At the Center of a Certain Turbulence

On the Front Porch with Marilynne Robinson's Jack (in which I finally know I am neurodivergent)

Dear ones, this is the penultimate chapter of my memoir, At Home with Books. This is the story I most want to tell you. This is where I begin to believe that I, too, am a dear one—beloved, like all of us, in all my unique ways. It’s a long read, but I hope you’ll come along.

“He
sees deep and is glad, who
. . . rises
upon himself as
the sea in a chasm, struggling to be
free and unable to be,
in its surrendering
finds its continuing.”

~ Marianne Moore, “What Are Years”

I sat crosswise on my porch swing on a Sunday afternoon, the wide spaces between the wooden slats cradling my heels, a bunchy pillow wafting its musty, left-out-on-a-rainy-afternoon scent as it protected my back from the metal hanging chains. The swing itself wasn’t quite comfortable, but I had learned the perfect position for this seat, the arrangement of my body on it just so, just the way I wanted to be in comfort and in peace out on this far end of my front porch, the wood that smelled like cedar and the chain squeaking against the vinyl ceiling its metal screws must pass through to hold me safely, safely, the still air a breeze I made myself.

All my life, I wanted a porch swing, as if a seat suspended in the air somehow meant having arrived. When we moved into this current house seven years ago, the front porch felt twice as broad as it was. Against the rising July sun, I would rest my morning tea on the sea-green side table I had snatched up at Goodwill before leaving the last town. My then-preschooler colored page after page on the other end, a curtain of tawny, tumble-down hair sheltering her work, which was her play, and I would gaze around me in satisfaction, morphing this small, recently built, vinyl Cape Cod into the breadth of a sprawling French Colonial in my mind.

Does it matter that it wasn’t true? I finally had a front porch. This porch, mine.

“It was the way things should be,” my husband explained. “Neighbors leaning against the railing, rocking chairs in the evening, everybody saying hello.” He was describing the subsidized housing neighborhood in which he and a friend lived several years before we met.

“You’d have conversations.” He described a kind of urban culture, lower income and more highly connected in the ways of community. “People walking by,” his others-oriented heart shimmered brilliantly on his sleeve.

One of my favorite tropes in any story has always been community: top-secret government agency teams that work together to fight the bad guys, including the ones within themselves, and never leave each other behind; friends who are willing to die for each other. Surely the real-life version of this phileo love, as the Greek has it, begins close to home.

What better way to live than before and alongside my literal neighbor, here on my porch facing my quiet neighborhood street, people walking their dogs, children running into the green grass of my yard, the sidewalk conversations, the woman next door loaning me a bag of frozen peas or sliding a book she thinks I’ll like into my mailbox, communicating grace and peace to each other, back and forth, like a porch swing, like birdsong?

But no. I couldn’t do it.

Once, at a small dinner gathering in that first house where I tried so hard to be the hostess I wasn’t, one of our guests dreamed big about moving in down the street. “We could buy it!” she exclaimed of the house that had come up for sale. “We could be neighbors!” she beamed at me over the meal. “We could visit every day.”

Maybe she saw my smile freeze or my face fall. “We would text first,” another friend reached across and patted my arm reassuringly.

One man’s treasure is another man’s fright, and that exuberantly social friend’s vision of adjacent living was a personal nightmare for me. The idea that anyone, even a close friend, might ring the doorbell at any time, unexpected, sent a rush of the bad kind of adrenaline prickling up the back of my neck. Who could live like that?

All my inner narratives from childhood, from well-meaning manners lessons to Southern church culture, from a thousand mixed messages within myself including that revolving-door hospitality of I was the recipient, collided in that conversation with the friend at our dinner table. As in so many moments, I was inclined to believe a false story that often being alone, that choosing to live much of my day quietly tucked away seeking a restorative peace isn’t supposed to be what a person wants—or needs.

“Church was hell for me.”

In the fall of 2021, I joined a Facebook group for autistic adults. The generous souls who managed the online meeting place first included me because I found myself deeply connected to a number of individuals on the spectrum. “Church was hell for me as a kid,” commented one autistic adult, talking not about belief systems, but instead about bright fluorescent lights and sound systems turned up to rock-band concert volume and the frowning faces of congregants at a stimming child unable to sit still.

