Letters to Sarah

I used to write letters to people. Way back when, before mail went electronic, before we had computers in our pockets, I would put pen to paper and write letters to my friends. These were people whom I used to be close with, who were now far away from me. Long distance phone calls were expensive, and saved for calling home. I would write and try to explain to my friends what was happening to me, and doing this regularly would force me to process a lot of the stuff I was thinking about and learning.

But that was a long time ago. The ways we communicate have changed, and those friends are all long gone. I've been mourning the loss of one of those friendships for a while now. I thought I was ok with it, but unlike all of my other friends, this loss was recent, and as I approached the anniversary of it, it was definitely weighing on my mind.

I've been working on something about my first year post diagnosis for a while now, and something keeps causing me to draw up short. I’ve been puzzling about it for a while. Not everyone has been positive about my diagnosis, and I thought maybe my frustration with that was what was holding me up. My desire to report about the first year was to share the positive, but there was a part of me that felt that I needed to be honest, and not everything about the first year was positive.

My friend denied that I was autistic. Her assessment was based less on her knowledge of me than of her fear and distrust of modern psychiatry. It’s just like when we were teenagers and they diagnosed everyone with depression. Now they’re diagnosing everyone with autism. But you weren’t really depressed, and you’re not really autistic.

It’s not fair to paraphrase her argument like that. That’s my interpretation of what she was saying. And I was depressed. And I am autistic. These are things I know. And because we were friends, we talked about it for a while, and talked around it, and then moved on.

But then something happened that caught me off guard. She suddenly broke off our email correspondence. Her husband was jealous of our emotional intimacy. We couldn’t talk any more; some line had been crossed, and we were too close for two old friend who were now married to other people. I was baffled, but my wife confirmed that we were probably being intimate enough in our correspondence that her husband had some reason to be upset. I’m still baffled, to be honest, but I trust her judgement.

My friend always said that every letter I wrote was a love letter, and I know this isn't helping my case, but in a way it was true. I wasn't trying to seduce her, or declare my love for her; I was just open and honest and intimate with her, and that was important to me because there were few people at the time whom I could be open and honest with.

And while I accept the loss and understand what happened, in a way, at least, I am still mourning it. And while the loss wasn't directly related to my autism (and believe me, as I've been circling around, trying to make sense of this block, I've tried really hard to make it about that, and it just doesn't work), I think I was pulling up short because now I don't know where the line is. I need to be honest, I want to write the truth, but it didn't end well. And that's what I'm afraid I've learned from the first year post diagnosis—I am autistic, and I don't know how these relationships work, and somehow I'm going to fuck them up and ruin something that was really important to me.

Over the summer, when I was first starting to work on this recap of the first year, I made contact with a different old friend. This relationship had ended badly, years ago, and we’d gone our separate ways. But she reached out to me, told me she’d read my blog and glad to hear that I was in a good place, that I’d found a place “to hang my hat.” And I replied, and we caught up a little bit. Buried the hatchet, mended the fence.

And at first, I was excited, because I wanted to talk with her about my diagnosis, ask her if that made sense to her, if it helped make any of the things we’d gone through together make more sense. But I didn’t. I wanted to email her, but the action sat in my task manager for a couple of weeks. And then I deleted it, and I didn’t keep in touch.

And this is it, right here. This is what has been keeping me from writing about what the first year post diagnosis was like, because this was the lesson I learned that I didn’t want to admit to. This is what I wasn’t being honest to myself about. That for all of the positives of finally learning and starting to understand myself, and there have been so many—again, this has been an overwhelming positive thing in my life, which is why I wanted to write about it, to share it—but for all of that, the fact remains that I have a disability that makes it hard for me to navigate building and maintaining relationships with people, that even with my new-found awareness, I can ruin one of my oldest friendships, and not even quite understand how. I can’t talk about what the first year was like without including this, because that wouldn’t be honest, and that’s why I was pulling up short.

I used to write letters to my friends. It was a way for me to process what I’d been going through, and when my friend and I started corresponding again last fall, it was like someone handed me a glass of water when I didn’t even realize I was thirsty. And while I miss my friend, I think I also missed just that simple act of communicating yourself to someone else, trying to reach out across the void and just make a connection, get something of yourself across.

So, as strange as this may sound, I think I’m going to start writing love letters to you. Another thing that I’ve long wrestled with the voice and tone for my blog. All of my long writing has been semi-professional, mostly because of a decade spent as an English Literature undergrad. If I’m writing not writing fiction, then it should be some sort of essay, right? Well, what if it was more of a letter? What if I took that impulse, that desire to write open, honest, intimate letters to old friends who don’t exist anymore, and just wrote to the void. In my head, maybe, I’m speaking to one of them, but you get to read it. And maybe if I pour my heart out to the void, maybe I’ll make a connection somewhere, a random person whom I’ve never met.

And then maybe these old friendships won’t have died in vain.