Memoir 3: Adolescent Identity

I was a teenage autist.

Autistic people really don’t like change. I think that’s a fair, if broad, statement to make. And yet so much has changed for me in such a short amount of time that I am beginning to question it. I think maybe it could do with some tweaking. Perhaps autistic people don’t like change when it is thrust upon them against their will.

   .Charlotte Amelia Poe, How To Be Autistic

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Though my adolescent social skills were deficient—my inability to read people’s intentions and feelings, the mismatch between my feelings and facial expressions, my tendency to tune others out and retreat into the black hole of my thoughts—I did enjoy socializing.

I never lacked friends in high school. I experienced a great deal of falling out with friends, like Sancho turning wrathful because I swiped his Boggs. But mostly I was oblivious to my failures (in high school, anyway). Whenever something went wrong I brushed myself off and eagerly tried again. One reason I may have been able to brush aside my frequent social fails was because I enjoyed sporadic success, too.