First Person Narrative

By Susie

My name is Susie. I live alone in Brookline where I’m a landlady and surrounded by all my children, who are 4 legged, with long whiskers and fuzzy faces. My animals have shared with me the closest, most endearing relationship ever and have certainly played an essential role in my life’s survival.

To me, the pot at the end of each rainbow was filled with happiness, not gold, and it seems a lifetime spent chasing rainbows to find this elusive thing called happiness. Only recently has it become apparent that true happiness comes from being with people, in lasting fulfilling, meaningful relationships. Epicurus, a philosopher living around 330 B.C., observed that “of all the things wisdom provides to help one live one’s entire life in happiness, the greatest by far is the possession of friendship”. One could have all the wealth in the world, but without friends, one can never be truly happy. In retrospect the happy times of my experience were solitary events, like the end of a 10 mile jog I ran daily for 15 years, or playing the piano, or building a beautiful stone wall on my island property at the vineyard.

I grew up in a dysfunctional family. My father was an alcoholic and my mother was a “refrigerator” mom who just wasn’t there for me. So memories of being little are few. I do remember lying in my bed at night pulling my hair out strand by strand and listening to the roots crackle. I was told I cried a lot. My brother, 4 years older than I, was very sick with asthma. Fortunately at an early age I discovered the piano, started studying, and spent hours each day communicating through my fingertips, exploring music by wonderful composers and unleashing into the keyboard my pent up emotions of anger and sorrow. I did have perfect pitch meaning I could perfectly turn the key of C, or other keys of the octave before striking these notes to duplicate their tone. I would continue to excel with my music into adulthood playing in summer camp to earn tuition, playing in the school orchestra, playing in church, and playing in recitals. I also loved singing and participated in my high school choir as well as in the Cecelia society chorus.

I was raised in a religion which didn’t believe in medicine or doctors and that illness was simply a false illusion. While these teachings taught me the ability to question current belief patterns and the unlimited power of the mind to heal the body, I often lost lots of time from school when I got sick. I remember allowing my dentist to give me novacaine before filling some cavities and getting severely punished by my mom when she received the bill. My brother and I were shipped off to Christian Science brother and sister camps in Maine each summer. I discovered how excruciating life could be, surrounded by hoards of other campers, was beastly unhappy, and ended up years later being thrown out for using foul language. I especially remember one parents’ weekend at summers end when we performed skits to show the talents we’d learned. My brother, who taught Riflery, put an apple on a camper’s head and from short range shot it off. I remember the hush of silence which seeped thru the camps and the commotion which followed. My brother confided his confusion to me over the reaction to his skit saying that what he’d done was the easiest thing in the world and therefore perfectly safe.

In my years of elementary and high school education nothing came easily to me. I suffered tremendous adolescent and social skills problems with nobody to turn to for help. Top grades were demanded in my family so I remained for most part an A and B student. But under the surface I lived in mortal terror of being called upon in class. My anxiety over this was so great that I could never pay attention to what was being taught in class. Afraid of being exposed for my true self, a moron, a dunce, or as somebody once said of me, an abortion which survived. I developed a terrible case of facial acne, scars from which have lasted till today, which was so demoralizing that religious rules were set aside to take me to a skin doctor for consultation.

The belief system which I was raised was that male children deserved all the education and other tools to become the family breadwinners. I, in turn would one day find a man who would take care of me. That’s an example of a belief system whose time has come and gone. Although I leaned toward a career in early education, I let myself be talked into a 2 year liberal arts secretarial course at Kathy Gibbs, which I completed in record time, and then set out into the business world to find my own way.

Some of my work experience went wonderfully. I worked for many years as assistant to the corporate personnel director of a retail department store chain. He then opened a number of art galleries and asked me if I’d like to manage his gallery on Boylston Street in Boston. So I entered a 10 year blissful work experience, where I became my own boss, surrounded in a vibrant, colorful world by works of Dali, Monet, Renoir, Chagall, and Matisse. We also did custom framing and dry mounting. My employees were usually gay, and I found them captivating, vastly different from people I’d come across before. Here I was accepted for my oddities in the world of art.

I married a man I’d met in my early teens who shared my love of nature and the outdoors. We traveled much of the world during month long vacations, hiked mountains, skied the Rockies, bought a sailboat and sailed the eastern seaboard. But when my husband started climbing the corporate ladder to success requiring greater social skills and interaction on my part, I was unable to tow the mark. I could function one on one with another human, but not in a crowd. Our marriage ended. The long term lease of the art gallery also expired, our rent was to double, and so we did not renew it. The store closed.

