The people I grew up with in Harrison, AR are in my thoughts a great deal lately. As I have written before, I nursed a great deal of resentment towards them, and the town in general, for a long time. My friendless childhood and no small amount of merciless bullying had me wondering what the hell their problem was. That changed the day I got my autism diagnosis, which was handy for the 2009 reunion. Autism changes everything about every interaction I had back then. I was punched twice in the face by a classmate the first day of preschool, and her explanation for the assault was, "He's weird." What neither of us could've known was that there was a medical reason she, and most of my classmates, found me so off-putting. So I find myself wanting to atone for all of the weirdness circumstances forced upon all of us. Everything makes sense now. All the pep rallies I protested, the obsessive crush that irrevocably alienated the nicest among them, the lack of athleticism, the staying inside for recess, and so many more eccentricities are explainable by autism. So now I'm friending all of them on Facebook now, with the hope of something of a fresh start.
Now, as to the Facebook thing, there's an odd element to it. A few years ago, I blocked everyone with connections to Harrison, with the exception of a sister I trust completely for discretion, in order to prevent feeding the gossip mill in ways that always seemed to embarrass my mother. So out of respect for her, I created the Reggie Morris profile, based on the family dog, in order to post uncontroversial things and still interact with people with whom I grew up. This blog is written with a wide audience in mind, including them. So far, I don't interact with many of them often, bearing in mind that I was widely disliked and some of them may well still feel that way. At least one person I know has blocked me and I cannot hold it against anyone who cares to go that route since I hung on to my old resentments for so long. People you grow up with didn't choose to grow up with you, nor you with them, so the whole experience of childhood interaction at school is a complete crapshoot. They likely picked up on the fact that I stopped viewing school as a social environment at some point and was merely attending it alongside them, as opposed to with them.
It's going to be a long road ahead of me as I go through whatever remains of my adult life. Things like career and family that define the experience of most human beings on this planet are denied to me and it took me a long time to face the fact of autism and how profoundly it has disabled me. In this context, I suppose it's natural to look to whatever roots one might have wherever one might find them. Maybe growing up with these people was just a meaningless fact of chance and, once graduated, there's nothing special about any connection we might share, but I like to think there is, even if it was a social desert for me. Whatever mistakes I made and whatever resentments may have formed, it was real and it's the only childhood I have. So as I face a lonely life sustained only by the money my family has been able to give me, I hope to find some understanding and perspective heretofore unknown to me in these people. We're all about 33 now, so whatever we were going to be when we grew up is a thing we already are. Whether we like it or not, we are all bound together by the things we went through together and it seems like there is a lot to learn from one another.
-Frank
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