“Home life was hell,” another voice added to the conversation. “There was so much yelling and angst. My dad’s anger filled the room, and I couldn’t understand what he was mad about.”

The autistics in that group didn’t use the word “comfort,” but the concept rumbled beneath all their shared stories, the felt fragmentations and the need for new narratives that made sense. They did use the words “neurodiversity” and “neurodivergence,” and my inner etymologist divided the morphemes: neuro set itself quickly aside, having to do with the mysterious nervous system and all its constant under- and over-communications between the body and the brain.

I could roll with “divergence,” though.

“Two roads diverged in a wood,” Robert Frost famously declares. “Midway in the journey of my life,” the poet Dante says in the opening lines of The Inferno, “I found myself in dark woods, the right road lost.” The dictionary chimes in with Road, n. “a marked way from here to there.” The speaker of Frost's poem arrives at the place where two paths split, and, sorry that he “could not travel both,” he takes “the one less traveled by,” as if there were really any choice.

Midway in the journey of my life, reading the autistic group chats, I found myself admitting that I had always diverged into a different sort of experience than most–more heightened at times, inexplicably agitated and raw to the world. I was always on the lookout for a better aural or ocular or atmospheric arrangement, one that felt truly Comfortable: adj., “Free from stress or anxiety; at ease,” like the times my six-year-old curled up under a blanket with me.

She and I would sit not on the porch swing, but on the evening-time sofa indoors, her warm, round head under my chin, that thick, fly-away, small-child hair tickling my nose, and in those rare moments snuggling together, I was happy. I was always trying to be as happy as I could be in this life, despite the fact that my active girl rarely sat still for long.

Sure, she could remain with me in my corner of the corduroy couch, ten years outdated, the cushions sunk to fit each of our body shapes, but as soon as she settled in, cozy on my lap, she rested for the mere space of a breath before she unsettled again: she would shift; rotate; violently bunch and fling herself, her sharp, round knees crunching the top of my calf bone even as I clung to a pipe-dream of sweet stillness with this child I love, the peaceful moment running through my fingers like sand and I couldn’t fully ground, an echo of that uncushioned chain behind my back on the porch swing.

In the fall of 2021, I was only just admitting this to myself. I was suddenly seeing the way the dial of my central nervous system was nocked several grooves above average, the lights, the sights, and all the sensory noise on my particular path through life registering too much information for my tight-wired brain to process.

The discomfort of it all.

On my worst days, when every nerve felt scrubbed and exposed, I felt each rumple in the cushion beneath me, every sound wave emanating over-loud from a distant room. In my most destabilized moments, I knew rationally that the house was unmoving, its foundations firm, and yet I felt that the ground was shifting, my living room floor, soft-blue rug and rust-red armchairs and all, tipping sideways, and I and the gold corduroy couch slipping and sliding toward some grand crash—or perhaps are about to be cast out into the ether, ever falling and never able to stand firm again.

Online, I heard the voices of others and I began to realize that the stakes in those destabilized moments were higher than a threat to mere “comfort” or “ease”; I needed to feel bodily safe. I need to feel comfortable, adj. “free from affliction or pain.”

“Midway in the journey of our life,” Dante says, “I found myself within a forest dark, / For the straightforward pathway had been lost.” That’s Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s rendering of the Medieval Italian. Translators Robert and Jean Hollander pick up a nuance in their version: “I came to myself,” their Dante says. It’s as if he has been lost all along, and then he is found. He arrives home at who he is, and what comes next?

In my own middle years, sixteen sun rotations gone from living among those teenage sibling-cousins of mine, my senses had heightened to fever pitch. I found myself lost. I dreaded more than ever before the sound of friends or neighbors knocking on the door. The thought of what it would require of me was too much to bear. I sat on my porch swing and hoped no one would arrive to break the moment of peace…and I was covered in a hideaway shame: those old voices of should and shouldn’t, of hospitality and generous welcome, resurrected loudly in my ears.

But—“Home was hell,” so many of the autistic adults said, remembering their childhoods.

“No one understood why I couldn’t always speak.”

“No one understood why I needed to repeat the same string of words over and over.”

“No one listened,” no one saw, no one turned down the volume, the flesh-felt assault of a world not crafted for these stunningly made, ultra-sensory individuals. What might comfort have looked like for each of these?

