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

by John Elder Robison

  My unusual concentration is buttressed by knowledge, and that in turn comes from what psychologists call the “special interests.” As a kid, I was teased because when I got interested in something I talked about that topic, about trains or bugs or whatever else, until everyone around me was bored to tears. As a child, my thirst for knowledge about a few specific topics may have seemed strange. (And I’m sure my rants annoyed people around me.) But as an adult, that drive for knowledge helped me become an expert. Sure, I may go on and on about Land Rovers until you are about to scream from boredom, but isn’t that the kind of person you’d choose to make your old Rover better than new?

  And when I do make an adjustment or a repair to your car, it’s done right or not at all. Sometimes I know it’s perfect right away; other times I tinker and tinker and then go back to check it ten more times. It’s just how I am. Before I learned about Asperger’s, I just figured I was a fussy sort of guy. Now I know I can thank my Asperger’s for my need to know everything possible about something, and to do my work as perfectly as I can. Just like stacking blocks back on the playground.

  ——

  I sure wish I could have seen my future when people called me names as a kid. And it wasn’t just the other kids—even teachers made fun of my focus and interests. It’s ironic how that works. Even today, psychologists say special interests and extreme focus are abnormal in a teenager. But if the person is twenty-five, the same shrinks call him an expert. That’s what happened to me.

  The world really does get better for Aspergians, and indeed for all sorts of geeks and misfits, as we grow up.

  Secrets of My Success

  When I look back at the stories in this book, a few key insights come into focus. These are the highlights of what I have discovered while struggling as an Aspergian throughout my life, albeit unknowingly for the first forty years. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading about my experiences, and that you’ve learned some helpful tricks, hints, and techniques that you can apply to your own life. Here’s what I suggest.

  Find Your Strengths and Interests

  The first secret is that you must figure out what you’re good at and stick with it. In school a lot of emphasis is put on identifying your weaknesses and then improving them. That’s important if your weaknesses are holding you back, but it’s not the path to greatness. Greatness happens when you find your unique strengths and build upon them. Building up a weakness just makes you less disabled. Building a strength can take you to the top of the world. Where would you rather be? When you discover a unique ability, there’s no limit to what you can achieve.

  I credit the adults in my life and the environment where I grew up with helping me find what I loved and excelled at. My parents’ gift of a computer kit started me on electronics. My mother’s uncle Bill and his tool kit introduced me to the world of machines when he helped me take apart my pedal car. My grandfather Jack bought me a Fender Showman amplifier and a bass guitar to start me off in music. Once grown-ups gave me a start I moved ahead on my own, but it all began with them.

  Environment played a big part once I got moving. Since I lived in a college town there were really great resources at my disposal. I found well-stocked labs at the university and helpful faculty and grad students. My father taught philosophy there, so all its doors were open to me. To some extent the Internet makes knowledge available anywhere for today’s kids, but there’s no doubt that my location was a factor in my success, and that your location still matters today. There’s a big difference between reading about something online and actually handling it in a university lab.

  Every kid has areas of strength, and it’s the job of grown-ups to help those kids find their unique strengths and then encourage them to develop them. Once I had my interests nailed down, I spent countless hours studying and practicing until I knew them cold. There were periods when I immersed myself in electronics and cars ten or more hours a day, seven days a week. There is just no substitute for that kind of concentrated practice.

  I was very lucky to pick interests at fourteen that would last me a lifetime. Teens who know what they love and pursue it with single-minded determination have an undeniable advantage. If you look at the superstars in any field, you’ll find people who took up their life’s work as young adults. My friend Ron Feldman, for example, was the Boston Symphony’s youngest cellist at nineteen. Bill Gates has written about immersing himself in computer programming as a teenager, which led to the formation of Microsoft a few years later.

  When someone grows up to be successful, people are quick to say, “He just has an ability I haven’t got!” But it’s more likely that he found his area of interest and invested in it at a very young age. It’s focus and hard work that truly bring success.

  Find Real-World Applications for Your Special Skills

  Right from the beginning I found people who appreciated my abilities and were willing to pay for them. You couldn’t miss my special interests, because I seldom talked about anything else. For example, anyone could see my love of cars, and love of fine machinery. With all my enthusiasm, it’s no surprise that folks would enlist me to fix their cars when I got older. My love of music and electronics was obvious, too, and that led to jobs working on sound equipment for local bands.

  In both cases, my special interests were visible enough that opportunity came my way with relatively little effort on my part. One successful job led to another, and I took on more and more complex projects as my confidence and ability blossomed. Once I recognized that pattern I was able to continue seeking opportunities to earn a living doing what I loved. If my social skills had been better I might have progressed further and faster, but I still did pretty well with what I had.

