Creative Nonfiction: Libraries and Autistic Sorrow

By Laney Lenox

My first memory of going to a library is with my grandmother. There was a tiny library near their house that she would take me to after school. My parents worked a lot when I was growing up, so I was often looked after by my grandparents. Small as the library was in comparison to the big city libraries I frequent now, I knew I’d never live long enough to read all the books that it held. Maybe that was my first time thinking about my own mortality, but it didn’t make me sad. I felt happy to live in a world that had too many books for one person’s lifetime. 

 

In Louisiana, where I grew up, reading is as much a summer activity as a winter one. With sometimes fatally hot afternoons and humidity that rivals the Amazon jungle (I mean this literally, I went to the Amazon during a recent trip to Colombia, and I was surprised that it felt less humid than home), people tend to stay inside during summer days. I spent so many of these days reading, my grandmother asleep on the couch across from me, and one of my childhood pets curled up on the relatively cool wooden floor beside me. Although reading is a year-round practice in Louisiana, I now associate cozy reading sessions with the long and cold nights of the Northern European winter.

 

Now, when I am overcome with despair (which lately, is relatively often), I go to the library. The library nearest to my apartment offers books in at least six different languages, garden tools, children’s toys, board games, and community events. There are also technology classes for seniors, board game nights, and historical or art exhibits relevant to the neighborhood. Libraries are places that understand the importance of not just sharing resources, but also sharing time, space, and common interests. Creating this type of space allows us to build stronger community ties and share joy.

 

Libraries are also sensory-safe refuges for people like me, people for whom the world outside is often too chaotic and inhospitable. They are kind and gentle spaces, full of predictability. Going to a library is usually my first port of call in a new city, even if I’m only there as a tourist. As an autistic person, I find it vital to have something familiar and grounding in a new place. Plus, one of my first and most pervasive special interests is books. So what better than to be surrounded by so many that are so readily available? 

 

Contrary to the autism stereotype that we are all emotionless robots, many autistic people feel emotions with a deeper intensity, and for a longer period of time, than some neurotypical people. I find this to be the case for myself. These days, I wake up most mornings sad because I miss my family and Louisiana. I moved away when I was eighteen. I’m now thirty-two, and I feel intensely homesick. It feels silly to feel this way, the same way that it feels silly that I’m overcome with grief every time I think about Fluffy, my childhood cat that died five years ago. 

 

The pervasiveness of this sadness and grief often becomes so overwhelming that I can’t move. In order not to face its intensity, I usually put on clips of old comfort shows. Lately, that’s been Gilmore Girls or Gossip Girl. It’s probably not a coincidence that these are both shows focusing on wealthy, upper-class people in New England, something very far from my own background. I can watch with total detachment and it’s likely nothing will trigger the waves of heartache I’m trying to keep at bay. But watching these shows ultimately doesn’t help, it’s just like putting a band-aid on a wound that needs fresh air. 

 

What does help is spending time in the library. Whenever we catch up, which is now almost every week, my mom and I talk about what we’ve seen at our respective libraries lately. My mom enjoys seeing which books the librarians have decided to display and sometimes picks out her next read in this way, letting herself be surprised. I’m usually more tactical, going to the library with a particular book in mind, or checking out something that I saw in the library’s selection during my last visit.

 

For most of her life, my mom’s working schedule didn’t allow much time for reading or library visits. As a child, I ate up every moment I got to spend with my mom during this busy schedule. I don’t feel so differently now that I'm an adult who has lived away from her mother for fourteen years.

 

This past summer, I was going through an extensive diagnostic process after my health started declining significantly (previously written about in another Autistic Asshole entry). My mom, fearing the worst, flew to Berlin to be with me through my exams and seemingly endless medical appointments. She initially only planned to stay two weeks but ended up remaining with me in Berlin for three months. We had never before had such an expansive period of time together. Without realizing I was recreating the days with my grandmother from nearly thirty years ago, I started taking my mom to the library. We checked out books together and read them outside by the river (Berlin’s comparatively milder summer allowing us this luxury we’d never dreamed of in Louisiana). 

 

At the halfway point of my mother’s visit, my doctors told me that I would need a diagnostic laparoscopy so that they could really see what was going on inside me and causing such intense pain. After the surgery, my mom read to me from a library book about time-traveling historians as I fell asleep in the hospital bed. As difficult as this health crisis was, I miss these moments with my mom. 

 

Perhaps the way that I feel and process my emotions as an autistic person makes me more prone to despair and sorrow. But I think the state of our world makes despair an understandable feeling for anyone.  Ignoring these negative feelings or drowning them in a false sort of optimism doesn’t seem healthy. However, I also know that change is made through figuring out how to actively hope that our world can become a better place.  

 

Spending so much time with both my mom and with libraries last summer reminded me that the most important thing for our very survival is the strength of our communities. Surely, a world that built libraries, these brilliant temples of community access and sharing, a place where a girl, her mom, and her grandma can find joy together, can’t be totally doomed? Of course, my home country, the United States, has groups of people bound and determined to tear down these sacred spaces via censorship and defunding. But public libraries came into existence in the first place, and they seem so mundane and normal to us. Doesn’t that mean something? This hope takes work and courage to imagine that things can be different and that the wider world can be the kind of space of community building that we find in libraries.

 

Laney Lenox is an anthropologist, researcher and writer from Louisiana living in Berlin, Germany with her husband. She has an interdisciplinary PhD in anarchist political theory and memory studies. Writing featured in Salvation South,  RTÉ Brainstorm, the Anarchist Studies blog, Burningwood Literary Journal, and elsewhere. Learn more about her work via laneylenox.com and on social media, Instagram: @laneylenox, Substack: @laneylenox.