My autism diagnosis has made me reconsider something I've spent most of my life believing about myself:
I am pretty good at winning, but I'm not always very good at keeping people in my life.
Scholarships. Fellowships. Graduate school. Mentorships. Jobs. Artistic opportunities. If there was a clear goal and a way to demonstrate that I could accomplish it, I generally figured out how to get there.
I've been fortunate—sometimes extraordinarily so—to work with people I once could hardly imagine being in the same room with. In theater, I studied with and was mentored by people like Jon Jory, Val Curtis Newton and Kurt Beattie, and later worked with Allison Narver, Adam Greenberg, Myra Platt and Jane Jones. In photography, I studied posing with Roberto Valenzuela, fashion photography with Lindsay Adler, and later spent 18 months in a Magnum Photos mentorship with Gilles Peress and Alex Majoli.
I don't say that to brag.
Actually, that's part of the problem.
Because I've spent much of my life accumulating evidence that I am good at what I do, while simultaneously accumulating evidence that I'm not particularly good at something else:
keeping people in my life.
I've had an odd pattern throughout my career. I get selected. I enter the room. I work hard. I produce something good. People seem to like me and respect my work.
And then the formal relationship ends.
The mentorship ends. The production closes. The fellowship is over. The class graduates.
And somehow, so does the relationship.
For years, I've interpreted that as a personal failure.
Maybe I'm impressive on paper but annoying in person.
I'm beginning to think that's not quite the right diagnosis.
The Holiday Card Problem
I've spent a lot of my adult life being frustrated with my parents—especially my mother—because I felt like there were social skills other families had learned that mine somehow hadn't.
My favorite example was holiday cards.
Other families seemed to possess an invisible calendar:
Buy cards.
Address cards.
Write something personal.
Mail cards.
Remember Aunt Linda moved.
Do it again next year.
Our family frequently didn't send them at all. Or sent them late. My parents gradually stopped participating in family gift exchanges. Over time, they became increasingly isolated from the extended family.
As a kid, I couldn't understand how everyone else seemed to know how to do these things.
I felt like I'd somehow missed a class.
Only recently have I realized something both sad and clarifying:
My mother couldn't teach me those social skills because nobody had taught her.
She's a profoundly solitary person. She didn't have the social-maintenance system herself.
And I think I've spent much of my adult life trying to compensate for that missing curriculum.
Learning the Rules
It wasn't until I was diagnosed as autistic that I began to understand some of this differently.
I'm not suggesting that autism explains every difficulty I've ever had with relationships. And I don't think of autism as an excuse.
But the diagnosis gave me a framework for something I'd struggled to articulate for most of my life:
I often need social rules to be explicit before I recognize that they're rules.
A neurotypical person might simply absorb the idea that staying in touch is part of maintaining a friendship. They may not consciously think about it at all.
For me, the connection between:
“I like this person”
and
“Therefore, I should periodically contact them even when I have nothing particular to say”
hasn't always been intuitive.
Once someone explains the rule, I can understand it perfectly well.
What I haven't always had is the instinctive prompt that says:
Now. Do this thing. This is how you maintain the relationship.
That distinction matters enormously to me.
Because I've spent much of my life interpreting the absence of those behaviors as evidence that there was something wrong with me.
I'm beginning to wonder if what was missing wasn't the ability to care about people, but the ability to intuit some of the unwritten behaviors through which people demonstrate that care.
I Learned How to Achieve. I Didn't Learn How to Maintain.
I am very comfortable with relationships that have a purpose.
There's a project.
There's a goal.
There's a problem to solve.
There's a mutually beneficial opportunity.
Great. I know what to do.
But what happens when I meet someone I genuinely like and there isn't a project?
What happens when I want to remain friends with someone but don't actually need anything from them?
Apparently, there is an entire invisible layer of human interaction devoted to this.
You send someone a message because you haven't talked in a while.
You invite them to coffee even though you don't have anything to ask them.
You send them something because it reminded you of them.
You go to their opening.
You remember their birthday.
You ask how their project turned out.
You maintain the relationship because the relationship itself matters.
I didn't intuitively understand that.
And I think this is where autism becomes relevant—not as a deficit in caring about relationships, but as a difference in how some of the unspoken mechanics of relationships are perceived and learned.
If nobody teaches you the rules, you can spend a very long time assuming everyone else simply possesses some mysterious instinct you lack.
I Once Asked the Wrong Question
A few years ago, I attended a presentation at the Photographic Center Northwest.
Afterward, I asked the presenters how one might take a good conversation with a curator and turn it into an ongoing professional relationship.
