Pathologically Genuine XVI: The Missing Map

For most of my life I believed everyone else had been given a map for navigating the social world. I assumed I had simply missed the day they handed them out.

My book coach has me feeling that I am growing by leaps in bounds in learning how to write a narrative non-fiction memoir. This week’s assignment was to write a scene where I focus on showing, not telling. And, to have perspectives change from beginning to the end of the scene. We also talked about the structure of a book with a suggestion that I try a possible first chapter. I decided that I could introduce almost all of themes running through my autistic life with a revision of the professional meeting article. It is also one of my first attempts to write a scene that is not chronologically linear. I post things here hoping to get feedback from potential readers. Please don’t be shy

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For most of my life I believed everyone else had been given a map for navigating the social world. I assumed I had simply missed the day they handed them out.

I am looking at my reflection in the mirror. I tuck in my Brooks Brothers light blue button-down shirt, pull up my pants over my belly, and pull my cheap faux-leather black belt as tight as I can around my khaki pants in the hope that this will keep people from noticing that I am a little bit fat. Then I put on my navy sport coat that got a bit wrinkled on the trip in. I really couldn’t care less about the wrinkles. But I know that I am supposed to care. I decide not to worry about it as an act of rebellion.

Then I glance at my face in the full-length mirror. My salt-and-pepper beard is a little wild. My gray, somewhat curly but thinning hair tends to do whatever it feels like on that particular day. The beard and hair look good enough to not be embarrassing to my wife, which is the only way I can judge embarrassing.

I am ready.

I leave my room and enter the hallway. As I do, I feel butterflies emerging from pupae in my stomach and feel my heart rate go up. In fact, my anxiety starts rising like a helium balloon that would fly off into the atmosphere if it weren’t tethered by my anxiety meds.

I take a deep breath. I tell myself that everything will be better this time.

I exhale. And say to myself, “Here we go again.”

I arrived at my room about thirty minutes ago. I pulled out my white card key and waved it in front of the door sensor. The lock retracted, the red light turned green, and I let out a sigh of relief. I wasn’t sure if I was in the right place. I rarely am sure. But at least I knew that I belonged in this room.

I entered the room and immediately looked for a door to an adjoining room. The wall was solid. No door. I let out another sigh of relief. Hearing people in an adjoining room at any time of day is, for me, about as tolerable as a jackhammer in the hallway. Ear plugs don’t help.

One more sensory problem needed solved. The room was warm. The air was motionless. If you ever wanted to kidnap me and force me to give you information, putting me in a warm room with stale, unmoving air would probably get you what you want in a minute or two.

Thermostats are either heroes or villains in my traveling life. Today, the thermostat was a hero. I turned the temperature as low as it would go. Soon after a cool breeze moved through the room. I let out another sigh of relief. This sigh of relief will probably be the last one until I check out in a few days.

I threw my roller bag on the bed. I am a million-miler on American Airlines. So is the roller bag. We are both exhausted from thirty-five years of travel, and it showed. But we still enjoy being together in quiet hotel rooms.

I had arrived in the room dressed for one purpose: comfort. I was wearing a baggy T-shirt, baggy fleece pullover, faded jeans from wear, not design, and sneakers I wish I had worn every day for the past six months.

Then I opened my bag and saw the dress shoes. I grimaced.

I unpacked my light blue Brooks Brothers shirts. They are a little wrinkled from the trip. Personally, I couldn’t care less about wrinkles in my clothes or anyone else’s. I have spent much of my life avoiding any personal relationships with irons.

So, I turned on the hot water in the bathroom, hung the shirts inside, shut the door, and let the steam do its magic.

As I dealt with the mild guilt of wasting hot water, I unpacked the rest of my bag. This was easy. I put a pair of khakis and a navy sport coat on the bed and threw everything else into a single drawer. The most important thing I did while unpacking was to pull out my small traveling fan and place it on the nightstand beside my bed so cool air can waft over me all night.

I am at this hotel to attend a meeting of academic administrators sponsored by the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities or APLU. This is a large meeting. Several thousand university administrators will be here with me. That is not a pleasant thought.

I am here because I serve as the fifty-seven-year-old provost at the University of Arkansas and have a role in an APLU effort to improve student retention and graduation rates. I care about those goals. But my expectations for any breakthroughs at this meeting are basically zero.

I think I am supposed to really enjoy being here. It is an unwritten rule for those of us that grew up in higher education that networking at large national meetings is a requirement for success. So, I have gone to large national meetings for over 35 years both as a plant physiological ecologist going to large scientific meetings and then as an administrator at meetings like this one hoping to network. But I often think that the only thing these national meetings have done for me over my career is increase the number of times I experienced acute depression.

