A Random Walk with Asperger's Syndrome

My Developmental Journey

Copyright © 2009 by Paul Ford

Childhood

My mother says I was born one month prematurely. I've read that as few as three weeks of prematurity can place a child at risk for developmental problems. Another potential risk factor is pregnancies that are spaced too closely together. My sister was born a little more than a year and a half before me, and the time interval between my parents and their next older siblings was even less.

As I remember it, kindergarten was low-impact and low-demand. You showed up, they gave you stuff to do, and you did it. Then you went home, where you belonged, sort of.

I attended the Merion Square School (now the site of a Montessori school) in Gladwyne, a small town in Pennsylvania. The first time I remember having difficulty there was in art class in one of the early grades. The teacher passed out some materials and asked us to draw something. The blank piece of paper, which seemed almost as big as I was, frightened me. Unable to think of anything to draw, I froze. That everyone else was working busily only made matters worse. I looked for an escape route, but the only place you could go was the bathroom, and an adult had to accompany you there.

I hated school and sometimes tried to avoid going there by pretending to be sick. Everyone tried to get me to go back to school, but it never occurred to them to try to find out why I didn't want to go in the first place. Unable to talk about my feelings, I had a generalized kind of fear, a fear that was usually untied to anything specific. To this day, I think that hating school is a sign of excellent mental health and perfect social adjustment.

I must have been a difficult child to nurture, as I hated it when people touched me or got too close.

One of my first meetings with the opposite sex came in the early grades. I had a crush on a pretty brunette named Janet West. She lived at the bottom of the hill on Waverly Road, a couple of blocks from our house. With the help of a co-conspiratorial aunt, I once left a small bottle of perfume on young Janet's front doorstep. Lacking the nerve to speak to her, I rang the doorbell and ran.

I could stop the narration of my love life here. Most of my encounters with the opposite sex have been variations on the Janet West theme. Much hopeful longing and yearning accompanied by much running in the opposite direction.

The perfume incident was my last interaction, if you can call it that, with Janet or any other female in elementary school. It was also the last time I ever bought perfume for a woman.

As a child, I hated quiet sounds like the rustling of leaves in the breeze or the soft feeling of the sheets against my body when I rolled over in bed at night. It was as if there were a sensitive microphone at the point of contact between the cover and the bed sheet, the sound amplified almost to the point of a painful feedback squeal.

My mother said I never spoke baby talk (a language I now know was invented by adults, not children). On the contrary, I was able to use adult words at an early age. They found this annoying rather than cute.

I never wanted to be an adorable child. It used to drive me crazy to see other children playing the role of the cute kid. Some of them behaved as if they wanted to be hugged or kissed or petted like an animal, so they could get what they wanted from adults. I didn't want anyone to touch me or pick me up. For their part, the adults seemed to like you only if you could fulfill their image of what a little kid should be. I knew some of these fawning children and most of them weren't stupid, needy airheads. They were learning their lesson in life, however, that to get what you wanted, you had to entertain the adult population and meet their expectations.

My family didn't buy its first boob tube until I was about five years old. That is, I lived in a healthy environment for brain development for the most important half-decade of life.

When I was older, however, my inability to follow the story line of a dramatic television show frustrated me. It seemed that everyone else was glued to the TV, and would sometimes have long discussions afterwards about the show. Who did what to whom, and why. The story lines were too complicated for me. I got lost by about the time the third character was introduced. I discovered that once you lose the thread of a story, you're lost for good. It was like falling off a bicycle. Each scene seemed to presume an understanding or appreciation of the previous scenes.

Seeing myself as different from others in this regard, I became jealous of them. Though I had little interest in socialization for its own sake, a part of me did want to have a social life like that of other people. From a distance, it looked like fun. I was slowly becoming aware of the importance of socialization in human society. All activities, inside or outside the family, seemed to depend on it.

The adults must have thought that I wasn't as demonstrative of my feelings as I might have been. They poked their fingers into my stomach or made loud noises in my presence, in what I believe was an attempt to provoke an emotional reaction in me.

Although I felt uncomfortable around people, I was equally uncomfortable with the prospect of becoming a hermit. (There would later be no hermit table at career night in school.)

Some of the boys in the neighborhood were reading and collecting comic books. Again, I had trouble following the story lines. People told me that my face resembled that of the character Henry, but my favorite was Casper the Friendly Ghost. I guess I could relate to the fact that he was generally benign and both of his environment and not of it at the same time.

One of my first recollections of the public library was my dismay that some of the books on the shelf weren't lined up straight. I was much more interested in straightening them than in finding out what was in them.

In the company of my peers, I often complained about school. On one occasion at the bus stop, another boy, who had heard enough of my bellyaching, said, "Come on, now. You know you like school. It's not so bad. You get to see all your friends there."

Until then I had thought that only a masochist or a pervert could like school. To me the other boy might as well have said, "You must like prison, because you get to see all your friends there." I did have a few friends at school, but I'd happily have sacrificed them in return for not having to go to school. A friend is only a friend, but school was torture. You might have a friend for a year or two, until you changed schools, but school went on for what seemed like forever.

Having feelings — even conflicted ones — was a good sign, I believed. At least I wasn't dead or completely numb. I valued my well-being enough to seek the protection of solitude. However poor my social skills may have been, at least my instinct for animal survival was in good working order.

In the sixth grade at the Valley Road School in Princeton, New Jersey, you stayed in the same homeroom most of the day and had the same teacher for every subject. There were exceptions for some classes that required special resources, such as shop, gym, and foreign languages. It was hell having the same lousy teacher all day, every day.

Mr Gutman was our French teacher. One day he asked us each to use the phrase "vous êtes" (you are) in a sentence. I'm ashamed to say that, when it was my turn, I said, "Vous êtes stupide" (you are stupid). I believed that his intention was to evaluate us on the grammatical correctness of our responses. As far as I was concerned, "vous êtes stupide" was a perfectly good construction. Like most earthlings, however, he took the remark personally, and spent the rest of the hour explaining to the class, in French, how he was going to torture me.

You might say that my public relations skills needed a little fine tuning. I knew I wasn't antisocial by the standards of Jack the Ripper, but I also understood that I was failing to fit into human society as well as I might have.

I also had trouble in French class with the use of the familiar form of conversational address ("tu"), as opposed to the more formal "vous." I tried to remember to use "tu" with my classmates, as I had been instructed, but it never felt right. Everyone is "vous" to me, no matter how familiar.

I hated the emotionally hollowed-out feeling in my body when I tried to conform to others' social expectations of me, or, worse, to lie about how I felt.

The following year we had separate classes for each subject.

Eugene Doherty, my seventh-grade English teacher, was a grizzled, crewcut World War II veteran who had a metal hook for a hand. Despite his disability, he carried on bravely and enthusiastically with his teaching and with his favorite sport, fly fishing.

He also loved to tell stories. Like the time, after completing his physical rehabilitation, he presented his wife with a hat he had decorated with flies laboriously but proudly tied with the help of his metal hand. She wasn't much of a fisherwoman, I guess, because whenever he needed an extra fly for his next fishing trip, he would poach one from the unworn hat. He eventually stripped it bare of its decorations.

I'm still scratching my head over that one. I know there's a moral in there somewhere; I just don't know where.

In any case, the administration had decided that we were now ready to read Real Literature. No more kid stuff, no more elementary-school stories involving Dick, Jane, and their dog, Spot. Our first book in that class was Homer's Odyssey. They might as well have presented it in the original Greek, for all I understood of it. While I was able to understand most of the individual words on the page, I couldn't grasp the whole, the story line. That is, I could see each of the individual dots, but, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't connect them.

Mr Dougherty's style of teaching by publicly ridiculing those who were falling behind only added to my misery.

Around that time, I started to read a little on my own, mostly in popular science, mathematical puzzles and games, and hobbies like coin collecting — activities that require a minimum of socialization. I also read the World Book, a middlebrow encyclopedia, which I believe a door-to-door salesman had sold to my parents. Sometimes I think that if the Britannica salesman had arrived first, I might have ended up at Harvard.

