Human Library Project: Growing Up Autistic and Undiagnosed

The island I live on has a “barter-and-swap” Facebook page, which many of us bargain-hunters read on the the regular. One day, an intriguing request popped up, and it gave me pause. It was from a school librarian in one of the towns on the island. She was producing a “Human Library” day at her middle school, and she was looking for volunteers to be the "resources," if you will, in this one-day library. Specifically, she was looking for folks with identities and experiences outside of the ordinary… folks who could enhance the kids’ understanding of diversity from a first-person-narrative perspective.

Word got out that I liked dolls, and family and friends began to give me all kinds of dolls on my birthday and for Christmas. I would inherit the neighbors’ outgrown dolls. My collection would eventually include over fifty dolls, and my cousins built me a dollhouse that was four feet high and six feet wide, with four floors, an attic and a dungeon.  It was basically a stack of boxes with doors cut between them.  For me, it was a palace. It had a  a chest of jewels in the dungeon; it had a garden terrace with a fountain; it had an attic garret for the servants. Yes, there was a full contingent of servants right out of the fairy tales: scullery maids, and grooms, and footmen in livery... It made no difference that I didn’t know what they did or even what livery was.
 
I would play with the dolls for six to eight hours at a stretch. When most little girls played with dolls, they would change up the outfits or hold miniature tea parties. When Barbie came along about five years later, little girls could put her in her car and drive her to the beach. My idea of playing with the dolls was very, very different. My dolls were engaged in complex plots involving abductions, and magic, and murder, and illicit romance... There were always four or five subplots going on, and the lives of the servants were as intensely dramatic as those of the court. In fact, the heroine of the castle was a rescue doll whose hair had been pulled out and whose body had been vandalized with ink.  She was a doll of mystery, greatly favored by Ginny and the Powers that Be. Her name was Pat, and it was only later, as an adult, I realized that the avatar of my youth had been a survivor and a gender-non-conforming lesbian. ,

There was something else I was doing in the dollhouse. I was plotting an escape from reality. My family was not well. My mother was a practicing alcoholic, as was my brother--who, like me, was on the spectrum. My father was a sex/pornography addict with scary and confusing dissociative disorders. I was terrified of him. He was a tyrant, and, from what I experienced as a child, he was never called into account for his malevolence.  None of us could ever mount a successful revolution, and any signs of resistance were met with cruelty and sometimes violence.  BUT... in the dollhouse, amid all the epic dramas, goodness and innocence would eventually prevail. To that point, the females always won, and matriarchy would always carry the day. Unlike my father, the perpetrators in my stories would be killed, banished, or won over by good. My dollhouse kept my belief in justice alive. It was an alternative world, and, quite frankly, one that I preferred to inhabit... which I manage to do, as much as possible. The dolls were my true family and my dearest friends.