As does any stressed out grad student, I’ve been questioning my decisions. Why am I an English major? How on earth did I come to enjoy rhetoric and composition in the first place? How can I stay up later without abusing caffeine?
This past fall, in a composition theory course, we were asked to compose our “entry tales” into the field. I decided to focus my narrative on the intersections I saw between my experiences as an Asperger’s autistic and my experiences as a compositionist wannabe. As I reread what I wrote nearly one year ago, I’m struck by how much I’ve learned since then — “then” being a moment when I thought I knew lots. And I realize that I’ve got lots more to learn… which makes me want to stick around in academia for another fifty years, even if it does mean that I have to socialize.
What I wrote, October 2007:
I have in my stockpile two narratives for describing my entry into composition studies. The first, and most often used, relies on metaphor and describes my aspirations to become a computer programmer when, lo and behold, I “saw the light” and realized, via divine inspiration, that English studies held my salvation. This first story often makes for wonderful application fodder: it lumps my previous computer science background and my newfound love of writing into a realization of spiritual proportions, thereby opening up the digital communication doorway in composition studies. Through this story, I have somehow become the mediator of two discourses, the champion of writing/communication and technology or writing/communication as technology—anything dealing with both words, as long as the emphasis remains on writing or communication.
My second narrative, however, does not meld the right-brain/left-brain worlds quite so fluently. In fact, of the few times I’ve dared to disclose it, my audience has probably doubted the existence of any “mediating” corpus callossum. Like many an interesting story, this one begins with the lost me seeking to be a saved me—a high school drop-out attempting a technical college. There’s a stock character, Professor Dan, the pony-tailed English teacher with a penchant for hacky sack and Donald Murray truisms. At one point, as with all stock conversations, an exchange occurs between the outside-the-box hipster and the conservative, inexperienced student, an exchange meant to spark conflict and radical new ideas, man, an exchange meant to so totally blow minds—except, this exchange results in all of the wrong things. After reading several of my essays, Professor Dan tells me that I’m in the wrong major and that I should switch to English. And I, horrified that I could be in the wrong major, visit the English department head and switch majors that day. Later, I learned from a mortified Professor Dan, after one of his close-your-eyes-while-freewriting techniques, that he was merely complimenting me, not really suggesting that I must go change my major that instant. He had wanted me to “think about it,” to muse and question, not to take immediate action. I recall thinking, in a bemused and irritated manner, Why didn’t he just say so?
Literally speaking, story number one occurs after story number two: after I’d already done the deed, I began to question being a student of English. There have been other notable misunderstandings on my part along my path toward grad-student-hood, but all theoretical perceptions of writing and communication began, for me, the moment I failed to understand the subtext of an important conversation: I could not register the simple genre of “the compliment,” and yet there I was, an English major. As a composition scholar wannabe, issues of understanding, of perception versus reception, strike me as most paramount. As a student-teacher with Asperger Syndrome, a mild variant of autistic disorder, I supposedly cannot communicate appropriately: I am what some (but not what I) might label as idiot savant, social retard, or male-brained. In everyday situations, I fail to meet the aims of the English 110 text, Writing Analytically, to make the implicit explicit, to root out the subtext from the apparently literal, or the literal from the apparently subtext. And somehow, I am a person with a communication disorder teaching first-year students how to communicate. This paradox used to trouble me, therefore keeping me closeted and guarded—until very recently.
