Christmas is approaching, along with its onslaught of sentimentality. I have found myself thinking, in slightly maudlin fashion, about failed friendships.
There is an expectation, isn’t there, that our friends will be similar to us? It makes sense, I suppose: we gravitate to those we can share things with. But the idea that our friends will be a group of people “like us” it is something deeper as well, almost ingrained. As autistic people, we quickly learn that this is not the case. We learn it quickly, often painfully, and our feelings can range from bewilderment to visceral hurt. Our neurotypical counterparts are far less likely to experience this St-Paul-on-the-road-to Damascus moment of “I am seriously different to everybody else around me”.
My own story of friendship begins with a lucky chance. When I was younger, I made myself a best friend aged five in one of those random incidences that shape our lives: I turned up to an open day at my new school, a dark-haired girl in a pink pinafore. Across the room was a blonde girl in exactly the same pinafore, only green. I remember pulling back my cardigan so that she could see my pinafore in all its glory, she did the same. There we were, sticking our tummies out at each other and smiling. We decided that we were best friends from that moment on.
On the surface we had nothing in common, although looking back we did share one thing that neither of us were aware of. You see, my best friend was neurodiverse – a term that hadn’t even been invented back then. She had dyslexia and ADHD. I was autistic and blithely unaware of the fact. I put up with her resolute lack of bookishness and her dreamy periods of mental wandering. She put up with my resolute bookishness and…ahem…. organising streak, shall we say? I do hate the term “rigidity”. Aged eight, she moved to America, which to be perfectly honest suited me just fine. The move disguised the fact that we were growing differently, and it enabled me to write long and detailed letters to her whilst remaining aloof from the other girls at school because I was “mourning” my best friend. Aged fifteen, she moved back to England. We picked up again although we had even less in common, had completely different higher education experiences and moved to London after university on opposite sides of the river. Soon, we were both in our mid-twenties, obsessed with work and doing things other than seeing each other. The gap between us had grown wider and wider until, one Christmas, I realised that it had in fact become unbridgeable. We drifted apart for good.
That early experience of intense bonding with one person did, however, turn me into a “best friend” kind of girl. That was the way I operated socially: I had one particular friend; my name was known often in tandem with another girl’s. Now I know that I am autistic, I can look back and see why this was: my black and white thinking reasoned that it had worked the first time, so let’s repeat the experience. I delve into things obsessively – not just things, but people. Having one friend allowed me to make a painstakingly thorough study of them – and there are few things auties like more than being painstaking thorough. It also helped me socially – reduced the terror of large groups of people, reduced anxiety if I knew that my best friend was going to be at a certain event. It helped me define myself, because I had the starting point of somebody else.
For all its advantages, the “best friend” model of social interaction (sorry to sound like an amateur psychologist) had distinct limitations, and being autistic meant that I was not able to fully comprehend these limitations until it was too late. Anybody who relies on one person is putting all their happiness eggs in one basket. Autistic people are not known for having the best judgement socially – whether this is true in every case is highly dubious, but what I will say is that we can be a little naïve because we take things – and people – literally. I made wrong choices in best friends when I was growing up. Spongelike, I would also absorb little ways of being from my friends – the way they talked, or interacted with others. Sometimes, I was really copying the wrong person, and again, only aware of this when it was too late. I was manipulated, even sexually pestered at one point by a girl at senior school who I thought was my close friend. Black and white thinking can let you down: it keeps you in relationships that aren’t very good for you. “So-and-so can’t be that bad,” I would reason to myself, “they’re my friend.”
Now, I am not saying that the only reason I made bad choices was my Autism: being a good judge of character is rarely innate, instead we learn over time. Some of those nasty girls I encountered were also making bad choices and have hopefully grown up into fairly sensible human beings. The issue with autistic girls is that we are less equipped to deal with bad relationships going wrong. We just don’t have the armour of a neurotypical girl – the inbuilt knowledge of what to do for the best, an instinct for self-preservation. A vivid memory is one of the blessings and curses of Autism, and it means that we are still plagued by those friends we broke up with or who broke up with us years into the future.
My experience with friendship is my own, with its own bumps in the road, but autistic girls rarely experience a smooth path. It seems that young female autistic people react to their discovery of difference – gradual or sudden – in a slightly different way to boys. In a lot of cases, autistic girls put on a mask. We pretend to be neurotypical, whereas boys let their autism run free. This impression that girls try to give of being like everybody else is often not particularly convincing. It is done for a variety of reasons, one of them presumably is to make friends.
Part of the reason that autistic girls pretend to be like everybody else is that we have a fear of not fitting in, a fear that doesn’t seem to exist to the same extent in boys. Whether this fear is something we are born with or due to the expectations that society places on us as women and girls is something that we probably won’t know for a long time, and I am not here to start a nature/nurture debate. But why are autistic girls so desperate to smother who they really are? Is it because their sense of self-worth is intrinsically bound up in what other people think of them? The idea that femininity – being a “proper girl” – doesn’t really have room for deviation from the norm? A knowledge that we won’t thrive unless we convince others that we are like them? If so, then friendship strikes at the heart of who we are and is bound up in our deepest fears: that we can’t understand people and other people can’t understand us, or that we will fail in life because we can’t seem to make human contact.
Diagnosis has made me look back on my childhood and teenage years and feel sorry for the girl that I was – most of the time I didn’t understand what was going on socially, and my struggle to be like everybody else was fairly futile. Luckily, even before I was diagnosed autistic, I came to realise that there is value in being yourself and letting other people come to you on your own terms. There are aspects of Autism that actually aid friendship: we are interesting, we offer a new take on things, our self-sufficiency can be attractive to others, and last but not least we always remember your birthday. As I have grown older, I find that my lack of neediness and my reserve when meeting new people actually creates the space in which friendship can develop. And I am honest with myself about my self-sufficiency: I don’t let other people tell me that I must be lonely because I know that I need time alone. Knowing my autism has made me aware of the best parts of me that I offer to a friend as well as the worst.
The last “best friend” I had came a cropper – like so many other people’s friendships – during lockdown. We fell out, and I felt enormous relief that I no longer had to deal with the stress of the situation, combined with guilt. I still think of her sometimes and miss her, but not enough to go back. It is done, and that is that – black and white thinking has its uses. My memories of her are frequent, and it will probably take me years to get over it, but that is ok – that is who I am. People often paint autistic people as unfeeling; when I get upset over losing a friend, that suffering is proof of a humanity that others say I lack.
A need to fit in, a need to be accepted and make contact with other people who will support us can drive autistic girls to desperate and paradoxically more lonely places. As I have said, my own friendships were driven by luck and lack of it – by chance, or fate if you are that way inclined. To any autistic person who has been scarred by the experience of trying to get close to someone else, or who has been labelled a misfit, I would say remember that sometimes we happen to be in the wrong place, with the wrong people, and none of that is our fault. That is the past, in the future don’t stop searching for people who will accept you for who you are, because those friendships are the ones that stick.
