My Origins Part 1

 Every story has a beginning and every triumph more than likely had a bit of adversity to climb and perhaps, like myself, there's a single defining moment that creates a chain reaction of events that, when all is said and done, it seems impossible. For myself, I still think what I've done from where I was just 12 years ago is impossible.

The photo to the right was taken in 2000. I was 17 and I knew exactly how my life was going to play out. There was, without any doubt, destiny to live as I was going to be the greatest race car driver that ever lived. It was going to be easy and when asked what I was going to do as a job my response had been the same as when I was in school, "I'm going to race! That's plan A for my life and there is no plan B".

No plan B... I had a singular mindset and had that gift/curse my entire life. In kindergarten I could barely have any conversation with my classmates, but I could give a monologue as to all the happenings at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. There was also my intense knowledge/fear of weather, and I could drone on and on about the threat of severe storms, but for the most part it was all racing all the time. There may also have been the occasional conversation in regard to my fear of nuclear war with the Soviet Union and those conversations went as well as you can imagine in a kindergarten setting.

Teachers attempted to tell my parents that something was, well, something was. What was it? If there had been a diagnosis of, "smart, quirky kid that no one can really makes sense of" that's what they would've given as even now I, or before the pandemic when presentations were common place, hear time and time again that, "Well, we don't really know if anything is really going on because this child is so smart." 

There were also times in first and second grades that my first experience with sensory issues happened and there was no understanding, and I had no ability to voice what it was. Actually I tried, I really did in first grade when the music teacher gave us examples of what bass was and it shook the room. I felt this horrible pain and I raised my hand with a furious angst, and I said, "this hurts!" and the teacher said, "No, it doesn't." This reinforced my fear of speaking about how I felt.

School got so difficult and the stress that I was under from the social and sensory aspect made my health shaky. My parents elected to home school me and I enjoyed that, but a few years later I wanted to give actual school another go but the same patterns developed and all the while there were no answers as to why what was occurring was occurring. 

Throughout all this I never once thought anything was different with me. Instead, I thought everyone else was the different ones. I could not understand why others had the interests they did, or why people wanted to "hang out" in a group. What was the appeal? Why was there this need for social interaction? 

It was December 2003 and I had driven down to Orlando from Saint Louis to test drive a late model stock car at a track when my viewpoint about life was shattered. I was in a Denny's parking lot right by my hotel and there was a family with three teenage looking sons and there were playing a game of keep away with what I recall to be a hat. Perhaps this wasn't all that fun for the person that had lost their hat but the liberating fun they seemed to be having with no restraints, no hesitations, and no cares to anything but the moment was, well, it hurt to the point that I'd say I was shattered. Shattered? Why? I realized at that moment there was some sort of restraint in my life meaning that I would overthink things and couldn't just "be" in the moment. From overthinking things came hesitations; how could these kids move so freely without thinking about the space they're in? And lastly, how could they run, jump, and even yell without thinking about 1,000 possible ramifications of their moves? As I watched them play on I began to sob uncontrollably, and I called my dad. 

Perhaps this was already in the works but shortly after that call and when I returned to Saint Louis my dad had me see my doctor to get a referral to get assessed to see if I were on the autism spectrum. Sometime before this there had been a story in Parade Magazine and it had been about another person with Asperger's whose story seemed extremely similar to mine. Perhaps my dad already knew the answer, but after the assessment there seemed to be little doubt. However, the defining moment of my life was just waiting to jump out at me.

Even though the assessment was done I had to go back to my doctor to get the results. Mind you, this was 2003 and the autism spectrum, or rather I think just the awareness of the word autism is nowhere close to where we are today. My doctor had no idea what a spectrum was in regard to autism and as he read the assessment in front of me, he made audible noises of, "Ah" and "I see" and "hm" and as he got to the end he said, "Yup, there's no doubt about it, you have Asperger's. I don't really know what to say so, um, good luck?" Why did I use a question mark on that sentence? I'm not sure if he was asking a question but his vocal tone was going that way and I'm not sure if that were directed at me or himself on having no idea what this meant.

Right then I didn't think much of the diagnosis. I had been given many before and I felt as if I were on a roulette wheel of diagnoses with this being just a new flavor of the month. That evening, though, I decided to look up what I had on the internet and the first bit of info did sum up, at least in medical terms, the way I felt in that parking lot in Orlando. Then, as I got to the prognosis, this website said, "Those with Asperger's will never have a job, will never have friends, and will never be happy." As many times as I've written that sentence and said it in presentations the icy chill of hopelessness still tries to creep into my being. When I read that horrendous statement my entire being changed; I went from a dedicated and focused future race car driver. Wait, future? Two months prior to this I had been a professional racing instructor at the Derek Daly Academy in Las Vegas but none of that mattered now. I was defined by frivolous words on a non-medically accurate website but to my 20-year-old self the source material was irrelevant because I had recently thought I was different, found out that I was, and now was told the future was hopeless. 

When you believe the "no" "don't" and "can't" that can pop up in life it can become a self-fulfilling destiny and instead of fulfilling my destiny of 22-time World Driver's Champion (what can I say, I had ambition!) I was now fulfilling my believed destiny of a stagnant life. The next thing that happened was the first in a long line of "impossible" events and that story will be part two which will be tomorrow's post.