Midlife Meditation

March 24, 1982: my 21st birthday party, and everyone else was having a better time than I appeared to be having. I occupy an extremely particular nook of the spectrum. Fifteen years and approximately 4000 students into my career as a music teacher, I've met and taught students from across the spectrum, from those so high functioning their autism presents as only a mild quirkiness to nonverbal children who express themselves through screams. In that time, I've rarely met any child who more than superficially reminded me of myself. Occasionally, there's an exception. There's a fifth grade boy at my current school whose single-minded enthusiasm for Harry Potter comes across as slightly obsessive, and who becomes deeply upset with his misbehaving classmates. I feel a real kinship with this well-meaning, nerdy kid, and imagine I probably came across the same way to my teachers when I was his age. However disturbed he feels at his peers' disrespectful attitu...

Last night, MaryAnn Rambo blew me away. MaryAnn has been on a weight loss journey for over a year now, and as of the last time I checked, had last 203 pounds. She blogs about it at " Repairing Me ," and reading it is well worth your time. She has also begun telling her story on stage as part of a show called "Campfire" and, for the first time last night, as monologist for a long form improvisation called "Disco Lounge." Working from the suggestion "teddy bear," MaryAnn told short stories from her childhood that were the inspiration for scenes by a group of improvisers. The players were silly, blasphemous, hilarious at times, often inspired, but none of what they did would've been possible without the offers MaryAnn made with her stories. To be fair, MaryAnn has actually been doing this for a long time. She's been running the screens at ComedySportZ, putting up images and text that comment on moments in the matches (in keeping with ...

I finally did it: I took the Autism Spectrum Quotient test. I've heard for most of my life that there's something not quite right about how I relate to other people. I don't pick up on nonverbal cues, I struggle and lose patience with small talk, I'm sensitive to clothing tags and repetitive noises in my environment, and I can have a powerful focus on something that interests me, to the exclusion of everything and everyone around me. And yes, I meant to say "not right," because that is how others around me have presented these personality traits when they've assessed me. I've responded in several different ways to this assessment. At times I've been hurt by it, humiliated to be seen as somehow deficient, lacking in essential survival traits. At other times, I've become angry, insisting that this is who I am, damn it, and I have every right to be myself. Anger like this can lead me to dismiss the person making the assessment: What does he...

I don't love the camera. This goes back to my earliest memories of being photographed. Pictures taken of me in my infancy are typical baby shots: a happy, smiling, inquisitive child utterly ignorant of the significance of the metal box in my father's hands and its ability to capture my image on film. But from the moment I became aware of what the camera was for, and why it was always being pointed at me and (by then) my younger brothers, my face lost its ability to smile naturally for a picture. Making myself smile for a posed shot, I could always tell there was something wrong: my eyes were too wide or too narrow, my mouth not open enough or frozen in a death grin, my nostrils flared like Wolverine sniffing for a supervillain. Try as I might, I just couldn't relax and let my face do what it would normally do if I was enjoying an episode of Batman, reading an elephant joke, or singing "On Top of Spaghetti." School pictures came out terribly, as I knew they...

This is me doing standup. I'm good with microphones. As a preacher, I learned to tell stories from my heart, to invite people into my inner pilgrimage and entice them to accompany me on my quest for awhile. During my second (and ultimately successful) attempt at ordination, several pastors came to observe me preaching a sermon. They took me out to lunch afterward, and one of them told me, "What you do is very powerful. Please use it for good." It gave me pause, made me think about Virgil Howard, one of my preaching models back in seminary, and a sermon he had delivered in the seminary chapel that was so revealing that, even as I was enthralled, I felt my skin crawl. I have wondered ever since if that sermon, however effective it was at delivering its message (I believe it was about overcoming fear), went too far, maybe even committed a kind of emotional assault. I preached revelatory sermons for many years, talking about my inner struggles, fears, inadequacies, using...