Your Uniqueness Is a Light Shining Brightly

Over the course of my meandering and winding life, I once chanced upon a little girl named Alina. Alina is the Greek word for light, and that she was, to me and to many. Alina had Asperger’s Syndrome. She was on, “the spectrum,” as science, so eager to classify and be done with it, would flatly tout. She was indeed on a spectrum, but as I was to discover, it was the color spectrum that dazzles off a prism. Alina shone with colors so unique that, quite frankly, they cast a spell on me.

I met her one afternoon at the auditions for a play I was directing. Her mother, a kind and gentle soul, asked me if I would mind if Alina tried out for the play. She explained to me that Alina had Asperger’s but quickly and breathlessly added, as though she were used to hearing “no,” that Alina loved mimicking voices and playing different characters when she read books. It brought her such joy that she would laugh out loud. My heart caught that word joy and expanded a full size. Yet, I had immediate misgivings and felt my heart contract one size smaller. This was not my usual world; the world I knew and understood. I was wholly ignorant of Asperger’s. What if I failed this little girl by my ignorance? What if she got overwhelmed? A clamoring of “what ifs” struggled for dominance within me for a long minute. But that word “joy” hung like a pearl in the pleading eyes of a mother. It was worth the great price. I said yes.

From the start, Alina was a stickler for truth. When another actor would forget his line, or say it incorrectly, her voice would emphatically call from the back of the room with the correct line – word for word. It soon dawned on me about two weeks into rehearsal, that Alina had memorized the whole play including my direction notes. She herself would dissolve into frustrated tears if she made a small mistake in acting or if someone wasn’t doing it exactly the way I told them to. She was all justice, Alina was. I discovered that because of her Asperger’s, she thrived on predictability. Surprises unsettled her. She didn’t know what to do with them. Mistakes were NOT predictable in Alina’s logical world. I confess honestly that I was put a bit out to sea by this reaction but managed not to panic. I quietly convinced her to keep going even if she made a mistake. I taught her slowly that my patience with mistakes was also predictable, and I made a valiant effort to be true to my word. Alina taught me a thing or two about mercy at those rehearsals. Her seriousness about lines DID rub off on the more laissez faire remnants of my motley cast, I might add. They memorized more diligently because they did not want to get called out by Alina. That was her first gift to me. Her second gift was soon to follow.

Children with Asperger’s have trouble with social cues. They cannot naturally read emotions or recognize nuance in conversation as most people can. They cannot read annoyance, fear, anger etc. It can be a trial for them and deeply frustrating in regular circumstances as they can’t read a room as we can but approach everything so logically it can be daunting to those they meet. But in drama it was a magical and marvelous advantage. Since Alina could not read emotions or pick up on social cues, she was completely free to enter the fantasy, a thing so necessary for good theater. She was not hampered in the slightest by a fear of being laughed at. She lacked all the self-conscious and posturing teenage bravado so utterly challenging to every high school drama teacher. Teens are literally hypnotized by the wobbling sense of self they see reflected in one anothers’ critical eyes. Alina saw none of this in anyone’s eyes. For her, the play truly WAS “the thing.” She could never get in the way of the creative process by second guessing herself out of fear of others’ reactions. She had a unique gift they could never have – an unhampered self-worth. And she shone with it like the light she was. Alina was told what her character was like, how she might sound, how she might walk. Alina would think about it for a while and then act it perfectly, with an unabashed panache, I might add. Every student in the room stopped gabbing mid-sentence to marvel when she was on the stage. All the actors soon took their cues from her and cautiously threw self-consciousness to the wind. They discovered, when they got out of the way, that the play WAS the thing. The joy was palpable. Alina was, quite simply, a creative genius. She ended up being one of the best actors I have ever had. Her mother sat in the front row every single night of that run and beamed a great smile at me each time the curtain fell. Alina was a revelation to me. She shone her light on what it was to be truly selfless before art.

I have spent the latter part of this summer in the company of Beatrix Potter, the whimsical creator of the notorious and lovely Peter Rabbit and friends that we all have read thousands of times, with many a chuckle, to our little ones. We picture her in her Wellingtons tromping the fields and valleys of her beloved Lake District in England – paintbox bouncing happily at her side. She did end up there, but she did not begin from there. Beatrix grew up in a London household with Helen Potter, a mother who was obsessed with social status. Beatrix was hampered by Helen’s imposed rules of self-worth. Beatrix was in desperate need of an Alina.

Helen Potter, like many women of that era, spent her days navigating the mysterious, arbitrary minutiae of Victorian do and don’t with a concentration as tight as her stays. What one must wear, who one must know, who one could talk to and who one could most emphatically NOT talk to. What Church was okay to attend, which one was not. Tradesmen as friends were taboo. Merchants likewise. Farmers, cabbies and washerwomen were not even blips on the radar. Young women were not to make money of their own. That was vulgar. These rules were endless, and Helen did not presume to ask where they had come from. Helen believed in them with all her being – they were her great Critical Eye judging her very self-worth like a despot. She drew status ever tighter and tighter around herself and tried to pull Beatrix in with her. Beatrix tried desperately not to fit.

Status is stultifying. It is all about self and how we appear to “those who know.” It is an obsessive sensitivity to social cues and the emotional reactions of those we wish to impress. It is full of fears: of failure, of not fitting in, of being on the outside. Outside of what, it never asks. It is tight gripped and narrow in scope. Fewer and fewer people are allowed inside its borders. It kills all curiosity of the greater world outside its tinted, Narcissistic glass. Creativity and curiosity about the greater world cannot exist there for they demand an outward glance away from self to the bright and beautiful other. Status is chronically near sighted and only sees itself staring back.

