Be Different: Adventures of a Free-Range Aspergian With Practical Advice for Aspergians, Misfits, Families & Teachers (3 page)

The third group contains everyone else. But what should we call them? If people with Asperger’s are called Aspergians or Aspies, it makes sense that we would need a special name for people who don’t have Asperger’s and aren’t proto-Aspergian. “People who don’t have Asperger’s” sounds pretty clumsy when you say it too often. “Everyone else” is too vague. You might think the correct word would be “normal,” but we’ve all heard the psychologist’s pronouncement “There is no such thing as normal.”

Professionals have coined the word “neurotypical” to describe any human who does not have some form of autism. “Neurotypical” has been in use for a number of years, but I’ve never liked it. Try it yourself. Say it in front of a mirror and watch your mouth. It’s like you’re chewing something just to spit the syllables out. It’s so clinical—you can almost smell the doctor’s office when you say it.

“Neurotypical” is the kind of word you hear in science fiction movies, when they select the specimens for dissection. I wanted a friendlier word, something that didn’t remind me of tongue depressors and needles. I wanted a word I wouldn’t stumble over if I said it late at night. So I made my own contraction, “nypical.”

That’s right. Nypical. Pronounced NIP-ick-al. Now you say it.

The word rhymes with “typical.” In fact, you could use the words together. As in, “You’re a typical nypical!”

So welcome to nypicality, in all of its wondrous variation. And if you are a nypical … get used to it. Now you too have a label to live with.

And it’s not all bad. As a nypical, you are part of the majority. And what a majority it is! When we have a majority in political elections, the winner’s share of the vote is fifty-five percent. When the share reaches seventy-five percent, it’s called a landslide. The share of nypicality is more than ninety-four percent. What more could you ask for?

If you can’t be a proud Aspergian, it’s the next best thing to be … a nypical.

And there you have it. The three kinds of humanity: people on the spectrum, proto-Aspergians, and the nypical masses. Everyone fits into one of those three groups. Which one is right for you?

T
hose of us with Asperger’s will always have different brains, but I firmly believe that different does not have to mean disabled. Many Aspergians—me included—were somewhat disabled as children, but with a strategy, hard work, determination, and the acquisition of hard-won wisdom, we overcame our disabilities to emerge as successful and capable adults. My own life story illustrates that clearly.

When I was young, I could not make friends. I couldn’t play in groups. At school, I didn’t do assignments the way I was told, and I ended up flunking out. I became a juvenile delinquent. Those are all signs of failure. That’s what psychologists look for when deciding if you have a disability. If you’re eccentric or even weird, but you’re not failing at work or in your personal life, you are not disabled. You’re just different. It’s only when you fail at some key thing—as I did—that you become “officially” disabled. In my case, the disability was a result of my Asperger’s. My different brain just would not permit me to
conform to the mold my teachers and other kids wanted to stuff me into.

In many ways, my Asperger’s set me up for failure in my early years. Luckily, the state of failure wasn’t permanent. I wanted to fit in and succeed, and I worked hard to learn to get along. I taught myself the basics of reading other people. I learned how to divine what people expected of me, and I learned how to deliver on that while still staying true to my own beliefs.

My strategy worked. Today, I’m quite successful, and the same Asperger traits that made me a failure as a kid have played a large part in facilitating my success as an adult. The brain differences that made it difficult for me to interact with people actually helped me to concentrate on other things, like machines. That concentration led me to develop abilities with machines that others don’t have, and I’ve been very successful in using those skills to advance my career. That’s really a good example of how something that seems like a pure disability can actually have components of a gift, too. That was true for me, and it can be true for you, too.

I sure wish someone could have told me that when I was in fourth grade. Back then, schools didn’t even know what Asperger’s was, let alone what to do for a kid who had it. The whole concept of special education and accommodations was just emerging. Even today, few people
can chart a path from failure to success for an Aspergian child. That’s why I wrote this book—to show the steps that took me from being a floundering ten-year-old to a successful adult.

The brain differences that make us Aspergian never go away, but we can learn two important things: how to play to our strengths and what to do to fit in with society. Both those skills will lead to a vastly improved quality of life. Actually, you could say every human has to learn those same things, but it’s more critical for those of us who are what you might call “nonstandard.” For us, learning is not as instinctive and easy as we might wish.

Learning how to fit in does not change any of the Aspergian qualities of our brains. If at age ten you have the unique ability to tell someone what day of the week he was born on, you’ll probably still have that ability at age thirty. The difference is, if you learned to fit in, you’ll probably have a lot more friends when you’re older, and the world will see you in a different light because you relate to others better. That, at least, is the goal.

Psychologists lump all that practice and knowledge under the heading “social skills.” Whatever you call it, learning how to get along with other people is vital for our own success and happiness. There’s even a fancy psychological theory for that. It’s called the “competence-deviance hypothesis.” Here’s what it says:

When you are young, you have not yet made a reputation in your community. You’re an unknown quantity. If you act strange, people will be very wary because they
don’t know what to make of you. They’ll be quick to assume you belong in a cage, under restraint. Later in life, once you build a reputation for competence, the same strange behavior will be dismissed as harmless eccentricity. So the stuff that gets you chased out of town at sixteen gets laughed off at forty-six. In adulthood, the focus shifts from superficial attributes to your actual accomplishments. That’s a much better place for an Aspergian, because our sharply focused intelligence often gives us special abilities.

