Satanic shit, Autistic Hooligans w/ADD — and other stories
Yesterday, after my meeting for my recovery from booze-a-hol addiction, I hung out with my friend Sal and wrote/drew in my journal.
“Circles again,” she noted as I filled my page up with line after line of circles — tight circles, big circles, circles everywhere.
She’s noted this before, and refused to tell me what the circles signify. “Don’t mention my circles if you’re not even going to tell me what you’re thinking about them,” I said, continuing to draw circles.
“Has anyone ever suggested you might be Autistic?”
“Is that what my circles mean? ‘Autism’?” I smirked, making more deliberate, tighter circles, making eye contact with Sal. “Do you think I’m Autistic?”
My friend had a career in psychology, neuroscience. “I think you’re a bit neurodivergent, yes,” she said.
“Say I am ‘autistic’,” I said. “Say I am that and then what? What can be done about it if I am?”
This is where my friend Sal, who has about twenty years on me, rolls her eyes, shakes her head, laughs says, “You really know nothing, do you?”
Last night, hanging with my friend Mike, I floated Sal’s theory about how maybe I am “neurodivergent.” “Maybe I’m not dying of cancer at all, Mike,” I said. “Maybe I’m dying of Autism, Mike. Ever think of that?”
“Oh, I’ve thought of it,” Mike laughed.
The night before, hanging with Mike and Betsy, I enthusiastically critiqued hotel art at ten in the p.m. after a day of teaching, running around The Dirty T, and at one point — noticing my friends were silently watching me carry on about how a quote needed to be “edited down” — I stopped and said, “You guys think I could have ADD?”
Betsy and Mike have known me for almost a decade. They’ve worked with me. They’ve borne close witness to the past, crucial, years of my life. They think I’m a little spaz, and love me in spite of this, and sometimes even for this reason.
I am a spaz. And as I move through my sobriety, as I return to myself, my actual True-self, here in The Dirty T, I am starting to apply diagnostics I’ve read in IEPs and 504s to myself. I can’t tell you how many times, in the last month or so, that I’ve been in a staff meeting for a student with ADD/ADHD or Aspergers, and have jotted down phrases, psychological concepts that I intended to follow up on for myself.
Last night, I made a contribution to Ice Cube’s continued financial success, and did not attend his show. There were a variety of reasons for ultimately making this choice, chief among them that I didn’t feel like exhausting myself for an Ice Cube concert.
Here’s the thing about being a woman in her forties with chronic health conditions: I can push myself “through,” and the next day I will feel like I’ve been drinking. I’ve realized, much to my chagrin, that I cannot “push myself” through activities anymore without suffering physical consequences. I can go to a late night concert on Saturday and totally ruin my Sunday with exhaustion, or I can know my limits and continue to enjoy my weekend all the way through Sunday.
I chose the latter. Mike and I drove in the direction of the concert. I decided I didn’t feel like going, and I said to my friend, “I can’t do this tonight. Want to just hang out with me instead?” And of course Mike obliged. Mike and I are never bored when we hang out. He’s a spaz, too. Together, we are spastic hooligans.
Ever since one of my kids said, “Gruber, if I didn’t know you, I’d think you were kind of sketch,” I’ve been owning my own peculiarities. I want my kids to love themselves as they find themselves in this world, and now I want the same for myself. I want to love myself, be good to myself, understand myself. I want to extend the same light I’ve extended (and continue to extend) to young humans to myself. I can do this.
In nine days I will have been sober for 200 days.
Most days, I don’t count days, but today I decided to do some “Congrats Math,” and the last time I “picked up” was 191 days ago.
I’ve had cravings in the days following my “good” PET scan results. I want to feel “normal” again, and to my alcoholic brain “normal” means drinking to excess with impunity. This is madness. There is no “impunity” for me when it comes to alcohol. So I choose not to drink. Last night, I scratched my “booze itch” with prayer, meditation, and french toast. Not the same, admittedly, but my future self always thanks my present self when I choose french toast over, say, tequila. (Seriously, if I get no other gift from this “sobriety endeavor” than never ever having to wake up with a hangover, that’s enough for me.)