What I expect at the APLU meeting is to listen to talks and conversations where the ratio of content to the number of words spoken gets pretty close to zero. There are also only so many times that my brain can absorb the words innovation, innovative, bold, transformation, and disruption, so I expect to roll my eyes a lot.

At my heart I am still a faculty member who cares deeply about students and gets excited by my research. But it feels like a main goal for many attending this meeting is to foster trauma bonding in conversations about just how intractable, lazy, and change-resistant faculty are.

I walk down the hallway and enter the elevator. It is empty. That gives me a small sense of relief, but it only delays the tsunami of social anxiety.

I hit the button for the floor that houses the conference center.

When the door opens, I feel a sensory explosion. The lights are bright. The patterns on the dull red carpet immediately start to give me a headache. The din of hundreds of people talking irritates me as if I were sitting down for a relaxing cup of coffee just as a pack of Harley-Davidson motorcycles drive by revving their engines. The air is stale, making me wish for a cool breeze.

I turn my head both ways and notice so many well-dressed people mingling, making small talk, smiling, and laughing. Some greet each other as if they were long-lost friends. I have an overly sensitive bullshit/inauthenticity detector and its screaming as if there were a five-alarm fire.

Nonetheless I feel a hint of jealousy because these people seem so comfortable being here while I stand there trying to remember how long eye contact is supposed to last. I also can’t seem to find anyone I know and would feel comfortable talking to. So, I stare at the carpet pattern and pretend to check my phone for an urgent email

I also feel like a failure for not having the skill to make small talk. That feeling reminds me of the feeling I had in Little League when a coach destroyed my self-confidence over a teenage fielding error, taking away any skill, I once had to hit a fastball and leading to strikeout after strikeout.

I was recently elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for exceptional contributions to my field and for building research infrastructure in universities and at statewide scales. I have helped garner over $200,000,000 in grant funding. If you asked Chat GPT, it would have told you my research was foundational to the field. It only gets my research about half right, but I am not going to argue with AI. And yet I am standing in a hallway trying to remember how to say hello to another human being.

I became an administrator because I realized that I could facilitate the success of other people and organizations. I liked doing that and I was really good at it.

There is, however, no relationship in my brain between the objective success I have had in my career and the overwhelming feeling of insecurity I have standing in this hallway.

The plenary session won’t start for another twenty minutes. But I can’t take another minute of standing awkwardly among all these people. So, I enter the meeting room with roughly three thousand mostly empty chairs.

It is quieter and darker, easing my anxiety. I feel happy to get there early because I can get a seat on the aisle, giving me more room and allowing for a rapid exit. I always sit in the front because it massively increases the probability that no one will sit next to me.

People now start to enter the room, and the noise level rises with talking and laughter. As the room fills, the din starts to overwhelm me. And, because I am not a part of the din, I feel as if I am an alien on the wrong planet

When will this god damn presentation start?

I deal with this angst by thinking about an annual meeting I would love to attend in Scotland where a few hundred golden retrievers and their human companions celebrate the breed.

Why didn’t I go to that meeting?

I imagine the room I am in with every seat filled by a golden retriever instead of people. I see myself seated in the middle seat of the middle section with golden retrievers all around me. My smile beams. The armor around my heart disintegrates allowing it to cuddle with my soul. For that fleeting moment of imagination, I know that there is a place I belong.

If only the APLU allowed dogs to attend. The meeting would be so much less pretentious if dogs were some of the attendees. So many more people would be in comfy casual clothes. There would be a lot more genuine smiling. When my golden retriever Annie is with me, strangers come from far and wide just to meet her and by default meet me, too.

I have felt the invasion of butterflies in my stomach at every plenary session of a large professional organization every year for the last thirty-five years. Yet every year I decide to go, hoping that this time my social anxiety will disappear and that my senses won’t be overwhelmed by the sensory torture chambers that exist in conference centers.

I felt optimistic when I registered and booked my plane and hotel reservations months ago. But here I am once again wishing I were somewhere else like a golden retriever convention.

Finally, the lights dim. The noise of people talking turns to silence. I am happily alone in my row to the left of the stage. The vast majority of the several thousand attendees are behind me. I am now oblivious to them.

My butterflies go to sleep for a bit. I often think that I was meant to be a turtle, able to withdraw into a safe and quiet place protected by an armored shell whenever I needed to. The dark room feels like that shell.

The word transformation will be thrown around at this meeting like a beach ball bouncing from person to person, filled with nothing but hot air.

But for me, a real transformation is just around the corner.