I have certainly seen that in my own life. People today ask me questions about a wide range of topics, and they take my answers quite seriously. Twenty years ago, most people would not consider my opinion at all, and if I voiced one anyway, they’d say, “You’re nuts!” The difference between then and now—as best I can tell—is that I have established a name for myself; I have demonstrated my competence to the world, and I am therefore credible. There’s another important difference: I learned to get along with other people. The quality of my thought at age thirty or even at age fifteen was not one bit lower, but no one knew who I was. I didn’t get any smarter, but I grew and changed in other ways, and that’s what made the difference.

Distilled down to one sentence, you can say: Competence excuses strange behavior. That’s a very important point for those of us on the spectrum, because our special interests can make us extremely competent in whatever we find fascinating. At the same time, our Asperger’s often makes us look pretty strange to outsiders.

Some of the changes that help us fit in better occur naturally as we get older. That’s the nature of Asperger’s—it produces what psychologists call “developmental delays.” We’re slow to pick up some social skills, and we’ll never be perfect at using them, but most of us can learn enough to get by. While all of us grow and develop our entire lives, the pace of development slows down for most people in the late teen years. That’s when those of us with Asperger’s get our chance to catch up. Catching up may be a lot of work, but with sufficient focus and resolve, it can be done. So a kid whose social skills were way behind his peers in seventh grade may end up being just a little eccentric in college, and downright popular in middle age.

Always keep this point in mind: the word “delay” means what it says: late. Delayed isn’t never, no matter how much it may feel like that at age fifteen or even twenty-five.

When we do finally start catching up it makes us feel good. We feel successful. At the same time, we may be at an age when we are beginning to discover some of our Aspergian gifts. And let’s be clear about something—we all have these gifts. I don’t mean we’re all geniuses; I simply mean that each of us has something he or she is particularly good at. Depression and attitude can rob us of the ability to see our gifts, but they absolutely reside in all of us. Since we Aspergians think differently, we’re likely
to have special or unusual skills, and it’s important to find them.

When we discover and build upon our gifts it spurs positive feelings in us and those around us, and those feelings go a long way toward dissipating the burden of failure that many young Aspergians carry as kids. That alone will make us more successful, because positive attitudes translate to positive results. Success breeds success, just as failure breeds failure. When we feel successful we’re less likely to melt down or lash out at other people, and we get along better socially. As we make friends we become happier, and it starts a cycle of positive reinforcement. I think that’s a key factor to help us avoid slipping into depression.

When we get older, we acquire more knowledge and our ability to understand abstract concepts improves. Few six-year-olds understand the concept of a neurological difference, but at sixteen, most can get it. If my own life is any guide, understanding how and why we are different is essential to knowing how we need to change for a better life. That understanding comes with increased maturity.

In my experience, that is the path from disabled to gifted. You learn social skills. You find life and work settings
that minimize your weaknesses, and you discover your strengths and play to them. It sounds easy, set out like that, but it entails a huge amount of work. It’s been a lifetime job for me, but the results are worth it all.

I hope my stories will give you some ideas.

I
sure love routine and ritual. It’s the way of my world. Everything has to be just so. As a toddler, I lined up my blocks a certain way, and, in my mind, that was the only possible way those blocks could be laid out. Any other arrangement of blocks was simply wrong and had to be corrected. It never occurred to me that other kids could have their own ideas about block arranging. Maybe that’s one reason I didn’t have too many friends back then.

Even today, when I can intellectually grasp the idea that blocks can be stacked and lined up in many different ways, and even heaped or piled, there is still just one way for me. I know other people have their own ideas, but that doesn’t make them right. At least, not to me.

But I learned a secret along the way. I learned to accept
the way other people do things even when I’m sure that they are wrong. By learning to let other people make their own choices, and their own mistakes, I avoided antagonizing them and I stopped making enemies for no good reason. It took a while, but I finally came to see that block piling was not something worth fighting over. Most of the time.

There are equivalents to that in adult life, too, and I’ve learned to treat them the same. I know you should never unplug your computer by yanking the cord, but I’ve learned to keep quiet when my friend George does it. For that reason, and a few others, he has remained my friend through many years and countless power cords. All that time, he has remained blissfully ignorant, and indeed he’s come to accept that six months is a long life for an electrical cord. For him.

Growing up, I always assumed that other kids were like me, that they saw the wisdom in my rituals as much as I did. There was big trouble if anyone tried to change my routines. I’d holler and yell and cry. Now I know better—each person wants to make his or her own decisions about how to act. Some people have rituals like I do, and others don’t. I still get uncomfortable if someone questions or disturbs my habits, but I’m able to avoid a meltdown.

I continue to have little rituals today. Some of them make sense to other people, while others seem nutty. But now that I’ve gotten older and have made a place for myself
in the community, people don’t usually criticize me for them. For example, I’ll go to the same restaurant, sit in the same seat, and order the same food every day. To me, that’s perfectly normal and comforting. No one at the restaurant ever complains. In fact, they think it’s great. They even have a term for people like me—“regular customers.” If I had done that when I was a kid, though, people would have called it weird. So which is it, weird or regular?