Fiction, however, continued to baffle me. To date, I've read and understood only a handful of fiction books, such as the James Bond series. On those rare occasions when I do read fiction, it's usually for the atmospherics, the settings, or in the case of 007, the escapism and the two-dimensional, cartoon-like characters. I have trouble with books that have a more complex plot or character development. I have no clue why the characters might be doing what they do or saying what they say.

When I was in school, the quickest way to get me to wish I were dead was to say the word "composition." Let's just say that I continued to contend poorly with blank pieces of paper. They caused my body to become tense and my mind to empty. I never wrote anything unless I was under the threat of the death penalty for not doing so.

As a child I made little effort to get outside of myself, to try to know or understand what others thought or felt about the world. When I did care, it was usually in a detached, distant way.

Early Teens

Our parents wanted my siblings and me to learn how to swim. I think that this was partly because swimming is fun and good exercise, and partly because they didn't want us to drown. My swimming teachers firmly believed that by breaking a stroke into its parts and by teaching them one at a time, step by step, they could teach me to swim.

They were wrong, of course, as emotion is stronger than matter. Between my lack of physical coordination and my fear of the water, the lessons didn't take. To this day, I still can't swim more than a few yards, despite much effort and anguish on everyone's part.

My teachers insisted that I swim with my face in the water. I wanted to keep it above water, as I associated holding my head underwater with drowning. No amount of practice or instruction has changed my feelings about being in the water.

I used to envy plump people. They seemed to float like corks, while I, then more of the string-bean type, sank.

Much later I discovered that to graduate from college you had to pass a swimming test. I think the rule was left over from World War II. Fortunately, I dropped out long before my inability to swim became an issue.

Around puberty, a time when I and the world around me were changing rapidly, I had a moment of clarity. I knew then that my developing sexuality would become a major source of frustration for me over the course of my life. This realization filled me with sadness, because I had always valued my sexual feelings as beautiful, special, and precious. I guess I must have been ill the day they taught you in school or church to hate or fear your sexuality.

In about the ninth or tenth grade, we had to memorize a poem in English class. I think I was able to memorize enough of it to pass the assignment, but I can now recall neither the name of the poet, nor the title of the poem, nor its subject. My guess is that the teacher's motivation was to give us the gift of the remembrance of some beautiful or meaningful words. I applaud the impulse, but it didn't work for me.

To me, the poem was a more-or-less random collection of words and phrases. As far as I could tell, even after dozens of re-readings and recitations, there was nothing beautiful or meaningful there to memorize, only separate, disconnected words. The memorization exercise only made me hate poetry and words even more.

You couldn't say these kinds of things to an English teacher, however. You might as well tell a priest that religion is a fraud.

In addition, I had special trouble with rhetoric that was more than about one hundred years old. To this day, I think that Shakespeare should be taught as a foreign language.

Speaking of Shakespeare, on one occasion much later in life, when I was in my mid-forties, I went to see a movie version of Romeo and Juliet with a friend and another couple. The action on screen took place in modern-day Verona, Italy, but the language was Shakespearean. I had flattered myself by then into believing that now that I was an adult, was holding down a good job, and had behind me a world of experience, surely I'd be able to follow the plot of this most familiar of love stories. Movie storytelling is, after all, mostly visual.

After the show we went to a cafe where we chatted and discussed the film. I'm ashamed to say that, much to my friends' amazement, I said something that betrayed my lack of comprehension of the plot. This is how deep these developmental issues are.

I've also discovered that the issue isn't visual information versus verbal information. Rather, it's about having had the life experiences that would allow you to enter into the action on the screen, and sympathize or empathize, or not, with the actors and the situations they find themselves in.

Despite my failure as a schoolboy to unravel the mysteries of poetry, literature, and composition, I never failed an English class, thank God. Perhaps this was so because I was a little better with the rules-based mechanics of writing, such as grammar, spelling, and punctuation. Nevertheless, the quirkiness of the English language and its lack of strict rules frustrated the mathematician in me. (Some of my readers in writing groups have said that my writing is mathematically precise.) I wondered why all subjects couldn't be as simple and straightforward as math.

While in school, I was like George Herbert Walker Bush — at war with the English language. Tongue-tied. Whenever I tried to say something, it came out as something else — an immensely frustrating experience. My difficulties with language only made me want to shut up even more. I did my best to wrestle most of my sentences to the deck, trying to make them behave by brute force. As far as I was concerned, language was an impediment to communication. There were far too many uncontrollable variables, too many ambiguities, for my taste.

My experience of assigned readings for English class in junior high school (now called middle school) and beyond was as follows: Starting with the first word of the assignment, I'd move my eyes from one word or phrase to the next, as I'd been taught in the earlier grades. Meanwhile, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't keep my mind from wandering. Reading was, therefore, exceptionally hard work. My word-by-word and phrase-by-phrase method of reading was so tedious that it took me several hours to complete a routine daily assignment.

I knew you weren't supposed to compare yourself to others, and that each person was unique and special and learns at their own pace. It seemed to me, however, that most of my classmates were completing their assignments in less time, with less effort, and with greater comprehension, than I.

At the end of each reading assignment, I recalled nothing of what I had supposedly just read. It was like this night after night throughout my school years. I couldn't tell you then and can't tell you now much about the plots or characters of any of the books we read in those classes.

I give myself credit for plowing all the way through those long, tiresome fiction books. Like tilling barren rock instead of fertile soil, it was a jarring, demanding experience. There were no emotional or intellectual fruits.

The actress JoBeth Williams, who was in my class at Brown University, and whom I didn't know, tells a story that illustrates this point. Soon after college, she joined the local repertory theater company there in Providence, Rhode Island. On one occasion, they were performing a Shakespearean play in a high school auditorium that had no formal stage with wings. When she finished her part, she needed to walk past some students on her way out. One of them grabbed her by the arm, and said, "Don't LEAVE him! He's a GOOD man, and he LOVES you!"

The student had understood what the play was about. I was like the other students, bored to the point of despair by their lack of comprehension.

As far as my parents and teachers were concerned, the only explanation for my repeated pattern of failure in English class was a lack of effort. This infuriated me, as I knew I was fruitlessly spending a great deal of time trying to read and understand the assignments.

To this day, nearly fifty years later, I'm still livid that no one took the time to evaluate, much less to help, me with my reading. What is more basic to one's educational development than reading? Teachers talk about evaluation as a necessary first step in education. That is, knowing up front where the student is in his or her educational development. Perhaps there's nothing they could have done for me, even if they had known that I had a problem. I don't know.

Here's what it would have taken: Someone, anyone, with an interest in me or my education — a teacher, counselor, parent, relative, or friend of the family. Any interested adult and fifteen minutes. Sit down with me and a fiction book written at my chronological grade level. Ask me to read two or three pages silently or aloud. Then close the book and ask, "What did you just read?" And wait for a response.

It's cruel to say to a child that no one is interested in your development as a person.

The usual excuses are that they don't have the time or money. I don't mind it if, for practical purposes, the system dedicates the bulk of its resources to the majority of students who fall into the middle of the curve — so long as it also makes adequate provisions for those who don't fall there.

On the quantitative side, my experience varied greatly from teacher to teacher. In the seventh grade, I had a good teacher who taught us about number systems with bases other than ten, which I loved. The following year I had a drill sergeant teacher whom I hated.

My days consisted of getting up in the morning and going through the motions of school, while avoiding as much social contact as possible. A neat trick, given that school seems to be designed to maximize social contact.

The curriculum and scheduling in the schools I attended lent themselves to a mechanistic approach to learning. At 8:05 you do this, at 8:25 you do that, exactly ten minutes between classes, all day, every day.

You tell me where the sun and stars are in the sky, and I'll tell you what you're doing — and even thinking — at any particular moment. Human beings are machines, according to our "educators." It appears that in the early part of the twentieth century, when school as we now know it was invented, psychologists believed that learning in animals and humans happened by way of rote repetition and punishment/reward conditioning. I'm told that the inspiration for the school bell came from Pavlov's experiments with salivating dogs.

