“I want to see stars, Daddy.”

I was little and my daddy was trying to put me to sleep. I wouldn’t say anything except the sentence, “I want to see stars. Finally, he got angry and left the room. When I was very little, I would lie awake and peer out my bedroom window, hoping to catch a glimpse of the first star of night. I would see the neighbors’ lights in their bathroom go on and off, on and off. Stars shone through the backyard stink trees. I wanted to run somewhere in a huge sky field and catch them up in my hands, free, free, free, where nothing could stop me.

I read and reread The Magic School Bus book about space travel. I drew maps of the solar system. I played with space View-Masters. I watched the space projector flash in vivid color across my brother’s huge bedroom walls. Stars. Stars. Elusive and frightening and small and faraway, all at once. Why was I so obsessed with space?

It had something to do with grown-up feelings stirring in my chest and longings for God and wondering about how everything came to be. Still, it was strange—the harder I longed to understand things as marvelous and faraway as the stars, the more I huddled into my little self and thought things that only I could understand. My longings became my strange, freakish, sloppy, random, frightening personality. It was like the stars had turned to playdough, and I was mixing and mashing their colors in my grubby hands. Whatever it was I longed to understand, my mind messed it up, leaving me to untangle my thoughts day after day…year after year.

All my life, I had no name for this awfulness. Now I know it is something very familiar and common. Asberger’s Syndrome. My dad has it, my mother has it, my older brother has it. Nobody ever admitted I had it, but they only vaguely suggested I had trouble with certain things. How do I know I have Asberger’s syndrome? It could be I am just a wacko. Or am I just one of those people on the internet who feign autism to get attention and sympathy? I guess I cannot say for sure, just by researching it and taking quizzes online, but many things about my life make sense when I chalk them up to being an Asbie.

Weird obsessions. Ah yes, weird obsessions. The definition of my existence. I can’t bear to think of all the crazy and random things I have been obsessed with. Reading warning labels on household products all the time, ogling drug advertisements in women’s magazines, inventing overly elaborate worlds of completely bizarre imaginary characters, drawing endless maps of this and that—and, as an older teen, memorizing obscure song lyrics—all this and more (just ask my mom) fill my mind and rattle around inside me forever.

Another sign of being an Asbie is that I freak about things that other people wouldn’t. I’m afraid to be walking in my house at night, even when I know the only people who will come inside are trusted family members. I feel like bolting for my room in terror and locking the door, even though nobody will inquire of me. I used to lie awake being terrified of seeing mice crawl across the floor. When I was working at my desk in my room, whenever a train passed on the tracks outside, I would abandon my work and leap for my bed until the train passed. Counting random things was a coping mechanism for anxiety. I would think things like, “If that window across the street is open, I won’t die. If it is not open, I will die.” Or I would freak out if I didn’t finish my schoolwork by an exact minute. I was afraid of what inanimate objects thought about me. Even now, I can’t bear to have a music playlist with a number of songs on it that doesn’t end in 0.

Even the expression on my face gives me away. Asbies who are girls and women typically look younger than they really are. I have always looked several grades behind myself. To make matters worse, I have rough uneven hair in the back of my ponytail that I constantly pull out for sensory satisfaction, no matter how many times I brush it back in place. Chewing on plastic objects, such as Ziploc bags, pens, twist ties, and Knex pieces, has been a bad habit with me always. My mom has always giggled and fidgeted with objects nearby in times when she was nervous, such as important phone calls, and I thought this was irritating, until I noticed I did just the same.

That’s far too much talk about myself to be decent. Yet I can’t stop analyzing and being introspective—another symptom of being an Asbie. An Asbie in an evangelical Christian household with an Asbie-crazed dad has it magnified times one thousand. Everything in life, no matter how mundane, must be picked apart for its spiritual and philosophical undertones. Love God, serve God, honor God. Fall asleep each night vaguely scared of the wrath of God. Force God thoughts into your mind to be reverent. Be a religious ritualist. Be more introspective. Pick everything apart. I do this far more than is healthy or right, and I can’t stop.

 Deeper and deeper, deeper and deeper, I rummage in the shelves of eternity, trying to drag God by my shoelaces. I’m so deep into my distance that I wonder how any kids can laugh and be carefree when I’m so…so outside them. I’m so deep into my distance that I space out and lose track of time, thinking vague and endless philosophical thoughts. Sometimes I feel like I’m from another planet. Analyzing, analyzing, analyzing, so long and so hard that I never notice it anymore, I am killed my own long-faced, belly-button gazing seriousness…all while hiding it with an equal and opposite exterior, giggling and jokes and laughter. So on my exterior, I look stunted and stupid and immature, but on my inside, what a tangle of impossible terrified thoughts.

I am too introverted to be real. I don’t have much use for people because they aren’t typewriters. Only in writing can I confide anything real about myself. Making and keeping friendships is difficult because I am so bashful and awkward. Sometimes I get into situations, like discussion time at youth group, when my mind turns a switch and I can’t make myself talk for anyone or anything. I don’t speak to people, and as the old saying goes, if you’re not friendly to others they won’t be friendly to you. I get so boring that people ignore me, run away from me, sit laughing and talking by me completely oblivious of my presence. It’s gotten so that I want to run and hide if I meet a friend in public, terrified of having to say hi and make small talk. Conversations strain me with social panic. Am I being rude? Am I being self-centered? What if they don’t like me? Oh, God, what if I’m being rude? I want to escape from people so I can be myself…but then again, it gets so lonely I could spit up. Introversion sucks.

