08/26/2007

Caught between what she wants — and what is

By Kathy Gibbons
Features editor

A woman stopped in the other morning.

She looked nice, like anybody else. But as she talked, I could tell something wasn't quite right. And she was upset.

She'd come to Traverse City from her home downstate to participate in a music program for adults. Now 44, she said she'd attended Interlochen Arts Camp as a teen and after just a few days, her clarinet playing improved exponentially — and she never forgot that wonderful experience. She still plays as much as she can, and when she saw the information about the adult program this summer, couldn't wait to come.

The thing was, she was ejected from it mid-way through for causing what the people in charge described as disruptions. A security officer escorted her as she packed up and left.

"That's usually what happens to somebody like me: 'Get rid of her,'” she said. "I was distraught, upset. I was trying so hard to do well.”

She'd spent the night before she stopped here sleeping in her car, in a parking lot at a library. She could have gone home, but she didn't want to show up there ahead of schedule. She didn't want her 83-year-old mother to know what had happened; her mother is always telling her she shouldn't be trying to do things like this program.

"I don't ever want to tell her what happened here and that's why I'm sticking it out,” she said.

She admitted it wasn't the first time she'd been thrown out of something like this, or come close. Why?

She has Asperger's syndrome, a form of autism that a Web site on it described as being characterized by "social isolation and eccentric behavior.” It sounds like she doesn't tell anyone about it up front, either. The people in charge of this program didn't know; neither did she mention it to the woman who ended up being her roommate for the few days she was here. (The roommate spoke kindly of her, by the way.)

"I'm emotionally and socially a little odd,” she said. She was first diagnosed in her later 20s, after she already had earned bachelor's and master's degrees. "I'm a little more reactive.”

And that's so hard, because she really, really just wants to be liked.

"I'd give the shirt off my back to be liked, to be appreciated, and to be needed,” she said. "But it's hard to make people like me.”

She also wants a career — if not in music, then anything that would enable her to support herself. She lives on total disability, which she said makes her ashamed. She even tried to become a teacher once, but the people in charge didn't think it was a good idea.

After she left, I thought about her a lot, and how it seems she is trapped. She has dreams and feels she has it in herself to achieve them and yet, Asperger's is the very thing in herself that always gets in the way.

"It's me against the world,” she told me. "I've always wanted the happy ending.”

I hope she finds a way, given everything, to get it.

Reach Kathy Gibbons at kgibbons@record-eagle.com