The Mooncalf
When I was a teenager, I secretly referred to myself as The Mooncalf. I thought at the time “mooncalf” simply meant being an absent-minded dreamer. The word comes from an old superstition that the Moon could have a sinister influence on children in the womb, producing monstrously malformed creatures. In reality these were miscarriages of a fetus, one that had either not fully formed yet or that had some fatal mutation. Mooncalf also came to be used to refer to fools, dullards, and, unfortunately, the physically and mentally disabled. As a teenager, I was blissfully unaware of all these additional definitions. I just liked the idea of having been influenced by the Moon. I’ve always had an affinity for it, and if the Moon was the reason why I was the way I was, then I would be happy.
Because I knew that the way I was—the way I still am—was not what one would call normal.
I have always been different from everyone else in a way I could feel deep down. Even in my earliest memories, the world around me seemed so odd. I didn’t understand any of it. Why did people do the things they did? Why did they expect me to follow suit? There were all these rituals and rules I didn’t understand, but somehow everyone around me seemed to know what these rules were and how to respond to them.
From early on I thought of myself as having to pretend to be human. I was something else, I had to be—a being from the Moon trying to navigate an alien world I could never truly understand. I needed to act like the humans did, I needed to study them, to learn their ways to blend in. I grew up watching Star Trek, and I strongly identified with the half-Vulcan Spock and the android Data because they too were trying to figure out these weird humans they lived amongst.
I had no desire to fit in, though. I did not want to be one of the humans. I was stuck here on Earth with them and had to play nice, trying to figure out what they wanted from me so I could survive, but that was all. I wanted to remain myself, whatever I was. When intermingling with the humans, I felt like I had to put on an act—play a part, slip on a mask. I would step into a persona, one I had cobbled together from watching TV and movies, and I tried to hide the alienness of my thoughts and behaviors.
Playing this part of Normal Human wasn’t easy. I often made mistakes, saying or doing the wrong thing at the wrong time. I would panic and get flustered. The wrong words would come out, or the right ones did but in the wrong order. Sometimes I would fall into a loop of trying to correct a wrong word or phrase but couldn’t get it right, so I would keep saying the wrong words over and over again. Other times, I felt like I couldn’t speak at all. I developed a script, common phrases I’d heard people use, and clung to it in every conversation. When inevitably that conversation strayed from that script, I felt lost, unable to improv.
It didn’t help that communication in general has always been difficult for me. Speaking and interacting socially is physically exhausting, with even short conversations rendering me drained in minutes. Adding to that exhaustion is the fact that I think in images, and I have to translate those images in my head into words that feel inadequate, a mental effort that sometimes just doesn’t feel worth it. In school I gained a reputation as The Quiet One because far too often I found it easier to simply say nothing than to expend the effort needed to speak even a simple sentence.
Writing was always easier for me. There was enough time to think my words through, and I could go back and change them later if I found a better way to phrase something. It allowed me to go at my own pace when transcribing those images in my head, so I could explore some of the emotions I’d felt but had never been able to properly articulate.
It was odd that I loved to write words but hated to speak them. I was someone who barely spoke a paragraph a day, but I was already writing novels by age twelve. It seemed a paradox, but everything about me was a paradox. I was human—I knew biologically that was true—but there was something different about me, something that left me feeling adrift in a world where everything seemed hostile to my nature.
There were so many things everyone else seemed to accept or even adore but that I struggled to merely co-exist with. I could not stand the brightness of the sun or overhead lights, my eyes burning under their assault. The feel of the seams in my socks or of shoes constricting my feet drove me crazy. The sound of too many background noises happening at once distracted me so much I couldn’t think, couldn’t concentrate. The smell of supposedly beautiful perfumes and soaps made me sick, turning my stomach and giving me a headache. The taste and texture of so many foods that everyone else claimed to love made me want to vomit.
Everything in the world seemed so overwhelming, all the time. I would try to play along but I felt like a battery drained, a candle hollowed out by its burning wick. In school and later in various jobs, I would do the same work as everyone else, but I always needed so much more time to recover, burning out when everyone else seemed to thrive. It didn’t make sense, I didn’t make sense. How could I belong to this world when everything in it hurt me?
