LOOK ME IN THE EYE: My Life With Asperger's – John Elder Robison

Should you happen to make the acquaintance of any Aspergian but me, beware. You just might find yourself face down at the bottom of a hole that's deeper than you are tall, hearing your acquaintance laugh as he or she walks off and leaves you there.

I know the above generalization isn't fair, as I'm aware of only one Aspergian who did this. But I offer it as an example of the sort of socially inappropriate and sometimes dangerous “tricks” one can encounter among the often hyper-brilliant, super-delicate social outliers named after the late Hans Asperger, a Viennese pediatrician credited with diagnosing autistic symptoms in children in 1944. Modern psychology classifies this syndrome on the mild end of the autistic spectrum.

I exclude myself from the danger list mainly because my Asperger's lacks the hyper brilliance. Alas, though, the fragility is mine in spades. It's what turns my face red whenever someone I don't know looks at me for longer than a passing glance. My long-dead mother's long ago warning kicking in maybe, making me unconsciously afraid the stranger's going to offer me candy. But this is not about me. This is about me. This is about John Elder Robison and his memoir Look Me in the Eye: My Life With Asperger's.

Robison's the only Aspergian I know of who has lowered someone head first into a deep pit and then gone back to the house for something to eat. The victim was his younger brother. “When I came out,” he says, “Varmint was nowhere to be seen. I had expected he would have gotten out in the time I was gone, but he was still in there. I kicked some wood chips in to see if filling the hole would cause him to emerge. He just yelled. I pulled him out before the neighbors heard him.” When his brother, eight years younger, complained, Robison reminded him the object was to test whether the hole would make a good trap. Playing such “tricks” had become Robison's way of winning acceptance despite his odd behavior, which ordinarily repelled other children from him.

Hans Asperger and young patient

Robison wasn't diagnosed with Asperger's until he was forty, and had overcome many of the condition's more obvious symptoms. But he didn't fool a therapist friend, who gently confronted him after noticing “certain odd things about me” but never mentioning them. He gave Robison a book, Asperger’s Syndrome, by Tony Attwood. “I picked it up. Warily. 'What the hell is this?'” He started reading, and recognized himself in the list of symptoms. These included problems with body language such as eye-to-eye contact, appropriate facial expressions, postures, and gestures, and a lack of emotional interaction with others:

It did fit me. Completely. It was like a revelation. I realized that all the psychologists and psychiatrists and mental heath workers I had been sent to as a child had completely missed what [his friend] had seen.

As a child, I had been told I was smart but I was lazy. Reading the pages, I realized I wasn’t lazy, just different.

I knew that I did not look at people when I talked to them. Hell, I had been beaten up and criticized for that all through my childhood. But until I read that book I had never realized my behavior was unusual. I had never understood why people treated me the way they did. It had always seemed so mean, so unfair. It had never occurred to me that other people might find what I did (or did not do) naturally disconcerting. The answer to “Why won’t you look me in the eye, young man?” was right there in the book.

The realization was staggering. There are other people like me. So many, in fact, that they have a name for us.

I kept reading, willing my eyes to pick up the pace. My head spun.

 

“I had always felt like a fraud or, even worse, a sociopath waiting to be found out,” he says. “But the book told a very different story. I was not a heartless killer waiting to harvest my first victim. I was normal, for what I am.”

Being a “normal” Aspergian has positive sides, as well, one gracing some people with an exceptionally detailed memory. Another, great mental speed. “No one knows why one person has a gift like this and another doesn’t,” he says, “but I’ve met other Aspergian people with savantlike abilities like mine. In my opinion, part of this ability—which I seem to have been born with—comes from my extraordinary powers of concentration. I have an extremely sharp focus.

” These heightened abilities along with a love for mechanical things, an uncommon capacity for patience, and a taste for audacity were his ticket out of hell.

Dropping his brother into the hole was an early example of his mischievous yen for risk. He found that playing pranks in school made him popular despite his odd social behavior. “In school, I became the class clown. Out of school, I became a trickster. I made quite a few trips to the principal’s office in those years. But it was worth it.

“I was good at thinking up tricks. When I did, the other kids laughed with me, not at me. We all laughed at the teachers or whomever else I poked fun at. As long as my pranks lasted, I was popular. It felt great, having other kids admire me and like me.”

These practical jokes grew in sophistication until they started showing “a nasty edge.” He blames this on sadness at how other kids had treated him over the years that curdled into a simmering anger. Fortunately no one was injured, but Robison understands he came close to disaster. “If I had not found electronics and music, I might well have come to a bad end” he says. His route to salvation started at age thirteen with the Christmas gift of a RadioShack computer kit. He assembled it, and moved on to tinkering with old radios and TVs. Before long he was devising improvements to electronic guitar amplifiers, making them louder and “hotter”, and by the time he was sixteen he'd dropped out of school and was hanging out in bars applying his innovations to equipment for local bands.