I used the word “leverage.”
I was immediately called out in front of the group.
The message was essentially: That's not how you think about relationships.
I was embarrassed. More than embarrassed, actually. I felt exposed.
Because the question I was trying to ask wasn't:
How do I exploit this curator for my career?
It was:
I really enjoyed meeting this person. I respect their work. How do I maintain the connection without being inappropriate or seeming like I'm asking for something?
I was trying to learn the rules.
Instead, I got shamed for using the wrong vocabulary.
Looking back, I think I needed someone to say:
Don't think of it as leverage. If you genuinely want to know this person, follow up. Thank them. Send them something relevant later. Invite them for coffee. Don't ask for anything. Just stay connected.
That would have taught me something.
Shame didn't.
The Theater Years
My graduate-school experience makes this pattern even more complicated.
I was the only married person in my MFA cohort.
My classmates could go from rehearsal to a bar, then to someone's apartment, then stay up talking until two in the morning. I had a wife.
Then I had a baby.
My son was born while my pre-thesis production was running.
And even when I did go out with my classmates, I frequently wanted to go home almost immediately.
So while my classmates were accumulating hundreds of hours of informal social contact—drinking, talking, complaining, laughing, watching one another's work—I was going home.
I don't regret that.
But those hours matter.
That's where people develop inside jokes. Familiarity. Trust. Shared history. The feeling that someone is one of your people.
Many of my classmates eventually formed Washington Ensemble Theatre. Most of the directors in our cohort were eventually hired as freelancers.
I wasn't.
I pitched them shows.
I had the credentials.
I had the experience.
I had the work.
But I wasn't part of the ongoing social fabric of that group.
For a long time, that hurt in a very specific way:
They chose each other. They didn't choose me.
And I assumed that meant there was something wrong with me.
I'm no longer sure.
Maybe I Was Trying to Solve a Belonging Problem With Achievement
This is the realization I'm sitting with now.
I've spent decades trying to solve a relationship problem with the tools that made me successful professionally:
Initiative.
Competence.
Strategy.
Hard work.
Value.
If I wanted to work with someone, I developed a project.
If I wanted a mentorship, I proposed one.
If I wanted an opportunity, I pitched it.
And those strategies worked.
Spectacularly well, sometimes.
But they don't necessarily create belonging.
Belonging is slower.
Less efficient.
Sometimes completely purposeless.
It's having coffee when there is nothing to discuss.
It's sending the text that says, “Saw this and thought of you.”
It's going to someone's opening even when you aren't showing work.
It's asking how their kid is doing.
It's staying in touch when neither of you needs anything.
It's doing another project together simply because the first one was fun.
I think I may have been trying to earn relationships that other people were simply maintaining.
If I've Disappeared From Your Life
And this is the part I feel I need to say out loud.
If I've disappeared from your life, I'm sorry.
If we were friends once and I stopped calling.
If we worked together and I never followed up.
If we had a meaningful conversation and I somehow let it become the last one.
If I seemed intensely interested in you or your work and then simply... vanished.
It probably wasn't because I stopped caring.
Quite often, I probably thought of you.
I may even have thought, I should reach out.
And then somehow didn't.
That's not an excuse. It's something I'm only now beginning to understand about myself, and something I'm trying to get better at.
Because I don't think I'm actually looking for another mentor.
I've had extraordinary mentors.
What I want now is something different.
Peers.
A small group of people who want to keep making things together.
Three or four photographers, models, designers, performers, writers—people who become familiar enough that the relationship itself becomes part of the creative practice.
Not:
I have a project. Can you help me?
But:
Let's keep making things together and see what happens.
Maybe that's what an artistic home actually is.
Not an institution.
Not a fellowship.
Not a prestigious mentor.
Not another line on a résumé.
Just a few people who keep showing up.
The Manual
I'm beginning to understand that I wasn't necessarily missing some mysterious ability to connect with people.
I may have been missing a curriculum.
Nobody taught me that relationships require maintenance.
Nobody explained that sometimes the reason you contact someone is simply because you like them.
Nobody taught me that staying connected isn't necessarily manipulative or transactional.
And nobody explained that being good at something doesn't automatically make you part of the community surrounding it.
My autism diagnosis didn't suddenly solve any of this.
But it gave me a language for understanding it.
It gave me permission to stop asking only:
What's wrong with me?
and start asking:
What is the thing I don't yet know how to do?
That's a much more useful question.
I'm 54 years old.
I'm still learning.
But for perhaps the first time, I don't feel like I'm trying to discover what's wrong with me.
I'm trying to learn something I wasn't taught.