Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's (28 page)

And in the middle you have people like me—some more functional, some less. We can focus our minds inward, and we also have some ability to relate to people and the outside world.

Some Aspergians can focus their minds extremely sharply, and those of us who cultivate this gift are sometimes called savants. Being a savant is a mixed blessing, because that laserlike focus often comes at a cost: very limited abilities in nonsavant areas. I don’t think I’m a savant, just a highly intelligent Aspergian. But I suspect I was on the edge of becoming a savant when I was a small child, and my later ability to visualize mathematical functions and the operation of circuits was savantlike.

Until recently, there were no widely available sources of knowledge about how savants or Aspergians actually think or see things. But recent books and studies have started to shed light on this. When I read Daniel Tammet’s book,
Born on a Blue Day,
I was amazed by the similarities between thought processes he describes and my own thinking. I’ve seen similar parallels between my thought process and Temple Grandin’s descriptions of thinking in pictures. As more firsthand accounts of lives like ours emerge, I sense we are on the brink of many exciting discoveries about autism and Asperger’s.

When we are young, our brains are constantly developing, making new connections and changing the way we think. As I recall my own development, I can see how I went through periods where my ability to focus inward and do complex calculations in my mind developed rapidly. When that happened, my ability to solve complex technical or mathematical problems increased, but I withdrew from other people. Later, there were periods where my ability to turn toward other people and the world increased by leaps and bounds. At those times, my intense powers of focused reasoning seemed to diminish.

I believe that some kids who are in the middle to more high-functioning range of the autism continuum, like me, do not receive the proper stimulation and end up turning inward to such an extent that they can’t function in society, even though they may be incredibly brilliant in some narrowly defined field, like abstract mathematics.

Scientists have studied “brain plasticity,” the ability of the brain to reorganize neural pathways based on new experiences. It appears that different types of plasticity are dominant at different ages. Looking back on my childhood, I think the ages of four to seven were critical for my social development. That was when I cried and hurt because I could not make friends. At those times, I could have withdrawn further from people so that I would not get hurt, but I didn’t. Fortunately, I had enough satisfactory exchanges with intelligent grown-ups—my family and their friends at college—to keep me wanting to interact.

I can easily imagine a child who did not have any satisfying exchanges withdrawing from people entirely. And a kid who withdrew at age five might be very hard to coax out later.

I also believe considerable rewiring took place in my own brain in my thirties and even later. I believe this because I can compare my thought process today to my processes as expressed in writing and circuit designs from twenty-five years ago.

Papers I wrote back then are flat and devoid of inflection or emotion. I didn’t write about my feelings because I didn’t understand them. Today, my greater insight into my emotional life has allowed me to express it, both verbally and on paper. But there was a trade-off for that increased emotional intelligence. I look at circuits I designed twenty years ago and it’s as if someone else did them.

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

My story isn’t sad, though, because my mind didn’t fade or die. It just rewired itself. I’m sure my mind has the same power it always did, but in a more broadly focused configuration. No one would have looked at me thirty years ago and foreseen that I’d have the social skills I have today, or the ability to express the emotions, thoughts, and feelings you read in this book. I would never have predicted it, either.

It’s been a good trade. Creative genius never helped me make friends, and it certainly didn’t make me happy. My life today is immeasurably happier, richer, and fuller as a result of my brain’s continuing development.

I suspect that grown-ups drew me out enough as a child to keep me engaged and on a path that led to being functional in society. Adults were able to deal with my conversational limitations better than children. They could follow my disconnected responses, and they were more likely to show interest in anything I said, no matter how bizarre. Had I not been drawn out by interested grown-ups, I might well have drifted farther into the world of autism. I might have ceased to communicate.

Even at sixteen years of age, it would have been easy for me to retreat from dealing with humans and move into the world within my own mind. Looking back, I can see a path that might have led somewhere far away, perhaps to autism, perhaps to the place where the savants who can multiply ten-digit numbers in their minds live. After all, I got along well with my circuits, and they never ridiculed me. They presented me with tough problems to solve but they were never mean. Around the time I dropped out of school, it was almost as though I stood in front of Door Number One and Door Number Two, as perplexed as any game-show contestant and with much more at stake, and was forced to make a choice.

My crazy family situation and my need to run away from home and join the working world in order to survive kept me from making that choice. So I chose Door Number One, and in doing so moved farther away from the world of machines and circuits—a comfortable world of muted colors, soft light, and mechanical perfection—and closer to the anxiety-filled, bright, and disorderly world of people. As I consider that choice thirty years later, I think the kids who choose Door Number Two may not end up able to function in society.

As a functional Aspergian adult, one thing troubles me deeply about those kids who end up behind the second door. Many descriptions of autism and Asperger’s describe people like me as “not wanting contact with others” or “preferring to play alone.” I can’t speak for other kids, but I’d like to be very clear about my own feelings:
I did not ever
want
to be alone.
And all those child psychologists who said “John prefers to play by himself” were dead wrong. I played by myself because I was a failure at playing with others. I was alone as a result of my own limitations, and being alone was one of the bitterest disappointments of my young life. The sting of those early failures followed me long into adulthood, even after I learned about Asperger’s.