To me a perfect day was one when I didn't have to do any of those ridiculous dances with people. I simply couldn't dance. I never knew where to put my feet. Even if I could memorize a step, a how-dee-do, a left-right-left, a do-si-do, it never felt right. On the contrary, it felt like what it was — the mechanical repetition of some movements I had memorized.

I now know that avoiding all social contact isn't a perfection to which one should aspire. On the contrary, it's sad.

I didn't know until much later that learning was about anything other than following instructions. I must have been sick, for example, the day they announced in homeroom that it was important for your development as a person to form relationships with your peers. I may well have been sick — I hated school that much.

My life as a schoolchild consisted of an uneasy sequence of troubled interactions with figureheads, like teachers and parents, whom you couldn't easily avoid. They were distant in the sense of being upwardly removed in a social structure of their creation. They were near, however, in that it was they who exercised direct observational control over most aspects of your life. At least my peers didn't try to dictate to me when to get up in the morning, which school to attend, and what to "be" when I grew up.

What I hated most about school was the regimentation, the need to conform, and the requirement that you think and act as you're told. I figured that the only way to fit my square peg into their round hole was to take an axe and chop off a little elbow here and a little foot there. It was painful, to say the least.

To me, conformity is for hockey helmets, girdles, and astronaut couches, but not for people. That is, things and institutions should conform to, and serve, people, not the other way around.

School rewards you for the lower-level exercises of memorizing and repeating facts, and punishes you for the higher-level exercises of thinking for yourself and challenging the assumptions on which the so-called facts are based. Their reasoning seems to be, you can't expect students at the current level to think for themselves these days. This is the vicious and self-defeating cycle of dumbing down. We're asked to come to the nonsensical conclusion that the more you dumb everything down, the better the outcomes will be.

Thinking, truly thinking for yourself, only happens at the next higher level, be it middle school, high school, college, graduate school, postdoc, junior faculty, or senior tenured faculty. It saddens me to think that most people never arrive at the point of thinking for themselves, not even in the memoir-writing stage of their lives. By then it's too late.

The most you can expect of students these days is for them to memorize a few facts or learn how to use a few standard, well-tested methods. Or so we're told. The few who have superior ability you can train to become clones of yourself.

At home, my brothers and I had some good times together, but as puberty approached, our bickering got more rancorous and mean-spirited and our fights more frequent. Having attended elementary school near Philadelphia, I can remember hearing the phrase, brotherly love. It seemed like an oxymoron to me. The only people in the world I truly hated were my brothers. I had no feelings one way or another toward those who weren't my blood brothers.

On one occasion I remember looking in the bathroom mirror and wishing I were dead. I never made plans to kill myself, but neither was I particularly enthusiastic about living. That was the last time I felt such deep despair until well into middle age.

As a child I hated being asked what I wanted to do or be when I grew up. My future was then, and is now, a blank, a dark hole. Others may have wanted to be an astronaut, a ballet dancer, or a movie star. I wanted to be twenty-one. Someone must have told me that at the age of majority, you could leave home, be your own person, and have your own life. That was the only goal I had then, and it's the only goal I have today.

It wasn't so much that I disliked people; it was that I was afraid of them. When I was walking down the street and saw someone I knew, my body would become tense with fear, and my mind would go blank. I wanted to disappear or find a way to escape the impending confrontation, the need to be social, to say the right things, and to pretend to be one of them.

As an adult, I'm a little cagier at masking my fears and pretending that I'm not feeling my feelings. I now know that however unpleasant my interactions with people may be, they aren't going to kill me.

That was the dilemma. On the one hand, I understood from observation that good relationships were based on a certain amount of emotional honesty. On the other, I knew that any outward show of my actual emotion — fear — would ruin any chance of a real relationship. No one wants to be in a relationship with someone who is afraid of them. I know I wouldn't.

If I couldn't avoid the person, I'd have to deal with the "How are you?" question. No matter how many times people ask me this, it always comes as a shock. I never know how to answer. The question is intrusive and presumes a level of intimacy I don't feel.

Okay, if you must know, here's how I feel. I feel like my body is filled with concrete. Not solid, set concrete, but rather the heavy, sludge-like mixture of gravel, sand, chemicals, and water you see coming down the chute of a cement mixer. Some days the mixture is a little more fluid than others, but sludge is always sludge.

Aren't you glad you asked?

Getting back to my school experience, due to my deficits in English class, I had to repeat the ninth grade. I went from being a little young for my class to being a little old.

Later Teens

After the early-grade-school perfume-on-the-front-porch caper, my next meeting with a female came in the eleventh grade. My parents were out of town, and I had to spend the weekend at the home of a couple who were friends of my family. As fate would have it, they also ran a local ballet school, which my sister had attended. They asked me if I had a date for Saturday night. I didn't have the nerve to tell them that I had never before been on a date. They made a few calls to their ballet-student friends and arranged for a date.

By a lucky coincidence, I had already bought a couple of tickets to see the Dave Brubeck Quartet that night at the McCarter Theater. I guess that music is a good way of bringing people together. Bud and Audrey drove Brooke Jones and me to the concert. If I remember correctly, she was a ninth or tenth grader at Princeton High School. She was cute; she turned out to be the only blind date I've ever had at whom I'd look more than once. Beginner's luck, I guess.

The musicians hadn't seen each other for several months, and they got carried away in the extended jam part of the program. It was clear that Brooke wasn't much of a jazz fan. Neither was I — I just happened to like Brubeck. She didn't complain, however.

While we were at the concert, Bud and Audrey saw the latest James Bond film, probably Goldfinger, which they hated. That was around the time that the Bond films started to get cartoonish, outlandish, and self-mocking. The earlier ones had followed the Ian Fleming novels more closely and were intended to be semiserious thrillers or spy-intrigue films.

In the company of young women, I was a cum laude graduate of the Cro-Magnon School for Grunt-Man Communications. I don't think I said more than five or six intelligible words to Brooke all night. This turned out to be about my average for most of the rest of my youth. I didn't feel comfortable enough with myself or with the situation to say much. On the contrary, I was scared out of my mind.

Years later, after I had gotten in touch with my inner loquaciousness and developed quite an obsession with all things self, they couldn't shut me up, but that's another story. That's a deadly combination, by the way, loquaciousness and love of self. Being a little cagier in my old age, I now know that if you want to get anywhere, you have to at least pretend to be interested in her. Even so, having this knowledge and putting it successful into practice are two different things.

We arrived at Brooke's house, and she got out of the car. I didn't know that protocol called for me to walk her to her doorstep. (I must have been absent the day that particular topic was covered in our Dating Behaviors of the Native Sapiens seminar at school.) The loud silence in the car, however, made me feel uneasy.

You can't say that I had no feelings or awareness of others at that stage of my development. The light finally went on in my head. I bolted out of the car and walked Brooke the remaining distance to her door. I don't recall what, if anything, I said to her before we parted ways, but I do remember the episode as awkward and unpleasant.

I never saw Brooke again. The good news is that you only have to go on your first date once, and you only have to suffer the sinking feeling of initial inadequacy in the bottom of your stomach once. The bad news is that it hasn't gotten much better since.

Later that year, a childhood friend invited me to her coming-out party. Christina was about sixteen, a year younger than me. Our parents had lived in the same apartment building in northern New Jersey when both couples had small children. I have few recollections of playing with her, but I gathered that the adults thought we were cute together. You know how adults get sentimental about such things. They want you to suffer marriage and children as they have suffered.

In any case, Christina asked me to be one of her escorts. I guess that was her way of reaching out to a friend she hadn't seen in years. I showed up at her house, which was about an hour from Princeton, and off we went to the ball. I didn't know anyone there except for her and her father. I spent the evening standing alone in my stiff, rented tuxedo, trying to disappear into the woodwork, wondering how I'd gotten myself into such a mess, and wishing I were dead.

After the ball, Christina, one of her other escorts, and I drove back to her house. I sat silently in her living room as she conversed with the other guy for what seemed like an eternity. I felt about as animate as the stuffed chair I was slowly sinking into. The situation had freaked me out so badly that I was unable to say anything.

That was the last time I ever wore a monkey suit.