“Soon the musicians and I moved from changing the sound of the amplifier to creating entirely new sound effects. In those days, reverb and tremolo were the only effects available to most musicians. I began to experiment, producing new effects, new sounds.” Word spread, he began traveling with bands. One day his path crossed that of Ace Frehley, guitarist with the headliner band KISS. Frehley was trying futilely to rig his guitar with a smoke bomb. Robison stepped in and got it to work. This led to touring gigs with KISS devising the special effects that would give the band its signature pyrotechnically spectacular shows.

Robison's interests and skills grew beyond the music scene, taking him into the corporate world where he helped design some of the first video games and talking toys. He rose into management positions, but soon found his technical talents atrophying as he struggled to improve his social skills:

There was a trade-off for that increased emotional intelligence. I look at circuits I designed twenty years ago and it’s as if someone else did them.

Some of my designs were true masterpieces of economy and functionality. Many people told me they were expressions of a creative genius. And today I don’t understand them at all. When I look at those old drawings, I am reminded of a book I read as a teenager, Flowers for Algernon. Scientists took a retarded janitor and made him a genius, but it didn’t last. His brilliance faded away before his eyes. That’s how I feel sometimes, looking back at the creative engineering I’ve done. Those designs were the fruit of a part of my mind that is no longer with me. I will never invent circuits like that again. I may conceive of something like Ace Frehley’s light guitar, but someone else will have to design it.

Despite this shift in skills, he says some of the old hangups lurk nearby. “I have taught myself to act 'normal.' I can do it well enough to fool the average person for a whole evening, maybe longer. But it all falls apart if I hear something that elicits a strong emotional reaction from me that is different from what people expect. In an instant, in their eyes, I turn into the sociopathic killer I was believed to be forty years ago.”

These days he owns a specialty automobile service company in Springfield, Mass. He lectures, is involved in autism research and is the Neurodiversity Scholar in Residence at the College of William & Mary.

He cites a 2007 report from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimating that one person in one-hundred-fifty falls somewhere on the autistic spectrum.

“Asperger’s is not a disease. It’s a way of being,” he concludes. “There is no cure, nor is there a need for one.”

[Find more Friday's Forgotten Books links at Todd Mason's amazingly eclectic blog]

Asshole or Asperger's?

Since we are talking about me, may we assume the second option, that my countless and varied episodes of assholery can reasonably be blamed on the neurological aberration known as Asperger's Syndrome? A comparatively mild condition on the autism spectrum that nonetheless can wreak havoc in a person's life? May we? If so, we can go ahead and slip on the 4-D glasses and settle in for a glimpse of my long, strange, angst-drenched (I'll try not to get any on you) trip. But if you can't--and I'm speaking directly to you, you there with the cynical smirk!—if you are unable to give me the benefit of any plausibly allowable doubt here as a guest on my blog, well then dammit you can buzz the fuck off. Go read another James Patterson novel!

Those of you still with me, in particular those of my acquaintances who have witnessed or experienced examples of my socially inappropriate behavior, please understand I am not trying to escape responsibility for the injuries and embarrassments I have caused. I'm not looking to excuse what I've done. My hope is to ease the sting of presumed intent by identifying the underlying reflexes that prompt many of my boorish actions. Virtually all perceptions of premeditation with these blunders are illusory. The blunders spring to life instantaneously. They're intuitive, born of a fallible reading of nuance. Self-protection for an Aspergian is tricky, risky business. The occasions when I've lost my temper with people, or treated them meanly, have haunted me from as far back as I can remember. My memory's nowhere near as comprehensive as the typical Aspergian's, but those of times I've unnecessarily hurt people are the ones that always seem to stick.

My self-diagnosis of what I've come to believe is Asperger's began while reading John Elder Robison's memoir, Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's, This book not only opened my eyes (figuratively, ha ha) it emboldened me to shed a little light on my own personality dysfunctions. I want to be forgivable, of course, even liked, if not loved, else I might never have recognized in myself some of the symptoms Robison describes so intimately. His suffering was exponentially greater than mine. Then, too, his brilliance in overcoming the paralysis of believing himself an inexplicable outcast compares in little measure with my stubborn trudging through the passive daydreaming my obsessively critical lawyer father constantly paired with “feeble-mindedness.” I'd fixed my bearing on an idea of normalcy, to escape the neurotic tangle of physical tics, asthma, skin rashes, self-reproach and thoughts of suicide to an existence that promised happiness.

Mine and Robison's trouble understanding and communicating with people pushed us along divergent paths. He found solace in inanimate objects, machines in particular awakened his self-confidence: “No matter how big the machine, I am in charge. Machines don’t talk back. They are predictable. They don’t trick me, and they’re never mean.” My path went inward, my “feeble-minded” daydreaming leading me ultimately to the magic of words. The lawyer could follow me there only by proxy. He'd embedded reflexes in me that foretold spyware, yet my stubbornness, bequeathed unwittingly by him in his Norwegian genes, proved an effective enough firewall to preserve at least a fig-leaf sense of privacy.