I’m a hooligan. In my free time, I want to fuck shit up. My impulse is to “fuck shit up” — this is a tremendous impulse when it comes to creative endeavors, and less “tremendous” as it relates to the physical self, the physical world, the soul. Or maybe I don’t want to “fuck shit up,” maybe what I want is wildness, a degree of chaos, I asked a student the other days why they wanted to bring such drama into their life with girlfriends/boyfriends and they replied, “Drama is the spice of life, Groobs.” While I disagree with my student’s assertion, I do understand the desire to bring in drama. This is a young desire, an ignorant (I say this with love) desire, a futile desire. I did not correct my young student. Instead, I shook my head, clicked my tongue, and made them laugh with my disapproval.
My hooligan-tendencies make me a decent educator, writer, maker. I am also a fun friend, if I don’t say so myself. Ever since I quit drinking and lost a bunch of bad-food-and-booze weight, I have remarkable stores of physical energy. My body, for the first time in my memory, is becoming a tool instead of a fearsome burden that carries my mind and spirit through time and space. My friend Sal says the first year of sobriety is “a physical year.” I think I do understand this piece. My body is coming back to me as something that belongs to me and me alone. Amazing that a strident Feminist like me could be so slow to absorb the very philosophies she peddles to young women.
That’s patriarchy for you. I consider myself a fairly liberated, independent woman, and yet I’ve carried with me — largely owing to the bad behavior of white men — a sense that my body is not my own or that my body is only “useful” insofar as it might provide service for another.
That’s some sick shit. “Devil shit,” as I’ve taken to saying to Mike only because it makes him laugh so hard. I’ll see some awful, cringey art or writing, and I’ll say to Mike, “That’s bad. That’s some Devil shit,” just to watch him crumple forward with laughter.
But really, reader, haven’t we all seen art/literature that’s so bad we can only really attribute its existence to Satan?
IN CONCLUSION (I hate this phrase, and insist that my ELA students never do this, but I am lazy this morning), I might have Autism, I’m definitely a hooligan, I most certainly have a touch of the ADD with maybe a touch of the “H,” and that’s okay. I’m not into running away from problems anymore. Hiding from my own shit has never served me.
Hiding from my own shit, keeping secrets, suffering because I thought that’s what others “needed” from me landed me face first on concrete in my bedroom, bleeding all over my bedsheets, busted eye.
The first time I fell down from drinking I was fifteen. Staying a friend’s house. Her mother was out of town and her much older brother was making us Screwdrivers, massaging my shoulders, and saying shit like, “Mmm. Mmm. Mmm. If only I was fifteen years younger.”
Gross.
And I would laugh at this memory. A thirty year old man was making me Screwdrivers when I was a little kid. I used to laugh at this memory. I got so drunk I fell down, under the supervision of a male adult who was making advances toward my child self, and I used to position this as a “funny” memory. The memory isn’t funny to me anymore. The memory is of a girl who was so lost and in so much danger. The memory is of a girl child who was trying to figure out how to survive, and of a girl child who despite her many foolish, ill-begotten decisions, was kept alive by the grace of God . . .
Yesterday, Mike and I were talking about how this is one of the tough parts of being an educator who loves their students: you don’t want them to hurt themselves, to fall flat on their faces, and yet you know that some of the hurting, the falling, is the only way forward.
Takes some of us (like me) longer than others.
Mike is also a parent. Parenthood would have done me in. I always knew I would not be good parent material. I used to believe I didn’t want to be a parent because I wasn’t interested in babies or men, but now I know it’s so much more complex and fascinating than that old, dusty explanation. Now I understand (or think I do) much more about why I chose not to have children of my own, but ended up spending my days in the service of children and young people.
