Removing the Mask

As someone who was a socially awkward kid — and remains a socially awkward adult — I find a lot to identify with in John Paul Scotto’s essays. He was recently diagnosed with autism, but for most of his life he knew only that he needed to hide his true self around other people if he wanted to fit in. Luckily John Paul had a tried-and-true path to social acceptance: he was quarterback of his high-school football team. Although it didn’t lead to the sort of status it does in the movies, it gave him an identity beyond just “the shy kid.” And it helped him hide.

All that concealment came with a price. In college John Paul abused alcohol to lessen his anxiety in social situations. It was a crutch he would continue to lean on throughout his twenties and into his thirties, until the death of a friend and his own autism diagnosis triggered a breakthrough. He’s since been able to come out of hiding and present himself as he is through his writing. We’re pleased to have published some of his work in The Sun, including his essay in this month’s issue: “Coach’s Kid.”

Andrew Snee: You were diagnosed with autism as an adult — within the last year or so, in fact.

John Paul Scotto: Yes, I was diagnosed on Halloween 2022. I sort of knew it was coming, but it took me a while to get in the room with a psychiatrist, because there aren’t a lot of them here in southwest Virginia, and it was during COVID. If it wasn’t for my wife pushing me to keep trying, it might have taken even longer. So I have her to thank for it. And I think my writing has gotten stronger since the diagnosis, because I’m gentler with myself, less vicious. Before, I felt an anger at the world and with myself that I couldn’t understand. I thought I was just a miserable jerk, messed up in ways that I couldn’t comprehend. Now I have a deeper understanding of why I am the way I am, and that’s helped me to be more forgiving — of myself and other people in my life. I get now that everybody is born into their body and has to deal with that. And it’s not always easy.

Andrew: You start “Coach’s Kid” by talking about how you felt “unforgivably different” even at the age of seven. What had happened in your life, at such a young age, that you knew you were not like the people around you?

John Paul: I had gone to school and met other kids. I just couldn’t figure out how to talk to them. Whenever I did say something, they would laugh at me or make fun of me. So I would pretend to have a stomachache to get to stay home. My mom eventually became aware that I was faking and wrote a letter to my teacher. After my teacher read it, she took me out in the hallway. I remember this teacher was a little person, and I was the tallest kid in class. So we were about the same height. And she said, “Your mother doesn’t think you want to go to school. Why would she think that?” And I didn’t answer. I just knew I had to go to school after that, because I didn’t like being singled out.

It was a public school in a dusty, lower-middle-class prison town in Upstate New York, so it wasn’t particularly challenging on the academic side, but I struggled socially. Eventually I became pretty good at sports, which gained me respect. The boys lay off you if you can really hit a baseball. That made it possible for me to pass as normal, even though I was still a bit strange. If a kid was nice to me, for example, I would get obsessed with him. It was usually one boy at a time. I was never good with a group. Then, if the boy I was obsessed with made fun of me, all of a sudden I was like, All right, we’re done. He’s not safe anymore.

Andrew: You’ve written about a friend you had since middle school and how he would make fun of you. But rather than avoiding him, you stayed friends, because you felt like he was acknowledging who you were.

John Paul: You’re talking about my friend who died in 2021. Since then I’ve written many essays to him and about him.* He’s my spiritual audience, which is odd, because he was not a good person. And most people could see that before I could. He was super friendly to me when we were hanging out one-on-one, but he became vicious in groups. If I said something weird, he would mock me. I always had the sense that, even though he was hostile, he was voicing something that everyone else just politely looked away from. He was saying things that other people wouldn’t tell me because it made them uncomfortable.

I think I latched on to him because he had an obsessiveness that I recognized. We could really get each other laughing when it was just the two of us. Our conversations were unlike the ones I had with other people. Neither one of us really knew how to act in groups, but together we could just be silly and not worry about the rules.

Andrew: Do you think his hostility toward you in groups was a way for him to camouflage himself?

John Paul: Yes. Right after he died, I wrote this chaotic, sloppy book about our high-school years. When my wife read the first draft of it, I asked her if he came across as too unlikable, and she said, “No, because you made it obvious that he hates himself.” I had no idea I had done that, and when I revisited my memories of him, I saw that all of his behaviors are the behaviors of someone who hates himself. He was certainly doing what you’re saying: exploiting a weakness in me so that people wouldn’t notice his pain.

Bullies are interesting characters. I believe people act that way for a reason. I think they’re often going through something as bad or as brutal as what they’re putting others through. I can never say for sure what was going on with my friend, but I do know that he came from a very rough household. He was arrested many times for doing violent things. In his last few years he’d become so dangerous that I was trying to kick him out of my life. And I suspect that, like me, he had some sort of neurodivergence. I feel like I can finally talk to him about it now that he’s gone, because he’s not dangerous anymore. He’s just that kid I knew all those years ago. It’s easy, after someone dies, to remember only the good times, but I don’t think that’s what I’m doing when I write about him. I’m acknowledging what was difficult about him and also trying to uncover who he might have been, beyond what he showed everyone.

Andrew: You’re sort of doing what he did to you — seeing him the way he really is — but in a more compassionate way.

John Paul: I hope so.

Andrew: “Coach’s Kid” is partly about playing football growing up. The stereotype of a person with autism is the opposite of a jock. Do you feel like that’s a misconception, and maybe being a jock just helps people hide it better?

