Asperger's on the Inside

And now, back to the next installment of “the peculiar life of Michelle.”

After graduating from senior school and thus having to leave my comfortable high school lifestyle, I decided to go on and take an engineering/science degree at university. It was actually a surprisingly simple thing for someone like me to organize. I applied—I can’t remember now if it was by submitting a form or online— and then I got in. There was no interview or assessment of my suitability as a student, as my grades were high enough to fall into the automatic acceptance range. Just a letter in the mail saying congratulations for being accepted into the course and please come in on such-and-such date for orientation week. And so that’s what I did.

I remember my mum questioning at the time if I really wanted to do such a long, technical degree or if something simpler and shorter would suit me better. But for me, it seemed the simple path to follow. I was good at maths, I was good at science, and there in the 1998 university course handbook I’d been given in school was a degree with both. I didn’t really have any concept of what else was out there or any other way to go about it. I was rather oblivious to the world of other applied degrees and options that were available.

Settling in to university, I wish I could tell you stories of the wild parties or fun college experiences that I had, but actually, I was boring. I commuted in to university and back home for an hour by train every day and stuck mostly to what you would expect a nerd to do. I worked hard and didn’t get involved in much extracurricular activity. (I lived so far away, it was hard to stay on campus that late anyway.) I focused on being on top of my workload and spent most of my free time working hard to get high marks.

Yeah, I was that person, the one who always had their head in the books, but with a bit of a crazy, playful personality unexpectedly thrown on top. One of my friends used to refer to me as “eccentric.”

I know that for many Aspies, university (or college) is a time in which we struggle to cope and organize ourselves well enough to function, but for me, it was a place where I thrived. I mean, I, too, had the usual Aspie struggles—difficulty multitasking, poor natural executive functioning ^[21]—but I invented systems that worked for me and mastered them well.

My diary was my second brain and the center of my life! Any time any little thing came up that I would need to remember later, out it would come. I wrote daily lists of things I had to do, and each morning, I would go through the list and prioritize the work for the next few days. It was something I actually looked forward to doing, and sometimes I would even reprioritize my lists multiple times a day just for fun—yeah, I know I’m weird!

I must have been visibly obsessed with it too, as I remember one guy in my class, Chris, having some fun one day. When I opened up my diary one morning, there in the task list, a new item had been added: “Shag Chris.” I’m pretty sure I didn’t write that myself!

When it came to working and trying to socialize at the same time, I quickly learnt that that was just not going to happen. I don’t have that multitasking brain that most of you are lucky enough to be born with, so for me, it was either “work mode” or “social mode” only. Thus, I simply decided: socialize at university, work at home. No stress, no guilt—it was my system. With people constantly talking to me and making noises around me at university, it was either that or frown and shush people all day! So I opted for the more polite route.

Of course, that made me rather relaxed at university, and I think sometimes in class, I may have annoyed people by talking a little too much. I made sure I always wrote down the material so I could study it later, but generally, I wasn’t always paying that much attention, and I’ve never been great with volume control. My friend, Chris, once asked if perhaps I might be partially deaf because of my tendency to talk too loudly or quietly for no reason, though it turns out I’m not.

I recall one particularly embarrassing day when I was having a more personal chat with a friend and had one of those moments where the room suddenly went quiet, leaving me saying loudly to the whole room, “Yeah I have pretty small boobs.” Hopefully one day, I’ll live that down!

The downside of my all-work-or-all-play system, of course, was that once I got home, I had a huge amount of extra work to do, and I spent most of my weekends sitting on my bedroom floor with my head buried in books and paperwork.

The lectures were often hard for me to grasp when I was in class—I only seem to catch every second sentence from verbal communication—so for every hour I spent in a lecture, I think I spent about two at home, re-reading the notes and learning the material. It made weekends quite a drag, so, contrary to most people, I used to look forward to my Mondays coming around when I would be free to play and chatter again.

I don’t think I ever had any spare time on weeknights or weekends, given my constant workload, but I did take a lot of solace in being alone in my room or the lounge room being able to look at the weird array of flowering cherries, conifers, rhododendrons, maples, etc., that made up my mum’s concept of gardening. We had six and a half acres of land with a small creek at the back, and Mum had a passion for planting garden beds. In some parts of the house, the trees from the porch stretched over toward the trees in the garden and almost made little arches of flowers at the right time of year, like a little fairy garden. I loved walking through that area.

When I needed to wind down, I would often put on my gum boots ^[22] and walk down into the yard just out of the view of the house. I would sit on a fallen tree and enjoy the peace that came with being able to look 360 degrees without a house or person in site. It was my calming place. (Although I did have to watch out for the leeches!)

Back at university, I found my first year socially challenging. The sizes of the first year classes I was in—chemistry, math, and biology—were colossal (maybe a thousand students over three streams of a subject), and it took a long time for me to be thrown together with the same people long enough to befriend anyone.

But by the third year, I was able to settle into a much smaller engineering group—mostly guys—and became familiar with the people who frequented the chemical engineering common room. I was comfortable there and enjoyed my little common room niche, and it made me a lot happier to have a place like that to base myself.