Autistic, ADD, H, no H, Hooligan (capital H, fuckers), Feminist, Alcoholic, Queer, Cancer Patient, Commie . . . all these things may be True about me. And yet there are Truths about me that have no language to define them.
Tomorrow, I get to go to work at a job that — even on the toughest days — makes me feel Alive, inspires me, brings meaning and light to my life, and allows me to bring meaning and light to the lives of the students I serve. I love the work I do, and how lucky am I for this fact? Moreover, I am presently in a job that forces me every day to challenge myself — my approaches, my assumptions, my way. My rapid-fire-brain works really, really well in a k-12 school setting where thinking-fast-on-your-feet is often the only way to successfully “do” a day of “work.” Adolescents, man. Amirite?
I call Sal “man.” Some women don’t like this; Sal doesn’t mind. She calls me “man,” also. I, myself, used to get hung up on such gendered nuances in the English language. Now, unless I’m at work, I don’t really police my language. Those who know me, know me, know what I know, know where I’ve been, what I’ve seen, who I am. I call my friends, even the female ones, “man.”
In the pantheon of shit I have to worry about on the daily in My American Life, omitting “man” from my colloquial usage of the language is not a high priority, and I am not sorry.
“What do I do if I’ve got Autism, man?” I asked Sal, laughing a little. I mean, how funny would it be if I did have some “issue” with my weird little hooligan brain?
“I don’t know what to tell you, man,” Sal replied. “Get a psychiatrist, man.”
My oncologist has requested that I get myself a psychiatrist. You know you got something “off” when your cancer doc is like “Yeah, you’re a little too anxious/mental even for a stage iv cancer patient.”
I can assure you, reader, I come by my madness honestly.
I can assure you, reader, I am not keen on seeing a psychiatrist. I’ve seen a couple in my life and never “appreciated” what they had to say about my mental configuration. Present Day Gruber is open to hearing a medical professional’s thoughts on the matter of her psychological wiring.
See, I am done with my suffering. I mean the suffering I can be done with. Some we can never be done with. Some we bring on ourselves (“drama,” contrary to my adolescent child’s thinking, is most definitely NOT the “spice of life). Some we come by honestly. Some we can address and mitigate.
When my doctors tell me I have cancer, I don’t say, “Well, I don’t like your stupid fucking opinion. I’m not doing shit about this.”
I say, “oh-my-fucking-god. Cancer? Really? How can medicine help me?”
Why don’t I say this about my mind? I know some tricks that I’ve learned just in the six odd (and I do mean ODD) months I’ve been sober: turns out meditation really does work. Turns out mindfulness really does work. I’m proud of the ways I’ve learned to naturally manage my anxiety, my spinning thoughts, my penchant for “drama.” I’m proud of myself.
This morning I woke up fully on my bullshit. I was grumbling and mumbling and swearing and carrying on in front of Sarah. My screed went something like this: Why am I so tired all the fucking time? Why haven’t I accomplished ___, ____, and ____ , yet? What have I been doing with my life all these years? Why is ____ not happening yet? I need to get real serious with myself now. I got to get serious, and . . .
And Sarah just stared at me agog. When I was done she enumerated my many accomplishments achieved just in the past year. I blinked. There was a lot. Publications. Careers. Friends. Public kudos.
And none of it means a goddamn thing if I’m not okay with Myself. I can’t even see my own accomplishments, much less appreciate them, if I am not right with myself. I think I’m moving in the correct direction to be “right with myself.” Even if I’m not on the straight-and-narrow every moment of my life, I am definitely moving in the correct general direction. Ask anyone who’s ever been in a car with me, and they’ll tell you it’s a rare, good time when Gruber actually knows where she’s going. And that’s the simple task of navigating a car. Say nothing of trying to navigate my life.
So I’m off into my Sunday. Taking a Favorite Former to coffee. Writing more. Laughing more. Dreaming more. Tomorrow, to the best of my knowledge, is Monday. I am sober. I am safe. I hope you are both, also, reader.
