked back on that time, I felt disgusted and had a new empathy for the child I was.
I didn’t have any friends, as nobody wanted to associate with me or even trust me. I started spending lunch in the library where nobody was around to hurt me. The librarians were kinder than the counselors and I discovered books. As a character in one of my favorite books said, “Books accepted you the way you were and shared all their secrets with you. Books never told you to stop asking questions or accused you of being nosy and annoying.” In short, to 9-year-old me, books had already proven themselves better than people my age. I thought of things in stories, people in tropes, and the character in books as being lifelong friends. My self-esteem was down the drain, every cruel word hurting like a razor and I was convinced that that was necessary. When I look back I see a 9-year-old who wanted to escape from this world and I feel guilty for the fact that they thought of this as normal.
During this year I started social skills training and one of my clearest memories was when they taught me how to make eye contact. I was in one of the bigger rooms with the skylights shining so bright they didn’t need to turn the lights on. The social skills trainer was trying to make me make eye contact. She talked about how I should try to do it even if I was uncomfortable, telling me that otherwise making friends would be really hard. I remember the cold, hard chairs and feeling scared because there must be something wrong with me. I make eye contact now because I figured out how to focus on the forehead.
When I was 10 things started turning around a little. I had been diagnosed with ADHD by the counselor. I was allowed to fidget a little and it was freeing. I was still bullied, but I was making friends, or at least people who didn't snicker at me. When Covid hit Switzerland and Basel, the school was called off. I was at home doing my assignments at my own pace. Even though I would be moving back to America soon, it was freeing, and I did better than I ever had even if covid had a toll on my mental health.
I looked back at all of these years, and I felt so many emotions but the most prominent one was anger. How dare they! I thought fuming. I was a child in elementary school and the people who were supposed to help me had repeatedly been bullies just as much as my actual bullies. I had been emotionally abused and turned into a self-loathing anxious mess, a state of which I was still pulling myself out. I was in flight and fight mode in school, which was supposed to be a safe space and none of the adults there, even the ones who had helped kids as their job, refused to do anything. I was angry that I had thought of my skills as a bad thing, angry that I had been lagging behind others for no reason, and most of all angry that a child was exposed to so many bigoted ideas about “normal” that I had internalized them. I wanted to scream and cry and kick down the door to my elementary school to tell the teachers and counselors exactly where they could shove their bigotry.
Nobody had tried to protect the child I had been and that hurt more than any of the other revelations. Until I remembered that I was still a child and my childhood wasn’t over yet. Nobody could change the past, nobody could make it so that the child I once was could feel safe except me right now, present in the moment. Even though I am still hurt from the years of bigotry and bullying, I am alive right now, at the moment, and I am helping the small scared child that I was and still am overcome their trauma every day. I am autistic and that is amazing. I am alive. My care is strong, vocal, energetic, unconditional, and healing more every day.