  Many people seem to go through life with the opposite perspective. They don’t find their special interests, or ways to apply them. They reach the end of school with the question What do I want to do? unanswered. They pick a major in college, or select a trade, based on some arbitrary factors, like an uncle in the business or a magazine article or a recruiter who promised fame and fortune at his company. They lack a focus—a purpose—to their life. That’s a problem I have never had.

  Focus and Work Hard

  Aspergian focus helped me become successful by allowing me to concentrate on my interests to the exclusion of all else. The tricky part was choosing productive things as my targets. If Apspergians can do that, there is really no limit to what we can do. My exceptional focus kept me on track, and my Aspergian brain helped me soak up new knowledge at a rate few nypical competitors could match.

  Teenagers have a lot of time on their hands. It may not seem that way at age fifteen, but when you look back from the perspective of fifty, it’s obvious. I had limitless energy when I was young. I’d get focused on something and stay at it till two in the morning, then get up at six and start all over again. Without really trying, I used that time to become a world-class expert in a few areas. And it’s those areas of expertise that catapulted me to such success in my early adult years.

  There is no substitute for hours and hours of practice. Music teachers say that about practicing the tuba or the bassoon, but it’s true for anything. Whatever you want to be—an auto mechanic, an engineer, even a tracker of wild animals—you can’t truly be an expert without putting in the hours. Asperger’s can help you with focus and concentration, but we all have to put in our time.

  Resolve

  Resolve is another secret to my success. I’d like to paint this in a noble light, but a lot of my resolve is probably just common pigheadedness combined with Aspergian obliviousness. When I was young I would decide I wanted to do something, and more experienced older people would laugh and say, “You can’t do that!” However, my Asperger’s made me blind to their skepticism, which might have discouraged a nypical kid. So I went ahead, and many times, I succeeded.

  Sometimes being oblivious of the skepticism and ridicule of others can be an advantage. When you combine that with my Aspergian way of solving pro
blems, it can lead to some pretty striking accomplishments. And my focus keeps me going, even when it looks like I’m about to fail. I can stay the course, try again, and ultimately succeed—all because I’m too stubborn to do anything else.

  Finally, I worked hard. And you can, too. Work those gifts for all they’re worth.

  Appendix for Parents, Teachers, and Others of Their Ilk

  At this point, you have made it most of the way through the book without ever reading a definition of Asperger’s or autism. That situation is about to change.

  In this section, I define Asperger’s and offer my thoughts on getting tested for neurological differences.

  I have also put together an index of autistic behaviors and where they are discussed in this book. If you hear that a child has, for example, trouble with perseveration, you can use this index to see where that’s discussed in Be Different.

  Finally, I have compiled a list of further reading and resources.

  Asperger’s—the Definition

  So what is Asperger’s? I’ll offer my insight interwoven with the “official” definition from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM IV), which doctors and psychologists use. The main thing to understand about Asperger’s is that it’s a neurological difference—a difference in the way our brains are made. It’s one of the conditions that doctors call an autism spectrum disorder, or ASD. In fact, in the upcoming edition of the DSM, due in 2013, Asperger’s will no longer be listed as a separate diagnosis. It will be categorized as one of the autism spectrum disorders. There’s no way to measure any form of autism with instruments—at least not yet—so a diagnosis must be made by asking questions and observing our behavior. There are six major points a doctor or mental health professional will look at when judging whether a patient has Asperger’s or some other form of autism.

  First of all, the person must have difficulty interacting with other people. I’ve listed four ways one might have trouble; the doctors say at least two have to apply for someone to be diagnosed.

  A. The person might have difficulty with nonverbal behaviors like eye-to-eye gaze or reading facial expressions, body postures, and gestures. I sure had a lot of trouble with those. Things didn’t really improve until I learned about my own Asperger’s as an adult. But knowledge is power, and I’ve made huge headway with these behaviors today.

  B. The person might not be able to make friends with kids his own age, at his own level. That’s something I remember well from first grade—my total inability to make friends my own age. The kids in my class just laughed at me, and called me names like Monkey Face and Retard. There were two things that saved me from total frustration over that. First, some younger kids looked up to me. After all, any six-year-old is like a god to a toddler, even a friendless one like me. Second, a few adults stayed friends with me despite the strange things I said and did. Luckily, I’ve gotten past that and I now have plenty of friends my own age.

  C. People with Asperger’s often seem self-absorbed or uninterested in other people. For example, a classmate might say, “Look at my test! I got an A+,” and the Aspergian might reply, “So what?” Anyone might react with total indifference every now and then, but acting disengaged and uninterested all the time is an indication that something may be up. Disconnection from other people and what they do is a sign of Asperger’s.

  This is a hard thing for people on the spectrum to work on, because while our self-absorption is innocent, others see it as malicious. It’s not. We are simply oblivious of much of what goes on around us, because we are wrapped up in our own thoughts.