This is the reason one of them began the discussion group: to help friends and family members better understand each other, not to mention the next generation of neurodivergent children for whom the world is too bright and life too loud. To break the cycle of pain and misunderstanding, to give others a better go at comfort: v. “to ease the distress of; to strengthen and support.”

I was surprised, and yet not surprised, to find in their posts and threads a better understanding not of others in my life, but of myself.

On the face of it, Marilynne Robinson’s fictional character Jack doesn’t seem in search of comfort. Jack the delinquent, often drunken, sometimes-homeless middle-aged son of a preacher man. Jack, who always seems to come around at the wrong time. Jack who is always trying to get things right and always despairing that he’s gotten them wrong—that he himself is all wrong. Jack who appears to cast himself in the opposite direction of peace and ease at every chance.

By the time we join him in the novel Jack, we’ve already met him in three other books: Gilead, Home, and Lila, which form a quartet that functions, at times, like the biblical Gospels. Each book focuses primarily on a different character, each tale weaving its own unique structure and tone, but the stories crosshatch in time, and several scenes appear across the tellings. One such cyclical episode, unforgettable for its convergence of wrecking miscommunication, occurs on a porch—but I get ahead of myself.

When we first cross paths with Jack in the fourth book, he is spending the night in a cemetery. He has chosen this nocturnal arrangement so he can rent out his leased room in 1950’s St. Louis, Missouri, to make some needed cash. Near-destitution aside, the prospect of sleeping in a darkened landscape of gravestones isn’t the least comfortable aspect of his experience. What’s worse is he can’t actually sleep, because it is illegal to be in the graveyard–at least, if you have breathing lungs and a beating heart–and he must spend the night with an ear half-cocked for the footsteps of the patrolling officer.

That’s just the start of the unexpectedly eventful evening that comprises almost the first quarter of the book, but it speaks volumes: Jack consistently makes choices that make others uncomfortable, that probably do more all-around harm than good, engaging in actions or inactions that most people wouldn’t. He seems unable not to make these choices. He knows this about himself, but he doesn’t know why he is this way.

He agonizes within and washes up against his particular frame of mortality, “struggling to be / free and unable to be,” as poet Marilynne Moore describes. But unlike Moore’s everyman who “sees deep and is glad” as a result of his imprisonment within himself, Jack is not glad; he is miserable. He is very aware of how different he is from seemingly everyone else. Discomfort dogs his every step, both inside and out.

“I am at the center of a certain turbulence,” he laments, holding family and friends and even potential lovers at bay, lest his inner vortex cast splinters of harm in their direction. He eschews earnest relationships, J. Alfred Prufrock-like, keeping himself always at an ironical distance, thereby removing himself from the path of any potential comfort, synonym: “consolation, fellow feeling.”

I, too, was feeling more and more at the center of a kind of turbulence. But unlike Jack, I urgently sought comfort, dogged for rest against the felt sensory and physical discomforts of my days. I also always—unlike Jack, and yet very like him—longed for connection with others who could understand, with a true Comforter, n. “a person or thing that provides consolation,” who would assure me that my hideaway front porch impulse was okay, because I was okay, boundaried as I was within myself, by my own changing and increasing sensory needs as I walked through my days.

I joined that Facebook group of autistic adults in order to clue into people I love, but almost everything anyone posted rang true for me, be it organizational issues from executive dysfunction or memory blockages from ADHD or mental exhaustion from social masking.

“Neurodivergent” encompasses a host of neurological uniquenesses, and I turned a diamond eye inward and saw myself refracted through new lenses: a raucous, late-night reunion with college friends? I’d suffer migraines and mild panic for days afterward. Take my children to a brightly colored echo-chamber of a children’s museum that resounds with the slap of running feet and the shrieks of over-stimulated elementary enjoyment? I would lose all capacity for clear thought and fight to suppress a rising, generalized rage: trapped-animal syndrome, felt threat, backed into a corner, a cage. Please let me leave.

In The Wine Lover’s Daughter, an autobiographical account of her relationship with her father, journalist Anne Fadiman seeks to discover whether she can overcome her life-long distaste for wine. Along the way, she meets with professionals who scientifically explain why the taste of wine is, for her, nearly intolerable. It has to do with the papillae on her tongue: those tiny, raised bumps are numbered and arranged so that, biologically, her brain receives different information than her father’s when sipping a peppery Syrah. Her palate is literally, physically different from his.