Once again I slipped back into the inhospitable world I’d experienced earlier. I was alone again, without a job, facing large mortgage payments and maintenance expenses, and now had to deal with tenant relationships by myself. I began a long succession of failed work attempts and a 25 year time span completely without one friend. I got my R.E. brokers license but never used it. I entered the U.S. postal service thinking I could work outside all day away from a boss and other people only to land the night shift at Logan Airport, processing undeliverable mail. When I finally became a mail lady. I started putting huge dents in the mail trucks I drove, getting lost in strange neighborhoods, and freaking out from the chaos of living in then an all male environment. Then followed the secretarial jobs I never liked and which were unsuccessful.

My coping strategy these many years was my love of exercise and the outdoor world. Exercise always made me feel good. I jogged at least 10 miles every day and ran my first 26 mile marathon at Newport, RI. Later I entered and completed my first open water triathalon for women which included a one mile swim, a 25 mile bike ride and a 10 K road race. I ran a Brookline road race and won the women’s division. Today I still spend much of my time outdoors where space is unlimited, not bound by walls, and I can get high from exercise.

By now I was chronically clinically depressed, and under the care of mental health specialists and carrying every kind of diagnosis possible. I tried one medication after another. After neuropsychiatric testing in ’94 I was given the diagnosis of extreme Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder and put on Ritalin. I later learned that had my tester been aware of Asperger’s Syndrome, I would have received that diagnosis instead. At this time I applied for social security disability benefits and left the work force.

The last major piece of business I got into also had its disappointments and I believed I went into it lacking poor executive function or failure to see the big picture of what I was getting in to. On the advice of my husband I bought a house and guest house on Martha’s Vineyard, expecting a situation of great tax write-offs, use of my vacation property, and a lucrative summer rental business to boot. What I received was a nightmare of stress and events I never bargained for. A big problem was my poor judgment of character in the people I had to hire to do business and whom I depended, and the vacation business I tried to run from the other side of the ocean. Vacationer’s needs ran from anywhere from skunk and raccoon removal, to changing lightbulbs, to appliance replacement. If my caretaker was unavailable I was in trouble. If the cleaning team I hired didn’t show up between rentals, incoming guests would demand their money back. I had major insurance losses in 2 consecutive years and ended up needing legal help to fight for coverage. Year after year I lived at orange alert levels of stress and anxiety. The good thing that happened was my new awakening to and unbounding love for the world of gardening and landscaping. Over the years I crafted a scenic utopia of my acre and one half property. People all around complimented me on my wonderful creation. I volunteered to work part time without pay in a nearby nursery to learn about plants and trees, ornamental grass and shrubs, how to plant them and what conditions they needed for survival. And of course my love for rocks and endless time spent building stone walls, stone patio’s and a stone waterfall into the fish pond I crafted here as well. Unfortunately when I discovered a neighbor who headed up the N.E. Harley Davidson motorcycle club and liked to make noise, my sense of sound backfired and my world caved in completely.

Three years ago I was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome and was so fortunate to find Dania Jekel and A.A.N.E. there I found caring and compassion and sound tips to get my life in order. I was advised to simplify and get rid of situations causing me stress. I followed that advice and life has become better. I got into a weekly discussion group with other adults with A.S. with the ultimate experience of knowing myself better. Dania and Jamie Freed have given their time each week these many years to guide us along this path to self-knowledge. In this time I stumbled across a rainbow and into a pot of happiness. I’m experiencing the exquisite joy of forging a wonderful relationship with a caring neighbor of mine, a doctor of education. It’s immensely rewarding to experience interacting with another human being, whether it is biking into the city together, going on picnics, listening to a concert, or just pulling weeds together. I now know that it no longer serves me to think of myself negatively, an aberration of genes, a misfit in society, an abortion which survived. For what we picture in our minds can become our reality. Each one of us is a member of the human race with intelligence, talents and capabilities. I believe as an adult with Asperger’s Syndrome it’s our duty and in our best interest to seek the help now available from organizations such as the A.A.N.E. to help educate the public about our needs in the workplace, and claim our rightful heritage as contributing members along with every other being in society, today and forever. We can and we must!

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