Autistics Anonymous

Hi group, my name is Nerdy Harry, and I'm a High Functioning Autistic.  That's DSM-V speak for Aspie.

Well, group, I'm here to admit to my innermost self, and anyone who happens to be listening, that I'm an Aspie.  I came to this new insight into myself courtesy of our oldest daughter, who at age 14, was diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome, or HFA.  After a long run of emotional, academic, and more recently, social issues, and a protracted outpatient course that was not leading anywhere productive,we had reached an impasse.  We were vexed, perplexed, and most of all worried.  Yet we were clear where her life path was leading her: trouble.  She hadn't found much of it yet, but there's one thing her recovering alkie parents know for sure, it's that you don't have to ride the train all the way to the end of the line if you know where it's going, and it was clearly the Express Train to Nowhere Good.

What we found in our quest for help, with the aid of an educational specialist, was Aspiro wilderness therapy, which had a group for troubled girls who hadn't yet found hardcore trouble (drugs, crime, etc.).  Outpatient therapy was too soft.  Rehab was too hard.  But this one was just right.  At Aspiro, they picked up right away what the common thread of her issues was.  Hiding behind the residual fig leaf of familial mind-blindness not yet pruned by the successive revelations of the 12-Step lifestyle was perhaps the most significant and overarching truth about her, about me, about several members of my family past and present: We're Aspies.  High Functioning Autistics.  Spazzy, awkward, smarty-pantses who couldn't buy a social clue in a dime store with a stack of Benjamins.  We're Non-Neurotypical, or in modern softball-speak, "Neuro-diverse."

Someday, I'll devote a whole post to why I despise that last term.

But as soon as I heard the phrase "Neurotypical," I knew exactly what it was, or more pointedly, what it wasn't: Neurotypical is what I was not; what I am not; and will never be.  It's what I've tried to be; what I've alternatingly coveted and hated in others; what I've faked and still fake to some extent for the sake of functioning in the larger society: Normalcy.  Fitting in.  Relatively effortless comfort in a group, in society.

There has never been anything typical about my neurology, in both good and bad ways.  Hyperactive, shy, smart, sometimes too loud, depressive, prone to dysfunctional relationships with mind altering chemicals.  This is my fate, and it was sealed some time in August 1966, on a sultry night in Laurel, Maryland, when a loud, dweeby Boston Irish sperm met a quiet, reserved Boston Irish egg.  My best efforts have not changed it.  The "blue pill" of excessive boozing couldn't make it go away.  And after 27 years of meetings and programs, my feelings of terminal uniqueness had not quite subsided.  Until now.

It has been both a relief and a condemnation.  But mostly a relief.  And I know from experience that more will be revealed.


So thanks for listening.  But since this is Autistics Anonymous, it doesn't really matter if anyone's listening.  Because as the saying goes, anytime one of us gets together in the name of recovery, you can call it a meeting.  Or I can.

You probably don't think that's funny unless you have some rudimentary knowledge of autism, and you've either been to 12 Step programs, or you've read Matthew 18:20.  But I really just cracked myself right the heck up, and hopefully you, too.

So what was I talking about? Oh yeah, autism.  That's all for now.  Thanks for letting me share.

BLOG REPURPOSING, AND THE HIDDEN SELF

re·pur·pose

rēˈpərpəs/

verb

gerund or present participle: repurposing

1. 1.

   adapt for use in a different purpose.

Anyonymous blogging hasn't appealed to me in awhile, but I'm beginning to recognize a use for it: a possible means of addressing a subjective sense of alienation based on factors that, for one reason or another, can't be discussed with my name attached to them.  Plus, I could always use a venue for speaking the socially unacceptable truths which seem so obvious to me. . .

I assume most if not all of us have private selves, unshared with others, or to some extent, unmet or apparently not understood by others.  So it is with me, unfortunately, to a significant extent.  It haunts family relationships, on rare occasions our marriage, but mostly, it completely dominates my would-be social existence.

So, short story long: Since adolescence, I've felt as if a lifelong wall between me and others.  Not uncommon, but usually the sort of thing that goes away when one grows up.  It seemingly cannot be willed, therapized, prayed, discussed, or ignored into nonexistence.   There are a few things about me that really drive this home.  