The comfort, the affirmation, when Fadiman realizes she doesn’t need to try harder! That there is nothing lesser about her because she doesn’t enjoy wine like her father did. Instead, her tongue receives its own unique information, “in which case,” in her words, “there was no way she could like exactly what he liked.” Fadiman’s dislike of wine was never a moral failing or some fault of effort.

Nor was my inability to walk through my days just like anyone else. In the middle of my life, I was beginning to see that.

“Are we set in our ways from birth?” Marilynne Robinson’s Jack asks.

He sits on the front porch of his family’s home with his ailing father and his aging godfather, both church ministers, and also his sister Glory and that aging godfather’s younger wife, Lila, who has just walked up the road to join them. She has grown up raw like Jack but has somehow ended up far less wretched.

“People don’t change,” Jack despairs. He longs for alleviation, succor, relief—for easement, n. “the state or feeling of comfort or peace, and what he really wants to know as he questions these gatekeepers of theological truth is, Can I be one of you, the certain and the saved? Or maybe, I’m not like you, and can that be okay, too?

Jack is afraid to voice these things out loud, even to himself. Across the four novels, he is never at ease with himself, and he hurts others to hide the fact of his own suffering—hurts himself not least. “I’m sorry,” Jack apologizes to the group for his whole self, it seems. “I think I have gone on with this too long. I’ll let it go.” No sense of easement, n. “the right to cross or otherwise use someone else’s land,” or imagination, or time. He moves to exit the porch.

“Just stay for a minute,” the pastor’s wife says. She has been listening neither to his words of challenge, nor the point-for-point theological argument flying back and forth across the table. She has heard the need behind the questions. “Just stay,” she says. Jack stays, amid the palpable discomfort.

Lila answers his question: “People can change.”

I ache for her words to be true. Jack has always felt wrong in his skin—or perhaps right in his skin, but wrong in the world. I beg the author-god of Jack’s tale to send Lila’s statement home to his heart, and also the truth behind it: I like you. You matter. You can be okay just as you are. I beg Jack to hear the words that matter, and not the ones that don’t. I hope he understands what it is about him that needs to change, and what doesn’t.

Because I need the same.

All my life, I have sought to understand the narratives that roil inside me, and also to escape them—the inexplicable shame of not measuring up to confusing religious rules, the felt moral failing against standards set by other people’s generous hospitality, social interactions that don’t quite make sense, other approaches to being in the world than what come naturally to me.

I have often found myself gazing through the windows of memory, looking into the vista of my past to explain the pain or confusion in my present. Books have helped, stories meeting me at my youthful points of need, fictional people and places granting a quiet path through—and at times away from—real confusion, real pain. Jack has always felt wrong in his own skin; I have always felt at home with books, but rarely at home in my actual world.

In this tense moment on the fictional porch, where acceptance might go either way, I actually feel most like Jack’s sister Glory, who is so stressed and disturbed by the confluence of personalities on her deck that she escapes inside, turns up the radio to drown out the distressing conversation, and tries to read a book. Nothing is comfortable out in that exposed social space with three men who can’t breathe the same air for long without emotionally imploding.

But if they weren’t sitting out on the porch, exposed to the world, Lila wouldn't have walked by, stopped, and stayed. And if she hadn’t stopped and stayed, Jack wouldn’t have heard her say that she sees him. That in all his miserable washings-up against the boundaries of himself, he matters and makes sense, and she understands.

Do you think I—might I—could I call myself neurodivergent?” I hesitantly asked my therapist in the spring of 2022. Imposter syndrome was knocking at the door. I ignored it.

“Yes,” she grinned reassuringly, emphatically. She had been counseling me for four years. “Let’s unpack that,” she said, and it felt so good to be seen.

Still, old expectations die hard. What if all the peace and rest in my particularly desperate version of home-crafting was narrow and selfish, not the way a person should live? Like Anne Fadiman trying to enjoy the taste of something she couldn’t stand, I worried over the message I’d so often heard preached: that discomfort for others’ sake is a holy pursuit, a loving sacrifice. I teetered on the edge of shame about my isolatory inclinations.

Worse, I worried that my carefully wrought comfort, my hard-won, homely life with its sensory sort of peace, was not only borne out of some deep spiritual fault within me, but that it was also a sham in and of itself.

