You CAN Teach An Old Autistic New Tricks!
How Medium is teaching me to write.
In the Beginning
I’ve apparently wanted to write since I was ten years old.
Ten was a transition year for me. That was the year I finally went to an actual public school, as I was home schooled for grades one through four. The details why are another story but the bottom line was that my family was living out of country after my father took us to an overseas construction project.
Fifth grade was my first experience with a classroom, with being with other children my age every day, with learning to sit still and be quiet from nine to three every day, with being bullied routinely, and a with whole lot of other firsts.
I also learned that I was different than the other kids. I did not enjoy roughhousing with the other boys. I did not know how to hang out and talk with them about stuff that they wanted to talk about. I generally did not fit in.
Mostly I learned that surviving was easiest if I was as silent and as invisible as possible.
I wrote my first story that year. Not as a school assignment but just for fun. I didn’t show it to my parents as it wasn’t the kind of thing they would care about. I did show it to my fifth grade teacher, Mr. Allen. He read it and said, “What’s the point of the story?”
What I hear was “This is stupid. Why are you bothering me with this?”
I’m pretty sure, in retrospect, that that was not what he intended. But it was what I thought he was saying. I was very embarrassed. Except for mandatory school assignments, I avoided writing for the longest time.
Struggle
I graduated from high school with okay grades in everything except English. In that I barely got a passing grade. And I suspect that the teacher was being kind.
In university, along with my mathematics and science classes, I had to pass first year English in order to eventually qualify for a Bachelor’s degree. The class turned out to be all about analyzing books and poems and then writing about them.
Being somewhat autistic, though undiagnosed, I was challenged with things like metaphor and the so-called ‘underlying messages’ within a writing. When the professor asked, “What is the author trying to say?”, I had no idea what the he was talking about.
Being extremely introverted and generally afraid of people in authority, I never asked. Not anyone. To me, the words said what the words said. What else could they mean? Needless to say, I did poorly in that class.
The next year, having done well in everything else, I had to retake first year English. This time they put me in a remedial writing class. That went somewhat better as the focus was more on how to write and less on analyzing other people’s writing. That year I did pass the course, barely.
As a mathematics and computer science major, quality writing was not a high priority. I made it through to a Bachelor’s degree without improving my writing at all.
Then I started working.
It turned out that most office work requires better writing skills than I had. After struggling with that for a year, I signed up for a night school class on Business Writing at the local community college.
The class was taught by a retired English teacher. She said something the first night that has stuck with me for nearly fifty years: “There’s no such thing as business writing. There is only good writing and there is bad writing. I’m going to teach you good writing.”
In her class I got lots of practice in basic writing skills. Enough so that my writing at work was no longer an embarrassment. These new skills, along with lots of on the job practice, got me through my working career.
Muddling Along
While I did learn to produce reasonably good writing, it turns out that there is interesting writing and there is boring writing. I had learned how to write clear, concise, and very boring prose.
I have never been very good at telling an interesting story in spoken form. My autism leads me towards being factual and concise. Why use twenty words when one will do? And this came across in my writing. My stories sounded like kids coming home from school and being asked:
“How was your day?”
“Fine.”
“What did you learn?”
“Nothing.”
I knew I was different. I didn’t know why. I only knew that letting people see what went on in my head would cause them to look at me strangely and then “ghost” me, even though that wasn’t a term in those days.
In part, this was because I grew up in a house where children were seen not heard, so I got limited practice being verbal.
In part, this was because I was autistic along with being introverted and a bit OCD, though I didn’t know it at the time. This made me weird as far as most other people were concerned.
I could share basic facts in conversation but little about what I thought or felt about the day, or my life in general. Sharing those things was way too scary.
Transition
I spent most of my young adult life living alone. Eventually in my middle years I ended up married to an alcoholic addict for nine years, but, again, that is a story for another time. Suffice it to say, that experience didn’t particularly help my communication skills.
During the marriage breakup I stated journalling. Much of it was gibberish. Some of it was work related. Some of it was attempts to write fiction. And much of delved into the messy corners of my mind in the form of stream of consciousness self analysis.
At quick count I have over 50 journals sitting on my book shelves. Being slightly OCD along with my other issues, the journals mostly look the same; coil bound art books without lines. The lack of lines wasn’t an issue because my OCD would make sure I kept my writing straight!
During my process of filling up journal after journal, my writing improved. It wasn’t great, but it was coherent.
Medium
Retiring was an interesting process. I got to do many things I had seldom had time for before. Gardening, hiking, taking university classes for fun, and more personal development. This eventually brought me back to writing.
Around the time that Covid appeared I found Medium. What a treat that was! Here were writers of various skills and interests sharing their stories in a non-judgemental, non-competitive environment. After reading a lot of articles, I tried it myself.
My early Medium writing was more along the lines of business writing. Factual, getting information across, but only interesting to those who had a specific interest in that topic. Not much personality.
I eventually decided to take the risk of writing more from the heart and less from the head. Using a pseudonym made that safer. If things went really badly I could always delete the stories and change my pseudonym.
Since beginning to find my heart-voice in recent months I have enjoyed writing a lot more. It no longer feels like work. And readers have responded.
I am touched by the comments I get about my stories. Thanks to you, I now have another retirement outlet that is fun, autistic friendly, and not affected by bad weather (except when the electricity is knocked out on our little island.)
So, thank you to Medium and to this wonderful community of writers that encourages me to express my weird, autistic self!
Thank you for reading my article.
If you this story interesting, here are a couple of other stories about my personal development path that you may find interesting.
I am frequently inspired by other writers on Medium. Here are some I’ve particularly enjoyed reading recently:
Yana Bostongirl helped inspire me in this article of hers. I read it some time back and reread it again today and it is even more moving than the first time.
While The Autlaw doesn’t generally allow comments on her articles so I haven’t been able to tell her how much I appreciate them. They are excellent! If you have autism or other neurodiverse characteristics I believe you will find any of her articles insightful and helpful. I certainly do. This is one of her recent pieces that I resonated with.
This piece by Nick MacIneskar is both heart breaking and heart warming in its conclusion. I’m trying to identify new writers that don’t yet have a large following. Nick is one of my favourite new authors that I encourage more people to read and follow.
Michele Maize (The Sober Vegan Yogi) recently wrote this heartfelt story about sharing a book with her daughter. It creates a wonderful bonding experience between her and her daughter that is moving away from home to go to college. If only all families could be this loving.
I wish to thank the following people who recently chose to follow me and my writing. Your interest encourages me to continue writing. I hope you enjoy this new story.
Dianne Herbert, Anandhi Palaniappan, Valorie Lasley, Krystal Morgan, Milli M., Barbara Mac, B. Goodman, Mawde Olssen, Karen Curtis, Duncan Klein, DL Nemeril
Thank you for following me.
Finally, I would like to invite my recent commenters to share this story with me. If any of you would like to be excluded from my tags in future, please, please let me know!
Janin Lyndovsky, Jenny Lane, Dr. Fatima Imam, Dr. Preeti Singh, Gustave Deresse (˙ᗡ˙𝐖 'ɥʇıƃƃı𝐳ɥɔʇı𝐌), Bob Dumont, Carmellita, Rebecca Romanelli, Pene Hodge, Mukundarajan V N, Charlotte Kingsbury- Fink, Kaia Maeve Tingley, Mia Verita, Conni Walkup Hull, Joyce Nielsen, Gauri Sirur, Mawde Olssen, Mulan, Teresa Roberts
I wish you well!
