Because I’m autistic, celebration isn’t something that comes naturally to me. In common with a lot of autistic people I struggle to define between different emotions or to have the “right” facial expressions for what is happening around me. It’s not that I don’t have the same feelings, it’s just that I can’t define them as mainstream people do.
It’s like painting, in a way. Some people get the watercolour paint boxes of life, with rows of beautiful, subtle colours: crimson lake, burnt sienna, vermilion. Others, like me, get three tubs of poster paint and left to get on with it. Layer the watercolours over and into each other and they remain recognisable and yet modulate one another. Try that with the poster paint and you’ll get the same mud brown again and again and again. That’s what emotions are like for me. I can recognise happy, sad and angry, and the condition my elder boy, also autistic, describes as “sad-and-angry”, but the rest is just so much mud.
Hold on, you say: celebration isn’t an emotion. It’s a happening. It’s a time of success, not a feeling.
Not if you’re me it isn’t. If I, or people I know, win a competition or succeed at something or pass exams or get married or have a baby or find the ideal home or whatever, I feel happy. Not excited or gobsmacked or ecstatic or any other watercolour feelings, just happy. And if a group of people are happy together and celebrating, I usually find myself out of key, too unsubtle, too matt for the sparkle all around me.
Then there’s the weird things mainstream people do when they’re celebrating: dress up in uncomfortable clothes, eat stuff that costs a fortune and gives them indigestion, and drink alcohol until they can’t remember what they were happy about in the first place and end up bickering, battering or sick. From an autistic point of view none of this makes any sense. A lot of autistic people worry about being out of control or taken out of their comfort zone and their own routines. This is why almost none of the people in the police cells and A&E on a weekend are autistic. We’re safe at home in a comfortable jumper with a good book and a nice cup of tea!
And the noise mainstreamers make when they celebrate! Yelling and squawking, clapping and stamping, banging and clattering and roaring and squealing! What in the world is that all about? A lot of autistic people don’t like noise and don’t like crowds: a party to a “normal” person is an anteroom of Hades to people like me. How can you think about the thing that is making you glad when you’re so busy making such a racket?
Having said all that, there was one time when I got it right. I was an odd child at school, a loner and confused, stumping around between the real teenagers full of bewilderment and anxiety. I was bright, though, and I made it to, and through, university. I went to Aberdeen and studied at King’s College, which is mostly very old and often very beautiful. Like many academic autists I had no difficulty managing myself and my studies, but also like many academic autists I made very few friends and had no idea how to endear myself to others. I still don’t!
Graduation Day dawned at last. Lady students were expected to wear dresses in either black or white under their gowns, so I put on my white dress and draped myself in my black gown, hired as all gowns were in Aberdeen, where people who wore gowns at other times were looked on as pretentious at best and something unprintable at worst. My MA hood was also black and white, all very tasteful.
Although I’d studied at King’s, that year all graduations took place at Marischal College in the centre of the city. It’s world famous, one of the largest granite buildings in the world, and I’d hardly ever been in it before, but there was no difficulty finding my way in the stream of other black-and-white figures all around, laughing and chattering. I went in alone but it didn’t matter because we were all the same on that day, at that time, sharing in the same achievement.
Up to the platform we went, class by class in alphabetical order, to be tapped on the head with a mortar board (hat, not chunk of plywood!) and given a roll of ribbon-tied parchment, which we then gave back since the real certificates came out in the post. There was a ripple of laughter at my turn: the head-tapper had been bored into semi-unconsciousness by then and wasn’t expecting someone almost a foot shorter than the average: he woke up abruptly and had to take a second swipe.
As I turned away I found my parents’ faces in the crowd and they were smiling. For the first time ever I could see they weren’t wondering why I was so unlike my smart, charming brother and what in the world to make of me. They weren’t troubled about what out-of-joint thing I might say or do next. They were just glad and proud. So was everybody in the hall, everybody in the restaurant where we lunched, everybody in the photographer’s. When I was walking back to the hire shop, passing the big townhouse where the courts are held, even a total stranger, a wee old man coming the other way, took in my outfit and called out, 'Well done, lass! Well done!'
So that’s my definition of celebration. It’s a time, however brief, when you fit. A period in life when the whole world around you is glad and you are exactly the same kind of glad. A magical moment in life when all the colours blend in harmony and nothing, not even I, can clash.