I also turned to inanimate objects, but my curiosity focused on fantasy rather than mechanics. Even something humble as a rock was alive to me, with feelings I worried about hurting. I think my mother encouraged this. This inclination has stayed with me, albeit my emotional attachment is less empathic. Now, I see things mostly in the role of scapegoat--the laptop gets cursed when my fingers hit the wrong key, the hammer hears shouted obscenities when it hits my thumb while I'm trying to hang a picture, the picture hissed at when it refuses to hang straight. I know this is not sane, but it's safer taking anger out on things than on people. And I do sometimes apologize to the things after I've calmed down. But only when we're alone.

Robison's discovery that his mind worked rapidly understanding complex problems and that he had an exceptionally detailed memory opened up a new life for him. These unusual traits converged with his mechanical savvy and an unusual capacity for patience to launch electronics as the vehicle that gave him a ride he'd not dreamed possible. After dropping out of high school, he became so inventive designing lighting and audio circuitry on his kitchen table for local nightclubs the rock band KISS learned of his skills and paid him to trick out some electric guitars with special effects. The group soon made him its special effects expert. In turn the Aspergian whiz kid made KISS famous for its spectacular live performances.

With dutiful effort Robison made gradual progress learning social cues and mastering the “illogical” small talk that enabled him to feel more comfortable in social settings. Same with me, although my deficit in this area was nowhere near as severe. This could be because my mind works much slower than Robison's, more cautiously. Not all Aspergians are alike. Our traits can vary widely. After reading Robison's memoir I sought out more information on Asperger's, to help me better understand the syndrome and to help me with my own diagnosis. This is from Adult Asperger's Syndrome: The Essential Guide, by Kenneth Roberson, Ph.D.: 

 The complexity of Asperger’s can be distilled down to one main idea – trouble understanding what goes on in other people’s minds.

So far, so good. In another section, Roberson explains the way many if not most Aspergians cope with this shortcoming:

The neurological vulnerabilities of someone with Asperger’s make them especially sensitive to ambiguity and unpredictability, which are typically overwhelming. Their counter-reaction is to seek orderliness, certainty and uniformity. To do that they focus on facts in the present moment, they take ideas and words exactly at their most usual and basic sense, and they avoid figurative or metaphorical thinking. The world of Asperger’s is an orderly one. Facts, rather than presumptions, are a priority. Doubt, uncertainty, and vagueness are avoided. Literal speech, focusing on things exactly as they are while leaving out figurative explanations and assumptions, is a hallmark of Asperger’s.

For me, while the distillate's the same, my coping, by contrast, is primarily subterranean. I'd learned to hide in my imagination, so it was natural for me to begin exploring there when I felt bold enough to venture outward. This led to my working out above-ground difficulties without the pressure of someone looking over my shoulder. Books, newspapers and other reading matter, along with stumbles, missteps and serious blunders comprised the resources I worked with in my secret little chamber. I went above ground to test hypotheses on real people, which gained me incrementally the successes that kept me going. My test method was to represent my findings in words, both oral and written. I taught myself basic wordcraft this way. Writing has been my life raft over the years—a four-decade career in newspapers, which fed my Social Security account. These days I blog and write fiction to preserve my illusion of sanity.

I nearly forgot to mention another neurological aberration that has complicated things. A psychiatrist diagnosed this one: Attention Deficit Disorder. It was a late diagnosis that identified a layer of difficulty over those of my as-yet undiagnosed Asperger's. All the more incentive to dive to my private place, where ideas whirl and dance before me with less risk of interruption by superficial stimuli. Yet danger is not completely absent there. Plenty of bad memories sleep below in the dark, and many can be awakened by resonances from above. My little hideout in one sense sits on a dormant volcano of bad juju. It's my good fortune to have a mojo, besides my writing, that is fairly effective in keeping the bad stuff at bay: certain musical strains. Two come to mind at the moment.

One is a certain section in The Nutcracker Suite. I don't know what it means, how it relates to the story, or even which of the eight numbers it's in or where it is in the number. It's only a few bars. I know only that whenever I hear it I start to cry. It's a purely emotional response to an unexpected triumphal-sounding advent of brass that follows a stretch of tones that seems to suggest hardship or trial. I've surmised that somehow this moving tonal progression taps deep into my subconscious with a healing touch on some long ago forgotten hurt.

Here's another that does the same thing for me. It's from the 1968 Broadway musical Hair, and it's called “The Flesh Failures.” The lyrics start out grim:

We starve, look at one another short of breath,
Walking proudly in our winter coats,
Wearing smells from laboratories,
Facing a dying nation of moving paper fantasy,
Listening for the new told lies with supreme visions of
Lonely tunes.
Somewhere, inside something, there is a rush of
Greatness.
Who knows what stands in front of our lives;
I fashion my future on films in space.
Silence tells me secretly everything, everything...

At the end comes the chorus, bringing the healing tears. It consists of a single phrase, repeated over and over, like a mantra: Let the Sunshine In.