John Paul: I don’t know. I do know that when you’re the quarterback of an undefeated varsity football team, nobody asks if you’re on the spectrum. And I suspect my experience isn’t unique. When I think about my former teammates, some of them are definitely not stereotypical “cool jocks.” They weren’t getting lots of girls and all that. They were mostly awkward guys. They would party, but they didn’t all seem like they were comfortable doing it. I might just be projecting. I will say that Friday Night Lights [a 2004 film about a west Texas high-school football team — Ed.] came out when I was a senior in high school, and I hated it, because it wasn’t the world my teammates and I were in at all. Most of us had difficult fathers and were trying to earn their love. In the movie the difficult fathers are portrayed as caricatures. Tim McGraw plays a dad who duct tapes a football into his kid’s arms and punches him. I mean, I’m sure that kind of thing goes on, but in my experience the paternal pressures were subtler. There was more love involved, more complexity.

Andrew: Do you think you would have played sports growing up if it hadn’t been something that earned your father’s approval?

John Paul: I don’t know, because I can’t imagine a life without sports. During childhood it made me so happy to be able to talk to my dad about something. I think I would have tended toward baseball on my own, but football was my dad’s favorite sport. So I made it my obsession. Though I liked thinking about football, I did not like getting whaled on. Practices and games were just brutal. Sometimes I wonder if my dad put me at quarterback because it’s a safer position. And because I could really throw a football. That might be wishful thinking, though.

My father and I don’t talk much about the past, because I think he feels confused about it all. We’ve grown into a place where we’re mostly just good, and I don’t think either of us wants to mess that up.

Andrew: How did he react when you told him you got a diagnosis of autism?

John Paul: I haven’t told him. I haven’t used that word with him or my mom. She knows something’s up, though. She knows I’ve been talking to psychiatrists. I’m just afraid to use that word, because I don’t know what it means to her. I’m afraid she will feel ashamed for not having done more for me. They didn’t have a lot of money when I was small. Before my dad became a teacher, they were both working so many jobs. One year they had fifteen W-2s between them. Also in my family, if you’ve got something weird going on, that’s your problem, you know? So to tell them this would be to break the rules. I’m very much a rule follower.

Another reason I can’t tell them is that I can’t predict how it will go. I like to be able to predict how things will go, or else I don’t do them. I know my parents worry about me a lot. They just can’t say, We’re worried about you, because that would break the rules. So we have to have these breezy conversations.

The attitude in my house was: if there’s anything that’s not working, fix it. But autism can’t be “fixed.” It can’t be changed. And it’s done me so much good to accept, at the age of thirty-six, that I’m going to be this way until I die. I see now that when I get depressed or anxious, it’s because I’m dealing with circumstances that are incredibly stimulating for me, and I’m overwhelmed. But I struggle with what that means for my parents and me, because I’d always hoped that I could change for them. My father and mother criticize people a lot. Sometimes they criticize someone whose struggles align with mine. And I just don’t know how to tell them. Maybe it’s a good thing that I live far away from them, because if I were close to them, I might still be trying to perform “normalcy.” I used to drink to get through stressful experiences, which is actually common with autistic people: using substances to mask. And I really want to stay sober for the long haul.

Andrew: I’ve read that women may be underdiagnosed as autistic because they are better at hiding it. But as a result they also experience a lot more depression and anxiety from the inability to be themselves.

John Paul: When I read about autistic adults, it’s the women’s stories that feel most like mine, and the autistic people who have reached out to me about my work in The Sun have been primarily women. I think maybe that’s because I learned to mask. Instead of letting myself get intense and show enthusiasm for something, I would sort of crush it, swallow it, eat it, push it down. So people thought, Oh, he’s just a shy kid.

Even at this point in my life, I’m afraid to get excited and happy, because I’ve been made fun of so much for that. So I try not to let it spill out. When the show Curb Your Enthusiasm came out, I loved the title. It’s what I do all day.

I used to be into sports stats when I was younger, and I can remember overhearing other kids saying something wrong. I would just think, Don’t correct them. Because if I started correcting them, I wasn’t going to stop.

Andrew: No one wants to be that guy who says, “Actually . . .”

John Paul: There’s a little bit of that guy who lives in my heart, and I’m always trying to keep him at bay.

Andrew: Are your essays we’ve published part of a longer work?

John Paul: Yes, I’m writing a memoir about my diagnosis, and also about my friend who died, because his death coincided with my wife encouraging me to get help. I’d been battling to stay sober and talking to a therapist, and when my friend died, I thought, I have to get better for my wife, and for my parents, and for myself.

My rule for the book is that it should explore everything that I’m not allowed to tell anyone, everything that I instinctively believe I’m supposed to hide. And I’ve been really enjoying the process. It’s been more fruitful for me than any medical help I’ve received. I’ve taken lots of medications with horrible side effects. Some made me feel like I’d been poisoned, I was so sick and anxious. Therapy has helped a bit, but because there’s a social component to it, I often leave therapy more stressed than I was when I walked in.

Writing this book is just making real everything I was hoping I could eradicate, and it’s been so good for me. And it’s also hard, because a lot of what I’m writing about is embarrassing to me.

Andrew: But if you’re trying to escape the negative psychological effects of hiding, maybe the cure is openness.

John Paul: Yes. Removing the mask. For sure.

*Two of these essays have been published in The Sun: “Hey, Man” and “Beacon.”