I stayed overnight at Christina's house, and the next day she and I went to a party at the home of one of her friends. All I can remember about it was wishing I could get out of there and forget I'd ever heard of social events. I don't think I said more than two or three words to anyone, including Christina, the whole weekend. I failed then, and continue to fail today, to understand why people torture themselves with these kinds of events, especially when they could just as easily be living separate lives, unmolested and unharassed.

At that point in my development, I had mastered such conversational tools as "hello" and "goodbye," and "please" and "thank you." The hard part, however, was the unscripted part, the moment in a conversation when the pleasantries were over. It was then that you needed to pick up on verbal and nonverbal cues and improvise or feel your way through the encounter. It seemed that I always panicked and my mind always went blank.

I learned, however, not to voice my feelings on this subject, as people who were older and wiser than me would quickly shout me down. Everybody knew that social events were, by definition, fun, not to mention critically important in the ordering of human affairs. Why would anyone assert otherwise, unless he were trying to cause trouble?

Christina sent me a letter a few days later saying in part that her friends thought that I was okay and that I was a nice guy. I think she sensed my awkwardness and was trying to give my ego a boost.

Having no idea what to say or how to account for my feelings or behavior, I never responded to Christina's letter and haven't heard from her since. Sometimes I think I might have been better off marrying a woman like her, someone with whom I shared a little history. That is, the equivalent of an arranged marriage. Perhaps my life would have had a little more stability, meaning, and purpose.

I know better, of course. The worst thing you can do when you're having emotional problems is to expect a relationship to cure you or save you. That usually has disastrous results.

It was clear that formal social events weren't going to be my cup of tea, so I skipped the proms at school. In any case, I wouldn't have known whom to invite. Having attended all-boys schools from the eighth grade through the twelfth grade, I had yet to make any female friends on my own in or out of school. I didn't want anyone, especially not my parents, to interfere with something so personal as my social life.

It often seemed that no one was there to help me with my problems. No one in my family or at school ever spoke to me about what was going on, and I was too embarrassed and ashamed to bring it up myself.

To her credit, however, my mother did notice that I wasn't going to the proms. She assured me that girls liked to attend these kinds of events and would likely be receptive to an invitation. I appreciated the feminine perspective, as it had never occurred to me to think about the subject of dating from any perspective other than my own. I was too wrapped up in my own problems. I was also convinced I had little going for me and was unlikely to become a desirable mate.

My mother never asked me why I felt awkward in social situations. It's a good thing, because I was just as bewildered as anyone else, and wouldn't have known how to answer. I'm old now, and I still don't know why relationships are so hard.

True to stereotype, my father remained oblivious to the matter. We never talked about love, sex, or marriage. Not that I've ever had much practical use for such knowledge. Maybe he knew I was already too far gone.

It was clear from an early age that certain pleasures in life, such as socializing, reading fiction, or physical activities that required a sense of rhythm, would be unavailable to me.

Despite my troubles, I wasn't yet done with my teenage social activities. I did have one more dating experience while still in school. The following year, my senior year, I dated the same girl twice — a first. Katy Kennedy lived on the same street as my family and her parents were friendly with mine.

I'm proud to report that I placed the phone calls myself, another first. They didn't kill me, as I'd once feared. I was moving up the ladder of social adaptability — not rapidly, but moving. I was becoming much more socially sophisticated and adept. Katy and I went once to the movies and once to an event at school. I don't think we had much in common, however, as I haven't seen or heard from her since.

I'm glad you only have to grow up once, go to school once, and go through teenage emotional turmoil once. Once is enough.

As I said, it never occurred to me that life was about anything other than following adult instructions. That is, until about midway through my senior year. Someone once jokingly suggested that the external part of my life fell apart because Bob Dylan had gone electric, dashing the hopes and dreams of a generation of folk purists. (That had happened the previous summer, the summer of 1965.)

Insofar as external events may have been involved, it's more likely that, at my eighteenth birthday, I was now old enough to be drafted into a shooting war. In a tangible way, I'd become an adult.

(This is no joke. According to statistics derived from government archives, twenty-seven US servicepeople who share the same birthday and birth year as me died in the Vietnam War. They were among the 837 dead who share the same birth month and year as me. Well over half [56%] of the dead were fellow first-wave Baby Boomers born between 1946 and 1949.)

I discovered that you didn't need to spend your life trying to meet others' expectations. This is a valuable piece of knowledge they'll never teach you in school. The problem in my case, however, was that I had no fixed goal or set of goals of my own with which to replace others' goals.

It came as a surprise that, for the first time, I had something approaching a normal social life over the summer after I graduated from prep school. I had had no regular social life while in school; neither would I have one during my first few years of maladjustment to college. The summer between the two, however, was different.

You might say that I was in transition, belonging neither to the world of the naive schoolboy nor to that of the more sophisticated young adult. For two or three long, carefree months, all things social seemed possible.

My parents were out of the house for much of the summer, and I fell into a group consisting mostly of boys and girls who were around my age and the ages of my brothers, two and four years behind me academically.

Tennis was my favorite sport, though I've never played competitively. One important aspect of sports like tennis, golf, or bridge is that they're good socially — you meet people. Don't let anyone tell you that love means nothing in the sport of tennis.

I had a brief dalliance that summer with another recreational tennis player, a rising junior at Princeton High. Judi had recently returned with her family from Nairobi, Kenya, where her Dad had been an officer in the Agency for International Development. He was in Princeton to do some advanced study in international relations, before moving on to his next assignment in Washington, DC.

Judi's home life, however, was troubled. Her Mom was undergoing treatments for a nervous condition, and was largely out of commission as a functioning parent. Electric shock was then the standard treatment for a variety of conditions that would probably be treated today with drugs. Meanwhile, Judi's Dad was bravely soldiering onward as the primary caregiver for her and her younger sister.

Looking back, I think that both Judi and I may have been depressed.

I tried to kiss her, my first kiss. This was my big moment, the one you'll never forget. My heart was beating so fast, and I was so clumsy with her, that she became frightened and ran. I had panicked at a time when remaining cool was the most important thing. I was having a great deal of trouble managing my heavily conflicted feelings about love and sex. That was the first time I had had any feelings to speak of toward a girl, and I'd found them to be quite overwhelming and unmanageable.

As I was getting ready to leave for college, my mother asked me to be sure to have some fun while there. That's right, that's a parent who's encouraging a child to attend more parties while in college.

I corresponded occasionally with Judi that year, but by then the thrill was gone. I was clinging unhealthfully to a relationship that was already over, a bad habit I struggle with today.

Nevertheless, I wanted to believe that I'd eventually outgrow my awkwardness. After all, everybody knew that when you grow up, you become much more mature, you gain a wealth of experience, and you leave behind your childish and adolescent behaviors.

I believed that the cure for my social ills would be repetition. Sure, I was uptight on my first few dates — everyone is to one extent or another — but I was convinced that by my millionth date, everything would be old hat, and I'd be fine.

I was wrong.

Although I have trouble with all relationships, the romantic ones remain the most difficult. To this day, I have trouble reading and understanding the signals associated with flirting and love. Signs that are universal and unmistakable across all cultures, we are told, not to mention fundamental to the process of ordering human society and giving meaning to our individual lives.

I've always hated it when people touched me. I'm not referring here only to physical touch. I hate any kind of intimacy. It should be obvious that this state of affairs has its consequences in relationships.

Some misguided friends denied my feelings, saying that I couldn't or shouldn't have felt what I felt. It's hard to decide which is greater, the arrogance of assuming you know what someone else is feeling, or the indifference about the effects that one's words, however well-meaning, may have on others.

I think that most people with any kind of disability or different ability will tell you that the misunderstanding, condescension, and denial you get from others is often worse than the disability itself.

As a teenager I had trouble relating to the world outside the home. I often wanted to say, "Explain it to me as if I were from outer space." Take the fact that women who have multiple partners are routinely referred to as prostitutes. To me, having sex out of desire or out of love (that is, with feeling) is the opposite of having sex for money (that is, without feeling). Not to mention that it's only women, and never men, who are so reviled. I'm not socially conscious or socially sophisticated enough to understand the ridiculous biases and bigotries of the outside culture.