I sat in the place I had crafted to suit myself: the crowd of bookshelves I’ve always longed to have, the furniture arranged just-so. What if my seeking for all this order—the armchair at a perfect distance from the sofa, the way the color blue pops off the rust and navy and blush throw pillows, the clean countertop with a vase of flowers, my children's framed art, the rocking chair from that beloved Asheville home, those ceramic goblets we brought back from our honeymoon a decade and a half ago—what if all my self-built safe space was worse than a pursuit of comfort?

What if my home was a meaning-gilded burrow for hiding from the real world and the things that actually matter? Was all the work I’d done to make this place my place only another version of escapism, like the books of my youth?

No. My therapist said, “You may absolutely call yourself neurodivergent.” The felt relief of many things, not least the fact that maybe now I really could cease striving to be something other than what I am. Not least the chance to settle onto the porch swing without guilt or shame. Not least there being a team of sorts to join, fellow sensory-sufferers to whom I now belonged.

Marianne Moore goes on in her poem about that person who sees deep and is glad. He is like the sea washing against its boundaries. The waters are imprisoned within the limits of sand and stone, but in the ocean’s surrendering to those boundaries, it “finds its continuing.”

Acceding my mortality—affirming my unquestionable neurological uniqueness—turned my various imprisonments upside-down: I was unable to be anyone but myself, and I did not want to be. In surrendering to the fact of my limits, I rose and washed up against myself, and, in Moore’s words, I found my continuing.

The fictional Jack, in all his social bondings and breakages, his tidal reachings-out and recedings, never stops trying to uncover an alignment with life that works. He finds jobs and consistently fails to show up for them; he indulges the idea but resists the reality of contacting his siblings who want him to come home. He is never completely at rest because he cannot permit himself to ground within the complicated limits of his own self.

Didn’t I know the feeling? But unlike Jack, this knowledge of myself came as its own sort of comfort. I was not breaking a cosmic, spiritual moral code by creating spaces that felt good to me. I was not unloving when I sought to be alone. So many of the experiences I read in the online group rang true because my own comfort-seeking inclinations had been, in part, gestated along neural pathways that ran crosswise to the loud world: the sky too bright, worship too loud, the unexpected knock on my door raising a pulse of adrenaline so large it shattered my bones into jelly.

I allowed myself to arrange the furniture of my life just so and set my doorbell to silent. I saw more clearly this way.

I looked back on the ways that second Asheville home—the one with the mushroom-bordered walls and the musical teenagers and the parents who became friends—was so welcoming to me, and I saw something I didn’t recognize before: the place was crafted especially for those of us who needed a dimmer light, a quieter space, a slower pace than most in order to function. It was a haven for the neurodivergent of the world.

I laughed with a sudden illumination at the implications of this. Sure, anyone could walk that house’s halls, rest in its many sitting corners, work and play at the multitude of perfectly placed tables and desks, but for those of us who felt assaulted by the brightness of the sun, by the sound of unexpected voices, by smells that didn’t jive and clutter that jarred, a place like that house was heaven.

So what if I fashioned my own home after it in every way possible? What else on earth would I do?

I would not stop seeking to make my home a dim, under-stimulating bastion of rest, would not stop positioning the musty pillow against the porch swing chain that would otherwise dig, knobby and hard, into my spine. I would never stop hoping not to hear the footsteps of neighbors on my porch stairs, unlooked-for. But I did stop blaming myself. I stopped struggling to be free of my limits. I began to see deeper, and I was glad.

On Mother’s Day, I sat on the porch swing by myself, and it was all I wanted.

A decade before, a friend’s husband, boisterous and extroverted as they come, had balked at my answer to the question, “What are you going to do for Mother’s Day?”

“Go to a coffee shop on my own,” I answered, alight with anticipation.

“Wait—what? Alone?” He couldn’t understand.

But this, this, the metal through the pillow on my back, squeaks and all, suspended and at peace, here, held, my family napping inside and—I’m not making this up—a daddy bluebird swifting insects through the door of the mildewed birdhouse hanging on a porch post, the babies crying for desire, for nearly-met joy, the mother bird on lookout from the mailbox at the end of our drive, overseeing everything that matters–this was almost all I ever wanted.

This is almost all I ever want.

Unsplash: James Garcia

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