Over a bottle of wine last weekend, a friend and I caught up on life. We both have boys who started a new school this year, so our conversation was dominated by troubling comments we’d peeked at in the seventh grade WhatsApp thread. This topic uncovered myriad others, and, as the best conversations do, ours delved deeply into those topics: racism, the political landscape, our childhoods.
At one point, I realized she didn’t know that my current opinions are not reflective of the ones I held earlier in life. In other words, I was not always so “enlightened.” In other words, I am a bit of a hypocrite, or, as one Twitter user recently stated, “I’d rather be a hypocrite today, than the same shitty person I was before.” Or, as Robbie Williams put it, “I’m a burning effigy of everything I used to be.”
What I’m saying is that types of change have occurred. But depending on where you’re standing, that change could be growth … or something else.
For example, there are people in my hometown, in my Instagram feed, in my own family, who would view my about-face on certain issues as a betrayal of the ideals I was raised to believe. And in a way, they are. Many of my opinions have taken such a drastic turn in recent years that even I get whiplash thinking about it (and Facebook memories are a stark, often bitter, reminder). In my better moments, I try to put myself in these people’s shoes, seeing one of their “own” deviate so markedly from the path they still walk. It’s probably jarring, even personal, my association with Those People and Those Ideas.
It’s no less personal for me, though, that they haven’t experienced a similar reversal. Maybe I’d do well to sit with the question my friend asked over that bottle of wine after I admitted my past: “What do you think made you change so much?”
Though not a believer herself, she knows I am, so when I waxed more-cliché-than-poetic about “a bigger hand being at play in my story,” she saw right through my aphorisms and said, “You mean God.” And yes, I did. But his grace has shown up in my life in so many ways that I could easily misattribute to other sources that don’t so obviously bear his signature, things like desperation and mistakes and New York. In fact, in many ways I think my deviation (or, put-to-rights — your choice) began when a series of professional and personal disasters (read: mind-numbingly bad decisions) did, in fact, lead me to New York and away from everything I knew.
This does not set me apart as wise or qualify my opinions as fact, of course. Plenty of people have never left their hometown and are no less living out the story they’re meant for (i.e., God’s will for their lives) with wisdom and grace. My turns are more indicative of just how dramatic God had to be to show me who he really is because of just how mistaken I was about his identity and my own. (Are we allowed to refer to the Almighty as a drama queen? Because I think I just did, and I’m kind of loving that for him.)
Once sequestered in the Big Apple, I met the people and experiences that would further change me: Grace embodied in preaching like I’d never heard, my future husband, and people whose lives and perspectives were both starkly different and somehow still connected to my own, such that I couldn’t write them off as Those People with Those Ideas. Even after I left New York for a vanilla life in the suburbs, God wouldn’t quit me, because he sent me children, and if they didn’t turn my world upside down, nothing did, as the Drama Queen himself saw fit to provide me with one neurotypical son and one autistic one, just to cover the bases so that I was left, quite simply, without anyone in this world to “other.” Then he sent us to Australia, dragging my ass across the planet because nothing else was enough. And the Oscar goes to … GOD, amirite?
Now I’m getting disability newsletters and pondering a new career and sweating through Christmas and voraciously reading nonfiction for no school credit, all of which would have formerly looked like insanity to me. And that’s not all.
When my son James was diagnosed, we signed him up for every therapy in existence — meaning, we changed everything we could, in an effort to change him. He rode horses, listened to electronically modified music, swung on platforms, had one unfortunate encounter with non-dairy cheese I bought … the list goes on. The biggest addition to our lives was ABA therapy, touted by many as the most successful way to “treat” autism. Multiple times a week, for hours at a time, he sat in our basement with a therapist who implemented the principles of ABA — basically, rewarding the “right” behaviors — in an effort to … well, basically, make him less noticeably autistic. There really aren’t many other ways to say it. He was still in this therapy when I gave a breakout talk at the Mockingbird Conference in 2019, right after keynote speaker Alfie Kohn’s session. Kohn denounced, among other things, ABA therapy, and I remember scoffing at his remarks. Regardless, I bought his book, and this week — five years later — I sat down and read it.
Reader, I was shook. I found myself agreeing with everything Kohn said: about the inefficacy of rewards, about how behaviorism is bunk, about it all. And though he didn’t mention ABA in the book, I could draw the connection between what he’d written and what he’d said at the conference based on my change in two arenas: autism and behavior.
In the past few years I’ve begun listening to autistic voices, self-advocates who articulate their lived experience, and those voices have fundamentally changed the way I view disability in general, neurodivergence more specifically, autism even more specifically, and … well, just humanity. I recognize now that it’s not autistic people who should have to change for the world, but the world who needs to change for them, and for many identified as “different.” Mothering my sons has made it impossible for me to be objective or uninformed about how we treat those who don’t belong in the traditional categories we assign to humanity.
As for behavior, I remember being a pediatric dentist and learning the principles of “behavior management,” when it dawned on me that such an idea is far from being limited to just that profession; in fact, I’ve used it throughout my life in an attempt to control my surroundings and make said life easier. The most tempting arena is parenting, when I try to reduce my children to automatons responding to my commands rather than as sentient beings with their own motivations and needs. (Kind of like how autistics are treated in some forms of therapy, or how Skinner used his rats.) The reduction in humanity that occurs when we reduce people to piles of behaviors — or to reduce the definition of sin to such — is unmistakable and sobering (as evidenced by Kohn’s conversation with Skinner at the end of his book).
I’m reminded of a particular moment during my residency when a patient with Down syndrome was in my chair and, turning from her to grab my instruments, I took a deep breath and recalled the behavior management techniques that would make this appointment as swift and efficient as possible. Then I looked into her eyes and was momentarily breathless as I confronted the fear, the reflected humanity within them — a humanity that made me confront all the ways I’d distanced myself from her for my own expedience. All the ways I’d fought change.
Maybe that’s why I still post about politics on social media sometimes, or attempt to have conversations that I know will end in a fight: because I have been changed, and I want others to be, also. Which means there is some covert narcissism in my altruism that I’ll need to further investigate. Because this change is not mine to assign — it’s above my pay grade and belongs to someone who is much more knowledgeable about the humanity he’s created than I am.
And beyond that, maybe change isn’t necessary for everyone. Not all types of it, at least. For example, though I can look back at ABA and see some apparent benefits it brought my son (because God isn’t just dramatic, but nuanced), I also know that I was the one who needed to change more than he did. And that any change that is just behavior-deep is really just performance-oriented and negates the inner change that is the work of God and his grace — change that is healing. Either way, I’m grateful for that work in my life: the grace that picked me up in one place and brought me to a much different one, somehow both being called home.