I was in my thirties when I was finally diagnosed with autism.
The diagnosis wasn’t a surprise. I had suspected I was autistic for a long time. As a kid, whenever I heard some of the common symptoms of autism such as difficulty with communication and social interaction, I had thought that sounds like me. But every fictional portrayal of someone with autism had shown such extreme behaviors—barely verbal characters unable to care for themselves, having meltdowns and hitting their heads when things went wrong—that I assumed I couldn’t be autistic. I knew there was a spectrum of autistic behaviors and experiences, but even the so-called “high-functioning” portrayals I saw didn’t quite feel right.
In my early twenties I was working as a page at a public library, and one day when I was shelving in the adult non-fiction section I stumbled across a book about women with autism. This book was a revelation. I can’t remember its name now, but it helped me see a different side of autism, one I had never encountered in all the stereotypes I’d seen in media. Not only did it explain the spectrum better than movies and TV shows ever had, but it explained that autism has different symptoms in women. In particular, women with autism are more likely to “mask”—meaning they try to hide their symptoms by pretending to be neurotypical. It made me realize this feeling of playing a part I had always felt was exactly that—I was masking, trying to act “normal” to hide my autism. Everything made sense.
But then I started to doubt myself. What if I was latching onto this possible diagnosis because it was easier to use autism as an excuse than to try harder at communicating and interacting with people? I knew I had social anxiety, and social anxiety can sometimes seem like autism because the fear of socializing leads to a lack of experience and therefore a lack of knowledge about how to socialize. What if that was all, and I just needed to try harder at overcoming my anxiety? I tried putting myself into situations that would force me to act “normal,” to learn to socialize. But it didn’t work. No matter how hard I tried, I still felt like the Mooncalf, like an alien built for a different world.
I went back and forth for years on whether or not I was autistic. I did more research, I heard more stories of women who were diagnosed well into adulthood, and I did some soul searching and personal reflection. Eventually I realized I did, at the very least, have several traits common with autism spectrum disorder, but I still wasn’t sure if I had enough for a diagnosis. In my head, though, I started thinking of myself as autistic, and I started discussing it with those closest to me as a possibility. They would sort of shrug it off with a maybe…but probably not. I think they were thinking about those same stereotypes I had grown up with, thinking that autism had to look a certain way.
As I became more and more certain, I started writing stories with characters that had autistic traits, the ones I could easily identify in myself, but I hesitated to name the diagnosis even in fiction. No matter how obvious the truth seemed, I still had these lingering doubts. They held me back from saying aloud what I truly am, to admitting it even through a fictional character. That’s why I finally decided I needed an official diagnosis. Those doubts would always be there unless I knew for sure.
Once I had my diagnosis—once I had proof of what I had suspected for so long—I was elated. I felt free to finally explore aspects of myself I never had before. I had a framework for viewing my behavior, for understanding why I am the way I am. No longer was I wondering why did I do that, because I now knew the answer.
I have spent the past year and a half since my diagnosis looking back at my life, going over all those moments that had seemed so confusing and thinking oh. I get it now. I get me. I’m not an alien or an android—my mind is just wired differently. Knowing this truth has made a huge difference. I’m much more open about explaining my autistic behavior instead of trying to hide it. Instead of accepting the weird looks when I fail at playing Normal Human, I can explain to people what’s going on, why I can’t just be “normal” like they expect.
Unfortunately, this world is designed for neurotypical people, not for autistic and other neurodivergent folks like me. I can feel every day, in every interaction, that this world is at odds with how my mind works, but at least now I know it’s not a failure on my part.
I will always be different. There is no cure for autism, only coping methods. Even now I still feel like the Mooncalf, like Spock and Data living alongside the humans. But I’ve discovered there are others out there like me. I’m not alone on this planet. And perhaps one day these strange humans will understand they aren’t alone here either, that there are people on this planet who don’t think or act like they do—and we could sure use their help in making this world more accessible for us all.