In those later years, I had a few particular friends. I became good friends with one guy, Chris (the “shag Chris” guy), at the start of second year university when he first transferred in. He would sit next to me in all my classes, and people would tell me he was frequently in the common room looking for me. I have to say it was a bit of attention I very much enjoyed. As I got to know him, it unraveled that he was quite troubled, but I have to say his complexity made him one of the most interesting people I’ve ever met. Sometimes, people—even though troubled—can be a deep and satisfying addition to your friendship circles.

Another guy in the class, Alex, sticks in my mind because he used to talk and play silly games with me during the lectures, such as rubbing out what I was writing while I was writing it down. He even once cut off a little piece of my hair! Sometimes he drove me crazy, but I forgive him that. He was a good guy overall. Perhaps an unusual one, but he turned out to be quite loyal as a friend.

And, of course, there were Colin and Sam, whom I worked with on a major project in final year. Sam invited me over to her house for small social gatherings and was always stable and supportive. Colin loved to gossip, and the two of us spent vast amounts of time together and had some great humorous, mischievous conversations.

Sometimes, my life was so unique in funny little ways that as we were walking around, Colin would make jokes about us being on The Michelle Show; i.e., where there were hidden cameras filming our every move. At the end of the year, Colin submitted a passage about me to the annual magazine, which read, “Sadly, there is not enough room on the rogue sheets to include for Michelle. This is a crime, since Michelle has had so many embarrassing moments, from those outbursts in lectures to those discussions with Alex. In reality, we could devote a whole magazine just to Michelle, and perhaps someday, someone will.”

And ironically, someone did end up writing about me one day—forget a magazine. It was a whole book! But I never realized that that person was going to be me!

Socially, I would say those university days were some of the happiest times of my life. The oddities of academia made me a good fit with those around me, all of whom I would still consider to be good friends if I had much contact with them now. But as time went on, unfortunately, most of us moved away to one location or another for work reasons. Long-distance friendships tend to slip away over time.

My later years at university were also the time when I met Robert, whom I would eventually go on to marry. He was taking chemical engineering also and graduated a year ahead of me, although I didn’t get to know him well until the end of his graduation year. Just as the year came to a close, he invited me to join him at a final year celebration being held by a group of students that weren’t going to the official Chem Eng ball.

I remember he picked me up in what he and his brothers called “the truck,” an older red vehicle with no roof. We had a lot of fun cruising around town there and back with the wind blowing through the car, and Robert and I got to really talking for the first time. He was deeper than I’d realized and had a subtle and dry sense of humor—an educated wit that I quite liked. He was also young and innocent and a kind, gentle sort of person. You could just sense that about him. By the end of the night, I declared him “good company,” and we made plans to hang out again. Things took off from there.

I remember Robert enjoyed building on Colin’s jokes about The Michelle Show, and when we would go on dates, he would point out a rainbow and tell me he ordered it in especially for me. His lines were mostly cheesy and sometimes taken from movies, but it moved me. He was trying. And so we continued to see each other on weekends through the next year while he took a job at a site a few hours away, and I plugged away at my final year of engineering and science studies.

As I continued on with the final subjects in my degree, I discovered that my chemical engineering coursework wasn’t turning out as interesting as I had first hoped it would be. I guess I chose the course because I thought engineering would be a good field to get work in and I wouldn’t have to write or deal with people too much. Ha! Well, that worked out to be a bit of a joke, and in reality, it was work that forced me to develop a lot more social and writing skills.

A few of my subjects were more systematic and very “me” (I loved Chemical Process Analysis), but many were ho-hum, and my passion wasn’t strong. I wish I’d pursued genetics, ecology, psychology, statistics, algebra, or one of the areas I was passionate about. But at the time, I was pressured to do chemistry and only the subjects I could fit in alongside my engineering degree, so unfortunately, I dropped the things that fascinated me the most.

I think that back then, my understanding of the purpose of university was solely to set yourself up to get a “good job,” “good” meaning solid pay and lots of employment opportunities available. I never questioned that idea or thought about the concept of learning for enjoyment until much later.

I wish someone had pointed out to me then that I was going to be working for the rest of my life and that I should do something that I love. And that if you’re passionate enough about it, the jobs will follow. I wish I’d understood that there’s so much more to life than working and earning money. Money is a means to an end, not “who you are.” Finding a life that makes you happy should be the real goal. To follow one’s passion is a beautiful thing, and I was strongly passionate about a few things. But instead, I made logical choices that led me away from them. We live and learn.

Regardless, I was motivated to succeed, and succeed I did. I graduated university with an average grade of 85, placing me somewhere near third when compared to those I studied engineering with (the class that graduated one year before me), in a class of around 100. I was extremely capable of achieving the goals I put my mind to, and university taught me to have a lot of confidence in myself and my abilities. I used to picture myself flying—soaring across the top of the world. I was on the up and up. Just imagine what I could’ve done if I’d pursued real areas of interest!

Unfortunately, this was probably the peak of my success, and after graduation, I ran into the business world, which wasn’t the devil I knew. It turned out to be a world that I didn’t have the skills to thrive in the same way, and I was in for a big shock. But anyway, we’ll save that for the next story topic.