On the Outside with Christina's World by Andrew Wyeth
my autistic journey of self-discovery and acceptance inspired by Andrew Wyeth's Christina's World
When I was in college, I had a journal with Christina’s World by Andrew Wyeth on the cover, and looking at it, I always felt connected to Christina. How she seemed so alone and so separate. Her outreached left hand grasped the ground, and her tense posture always made me think she wanted to be at that house so far up the hill, but she couldn’t get there. Or it was so much work to get there.
I always sensed that she didn’t know how to bridge that gap. That she was stuck. That it’s just too hard, and she will always be separated from the rest of the world. That she will always be alone.
Because that is how I felt.
In my journal, I wrote pages and pages of thoughts and feelings that tried to analyze my place in the world and my own feeling of separation. My own struggle to feel like part of the rest of the world. I deeply know what it feels like to be separate. To be different but to not know why.
Wyeth didn’t include Christina’s face at all so her anonymity made it easy to put myself into this artwork. To make it about me.
That’s what we do with art, and that’s what makes art so special. When we’re going through a heartbreak, we listen to sad songs. When we want to laugh, feel moved, cry, or experience adventure, we pick a movie according to how we want to feel.
Art is the same way. We find ourselves in art so we can feel, heal, and see ourselves from new angles. It’s not the only function of art, of course, but it’s the part of art that I love most.
I didn’t spend all that time with Christina’s World just to wallow in my separateness, though. That would be too depressing. I find hope in this painting, too. Even though I feel Christina’s struggle, the title, Christina’s World, tells me that she was at peace in her world. That her world was separate from the bigger world, but that she was safe there, at home there. That part of her was choosing herself—alone in this moment of peace.
The words that filled my journal represented the depth of my own inner world, which only I knew, but it took me twenty years to find peace in my own world. For years and years, I analyzed why I was different.
Why couldn’t I be like everyone else?
Why do I feel so alien?
How can I fix myself?
How can I mold myself to be what fits in the world?
Layers and layers peeled back would make me feel better about it, yes, but the difference was still there. I never had an answer. Nothing ever worked. I still felt different.
I still feel different.
Years after I filled the last pages of that journal, I learned it was indeed a lot of work for Wyeth’s protagonist to get up to the house at the top of the hill. Christina Olson, a neighbor of Andrew Wyeth, had a degenerative muscle condition. Unable to walk, she chose to crawl instead of using a wheelchair (Source: MOMA).
No amount of inner work, journaling, therapy, medication, or anything is suddenly going to make her able to stand up and walk up that hill and be like everyone else. It always will be extra work. She will always be separate in some way. It’s her choice to be at peace with that, at peace in her own world, but it doesn’t make it any easier or even possible to crawl up that hill when everyone else can walk.
I’ve just come back from the National Art Education Association conference. I’ve attended nine of these national conferences, and each one has been my own version of Christina’s hill to crawl up—my own version of feeling separate. Each time, I feel overwhelmed and frozen, spending more time in my hotel room in recovery than in sessions, walking through loud corridors of people feeling as if my senses are under attack. I’ve blamed shyness, introversion, and anxiety. Still, nothing fully explains the feeling in my body when I walk into the conference. The complete shutdown that I experience. The days it takes to recover and feel normal once I am home.
I love art education, and I love art teachers. I could talk about art all day with anyone, but when you drop me into the depths of this conference, I freeze up. I run from people. I hide. My voice catches in my throat, and I can barely get myself to even say hi to someone I know and like, let alone a stranger.
This mystery has plagued me year after year—each year thinking, it won’t happen again, I can do it this time. I’m in a good place; there’s no reason why this conference should be so hard. There’s no reason I, a person who has dedicated her entire life to art and art education, should feel so separate from a national conference on my favorite topic. But then I show up, and it happens again. Again and again, I wonder what is happening, and I still end up going the following year, telling myself I am being ridiculous and to just suck it up and “be normal.”
The house on the hill is still so far away, and it feels impossible to get there with everyone else.
I’ve been trying to write about Christina’s World for years. It was going to be in my book, but something was always just out of grasp when I tried to write about it—some mystery that hadn’t been solved yet—the mystery of my difference, my separation, my challenge—a missing piece.
I feel like Christina has been trying to tell me something that I just couldn’t understand.
I know it now. I’ve figured out the missing piece.
It’s autism.
I am different. I am separate. My inner world does not match up with the inner world of most of the other people in this world. I’ve known it all along, and it is a relief to know that it’s actually true that I am not making it up.
I no longer have to gaslight or shame myself.
This NAEA is the first conference I have attended since knowing that I am autistic, and it was the same as it always was. I still hid in my hotel room, got migraines from the light and noise, avoided social interaction, felt alien, all the things. I’m on day 3 of being home, and I am still exhausted. Of course I am, I’m an autistic person putting myself into a sensory and social minefield.
But some part of me thought that now that I knew “the problem,” it wouldn’t impact me quite as much. It’s as if Christina thought that because she knows that she can’t walk, suddenly, just with the awareness of the problem, she’d be able to walk again.
But what I did a little less of this time was judge myself for my response. A little less guilt and a little more understanding. Less judgment, more accommodation. More grace.
And that’s what life has looked like since this new discovery. It’s asking myself a lot of questions.
Where am I pushing through—forcing myself to try to walk when all I can do is crawl?
Where am I judging myself for not being able to walk when everyone else can?
How am I holding myself to standards set by people who don’t know what it is like to be unable to walk?
How am I not recognizing the exhausting impact of living with this invisible yet disabling condition?
Where am I forcing myself up the hill to interact with others when really I would rather be alone with my thoughts in a field?
How am I not honoring my natural way of being?
This is my work now.
There is no longer any problem to figure out or to fix.
Now is the work of acceptance, of accommodation, of self-compassion, of rest, and of understanding.
Of not forcing myself into big conferences that make me feel terrible. I won’t be attending any more NAEA conferences as an attendee.
I am choosing to rest in the field and to allow myself this moment of peace without being crushed under the weight of my perceived expectations of the neurotypical world.
I am choosing to allow myself to be who I am and how I am.
I look at Christina and see an entire universe represented in Wyeth’s portrayal of her. And I see how she has quietly shown me the way all these years.