Beatrix was incorrigibly curious about that beautiful other. She was born that way, being the true ancestor on her father’s side of merchants and inventors, artists, and problem solvers. She loved being outdoors among animals and trees. She cared not a fig for the outlandish outfits society girls were supposed to wear. She got dirty and picked up slugs, worms, and mushrooms. She had pet newts, rabbits, and mice up in the nursery. She questioned everything. Her mother just rolled her eyes in exasperation at her daughter’s stubborn refusal to be a proper Victorian girl of means. Beatrix became an embarrassment. She constantly chafed under these forced and capricious rules that made her what she feared most - a useless ornament in society. It caused no small rift between them, and Beatrix slowly felt herself dying inside. Art and knowledge and science called, but she was caged by status and her mother held the key.

During the summers of her mid-twenties, Beatrix’s family fortuitously let a house in Scotland. Helen would stay housebound and fuss about menus or make endless calls for tea to other society families in the area. Beatrix was set free to roam. She had heard rumors of a wild sort of little man who knew the natural world of Scotland like the back of his hand. He was by trade a postman in the area around the small town she inhabited. His name was Charlie McIntosh. She wanted desperately to talk with him, as she had a great love for drawing fungi and had made many studies of them late nights up in her room in London. She had a voracious appetite for knowledge – so did Charlie. Alas, she and Charlie were in social strata that ran parallel and never the twain must meet. Helen would be shocked and probably take to her bed with her salts if she knew Beatrix was conversing so casually with the...postman. Lucky for Beatrix she had covertly made friends with the tradesmen and farmers in the town when she went on her walks. One of them devised a plan that would satisfy the letter of the law. He borrowed Charlie’s notebook and under pretext of returning it by favor through Beatrix he set up a meeting. This is how her co-conspirator arranged for her to meet Charlie and talk to him a bit without technically breaking Helen’s rules. She was overjoyed.

Charlie McIntosh was a local boy, had been all his life. He grew up playing music and was a grand fiddler and cello player. He went to work at the local sawmill when he came of age, like all the boys in the area. He had an unfortunate accident while still a young man in which he lost all the fingers on one hand. His mill days were over, but undaunted, he became the postman for the district. As he traveled his route of fifteen miles a day, he began to notice the mushrooms at the side of the road. He also began to spy ferns, lichens, and flowers in the grass. The colors and shapes intrigued his naturally scientific curiosity and he began to write down information about them and to draw them. Over time he became the resident sage of the county and knew almost everything there was to know about the natural world he inhabited. He was a slight man whose clothes hung loosely about his frame. He had a long bushy beard under which he hid. He was excruciatingly shy around strangers. He was self-conscious about his hand and was about as skittish as the shy woodland animals he loved to watch. Beatrix was charmed by him.

At first, he stared at the ground and was very formal with her questions. She was able to get a good look at him and his whiskers. She was a bit disappointed that he was so shy and formal. They both stood in awkward silence. That is, until they started talking about fungi. Beatrix asked a furtive question. He shifted in place and answered it tersely. She asked another. He forgot himself for a second and looked up at her. Then she opened his book and looked at the drawings and told him shyly that she had some drawings as well. Then suddenly he forgot he was talking to a Victorian lady and she was completely oblivious that he hid his lame hand behind his shabby coat. He never once asked why she was so interested in science being a woman and all. She never laughed at his clothes or commented on his hand in condescending pity. Nor did she ask how this country bumpkin could possibly have such deep knowledge and wisdom. All status dropped between them and they discovered – joy. The joy of knowledge shared, the joy of seeing the Universe with and through the eyes of another. They were not looking at each other – they were looking out at the bright beyond and marveling. Beatrix had found her Alina.

Beatrix wrote to Charlie after that first encounter and he wrote back. Charlie commented on her drawings with unalloyed admiration and taught her how to present her work more scientifically as he had learned to do over the years. She would find rare species of fungi deep in the woods and draw them just so he could see them first. They were both generous with their techniques and discoveries. Charlie gave Beatrix back to herself. His open heartfelt validation of her talent as a Natural Scientist gave her the impetus she needed to pursue her studies and ignite a passion for the possibilities within herself both as a natural scientist and as an artist.

Beatrix was to meet others who would help her on her way, but it was humble Charlie McIntosh who opened the gate to her great beyond – to a life of glorious usefulness. It was Charlie McIntosh who unlocked the cage from which she had the courage to fly to her own life. His belief in her paved the way for other endeavors: like having the confidence to meet a publisher with her drawings of a little rabbit named Benjamin Bunny and his friend Peter. It was probably Charlie she thought of when she signed the deed to her own property in the Lake District and became a proud home-owner who just happened to be a woman. Charlie would have thought it was only right and just. And when she came upon a new mushroom in the deep woods, could she feel Charlie smiling behind her telling her she was as smart as paint? In the end, she would immortalize Charlie’s whiskers and winsome ways in the notorious Mr. McGregor of Peter Rabbit fame. Charlie would have laughed shyly into his beard, I am sure.

It is the Alinas and Charlies of this world who make it worth living in, who make us turn away from ourselves to the beautiful beyond we are meant to see. They are those who shine on all the far flung possibilities constricted by our myopic self-doubt. Look out for them in your lifetime and don’t be afraid if they seem so different from you. They were sent by God to shine a light. Let it shine.