Adulthood

While in my late teens and early twenties, I was willing to accept the proposition that sex, drugs, and rock-'n'-roll were legitimate forms of communication. Words, however, were too dry, too antiseptic, and too problematic to qualify as meaningful forms of communication.

As I said, I had no romantic attachments during my first failed attempt at college. Afterwards, however, an attractive young woman named Claire from the accounting department at work would sometimes come up to me and talk. Flabbergasted that anyone would pay attention to me — I was convinced that I had nothing going for myself — I could never think of anything to say to her. My mind would always go blank, no matter how much I'd coached myself beforehand. It seemed that the most I could manage was a few feeble mumbles or weak grunting sounds.

I still can't understand why anyone would pay attention to me. In a way, I preferred chasing them, however awkwardly. Such efforts were usually to no avail, but at least I felt as if I were more in charge of the situation.

I guess it was Claire's carefree spirit that intimidated me and made me feel jealous. She had something, let's call it social ease, that I didn't.

Unable to ignore the obviousness of Claire's brief infatuation with me, my boss, Tyrone, asked me why I didn't ask her out. He said, "When you got it, you got it." It had never occurred to me to ask her out. Those kinds of things were for other people, I thought. Being young and impetuous, however, I took Tyrone up on his challenge and gave it my best shot.

I tried one more time to have a conversation with her. It felt awkward, which I now know is a bad sign, but I was somehow able to arrange to take a walk in the park with her and a friend of hers.

Things went downhill from there. By the end of the stroll, she was yelling at me. I don't know why; it was her stuff, not mine. Perhaps it was because I wasn't being vocal enough. I don't know. This wasn't a lover's quarrel. Her voice had an angry, almost mean, edge.

That was the end of that. In a way, I was relieved. The pressure to succeed was off.

I still can't understand how you can like someone one minute and hate them the next.

When I wasn't trying, I had what Tyrone referred to as "it," whatever "it" is. When I was trying, however, I spoiled the whole thing and ended up getting yelled at. A problem I still struggle with today. If I do nothing, if I simply mind my own business, I'm usually okay emotionally. Wandering dangerously into the minefield of interpersonal relationships, however, is where I get into trouble.

People told me, "If you can't get laid in New York, you can't get laid." They said the same thing about California when I visited there.

A few years later I moved not to California but to Vancouver, British Columbia. It was there that I was finally able to break the sexual ice. I had several one-night stands in my first two years in the province.

Abstaining from sex while in a religious cult was relatively easy, as I hadn't previously been in the habit of having women in my life. After leaving the cult, however, I had two relationships that lasted about ten days each, then my longest to date. A subsequent relationship at the ripe old age of thirty-three lasted about six months.

I don't want the reader to think that I simply walked away from the six-month relationship. I ran. I must admit that the first three months were nice, as my girlfriend and I were close. Realizing how serious we were becoming about each other, however, made me feel the most intense, primal, overpowering, and debilitating kind of fear I'd ever felt in a relationship. For the next three months, we fought much of the time.

In the end, it seemed that the bad days outnumbered the good by a ratio of about five to one. On one occasion, I announced to no one in particular that I was leaving, and moved my stuff out of her room. We never discussed breaking up.

At first I felt a great relief, as if a burden had been lifted from my shoulders. It was wonderful to be able to come and go as I pleased without having to check in with anyone. I was like a child, joyously turning the lights on or off or opening and closing the window whenever I felt like it. I was happy to have regained a much-needed measure of control over my environment. I soon fell into a deep depression, however, and watched TV all day for a couple of months.

We were living in Rochester, New York, which is on the shore of Lake Ontario. The image that came to mind concerning my relationship was of a certain species of eel that attaches itself to another fish by way of lips that function like suction cups. Once the lips are secure, the predator slices a hole in the host's flesh with its razor-sharp tongue and lives henceforward on the host's blood.

To me, being close to another person means being close enough to hurt or be hurt.

The following year, after some of my anger had subsided, I met a woman in one of my classes at community college. She had everything going for her — pretty, bright, ambitious, accomplished, well brought up in a good family — in other words, way overqualified. Going to the movies together was her idea. I went along only because there was nothing else going on in my social life. I knew I was in trouble when, as we were walking into the theater to take our seats, I was thinking of my former girlfriend.

A few years later, I returned to university for a second, much longer period of maladjustment. There I met Ann, a pretty undergraduate who was in one of my French classes. I never did learn her last name. She had a rebellious, fun-loving spirit, which I adored, as well as a wonderfully rubbery, plastic, expressive face. She wore her emotions on her sleeve.

I was too scared to say anything to her in class. On one occasion, however, we ended up in line together in one of the cafeterias on campus. We struck up a conversation. Taking a table together was her suggestion. At that point, all we had in common was a tendency to complain about our rookie twenty-two-year-old instructor, Mlle Véronique Dumolard. That's another story.

I boldly invited Ann to an event. One of my favorite bands, the Hooters, was playing at a club in downtown Providence. She probably thought I was being fresh when I mentioned the name of the band. I don't think she had ever heard of them, as they had been popular when she was still in middle school.

As she was being carded at the door, I wondered if her ID was real. I was pushing forty at the time.

My conversational skills weren't as strong as they might have been, and I had trouble keeping the conversation going. Midway through the evening, I looked across the dance floor and saw her sitting on a stack of chairs against a wall. She looked forlorn and disappointed as a result of being abandoned in mid-date by me.

Over the course of the evening, I read doubt, hope, longing, and frustration in her face. It was all right there to see.

The band, which had been in the habit of playing larger venues, was extra loud in the cramped confines of the club. I'm sure I lost five decibels of hearing that night. On the way home in her car, I couldn't hear anything Ann was saying, so I answered questions I thought she might be asking.

We said goodbye at my doorstep, and I haven't seen her since. It was the best and worst night in my ten years in Rhode Island.

Instead of having my own life, I read the class notes in my school and college alumni magazines. I know you should discount as little more than blatant self-promotion what most people say about themselves in such a forum. Nevertheless, it seems that many of my classmates have arrived at the stage in their lives when their children have left the nest, and some of my classmates are even becoming grandparents. That is, as time passes, they experience new and different phases of their social and familial lives, each of them offering deeper, richer, and more complex forms of personal interaction.

My life, on the other hand, changes little from decade to decade. It doesn't involve people much. I guess you could say that death will again make us equal, if, indeed, we were ever so.

Speaking of death, my grandfather died when I was about eight years old. I felt nothing, not happiness, not sadness, nothing. The same thing happened the following year when my grandmother died. When my Aunt Lucile died prematurely a couple of decades later, I felt nothing. Same thing when Aunt Joanne died.

When Diana, Princess of Wales, died, however, I was overcome with a deep sense of grief. And I'm not a big fan of royalty.

Therapy

After my first dismal year of college, my parents sent me to a psychiatrist. It was my first meeting with the so-called helping profession. The shrink didn't seem to think that much was wrong. As far as he was concerned, I was having some growing pains and would probably be okay in the end. I'd love to kick him in the balls, but, unfortunately, he's probably dead by now and wouldn't be able to feel it.

By the 1960s, shrinks had become a standard part of the middle-class, suburban landscape, much like stationwagons, uniformed school-crossing guards, and urine-stained fire hydrants. And about as effective for me from a therapeutic point of view.

Before being readmitted to college a decade and a half later, I had to see their shrink. You have to give the Ivy League credit for its attention to theatrical detail. This particular individual was right out of the casting department. Late fortyish or early fiftyish, with a graying, well-trimmed Mephistophelean beard, a stiff, formal manner, and, of course, a thick foreign accent, he knew nothing about cults. (I guess the Krishnas and the Moonies weren't on the curriculum at the German institute where he studied. A part of the world that has suffered so terribly at the hands of ideological extremists and pseudo-religious totalitarians.)

That's right, a mental health professional who doesn't know what a destructive cult is. Nor that there's a connection between our separate, individual lives and larger social, political, and historical events. Can you get a medical degree without knowing what the AIDS pandemic is?

