HOW TRUE PROFESSOR TONY ATTWOOD’S WORDS WERE ABOUT FRIENDSHIP.
“You go to school and you come home. You have no interests.” These were the words that my mother uttered to me on a Saturday, in March, 1985. Well, yes, I went to school and I came home. My interests were reading, collecting coins and the like. They were individual interests, not club interests.
In July, 1989, my brother asked me about doing sports for a club, and perhaps unsurprisingly, I said no to all of them. I’m not sports minded, and I don’t really like club activities.
My mother sent me to tennis lessons for a while, and I never really enjoyed those, either. The only thing I really liked about tennis was that until John McEnroe burst into the scene and would yell, “You cannot be serious!” to the umpire, tennis was not a sport that appealed to the uncouth. I have long been disgusted with cricket fans that boo when a potential stumping goes to the third umpire and the third umpire rules it not out because it wasn’t for the team that they support. Or boo when it is ruled out and it was for the team that they support.
My father worked with a man who donated to the social club at the company but did not attend social events. I remember a girl, when I was in Year Twelve, who said to me, in the closing months of the year, “Having friends over to watch a video. Socialising.” I wish I could have quoted my father’s colleague and said, “I have my colleagues, I have my friends and I have my family. I don’t let my colleagues become friends, and I don’t have my friends to my house.” (This man was NOT an abuser, I will add). My father asked him if he would come to our house, and he replied, “As it’s you, I would probably say yes, but then you’d expect me to invite you to my house.” I am the type of person who, if I have enough to do, that I’m happy with, can say, “Oh, I see so and so at the weekly club meeting. And my friendship ends at the end of each meeting.” That doesn’t mean that if I saw them when I was doing my shopping that I’d walk the other way, as that would be rude, but I would either, depending upon the level of friendship, say hello and keep walking, or stop and chat.
Professor Tony Attwood was right about phase four friendships (past the age of 13) where people start to have friends of more than one sex (I said sex because sex is biological, gender is social). And it is not uncommon, despite what that stupid doctor said, for teenagers to go out in mixed groups, and it is not always a group of six whereby it’s six guys and six girls and they’re all couples; in many situations, they can be six people who are all just friends.
Many of my friends at school were girls, even in my tween years. I did have a few male friends, but the friendships were always complicated.
With many of my friends at school, our friendship could be confined to the schoolyard and we didn’t need to mix outside school. What male friends I had were more those, in a non-competitive way, who could talk about things that they collected. Some claimed I was a nerd, but I was happy being a nerd.
If I could have had some friends in clubs (I hated cubs and one of the things that I thought was, okay, two hours one night a week was bad enough, but cub rallies of weekends, rare though they were, were pointless to me) I would have probably been, “That’s my friend at school, and that’s my friend at, say, the remote control plane club.” And kept the two separate.
My last two years at school were the ones I enjoyed the most. By that time, most of the bullies had gone, but when I wasn’t at school (yes, I studied on the weekends and at night) like during the winter and summer holidays, I wanted to either escape into the world of reading or television, or listen to music. I remember, 31 years ago, this month, going on a holiday in Western Queensland. I enjoyed the historical sites, but I hated the fact that we had another couple come along and they dominated things. I remember when the stub-axle on the rental caravan broke, and I was concerned about my books. I wanted to escape into the mystery world of John Rowe Townsend and his story about a young English woman in the fictional small country of Essenheim, and a story by S. E. Hinton, That Was Then, This Is Now, about two young teenagers, who were like brothers, who were driven apart by circumstances.
I think what many autistic people have a need for is friends, but true friends, but it needs to be understood that we can compartmentalise our friends. That doesn’t mean we don’t value them, rather, we don’t need friends in our inner sanctum constantly. While we may have friends who we see in more than one place, those we don’t we can easily deal with.
We also tend not to judge people. Okay, I remembered with my Year Twelve Science Teacher, a man who was quite unhappy with teaching (he had been studying to be a vet but he failed one subject and he transferred out of Vet. Science and into Science and then did a teaching certificate) dressing some days in stripes that went horizontally and others that went vertically, or black socks and white shoes and somebody said something to him about it, and he said, “Well, when you’ve got trousers on, you can’t see your socks.” I remember, one Saturday afternoon, in July, 1986, my mother told me to take my sweatpants off and put shorts on and I left my socks on without thinking, and she said to my father, “Look, he’s got on navy blue socks and shorts!” I didn’t think twice about it, but she laughed and told me to take my socks off and just wear my shoes. I wouldn’t have cared, but she had to notice.
Autistic people have our special interests and we have our people we associate with, but our definition of friendship does not include an agenda, we want friends because we like certain people. What we also have is a need to have friends that we can say, “Okay, that’s my friend from school; that’s my friend from the camera club; that’s my friend from this place; that’s my friend from that place;” and that’s all we need.