Fearlessly Different by Mickey Rowe

Author:Mickey Rowe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2021-10-19T00:00:00+00:00

9

The person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person doing it.

—Confucius

At twenty-eight I could have been in a different city every week, performing the lead role in a Tony Award–winning play upon whatever the city of the week’s grandest stage was. My wife and children would get to live it up in my hotel rooms across the country for a full year or more. No rent, housekeeping taking care of nearly everything, exploring national parks and new cities on my four days off per week, what a carefree life!

Instead, at twenty-eight years old I was washing dishes for a living, with my wife trapped at home by agoraphobia, her brain wracked with so much anxiety that it made her refuse to even let me hold my own baby.

This wasn’t the plan.

At twenty-four years old, I’d still only had the one girlfriend and a few friends with benefits. I met girls from working in the theatre industry, as well as online. In December of that year I met someone with a color for a name through an online dating site. Grey. Weird. Well, okay. I’d had some even weirder experiences with girls I’d met online, like the one time some girl told me she genuinely believed I was Jesus or another who told me she was a witch who could cast spells. This girl’s name just happened to be the name of a drab color. That’s not so weird. We met for our first date at a gas station in front of her parents’ house then took the bus to my apartment while eating out of a plastic grocery bag the popcorn she had popped for us. I had thought that the plan was just a hookup date, which was usually all that girls wanted with me, but was pleasantly surprised by the rare find of a girl who afterward expressed interest in us seeing each other again and getting to know each other more. It had been two years since things had amicably ended with my first girlfriend Anika, the Nordic hippie, due to college and I hadn’t had a girlfriend since, so I was excited and ready to explore entering into another relationship.

Very early on in our relationship I let her know about my eyesight and autism diagnosis. I wanted to be sure she knew before she got too attached. To my surprise and great relief, she didn’t have an opinion about it either way. I was so used to always being stigmatized, rejected, or infantilized whenever I shared with anyone that I was autistic. It felt really new and reassuring to have someone whose feelings for me didn’t change when she found out I was autistic. She let me know about her ongoing mental health struggles with bipolar disorder and psychosis and the meds she took to manage them, which truly didn’t faze me at all. I strongly believed that mental health issues shouldn’t be stigmatized, in the same way that physical health issues and disability shouldn’t be stigmatized.

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