spock-tism (spock autism)

Listen. I am not twenty-five. My life is not being refracted through the lens of a small woman with a lot of degrees and an ice cold—yet somehow empathetic—voice. I’m not perched on the couch in her office listening to her dictate the sum of my parts that she carefully measured through a series of tests and tasks.

I’m actually twelve and in my TV room with a half-eaten Zebra Cake laid out on a napkin on my lap. In front of me, my dad is fiddling with the DVD player. He whacks it a few good times, then flicks at the controls. His presence drifts back to me and the screen lights up with colors and orchestral arrangements.

We are watching the very first episode of the very first season of the original Star Trek series.

I melt into this space, into the 60s view of space travel and the familiar squabbling between crew mates and captains and doctors and aliens (which look suspiciously like humans, just with some putty on their faces). Dad does too.

Something you have to understand about Star Trek is that many of the episodes are objectively not good. Sure, one of the big bad villains is a man in a garish green lizard suit and, okay, some of the plots are ham-fisted to the point of sounding like cassette public service announcements, but the real joy of Star Trek is recognizing this and finding things to love anyways.

From the very first episode, Dad and I agreed on a stark favorite among all the elements in the series: the half-human half-Vulcan, Spock.

Dad likes him because he is the picture of cool rationality, a man who is unapologetic about replacing emotion with logic. Vulcans, as an alien species, prize intelligence and thought over baser instincts, which makes me belly laugh and call Dad an alien, himself. In a lot of ways, Spock is a mirror image of him, with his ability to block out noise and focus on tiny details and his attention to the more mathematical side of human interactions.

At first, I just like Spock ‘cause the guy has cool pointy ears and is half-alien, which is a legit enough reason for a gun-shy twelve year old. But, as Dad and I move through the series (you can’t skip an episode, even if you know it’s going to be corny), I get a little jealous of the Vulcan.

Spock has this way about him that is incredibly different from his fully human crew mates, and I relate to that a lot as a middle schooler. I understand the feeling of being half-in half-out of something and never quite fitting in wherever I am, no matter how hard I try to understand the pragmatics or the social dynamics.

The kicker is, Spock does not apologize for the way that he is and is never made to feel ashamed by his found family, his crew mates (his real family is a different story…). His differences as half-Vulcan are welcomed and his logical mind brings something to the table that no one else on the Enterprise can replicate.

My dad was a lot like Spock in a lot of the good ways, but I was not. Throughout my schooling, I hid myself in a carefully crafted mask. I am overemotional instead of rational—never seeming to get the hang of regulating myself—and I get to the point of meltdown rather easily.

After my dad passed, I was diagnosed with autism by a very nice and very smart psychologist. Sitting on that uncomfortable, scratchy couch, she read off the symptoms list and what she noticed in me: my sensory and emotional issues, my deep passion for a few select interests (hello, writing?), the way that quiet, alone time is a need for me and not just a want, and more down the list of the DSM-5.

The weird thing was, sometimes it felt like she was talking about my dad, too. We shared a lot of the same traits, but his presented as a cool, rational outer image, while mine was a mask of bubbly, social glitter that choked me.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the diagnosis lately, which includes telling others and advocating for inclusion and accommodation for the more disabling aspects of ASD. I haven’t always been treated the best because of a lot of traits that have to do with my now-known autism.

I have to imagine if, instead of Captain Kirk and the other members of the Enterprise embracing Spock’s differences, the half-Vulcan had to contort himself to a humanity that didn’t exist.