Because I am an Asbie, everything is overdramatic and magnified. When I am crabby, the world crashes down. When I am criticized, I throw a screaming fit. When I am happy, Jesus comes back and the flowers open. In my strengths, I often leave people bug-eyed, but I am never more stupid and clumsy than when I am doing something I hate (like math formulas).

This isn’t just about me. Asbergers defines my family. It’s the reason why we stumble and bumble our way through life. It’s the reason why my twenty-three year old brother is obsessed with chasing security guards, it’s the reason why my mom and dad look so tired and faded and alone. We don’t hold much with outsiders. Everywhere we go, our eyes are somehow drifting above and beyond everyone else’s. We are spacey and vague and dreamy, our laughter sounding foreign to others, our life stories too embarrassing to repeat in polite company. It’s the reason behind umpteen visits to psychiatric units, medicine bottles, therapists, and family fights. Asbergers dresses up as depression and makes itself at home. It feeds off adolescent inner turmoil. It makes my life as a homeschooled twelfth-grader frustrating and lonely. We are all stuffed inside our souls like Italian stuffed shells. So we can’t even understand each other, because we’re so lost in our own little worlds.

All this may sound pretty negative and sad. But Asbergers is a blessing as well as a curse, believe it or not. It’s why I’m proud to be part of this family. We are interested in artwork, writing, church ministry, nature hikes, camping, and music appreciation. When we get going about our obsessions in respectful ways, we have great and unforgettable times. We team together to help my second brother, (who has a nonverbal, severe type of autism and lives in a group home.) Asbergers is behind everything happy we do, when we stop trying to be normal and just be ourselves.

I am still struggling to understand this huge thing—that I’m not weird because I am a bad person, but because I have a problem nobody has ever admitted. Awhile ago, when I told my dad I thought I was neuro-atypical, he told me to go ahead and be neuro-atypical if it made me happy and creative. I felt misunderstood when he said that, because nobody in my family wants to admit I am an Asbie to the fullest extent. Asberger’s Syndrome isn’t a choice. I am the only one in my family who hasn’t spend time in a psych ward or had a mental illness diagnoses, so they want to hold onto my innocence, my normality. In other words, it’s OK to talk jokingly about my Asbie obsessions in the privacy of the home, but when it comes to job interviews, church, and college, I had better deny any mental disturbance, because, after all, I’m perfectly normal and functional. I can be an Asbie as far as my writing and artwork goes, but I can’t admit that it is real in a negative way.

It doesn’t seem right that I must shelter and protect my parents from my Asbie dysfunction. But they are too troubled themselves to handle another Asbie in the family, discovering what is really inside her head, and perhaps recoiling in the horror of illusions shattered. I’m afraid it might make them crack and have a breakdown. A child should never be afraid of causing her parents’ breakdown just by admitting her honest feelings, but this is something we just can’t help. Keep a lid on it. Sigh. Keep a lid on it. Keep a lid on it.

So I am a secret Asbie. Some of my traits are visible, but they are humorous and laughed off easily. But the darker parts of Asbergers are hidden deep inside me. I am the Asberger’s Iceberg that is ninety percent below water. This is because—here comes another trait of Asbergers—I am good at hiding everything.

Girls are born with this innate knowledge of masking their true selves. But I can step into a thousand different acts. Imitating book characters and imaginary characters has always come easy for me. In a way, I can be a different person for everyone I encounter. Even in my journals, I shape my thoughts around the lyrics of my favorite singer (Jackson Browne.) All this is very weird to talk about and even weirder to live. I become what I admire and try to make myself into different people. I want to be this and that.

I am not a stereotypical Asbie. I don’t walk into a party and tell everyone I have a demisexual crush on Bob Dylan or the history of trees or dumpster-diving or anything cringy like that. I don’t go on and on and on the way my brother does, rambling about anything his heart desires. Sometimes my heart desires that I keep myself shut, keep it shut, keep it shut. I lie awake thinking about my obsessions, louder and louder. I’m the hiding type of Asbie.

Where does the theme of stars fit into all my babbling about Asbergers?

We Asbies aim our hearts for the wooden stars. We think the stars are distant, ethereal, burning in mystery, the fulfillment of everything we ever hoped for. Yet when we get closer, we find the stars are made of earthy and everyday stuff, nothing but our own personalities. Wooden stars. We dig deep into the mysteries of life but can’t escape ourselves. We are lost in our own distance while our life candles burn short and time is running out. We are all so lost, so sad, aiming for wooden stars.

“I want to see stars, Daddy.”

Maybe when I said this, my dad remembered how he used to be and he hated the memory. Maybe he saw his little-boy self staring back from my eyes. It’s the worst thing in the world, how people turn into their parents and have no separation between them.

We live in a time when people hold signs that say [Insert Minority Here] Lives Matter. Yet I don’t see anyone with a sign that says ASBIE LIVES MATTER. We fly under the radar. Maybe it’s because we’re too common to be seen. It makes me wonder if most people on earth are Asbies, and those who aren’t Asbies have been covertly shipped here from another planet. Normal may longer be the default setting for us. Face it, it takes too much effort to be completely normal and flawless in every way. Asbies are not unique. Every person on earth has a thread of Asbie living inside them.

This is the last thing I’ll say: The next time you’re thrown beside a shrinking person who aims for wooden stars and talks funny, and is odd-alone, take a deep breath and remember to be kind. Remember that normal people don’t know what they’re missing. In the song-lyric structure of my mind—as Jackson Browne would say—“When you’re thinking you’re alone/Be aware of each other/When you’re looking for something of your own/Take good care of each other/You’ll find it in the care of each other.”