The shrink's fallback position was to ask me about my sex life. When doing so, he hissed the word "sex," much as the snake in the Garden of Eden might have. To further complicate matters, he refused to accept, "I don't have one," as an answer. To a Freudian, that particular answer doesn't compute.

As a thoroughly institutionalized and paper-trained professional, he well understood the axiom that if the reality conflicts with the theory, it's easier to change the reality than the theory. An individual practitioner can no more "change" psychiatry than an individual priest can "change" Catholicism. Maybe the Pope can, but few of them do.

Trust me; I had no sex life. He finally gave up and spoke for the rest of the hour about his female patients who had had too much sex in the 1960s, and how it was screwing up their lives. What that had to do with me, I don't know. This guy was a real piece of work. The house psychiatrist at a major university.

My first therapist of any consequence was another psychiatrist named Robert Florin. I naively started at the top of the food chain. Having until then avoided shrinks, I had little or no idea of what to expect. Looking back, my first judgment, that it was all hocus pocus, was correct.

Nevertheless, I still harbored many romantic, media-driven conceptions about therapy. That it transforms you, reaches deep into your innermost recesses, and heals you. Those kinds of things. I give most of the people I met with credit for trying earnestly to apply the techniques they had been taught. The problem was that their techniques have had no effect, positive or negative, on me.

In my first session with Dr Florin, I said that I was having trouble with relationships, and that I felt that my communication with others was poor.

He said, no, I wasn't. He experienced me as a person who communicated well.

I once said to him that the more attractive a woman was, the more difficulty I had in handling my emotions, the more likely they were to overwhelm me, and the more likely it was that she or I would run away. He laughed at the thought of being afraid of a beautiful woman, but I didn't think it was so funny.

At the end of the year, I told him truthfully that I didn't believe that I had gained anything useful from our sessions, and didn't see how I could continue to justify the time and money. As I was walking out the door, he looked up from his desk, where he was filling out some paperwork, and said, "It's as if human relationships don't matter to you." He had finally understood what I had tried to tell him in our first session. So I guess there's some hope. He needed to see it with his own eyes.

One problem with the profession is denial, a serious offense when committed by a patient. No, Florin said, you aren't having a problem — you only think you have a problem. Once you rid yourself of your negative attitudes, you'll be fine. It's all a matter of changing your perception of reality.

I don't care whether this approach works for others. I only know that it doesn't work for me.

From there I worked my way down the food chain of mental health workers to psychologist, psychiatric nurse, and social worker. At each step, I kept hoping that money, power, credentials, intellectual overhead, and other institutional baggage and luggage would become less important, and that healing would become more of a reality.

I hoped that, by descending through the Darwinian tree of hairy psychotherapeutic primates, I'd be likely to find people who had fewer preconceptions, who were more flexible in their thinking, and who were motivated to a greater extent by a simple desire to help.

I also tried seeing women therapists, who were generally less hairy than the men and less comfortable with the idea of swinging all day from one tenuous branch of the ideological tree to another. I hoped as well that the women would be more empathetic.

I had marginally better luck with Marge Weishaar, a psychologist at the medical school. I had my first breakthrough in therapy after she gave me a book, which I read outside our sessions. Hope and Help for Your Nerves by Claire Weekes helped me to get a handle on my panic attacks. We didn't discuss the book in our sessions.

After Marge, I saw a psychiatric nurse whose last name was Harrison and whose first name I've forgotten. Her office was in a lovely old house on the East Side of Providence, of which there are many near the college campus. She was in her mid- to late thirties, a few years younger than me. We met weekly for about a year or a year and a half.

While living in State College, Pennsylvania, I saw a counselor named Ursala Sherill. I tried hard to explain to her that I wasn't interested in therapeutic techniques. They had already failed to change anything about me. Drugs and techniques are things; they aren't human. I'd like to think that despite my difficulties, I'm still a human being.

My heart sank when, after six months of such requests on my part, she went ahead and suggested two or three mechanical techniques. She apparently hadn't heard what I had said.

If you go to the witch doctor, you'll get potions and spells; if you go to the herbalist, you'll get herbs; to the western medical doctor, you'll get drugs; and to the therapist, techniques. It would be naive to expect anything else of the profession, and the first step on the road to recovery is to face the human limitations of your caregivers and take charge of your own life.

Autism

Despite my troubles in therapy, I had a second breakthrough, this one while working with Ursala Sherill in State College, Pennsylvania. I had stumbled onto the subject of autism while reading a magazine article outside of our sessions. The connections between what I was reading and my own life were uncanny. It was as if someone had poured water over my head. Words and phrases were leaping off the page. When I asked Ursala about autism, she said she didn't know, but would check into it. The next week she reported that her superiors, with whom I hadn't spoken, had informed her that I wasn't autistic. She refused to discuss the matter further.

The term autism, which is derived from the Greek word for self, refers to a constellation of lifelong neurological, cognitive, and social deficits that first appear in early childhood. Autistics are generally incapable of forming close personal relationships. Rather, they exhibit some degree of emotional detachment or dysfunction.

Low-functioning autistics often retreat into a world of their own and appear to be unreachable. In certain severe cases, they may even require institutionalization. Higher-functioning autistics can be successful in their careers and lead lives that are "typical" (normal) in every way, except for the absence of close personal relationships. Most in the spectrum are somewhere in between, each of us with our own individual strengths and weaknesses, which may or may not be well described in the diagnostic manuals.

I should add that some researchers believe that certain kinds of repetitive or excessively rigid patterns of behavior are linked to autism.

Asperger's Syndrome, a subset of the Autistic Spectrum, usually refers to high-functioning autistics who have social deficits that range from mild to severe. (Frith, p. 8)

Another related medical term is Pervasive Development Disorder (sometimes called Pervasive Development Delay), which unfortunately has fallen into disuse. I like the word "pervasive," because it implies a condition that affects every aspect of one's life, and the word "development," because it suggests the lifelong processes of emotional growth, adaptation, and maturation.

It's common in the world of developmental diagnoses not to fit perfectly into any single category. It's okay; my feelings aren't hurt. Those of us who are different are already used to not quite fitting in anywhere.

I read a book by Judy and Sean Barron about their family's struggles with autism. There's a passage where Judy and her husband, after years of frustration with programs and techniques that had failed to help their autistic son, Sean, decided to call a halt. They had realized that the techniques were taking an emotional toll not only on Sean, but on themselves. Not to mention the expense, which was substantial. They usually stayed on the wagon for a short time, until the next latest, greatest technique came along, which they again found irresistible. (Barron, p. 168)

There's no laboratory test or diagnostic biomarker for most developmental conditions, including autism. Clinicians are, therefore, forced to rely on behavioral symptoms as a guide, and to exclude other possible causes. This is an expensive, labor-intensive, imprecise, and, I would argue, in many cases a highly subjective, process.

Diagnostic tests that are designed to provide greater objectivity do exist, however, on paper and on the Internet. I don't know whether to treat them as solid science or little more than amusing parlor entertainment. For what it's worth, I scored on the Baron-Cohen diagnostic tests about the same as the general, non-autistic population in the Systematizing (compulsive/obsessive) Quotient and in recognizing facial expressions.

As I feared, my score on the Autism Quotient was in the mid-range among those who have a formal diagnosis of autism. The worst news came, however, when I discovered that my Empathy Quotient was considerably worse than those of most high-functioning autistics or Asperger's. Their scores are, in turn, considerably worse than those of the general public.

The therapists I've seen seem to be motivated by what I call the "disease of the month" syndrome. For example, in the 1980s most of them insisted that I had been sexually abused as a child. This was happening, of course, when reports of child abuse scandals were appearing regularly on the nightly news. I have no recollection of any such incident in my own life.

My therapists also erred in ignoring the fact that sexual abuse tends to play itself out specifically in the sexual areas of one's life, as opposed to other areas. With me, all aspects of social interaction, not just sex, are compromised.

The same thing happened when the dyslexia and attention deficit disorder crazes hit the popular press.

To be fair to the therapists, however, some researchers believe that most individuals who have a history of severe abuse or trauma exhibit a constant state of fear or anxiety.

