I’ve written in spurts during the years I call my “Dark Days.”

These years cover the time from 2014 to June 3, 2019. 

One Category?

Often, the pieces are fit for the memoir I’ve worked on in various stages, or they are complete crap. Some are written in the style of my previous publications, “We Never Said Hello,” published twice, or “The Write Mother” with a good degree of writing growth. 

Some pieces are poems while others are written in the traditional prose fashion. In all of my memoir pieces, including “We Never Said Hello,” I searched for a connection that I could use for a full, connected memoir. A memoir is not a full book about your life, but there has to be something worth telling.  The memoir’s working title is A Messed Up Kind of Beautiful. 

But, I don’t think I’ll go with that. The memoir itself has had many evolutions from 2010 when my son was born. It was first called Fractured Snowflakes. Then it changed to other titles, but I was missing a connection. Until the pattern evolved: the neuroatypical brain in my son and me. 

I’m not just a memoirist. 

I’ve never fit just one “category” as a published author. My poems, essays, and fiction have been published in multiple journals. 

Neurodiversity and Atypical

I worked on a book called Sons of the Edisto from 2006 until about 2014. I put it away for a long time until an idea came: How do people handle the differences in not only their cultures or races, but in neurodiversity?

All these inspirations come from the fact I’m not a person with a lot of friends. I do not make friends easily. Sometimes friends I thought I had just went away, and sometimes I assumed it was because of my social awkwardness.  As I got older, I became okay with not revealing too much of myself to a person in the hopes of a false friendship.

I’m fine with writing though because it doesn’t lie to your face or just disappear.

I don’t want to spend time trying overthink or overanalyze social cues that come so naturally to some other people.  

This is what I mean by neurodiversity. 

Old paperwork has recently come to light showing just how much I am like my son, Hayes.  I was labeled by doctors at five-years-old to have the maturity of a four-year-old.  I was labeled by my Kindergarten teacher as an unimaginative child, lost friends easily compared to other children, and lacked the ability to finish certain tasks. 

I was “echolalic.” According to the doctors, I would repeat words without meaning. In a class in 2015, I wrote a research paper about echolalia inspired by a student I had taught at my old school. Until now, I’d never known that I was diagnosed with it. 

In 1990, autism was a controversial word, and my parents wanted me to grow up as “normally” as possible.  They were parents of their time, so I understand that now.  

It has given me a different perspective as a parent, and a writer of what it means to live an atypical life.  

I will sit in a room, and not say a word.  I will speak when I feel compelled, but I do not reach out easily. If I feel I missed a social cue, I step back, and put distance between myself and that person because the fact is people come and go, always have, like magazine after recycled magazine.  

But the writing never left me. The books I adore never left me. The hope for Sons of the Edisto always remained and it has reemerged as a new manuscript with diverse characters and an alternate fictional twist. The memoir still remains on pause, but ever present. 

It’s Okay to:

• Be alone 
• Live in complete silence 
• Lose someone who did not understand you
• Have a mind less common
• Feel shaky when you believe in an idea outside-the-box that others don’t understand
• Be angry as long as you deal with it, and it may never completely go away.

As I Learned with my Diagnosis, we are Not:

• What our Kindergarten teacher, or any person, says we are
• Awkward without friends
• Less than something when our brain shows nuerodiversity

My Kindergarten Teacher and Doctors said:

• She has a low IQ = I went to my state’s Governor’s School of the Arts for Writing in 2000
• She has no imagination = I won my first writing award at the age of 11
• She cannot recognize and write letters neatly = I became a news staff writer 
• She cannot multi-task = I was able to meet deadlines daily with up to five stories.
• She cannot manipulate small items = So, I became a photographer, and brought Legos into my classroom. 
• She tires of tasks easily = When I was at my worst mentally and physically as a teacher, I remained a teacher. 
• She does not make or keep friends easily = I found books and a pen
• She lacks language and is echolalic = I am raising a son with autism about whom his Kindergarten teacher admitted has, “an advanced oral vocabulary for his age.” 

I am consistently writing again, and not when I’m at my worst. I am writing like a staff writer who has material to push out. Even when I’m absent for months at a time from my blog I started in 2012, I’m still writing.  

The evolution from:

No More (2010)

“The headlights invade

wet, black pavement.

Someone’s leaving.

Someone’s coming.”

TO

Some Memories (Original Version, 2014)

“Some memories I try to clear away like a broom sweeping away dust bunnies and spider webs. The white-gray mess gets tangled in the hard straw of the broom. Some memories are like that.”

TO

Remember Arc Fall Road (2019) 

“I go into the church, and I think I find some friends.

Mimi says you meet the ‘best people in the church.’

I go into the bathroom when I overhear

a boy and girl talk about me out there.

I struggle with reading maps 

of people’s thoughts and feelings.

I have a crush on the boy.

I want to be the girl.

‘She cries out for attention,’ he says.

‘She wants us to pity her.’

It’s like being stuck inside a locked, walk-in closet

Speak to the walls. Eventually you recall no one 

will hear you. I leave an empty spot 

on a pew 

in the church.”

No Words for Sinners (2019, from my Luska Road collection) 

“I have no words for sinners

for nightmares wait beneath

the shattered silence after 

the midnight hour meets

my kids on Luska Road

where they cast off 

Cinderella dreams.”

The Novel and the Memoir

The novel and the memoir are my current projects with the novel at the front. I rarely put out excerpts from my fiction and traditional memoir writing. The poems work in the background.  

I share this to say: 

Anyone can walk through an Earthly hell where people define you. 

What are you going to do about it?

Rebecca T. Dickinson

All work belongs and is the intellectual property of Rebecca T. Dickinson copyright 2010-2020.