While visiting my parents last year and looking for some late-night reading material, I flipped through my mom’s worn-out copy of one of Temple Grandin’s memoirs. I got only about 50 pages in, I confess, but in the opening chapters, Grandin described the way she perceived the world as a person with Asperger’s syndrome: how, for instance, she could vividly picture objects and places in her mind then manipulate them, mentally viewing them from angles she’d never seen with her own eyes.
The next morning, I mentioned Grandin’s thought process — this way of “seeing” things — to my parents over breakfast. My mother’s reaction was immediate: She thought it was fascinating. But for my autistic father and me, Grandin had managed to put something intangible into words; many of the ideas and mental processes she described were startlingly familiar, even if we’d never thought of them as anything but business as usual.
Most people, I think, would be incensed if you inaccurately called them “autistic.” But when, over the last two years, I’ve mentioned to someone that I have Asperger’s, that admission is often met with laughter or incredulity. And while I’m certainly not offended — usually all they’re trying to do is tell me that they don’t find me somehow deficient or don’t picture me however they picture an “autistic” person — it puts me in an odd place. How can I be proud or ashamed of the way I’m wired when I’ve never known anything else?
As a species, humans don’t think much about the way we think. So long as I seem to make the mental jumps from point A to C, nobody really notices or cares if I ever get to B. That’s how I like to think of the way I experience Asperger’s, or so-called “high-functioning” autism (an outdated label). On a good day, I deal with adult life’s problems approximately as well as anyone else does, without special help, even if I solve those problems using vastly different logics. And because the way I navigate the world is evidently similar enough to a nonautistic — or “neurotypical” — person, I often pass as quirky, not functionally different.
I’ll give you an example using something I find very difficult: reading facial expressions. I gather that most people can intuitively “know” people’s feelings by looking at their face. But I have to break expressions down into parts — eyes, mouth, brow and so on — and consider each facial structure individually. Then, I compare that combination of features to what I know certain expressions are composed of: Most people frown when sad or grumpy, for instance, but some also frown while deep in thought. That’s how I “read” them. It’s a multistep process, but it works.
Of course, human faces aren’t so easily quantified, and sometimes I just get it flat wrong. (When my mother cried at my high school graduation, I had to frequently stop myself from asking what upset her.) And there are some people I find inscrutable, no matter how hard I try. But by and large, I’ve become very good at it, and I’ve had 20 years to practice.
Nonautistic people have misunderstandings all the time; I’m not special in that regard. So why does it matter if I’m “wired” differently, if I’m not so obviously affected by my autism that people can’t help but notice? Until I came to UC Berkeley, that was more or less my way of thinking. Autism, at least in the competitive public schools I attended, was a liability; to avoid both ridicule and the bureaucratic nightmare of opting out of learning disability programs, my parents and I spent an enormous amount of time and energy training me not to do Asperger’s-y things.
Another example: one of my most visible, classically autistic behaviors has always been my difficulty looking people in the eye. It’s often physically uncomfortable for me, like staring into the headlights of an oncoming car. But my father conditioned a 6-year-old me to do it anyway, even going so far as inventing a “look at me” hand gesture he’d use when he spied my gaze inappropriately slipping. And maybe you’ve spoken to me and noticed it yourself — though I’ve yet to master the delicate rhythm of making and breaking eye contact so crucial to polite conversation, I can usually fake it well enough to get by.
But as an adult with Asperger’s — an adult entering a world in which one in 68 children is diagnosed with an autism-spectrum disorder — I no longer try so desperately to hide. I’m less afraid these days to avert my eyes or ask for clarification when I can’t tell from someone’s face if they’re being sarcastic. If, statistically, everyone has met or will meet someone whose brain is wired like mine, my behavior won’t exist in a vacuum. Perhaps a day will come when Asperger’s won’t be this nebulous thing I have to compensate for or rationalize away but merely a different way of functioning, like someone writing with their left hand instead of their right. And in the meantime, the least I can do is help those around me understand how I think, just as I’m always growing better at understanding them.
My mother later met Temple Grandin by chance on a flight to Philadelphia. She told Grandin she had an autistic child in college and asked if she had any words of wisdom. Grandin’s sage advice to me? “Get a job.” Anti-climactic? Maybe. But the idea that Asperger’s isn’t so strange anymore so as to leave me unemployably, alienatingly weird? That sentiment is damn uplifting.
“Off the Beat” columns are written by Daily Cal staff members until the spring semester’s regular opinion writers are selected.
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