I've raised the issue of absent or improper diagnosis with some of my therapists. They seem to think that they aren't responsible for diagnosing illnesses that are controversial, little known, or only recently recognized. The vicious cycle of ignorance and blamelessness. In addition, they apparently believe that it's okay to make a wrong diagnosis, so long as one is trying sincerely to make a right one. That is, they define therapy as whatever happens while the meter is running.

For example, Jonathan of the Wright Institute in Berkeley promised me in our first session that my life would change for the better within the first two or three months of therapy. When no such changes were forthcoming, I asked, "What do I need to do to be able to take advantage of this therapy? Are there adult preschool therapy sessions that prepare you for the real thing?" He laughed. I was apparently the only client who had ever challenged the efficacy of his therapy.

My issues were troubles understanding fiction, aversion to touch, and difficulty with activities that require a sense of rhythm. I told him that I'd been reading about the Autistic Spectrum and felt that many of my symptoms were similar to those of Asperger's. He never addressed the possibility of a diagnosis of developmental issues. To his credit, however, he did ask, "What would such a diagnosis mean to you?"

I guess there are four answers:

• Knowledge is power. The truth makes you free. You cannot know too much or learn too much. All the great philosophers have advised us to know ourselves and to know ourselves well.

• Inclusiveness, a feeling of belonging to the human community, not as a visitor from outer space. Sean Barron, who had severe behavioral issues as a child, and who was often the recipient of stern discipline, posed the question: "Could it be that what made me like this was a disease of some kind and that I was not a horrible person after all?" (Barron, p. 229) It's important to take these developmental issues, issues over which the sufferer has no control, off the moral platform.

• Access to resources. You must have a formal diagnosis of HIV/AIDS, for example, before you can take advantage of the menu of services that's available for that specific ailment.

• Trust in our public institutions. I'd like to believe that medicine and therapy are there to serve our needs, not we to serve theirs. It's important that people feel confident that when they present themselves at the doorstep of a helping professional, they'll be taken seriously and will get the help they need.

I'm ashamed to admit that I ended up screaming at poor Jonathan and stomping out of his office. Such actions on my part are, of course, indefensible, regardless of the provocation.

Autism and other causeless and cureless conditions present some of the greatest challenges and greatest opportunities for a practitioner. While she'll need to make appropriate use of every effective tool she has been taught, it's equally important for her to be able to put aside, temporarily at least, those techniques that prove unhelpful for a particular client.

I wonder if anyone has studied the Sean Barron "ah-ha" phenomenon that accompanies the discovery that you aren't alone, that you no longer need to suffer in silence and isolation. That is, whether an accurate diagnosis can by itself help to heal the patient.

I was only able to find one paper (published in 1981) on the subject. It said that patients who are tested do better as a group than those who aren't, regardless of the results of the test.

When you're hurting, you'll spend almost any amount of money in the pursuit of a cure. I invested about two hundred and fifty hours of my time in therapy. I haven't kept all of my receipts, but if my average hourly copay was $35 in 2009 money, that comes to about $8,750 out of my pocket. Not to mention a roughly equivalent amount paid by my insurance companies.

Autism raises important questions about us all:

• Is what passes for civilized social interaction merely a set of rote, memorized procedures, or is it something more?

• What does it mean to be human? Poets can admit to math-phobia and still retain their claim to humanity, but poetry-phobic people like me sometimes cannot.

• Should we make exceptions for the exceptional?

• As Lenny Bruce once asked, "So who's deviant?"

I know that some people swear by their pills, but one of my problems with drugs is that the side effects are usually worse than the disease. Another important concern is that, as external impositions, drugs tend to deny you the dignity of your own inner struggle. And they are particularly pernicious in that they mess with your brain. I learned in my anti-cult work that if there's a cure, it's to take back control of your life, and that includes taking control of your recovery. In fact, the two are synonymous, at least in the beginning.

I think we can all agree that every child is unique and special and deserves to be treated as such. It gets harder, however, when the discussion turns to the disabled, those who are seen as "less than". They want us to be an undifferentiated mass at which to throw drugs or other interventions in a hit-or-miss fashion like darts against a board. Some professionals have a hard time with the proposition that every developmentally challenged individual is different from every other. An obsession with putting people in boxes is a symptom of ignorance or lack of resources, not evidence of knowledge.

There's no pure autism or pure Asperger's or pure anything else, any more than there's pure non-autism or pure normality or pure typicality. Except for identical twins, perhaps, we all have different fingerprints and DNA. I have nothing in common with other developmentally challenged people other than the challenges themselves.

Imagine a classroom with thirty pupils. Let's say that three of them are diagnosed with a serious learning disability. Let me pose the question: What's the profile of the other twenty-seven? Take a look. They're short, tall, male, female, fat, skinny, smart, stupid, athletic, nonathletic — there's no profile. Such a notion is nonsensical.

The same goes for the three who are diagnosed.

The psychological term "scatter" refers to a highly uneven pattern of strengths and weaknesses that, when viewed as a graph, more closely resembles a seismic event than a smooth, horizontal line. We should all take pride in our strengths, such as they may be. As Uta Frith points out, however, these "'islets' of abilities are not so much tranquil oases as volcanoes, blatant signs of underlying disturbance." (Frith, p. 91)

This culture alternately glorifies and patronizes those with scatter (think of Van Gogh, Einstein, and Bill Gates). Love them or hate them, we seem incapable of seeing them as whole, fully integrated people.

The lesson is that human beings are quite capable of being good at one task and bad at another. I don't necessarily want the person who prepares my taxes to paint the picture I hang in my living room. Or the person who fixes my computer to deliver my child. Or the person who coaches my favorite football team to install the air conditioning equipment in my home. There are different kinds of skills.

Looking at the world, I see scatter — people who are wonderful at one activity, and rotten at everything else. That is, vertical slices of ability. Others see non-scatter, or horizontal slices. Their world is divided into the smart, competent people who can do almost anything, and the dumb ones who are good at almost nothing. This is the politics of modern medical science, the politics of the hardened categories of neurobiological nomenclature, and the politics of unforgiving mathematical methods applied to quirky, unpredictable, and often internally self-contradictory human beings.

As a person who has one foot in terrestrial human affairs and one not, I prefer to think of people as analogous to stars in the sky. Although no two stars share precisely the same characteristics, we humans have long enjoyed lumping them together into constellations. Which stars are included in any given configuration is determined by our convenience or by historical or cultural convention. I'm sure that the stars themselves care little about what we think.

Stars in a constellation may be nowhere near each other in actual space. They appear close only when viewed from earth. For example, the most distant star in the Little Dipper is about five times as far from earth as the closest star in the same constellation. Not close by any yardstick.

The recent controversy involving Pluto and the dwarf planets confirms our belief that science is a dynamic, ever-changing process. It also underscores the importance of accurate, meaningful nomenclature. If you don't get the names right, you probably won't get the science right either.

Perhaps the "will to normality" that causes children to feel that they must become more like their peers will always be with us. But to what extent are these pressures there to encourage those who are different to land in the best possible situation for their personal growth and development? Conversely, to what extent are these pressures there so that they will simply require no additional special attention? Saying that special children need special care is just another way of saying that all children — developmentally challenged or otherwise — deserve attention and care.

The proper care of a child begins with an honest evaluation. Where she is today, not where you'd like her to be tomorrow. It's true that, at least in the short term, those of us who are different sometimes make additional demands on finite resources. It's equally true, however, that each of us in our own way has much to give back.

As I wrote on a previous page, I don't mind it if the educational system aims the bulk of its programming at what it thinks the norm is. So long, that is, as it makes adequate provisions for those who don't fall into the middle of the curve.

The problem isn't only the finitude of available resources. There's also an issue of outright bigotry, the idea that people shouldn't be different, that they're to blame for their differences, or that they're somehow less than full-fledged citizens deserving of a first-class education.

It turns out that high and low achievers have more in common with each other than either has with the middle. Frith argues that precociousness in math, for example, is at least in part a result, and not a cause, of social dysfunction. That is, those who are socially dysfunctional but who have active minds often take refuge in activities that require few or no socialization skills.

