Tue, 30 Aug 2022
Part-Time Lefty
When I was around eight or so years old, I played little league baseball in a rural area full of very small towns (smaller than you're thinking, most likely). It was far from the most competitive of sports for children in the area, but I still thought it was so cool to play a game that I'd seen played on television. Donning the team uniform felt very official, as did slipping the leather baseball glove onto my hand.
I wasn't very good. I couldn't throw well at all and I couldn't hit well enough to compensate for those poor defensive skills, either. I found it frustrating that my teammates seemed to consistently do better than I could, and I remember once having such trouble hitting the ball that the umpire gave me extra strikes, which aggravated me further because I knew the rules and it felt patronizing, even though he was trying to be nice. Regardless, it didn't help. Eight strikes later I left the field without a hit and in tears.
One day, my family spent some time at a lake in Eastern Washington and I started throwing stones in the water to watch the ripples. I found it soothing to toss the rocks in and watch them disappear, enveloped by water, leaving only a series of circular rings as evidence they ever existed. After awhile, my dad noticed something.
"Jesse, are you left-handed?"
I hadn't noticed, but, in fact, I had been throwing the stones with my left hand the whole time without a thought. I shrugged. I'd never considered this. I write and eat with my right hand, so it had never occurred to my family (or me, for that matter) that I might throw with my left.
The next time we went to the big city (AKA Spokane, WA), my folks bought me a left-handed glove at Big Five Sporting Goods. It didn’t make me suddenly prodigious at baseball, but now that I had the correct glove to suit my quasi-dominant hand, I did much better.
One of my favorite memories from my time playing little league baseball was the first game I played with my new and more appropriate glove: I made a catch for the first time ever and that batter was out!
Similarly, before I started taking guitar lessons, my parents took me to Guitar Center for a little fact finding as to where we might find lessons, as well as what guitars we should be looking at. The employee brought over a guitar and had me hold it, but I told him it was upside down; I would need to hold it the other way. He looked at me, and then at my parents, told them I should learn to play right-handed instead of left-handed. He seemed weirdly insistent about it at the time (and came off rather off putting), but I definitely get it now.
For whatever reason, I didn't actually begin guitar lessons until years later. When I told my teacher that I would need to play left-handed and asked if he could flip the strings, he asked me to try right-handed first. He showed me the finger placement for a G chord and asked me to copy it on the neck of the guitar I'd brought. It took literally all of my effort and concentration to form that chord and, when I strummed, it just sounded like a bunch of steel strings vibrating against a metal trashcan.
To humor me, the teacher told me to flip the guitar around and try the same chord left-handed (even though the strings would be backward). I did as he said and was able to move my fingers right to the correct spot with little extraneous effort beyond that of a beginner.
The teacher could see right away that it would be infinitely easier to teach me to play left-handed than to try and force in me the capacity to play right-handed, even though it would have been far more practical to play right-handed down the road.
We live in a right-handed world. The presumption is you're right-handed until proven lefty. It's a place where things are generally easier (or at least better designed) if you're right-handed.
I've always been both left- and right-handed depending on what we’re talking about; neither is truly dominant, which made it less obvious that I might need something like a left-handed baseball glove as a child. And because most folks are right-handed, why not make it easier for the kid early on and teach him to play on a right-handed guitar, even when a left-handed guitar may come more naturally—he'll thank you later when he's trying to find a new guitar and all the lefties are more expensive, and limited to a pathetic selection of options.
But the thing is, given the proper tools, lefties can excel with as much ease as righties. The problem with being left-handed is not being left-handed; it's living in a right-handed world.
This isn't about dominant hands.
***
I've struggled with depression since I was an adolescent. Looking back on my journals from the time, I can see the onset of overt depressive symptoms at around fourteen (though I know they go back much, much further, into childhood, but I didn't keep journals then). I had my first major depressive episode at the age of seventeen and—with the exception of two glorious years between late 2013 and late 2015—it's been a downhill slide into worse and worse mental states ever since.
My entire adult life, and most of my late adolescence, has been spent in search of an answer to the question of why. Why am I like this? What causes this depression? I can point to several known triggers that tend to precede depressive episodes, but I don't understand why. Rather, I didn't understand why. I do now—at least, more than I ever understood before.
In mid-February of 2021, I listened to a podcast episode from a show called Skeptics with a K. I'd been listening to this particular show for several months at that point and had no reason to suspect that this individual episode would change the course of my life. And then, within the first thirty minutes of the episode, one of the hosts opened up about struggles he's had in the past (and present) and how he eventually found an explanation when he was diagnosed as Autistic.
If you were to remove the specifics of his story and just maintain the overall broad strokes and the emotional and psychological experiences described, his story was mine. My jaw hit the floor and stayed there for a long, long time.
Adult Autism was a potential causal factor I'd never considered, nor even thought to consider considering. I only knew of stereotypes and misinformation about what Autism even is.
So I turned to Google. I took a few online assessments and read, watched, or listened to stories from Autistic people directly to see what their experiences were like as best I could piece together. I scored high on each of the assessments I took and deeply resonated with the various stories of Autistics I could find online, especially those who received their diagnosis as adults.
Still, in my search for answers, I wasn’t comfortable with the ambiguity of a Google MD diagnosis one way or another. I wanted to undergo a diagnostic evaluation with a medical professional. I stopped researching on my own; I didn't want to continue filling my mind with information that might influence how I interacted with the diagnostic process, even unconsciously. I resolved to first learn whether I am on the Spectrum and then allow myself further learning about the neurotype.
