A Touch of Asperger’s
A few weeks ago, music critic Tim Page published an essay in The New Yorker, “Parallel Play,” in which he described the suffering that he endured as a childhood victim of Asperger’s Syndrome – suffering that might have been alleviated had he known that he was afflicted with it. (He was not diagnosed until a few years ago, at the age of fifty.) Much of his misery seemed very familiar to me.
We are informally referred to as “Aspies,” and if we are not very, very good at something we tend to do it very poorly. Little in life comes naturally – except for our random, inexplicable, and often uncontrollable gifts – and, even more than most children, we assemble our personalities unevenly, piece by piece, almost robotically, from models we admire.
Very familiar. I talked about this article with my therapist. He had read it, too. At the end of the hour, I asked him to tell me if it had made him think of me. He said that it had.
So, a mild case, perhaps. As Mr Page implies, you can “learn” your way out of Asperger’s. It never goes away, but you learn how other people are likely to expect you to behave. That may be why I have such great faith in learning; knowing how much good it can do has enabled me to take an interest in things that were not at first appealing – most notably, politics. But the disorder, to the extent that I suffer from it, generates a kind of hyperconsciousness that can be exhausting. (I know that I drink martinis in order to shut it down for the night.) The dread of being exposed as an emotional fake never vanishes altogether. My feelings may be genuine, but they’re tainted by the fact that I learned to have them. I daresay that that statement makes no sense to some people: how can you learn how to feel? I must be mistaken – or so they might argue, at least in my imagination. I hope that the matter won’t come up.
It’s probably typical of my touch of Asperger’s, though, that I find it so interesting that I’m (inappropriately) telling the world.
Your phrase regarding “a kind of hyperconsciousness [that] can be exhausting” so resonated with me I turned to the article by Tim Page and am still digesting it, and wondering at what point on the spectrum of the condition I lie. A disturbing and oddly comforting piece. Can we see or judge the condition in others? What do you think: am I a worse case than you, or vice versa? “Nine times nine is equal to 81.” As a greeting to strangers, I’ve used worse. Thank you for bringing this informative piece to my attention.
I only just read the Tim Page article online, my subscription to The New Yorker not yet having followed me to my new residence in CT due to some boneheadedness that may or may not have a pathological lable, a pathology that also allowed me to fail noticing that my cell phone minutes expanded drastically unpon unemployment and that unlimited texting had been dropped from my Verizon plan when I got my new Blackberry thus resulting in a $912 Wireless bill the month after losing my job. There. I just demonstrated my communication style, one where, like a dog on a path, I might stop suddenly an intent propulsion forward with an abrupt pause to sniff something engrossing in the grass clippings that reminds me of another idea. Differently intelligenced or gifted or equipped seems to me a more respectful and accurate interpretation of your so-called affliction, identification with which I must say I agree. I am sorry for the grief it causes you. My zig-zag communications style causes others much more grief than it eventually ever reflects to me. I fault, to a large degree, the homogenization of our culture, an agreement that goes insanely beyond manners which I agree serve as ways to be respectful of other human beings. School and playgrounds, two early arenas for socialized acceptance, are systems that reward only certain personal, physical, emotional, and intellectual attributes, respectively. Like coming from a relatively affluent family and receiving a good education, I count myself only lucky at having a good balance of those very attributes. I see the intelligence and gifts of others who had less of one or all of those attributes as no less valuable, even though bad grades and being chosen last on the team might infer otherwise. My sister performed only average in school. She was only later to understand her resistance to learning and testing stemmed from (obviously) undiagnosed anxiety. Oh, the poor kids who had dyslexia before it was recognized! I’m recognizing the harangue that I’m on about society and it’s narrow measure of success and how it obviates great talent and even greater hearts. I’m yelling and rebelling. You may have had challenges with emotions and feel they’re tainted by having learned them, and you may even feel like you’ve defrauded me when I say this, but you are a person whose thinking, intellect, and love as a friend I most greatly appreciate and admire. The affliction is in the compulsion to find oneself in conflict with the average in society. Who wants that? You’ve escaped. Stop suffering from it and revel in it. You’re fab!
(I note the lack of mechanism for reviewing this comment before posting, so I hope it reads OK and, being posted after the date, it mostly is read just by you!)