My undergraduate concentration was in math, and my experience tends to confirm the above observation. Discipline and the ability to concentrate for long periods of time are usually more important than innate talent, whatever that is.

Donna Williams wrote with insight and compassion that before we ask people to join the mainstream, we should first make it a welcoming place that's worthy of their souls. (Williams, p. 207)

The good news, however, is that my developmental issues are non-progressive, and that under certain conditions it's possible, with effort, to make limited, incremental progress. The bad news is that, despite any progress I may make, the gap between the so-called neurological typicals and me continues to grow over time. That is, others grow and change at so-called "normal" rates while my growth rate is less.

Final Thoughts

While working in the anti-cult field, I learned that what one needs to look for in a professional is personal and professional flexibility.

Most future therapists accept as their own a relatively stable worldview while in school or training. That is, a way of ordering or making sense of an often chaotic universe. There are exceptions, of course, but most trainees adhere to this worldview for the rest of their careers, perhaps with gradual or incremental revisions as they and their field change and grow. This isn't necessarily a bad thing for most professionals and their clients most of the time.

The other side of the coin of professional flexibility is personal flexibility. By that I mean the realization that only by being present with one's entire self will one be able to reach the other person. Artists and writers have always understood this principle, the need to invest one's entire being in one's work. You may be able to fake it awhile, but withholding any significant part of yourself risks the ultimate impoverishment of the work.

We must not confuse doctrines, structures, and other formal orderings of reality with reality itself. They're supposed to be there as guides to help us with the work, and we should never allow them to interfere with it.

* * *

A few words about the so-called classics of literature. If a book means nothing to me, is it still a classic? If a tree falls in the forest, ...?

What I'm suggesting is that there's something between the writer's cup and the reader's lip. That something is the self, the person, and the experience, imagination, and humanity of the reader, without whom or without which the exercises of writing and reading are pointless.

I have my own classics. Some might be on others' lists; others might not. If you scratch the surface, I think you'll find that this is true of many readers. In my early adulthood, it was The Indian Tipi by Reginald and Gladys Laubin, Be Here Now by Baba Ram Dass, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and 1984 and Animal Farm by George Orwell. More recent favorites include Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee by Dee Brown, Glory Bound by Woodie Guthrie, and The Legacy of Luna by Julia Butterfly Hill. Statements in plain language of idiosyncratic principles, of different ways of looking at things.

The school didn't assign these books, not because they were irrelevant to our lives, but because it would have seen them as subversive to its mission. It was like living in the Soviet Union. The Orwell books, however, were on a suggested summer reading list. (I chose them because they were the shortest books on the list.) Trying to read with the eyes of others more typical than myself, as I was asked to do in school, would have almost certainly neutralized or neutered the important lessons in life I took from my classics.

I didn't discover the books that would prove to be formative or transformative in my life until I abandoned, at least temporarily, the idea of living a life that met conventional educational, career, and social standards. It wasn't until my early adulthood that I felt free to pursue that which was important to me, without reference to externally imposed standards.

Depending on one's point of view, Asperger's is either the absence of the ability to take social context into account, or the presence of the ability to ignore context. So-called typicals lack the latter capability just as surely as those with a diagnosis of Asperger's lack the former. (Frith, p. 90)

I say, never read a book simply because someone says you should. Don't waste your time; read books that speak to your heart.

I'm not a literary person and I don't live in the metaphorical world of fiction where nothing means what it is and everything means something else. Nevertheless, here are some of the literary figures with whom I identify. Peter Pan, who didn't want to grow up, take a career, or take responsibility for a family or a mortgage. The Little Prince, who was "always and forever explaining things to ... grown-ups [who] never understand anything for themselves." And Peter in The Diary of a Young Girl, whose friend, the author Anne Frank, wondered, "And yet why should he keep his innermost self to himself and why am I never allowed there?"

In the end, it's about the stories we tell. Let's start telling some deeper and richer stories about growing up different. In my own case, I've come full circle, from hating school, from being on the receiving end of the harsh and unforgiving instructional stick, to being an aspiring writer who's trying to take back the instruments of communication and the means of creative expression.

* * *

People sometimes comment on what they see as my distance. What they don't realize is that they're as distant from me in their attitudes, lifestyles, and social habits as I am from them. All the issues that surround difference, including distance, alienation, distrust, ignorance, misunderstanding, and even hatred and bigotry, work equally well in both directions.

I've never been able to picture myself married. This is due either to a failure of imagination or to a lack of female friends, or both. As a youth, I once half-jokingly said that maybe when I was sixty-four, I'd give it a try. Now that I've turned sixty, sixty-four doesn't seem all that old, so I've postponed the diabolical event until eighty.

* * *

A burning issue in psychology is that of "personal change." Entire disciplines, such as behavior modification, psychoanalysis, groups, recovery programs, and self-help, to name a few, are based on the assumption that people are capable of change. The pursuit of change is a booming, multibillion dollar per year business, much of it centered in nearby Marin County. Suggesting here that maybe in the end people don't change all that much is like suggesting in Rome that perhaps Mary wasn't all that much of a virgin after all. How far are you going to get?

Nevertheless, I've read that the professional community is beginning to debate the issue of change. Whether we should even try to make everybody the same. Whether all the lilies in the field need to be the same color. If you could wave a wand and make everyone neurologically the same, then you would lose the richness and sustaining qualities of a robust biological diversity. Your Ma, nature, is smarter than you are.

The psychologists James Hillman and Michael Ventura have concluded that what is needed is a discourse, a conversation, about the seemingly opposite poles of change and changelessness. (Hillman, p. 11)

What are the agents of change? Psychoactive street drugs and prescription drugs; living "off the grid," far from the maddening world; extreme diets and fasting; love and sex; fundamentalist and evangelical religion; non-tourist travel; heavy exercise; individual and group therapy; "self-help" books; a liberal arts education; confessional writing; and time, the physical maturation process. I've tried them all to no avail. Looking back, I'm glad that some of the more extreme techniques didn't kill me.

I'm aware that many maintain steadfastly that change is possible, and that some go so far as to assert that anyone can do anything. I'd invite them to try the following experiment: cut off all close contact with family and friends for one year. Repeat the process each year for a lifetime. Then maybe we could have a conversation.

Extreme or absolute notions of change collapse in on themselves. Their proponents must know that, no matter how trendy their convictions may be, they cannot change and become like me.

What would it take to bring about significant change? A nervous system transplant, including the brain, brain stem, spinal cord, and all the nerve endings throughout the body.

The romantic in me would like to believe that love conquers all; the scientist that psychology and pharmacology cure all; the religionist that ritual and belief make it all better; the realist that it's all pissing into a steady head breeze. Nevertheless, I remain optimistic, as no one can predict the future. Breakthroughs happen, and when they do, they usually happen in their own way and in their own time.

Bibliography

Simon Baron-Cohen, Autism and Asperger Syndrome: The Facts, 2008

Judy & Sean Barron, There's a Boy in Here: Emerging from the Bonds of Autism, 1992

Echo R Fling, Eating an Artichoke: A Mother's Perspective on Asperger's Syndrome, 2000

Uta Frith, Autism: Explaining the Enigma, 1989

Temple Grandin, Emergence: Labeled Autistic, 1986

Thinking in Pictures and Other Reports from My Life with Autism, 1995

James Hillman & Michael Ventura, We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy — and the World's Getting Worse, 1992

Robert Jay Lifton, The Life of the Self: Toward a New Psychology, 1976

The Protean Self: Human Resilience in an Age of Fragmentation, 1993

Valerie Paradiz, Elijah's Cup: A Family's Journey into the Community and Culture of High-Functioning Autism and Asperger's Syndrome, 2002

RD Rosen, Psychobabble: Fast Talk and Quick Cure in the Era of Feeling, 1977

Steve Silberman, NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity, 2015

Claire Weekes, Hope and Help for Your Nerves, 1962

Liane Holliday Willey, Pretending to be Normal: Living with Asperger's Syndrome, 1999

Donna Williams, Nobody, Nowhere: The Extraordinary Autobiography of an Autistic, 1992