There's a shadow just behind me,
shrouding every step I take, 
making every promise empty, 
pointing every finger at me. 
Waiting like a stalking butler 
who upon the finger rests.--Tool, "Sober"

#1: I am, by no fault of my own, smart.  My IQ is 154.  Sorry.

So what's the problem?  Most would say.  People dream of having that sort of ability.

That's because they don't know what it is.  They can see the scores, grades, the interest in things scientific, but cannot intuit their way into an experience foreign to them and imagine the downsides.  Special is special, and I mean that in the pejorative sense.  To be above the norm is to be away from it, is to feel, at least for me, disconnected from it. 

For purposes of connection, and pointedly not for snobbery's sake, I belong to an above-MENSA High IQ group.  Recently, a member of this group, Martin Manley, who was a fairly well-known sports statistician, committed suicide while publishing a posthumous blog explaining it.  Unsurprisingly, this blog, and Mr. Manley himself, were the subject of a fair amount of discussion, and presumably reflection, within the group.

A quick interlude to answer the obvious question--there is no risk, none, zip, nada, zero point zero zero zero ad infinitum, that I'm following in his footsteps.  Life is far too precious, and enjoyable in a generally sweet but not infrequently bitter way.  Most notably, the lives of the little ones that my wife and I have made are precious.  And I want to live to 105, 125, or even 155, and be active and involved all the way.

Back to perhaps morbid contemplation: A group member who had met Mr. Manley had the impression that he thought Mr. Manley ended his life in no small part because he was "slowly dying of loneliness."  This description, whether accurate or not, struck a chord with me.  I have no conscious desire to die (merely to retire early).  But the social side of me, small at it may be, feels as if it has been asphyxiating for close to 50 years now.  Sometimes I am mercifully distracted by life's rich panoply and I don't know the part of me that suffers is there.  Other times, I feel it acutely, and think it can't die soon enough. 

But it hasn't.  And it won't.

#2: What is it to grow up living a life of long-term abstinence from alcohol and all mood-altering drugs, when all "normal" people around me do not? Isolating.  Virtually anywhere you find people having fun together or socializing, you find drinking as a bonding ritual.  This make it hard to truly feel as if I belong to any group outside of an AA meeting. 

Jealous of that large-ish number that follows the letters "I" and "Q" above? Don't be.  Truly, I'd give those last 30 points to you if I could.  This was part of the mirage of alcohol that I chased: the blessed relief of temporary stupidity; the "blue pill" of forgetfulness from The Matrix.  You see, once that number is more than a couple standard deviations above the mean, the fraction of people in the world with whom one can relate intellectually starts to drop off precipitously, and without much more of the imagined benefits of intelligence.  Your would-be friends won't get you.  Or very few of them, and not all of you.  Tell them why, and they'll be jealous.  The richest and most powerful people in the world are not the smartest.  Nor are the happiest people necessarily the smartest.  It's no accident that high IQ groups like MENSA start at an IQ of 135, above which the external advantages of higher intelligence either plateau, or, believe it or not, fall off.

So there's most of the human race right there.  Add some historical social pain to an already sensitive psyche, and the deal seems like it has been pretty much sealed for me.  I stand, like Tantalus, knee deep in water that I cannot drink, fruit that I cannot pick within arm's reach.

Perhaps tossing my thoughts out into the great, amorphous realm of human semi-connectedness, aka the internet, might help.  No reason it would, but no reason it wouldn't, either.

As long as I keep potentially damaging revelations, ruminations, or opinions unattached to my "real world" existence, it can't hurt.

More later.

"Every excess causes a defect; every defect an excess. Every sweet hath its sour; every evil its good. Every faculty which is a receiver of pleasure has an equal penalty put on its abuse. It is to answer for its moderation with its life. For every grain of wit there is a grain of folly. For every thing you have missed, you have gained something else; and for every thing you gain, you lose something. If riches increase, they are increased that use them. If the gatherer gathers too much, nature takes out of the man what she puts into his chest; swells the estate, but kills the owner. Nature hates monopolies and exceptions. The waves of the sea do not more speedily seek a level from their loftiest tossing, than the varieties of condition tend to equalize themselves."--Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Compensation"