  D. When two people approach each other, one often smiles, and the other smiles back, mirroring the first person’s expression. One person might say, “Check out this new video,” and the other person might answer, “Yeah, I’ve been wanting to see that one.” Psychologists call that kind of behavior “social or emotional reciprocity.” Often, people with Asperger’s don’t act that way. People smile at me, and I just look back at them with a flat expression. Someone might tell me about her video, and I’ll say nothing.

  I see myself in every one of those points. However, now that I’m an adult, I have learned how to adapt, and I’ve learned what other people expect of me. As a result, the differences that disabled me as a kid just make me eccentric as a grown-up. If there is a good side to life with Asperger’s, it’s the knowledge that we just get better with age.

  That’s not all there is to an Asperger diagnosis. In addition to poor interpersonal skills, the person must also have unusual interests, strange patterns of behavior, or fixations on objects. The diagnostic manual says that at least one of the four issues below must apply.

  A. The person must have “an all-encompassing preoccupation” that is abnormal in intensity or focus. That’s a mouthful, and it is kind of tricky to understand. I think this point is where many of our interests lie and where becoming a grown-up changes perceptions. For example, if you’re ten years old and you can’t talk about anything but carnivorous dinosaurs, you’re abnormal. If you’re the same way at thirty-five and a professor of paleontology, you are the smartest guy in your department. If you are fifteen years old and you can’t think about anything but girls, you are normal. If you can’t think about anything but light switches, you may be Aspergian. What that shows is that perceived mental health is sometimes just a matter of context and situation.

  B. Alternately, the person might be someone who is stuck on what the doctors call “nonfunctional rituals or routines.” Here’s an example: You walk through the door of your school and immediately turn to check the potted plants by the door. You have to check to make sure that no one has thrown trash in the pots. If there is any trash, you have to get rid of it before entering homeroom. You go to the bathroom, get some paper towels, and then use them to pick up the trash without actually touching it so that you can throw it out. On your way to homeroom, you check every door you pass because the doors are supposed to be closed and you must make sure that rule is being followed. When you reach the bathroom near your own classroom, you go inside and make sure the light is on. You also make sure there are paper towels and toilet paper in case you need them later. You do your best, but you are always ten minutes late to class because you must do those things before going into your classroom.

  That’s the kind of routine they are talking about. It disrupts someone’s life and causes issues with other people, and when you get right down to it, there’s no purpose to it. I remember my little rituals well. Remind me to tell you about my pet trash.

  C. The person might display stereotyped and repetitive motor mannerisms. For example, I used to rock back and forth endlessly. “Stop rocking!” grown-ups would yell at me, and I’d stop, but a moment later I’d start rocking again without even thinking about it. I always thought rocking was harmless to others and comforting to me, but it drove grown-ups wild. And that wasn’t all. They’d also pick on me for twisting my hands a certain way, or tapping my foot in rhythmic patterns. Other people were convinced I did those things to drive them crazy, but it was really unconscious. I certainly didn’t mean to be annoying.

  I developed a whole host of strange mannerisms as a kid, but when I saw how they got me teased, I taught myself to control myself in public. For the most part, it worked. Some Aspergians learn to manage this pretty well; others don’t.

  D. The person might be preoccupied with parts of objects. Once again, the shrinks have said some “parts” are okay and others are “abnormal.” A preoccupation with girls’ legs is fine; a preoccupation with the differences between Standard and Kohler flush handles on the bathroom toilets is weird. If a guy talks about his female-leg fixation, all the guys around him will understand and chime in. If he talks about plumbing levers instead, those same guys will send him to the doctor. That’s how we tell what’s weird from what’s normal. Weird preoccupations often get us into trouble.

  Taken individually, those behaviors are harmless. But when a bunch of them o
ccur together, and we are compelled to do them constantly, they can add up to a disability. It’s all a matter of degree and control.

  Psychologists talk a lot about rituals, how we struggle with them, and the ways perceptions of rituals change as we get older. Grown-ups jump all over us when we are kids, but when we become full grown others our age just look at us and say, “He’s really set in his ways!” If our rituals are really extreme, they might say, “He’s nuts!”

  Everyone has eccentricities, but for those of us with Asperger’s, those differences are a lot more pronounced. To get an official diagnosis, our behavioral aberrations have to cause significant impairments in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning. As a child, my Aspergian behavior kept me from making friends and held me back in school. Therefore, when I was eight, a psychologist would have said that I had the disability of Asperger’s. Later, my Aspergian brain helped me achieve unusual success in business and the creative arts. Today, I’m still Aspergian, but I am not disabled by any measure.

  That’s a very important point. Asperger’s is a difference in our brains. It never goes away. However, as we get older and learn more skills, we can go from one extreme to the other—from disabled to gifted. That was hard for me to see at age sixteen, but it was obvious by age twenty-five. If you’re struggling with Asperger’s in middle school right now, no one can say how far you will go as an adult. All we can say is, life gets better for people like us. Often, a lot better. You may well surpass me in a few years. If you do, write a book so I can read how you did it.