Early in August of 2022, I finally received my diagnosis and an answer for most of the questions I've asked about myself up to now.
I am Autistic.
Note: I feel compelled to insert a little additional commentary here. I’ve since seen a significant amount of advocacy for the validity of self-diagnosis, and I can easily understand why and fully support that myself for a variety of practical reasons. First, it’s prohibitively difficult and expensive to get an official diagnosis. I did eventually find a diagnostician a year and a half after the question came up for me, and she was a referral of a referral of a referral, and her services were not covered by insurance so I had to pay out of pocket, and the process took about two months from start to finish. The diagnostic process itself consisted of close to ten hours of interviews with the doctor, multiple surveys and questionnaires, in addition to questionnaires completed by some close friends and family to get third-party perspective. A lot of things went very right for me to even have a chance at going through this process and not everyone gets those opportunities (more on this below). Additionally, some folks may not want an official diagnosis on their medical records for the simple reason that it can bring unwanted stigmatization.
***
Initially, the diagnosis was immensely relieving. It’s incredibly challenging to put into words just how validating it felt to suddenly have an explanation for virtually every question I’ve ever had about my mental health.
I finally understand the nature of my depression and anxiety. I finally understand why I've always been really particular about such things as food or the texture of my clothes. I understand why I find unexpected disruptions deeply upsetting and difficult to adapt to. Most importantly, though, for the sake of my long-term mental health, I now understand why it is I’ve struggled to find meaningful connections, and why I constantly feel like I'm "faking it" socially. I finally understand why I’ve always felt like an alien in a human skin-suit. All of this allows me to understand myself better than I ever have.
With this new self-knowledge, I dove headlong into books written by Autistic folks about Autism. Never before have I felt so seen as I have reading these books and, for literally the first time in my entire fucking life, I know definitively that other people like me exist.
But then the dread settled in, and it's still here, clinging to me with the vice grip of a tick who found a delicious vein and insatiably refuses to let go. In sometimes small, sometimes massive ways, I'm slowly realizing that I have lived my whole life in a world not built for me. I've survived this long by emulating the kinds of behaviors I believed were expected of me, and many of those behaviors have been downright carcinogenic for my mental health.
The depression and anxiety resulting from this immense energy expenditure have been slowly building for two decades. They finally cratered my mental health this year. Based on where I am mentally and emotionally right now, I think things will get a hell of a lot worse before they get better.
And I'm one of the lucky ones. I was able to jump through all the hurdles on the way to a diagnosis (albeit with significant help from my support network along the way). I was able to pay out of pocket for each step of the diagnostic process. I was able to take a medical leave of absence from work to focus on my mental health, to stem the bleeding and, hopefully, find ways to improve things long-term. Not only that, but I'm also a straight, white, cisgender male: the demographic most likely to be accurately diagnosed as Autistic.
If I were a woman or LGBTQ+ or a person of color, I would be at much higher risk of being misdiagnosed with a number of conditions that are potentially far more stigmatizing and lead to a greater likelihood of institutionalization, incarceration, or even preventable death in some cases.
Like I said, I'm one of the lucky ones. If even I’ve had such a brutal go of it, how much worse must it be for someone who is like me in addition to being externally “other”?
Also, to be clear, I’m glad I'm Autistic. I’ve always liked my mind, I’ve just also always found it beyond exhausting to exist in a neurotypical world. This was true of me long before I knew I was Autistic and, now that I know, I can make better-informed decisions about my future. This is huge. It's intimidating and terrifying and exciting and stressful, but ultimately, I now have legitimate hope: hope that I might actually be able to build a life I want to live rather than suffer through a life I want to leave.
What discourages me is just how stacked the deck is. I'm an Autistic in a neurotypical world, which has always been hard but I'm beginning to see just how hard with the scaleless eyes of an enlightened soul for the first time. I'll be unpacking so many things I’d previously taken for granted for years to come, but I'm already learning more (and sometimes surprising things) about the manner in which I exist.
As a relatively lighthearted example, one of the big question marks I had before receiving my diagnosis was the matter of eye contact. Autistics are notoriously uncomfortable with eye contact, but I always thought I was really good with eye contact, largely because I'd been told as much as a child on more than one occasion. I always assumed that what I've been doing is eye contact because no one corrected me or had any reason to suspect otherwise.
It turns out, though, that eye contact is LOOKING PEOPLE DIRECTLY IN THE EYE??? This is fucking insane. People do that? On purpose? Hard pass. If you've ever thought I was making eye contact with you, know that I was either looking at your mouth, your nose, or the bridge of your nose, which apparently doesn't count. If I do accidentally look directly into someone’s eye, I immediately turn away, regroup, and then return my gaze to near the eye, and most definitely not into it.
In just the past few weeks, there have been myriad instances of self-discovery like the above example, some similarly innocuous and some intense or unsettling. I’m certain I’ll continue to be surprised for quite a while, and I’m infinitely grateful for such a unique opportunity to relearn everything I thought I knew about myself.
I'm a part-time lefty in a right-handed world. Part of me wishes I'd known sooner, but mostly I'm just glad I know now. Maybe I'm not shit at life; maybe I just need the proper glove or guitar.