As a young adult, I was lucky to discover and join the world of musicians and soundmen and special-effects people. People in those lines of work expect to deal with eccentric people. I was smart, I was capable, and I was creative, and for them that was good enough.

In some ways, it was a mistake for me to have left that world, because I was accepted and made to feel welcome there, something I seldom felt in corporate life. But I could not afford to keep moving ahead with my work in electronics with my nonexistent resources. I had to get a job.

In the corporate world, I had started out as an engineer, making $25,000 a year. Back in the 1970s, that was pretty good money. As I moved up, the pay increased. Staff Engineer, Manager of Advanced Development, Assistant Director of Planning, Director of Engineering. And, finally, General Manager of Power Systems. After ten years, I was making $100,000 a year. I was the envy of all the people below me in the food chain, but it was a vicious trap.

In the beginning, I created circuit designs. That was something I loved to do, and did well. Ten years later, my job was managing people and projects. I enjoyed the status and respect, but I wasn’t good at management, and I didn’t like it. The problem was that if I wanted to be an engineer, I’d be looking at a 50 percent cut in pay and a job in some other company. The message was clear: Managers are more valuable than engineers. That made me mad. I wasn’t going to consider going down the ladder and down the pay scale just to be creative. I wanted it all—good pay, independence, and creativity.

“You should really be working on your own,” I was told by my bosses.

Was that a precursor to “You’re fired”? I had already been laid off—rejected—twice. In 1983, I went from a seemingly secure $60,000 salary to a $197 weekly unemployment check. And I had to stand in line for an hour and fill out two forms to get even that. I resolved in 1983 that I would never again collect unemployment.

I realized the comments were right. I was not a team player, so I needed to work on my own. But what could I do that might make money? I thought long and hard about how I could control my own destiny. I could design electronic circuits, and I could fix cars. Those were the two great loves I had grown up with. Either might offer a career. Could I exchange my suit for overalls and start fixing automobiles instead of supervising engineers?

I had always loved cars. I had continued to buy old cars, tinker with them, drive them, and sell them as long as I’d been on my own. I began to seriously consider the idea of abandoning electronics to become a mechanic or car dealer. I broached the subject to some of my friends and colleagues at work.

“I just can’t do this anymore. I can’t stand the bullshit, being in a company like this. It’s just no fun anymore.”

They either didn’t believe me or thought I was just depressed. “You’re going to quit electronics to become a car mechanic? You’ve got one of the top jobs in the company! Don’t you know how many people would give their right arm for a job like yours?”

Or they would say, “You’re full of shit. You can be straight with me. I’m your friend. If you’ve got a good job at a competitor, tell me. Maybe I can go, too!”

Everyone thought there was some angle, some trick. But there wasn’t.

“If you leave the industry it’s going to be very hard to get a job again in a few years. Look at Tom.” Tom was one of our technicians. He had been an engineer until he quit work in order to build houses with his brother-in-law. When he wanted to return to engineering, the only job he could find was as a technician, a big step down from where he had been.

But my mind was made up.

“I got into this business because I wanted to be creative. I wanted to design things. Now, I’m just an administrator.”

Everyone I talked to at work seemed to think I was nuts, but in the end it didn’t matter what other people thought about my job. What mattered was what I thought about my job. And I didn’t like it.

It was time to take my chances on my own. In 1989, I quit my job and became a car dealer. That meant taking out a second mortgage against my house. That $30,000 was my seed money, and it was all I had, so it would have to last. I started to buy secondhand European cars, fix them, and sell them. In addition, I serviced what I sold. My first acquisition was a five-year-old Mercedes 300SD, which I cleaned up, serviced, and sold for a profit of $1,500. It seemed I was off to a great start.

I knew fixing up cars and selling them was not creative like designing sound effects, but it had much to recommend it. There was no long commute to work. I could be myself. I would no longer live in fear for my job. There would be no one to fire me. I would no longer feel like a fraud. Selling cars and doing car repairs would be whatever I could make of it. No one would question my qualifications or ability.

If only it were that simple. By the time I realized there was more to it, the $30,000 was lost, and I was an additional $50,000 in debt. Somehow, the $1,500 profit I’d made on each of my first cars had turned into $2,000 and $3,000 losses on later ones, as the economy slid into recession and I made bad decisions. But there was no turning back. I had to succeed. I still remembered mixing my thirty-cent macaroni dinner with water because I couldn’t afford milk, and I had vowed never to return to that state.

The thing that saved me was my technical skill, fueled by my Aspergian need to know all about topics that grabbed my attention. And cars certainly had my attention. I may not have made money selling them, but I had the knowledge to fix them when no one else could, and people paid me for that. Even more, their praise made me feel good about myself and gave me the courage to go on in the face of my financial losses. And the electrical problems that had other mechanics scratching their heads proved trivially simple for me.

For ten years, I had listened to my bosses tell me that I could not communicate or work with other people. Now the stakes were higher. And I seemed to be communicating successfully. How could I tell? Because people were coming back. And some of them were even visiting with me while work was done.

I had found a niche where many of my Aspergian traits actually benefited me. My compulsion to know everything about cars made me a great service person. My precise speech gave me the ability to explain complex problems in simple terms. My directness meant that I told people what they needed to hear about their cars, which was good most of the time. And my inability to read body language or appearance meant—in an industry rife with discrimination—that I treated everyone the same.