WHAT MAKES ME THINK I HAVE ASPERGERS SYNDROME?

(and how that relates to me)

I am apparently convinced that my obvious inability to communicate with nearly everybody has got to be their fault.  Making my point of view accessible to the general populace is apparently not learnable by me.  Studying dozens of books on psychology and communication has made it possible (for example) for me to keep most jobs for at least six months, but very few for a year or more.  I have had about 35 jobs in 30 years.  In my early 20s I was basically unemployable for longer than 3 months, which to me was a long long time to follow someone else's routine.

Several times a day I freak out inside because I don't know how much eye contact is expected of me.  I am very worried about what to do with my hands and what posture to assume, for example, if standing around waiting for someone; I'm sure I am being watched and spontaneity is out of the question.  Attempts to use appropriate gestures, postures, and expressions are lame-to-pointless, with occasional success in communication being hinted at if I surround myself by other people who are wired up backwards like me.

There has never been any question about this.  My mama used to hound me: Make some friends!  Did you speak to anyone at school today?

After endless experimentation (also known as washing dishes in many different restaurants), I have discovered that I best fit into the pizza delivery business, because other lamebrains like me find their way there too.  Unfortunately there's one screwball yuppie go-getter in each establishment, so there is always the element of having to move on to the next pizza job.

But I do make "friends" among my fellow workers at pizza restaurants.  But do they follow me home?  Or invite me to join them in their social life?  Are you joking???

Attempts to join clubs, etc., generate the most incredible anxiety.  If I have a social appointment (God forbid anyone ever invite me to a party) two weeks away, that two weeks is the most miserable experience...and chances are very good that I will end up not going to the social function anyway, after all that buildup.

I took Aikido (a form of martial arts) for a couple years and although I practiced obsessively and spent the rest of my spare time reading about Aikido, the people at the dojo acted like I had cooties or something.  My jokes fell flat, the women I asked for dates had something better to do, my Aikido technique was criticized as too aggressive, and in general the concept that I was making a social move of some kind was contradicted by the body signals and verbal cues sent to me from the others at the dojo.  Eventually I got the message:  "Don't bother; you just don't fit in."

And yet, I AM NOT SHY!  I just simply can't connect with people for some reason.  Sure I was mistaken for shy when I was young, but with two big sisters telling everyone "He's shy" before I could figure out the proper way to respond to "My aren't you cute, look how much you've grown!" there was no real opportunity to pipe up with what I really wanted to say.  Besides that, I didn't learn to say F*** YOU till I was about 11 years old.  When I was 12 a friend told me I was "too self-conscious."  After that I became obsessed with trying to not appear self-conscious.  Not a fun circle game to play.

I am ecstatic to discover that I'm on the autistic spectrum.  I feel vindicated against all those condescending jerks who have pitied me all these years for being "mentally ill;" this ain't about mental illness and for a change my life seems to make sense.

Despite always having some obsession or another that I can't figure out why other people don't share, if someone tries to bring me out by saying something like, "Tell so-and-so about your such-and-such," I freeze up and the whole room is filled with a jello-like substance that makes tongues thick and spontaneity impossible, until some genius changes the subject to get me out of the limelight.  In a few minutes, if possible, I disappear for a few minutes or for the duration.

I am very good at many things, but as the years pass I fall more and more into routines that are inadequate to express my talents, mainly because young weirdos and revolutionaries tend to support each other, whereas (at least in my case), I have lost interest in weirdos and revolutionaries so I no longer feel any support for my strange world views.  Of course many of my strange friends have "grown up," a syndrome I managed to avoid somehow, and others are "trying" to grow up, i.e., avoiding people like me so they can at least hope to fool themselves, their spouses, and their employers and other important social contacts who might otherwise guess the truth about them and send them over to my shack to watch videos with me.

All of my girlfriends (including some of the ones who dropped me after three hours or less of being madly in love with me) have wondered what is wrong with my ability to give and receive affection spontaneously.  Once I solved this problem by marrying a woman who was socially unacceptable (marriage one) and therefore no challenge, then a gypsy who despised commitment (marriage two).  Marriage three was craftily arranged by my guardian angels; to all appearances I have found a happy productive woman who loves me and because of this I expect this marriage to last the rest of my life.  What is my secret?  I am not going to JINX myself by telling you!

Sounds good to me.  Small is safe; focused is small.  Obsession shuts out the world and its yammering demands.  I am the world's foremost expert on cars that run on compressed air, 25 years in the making.  Besides that I have burned through all-out obsessions (lasting longer than the jobs I've held) in the areas of Welsh language and folklore, hallucinogenic substances, marijuana, Aikido, rebuilding player pianos, primal therapy, being a born again Christian, shamanic soul retrieval, a singer named Tiny Tim, and others.

Compare that with your next door neighbor, Bob...the one who slaps you on the back and hollers in your ear, "Hey, how about those Lakers!"

Like when I was a kid and when I walked through the living room I had to step on only certain parts of the rug.  Or the way I get fired from jobs because once I learn a way to do something, it is the only way, and everyone I work with from that point forward must learn this way from me, and if they don't want to, they are TOTAL SCHMUCKS who don't deserve to live.

I have no apparent ability to intuitively discern the unwritten rules, and I embarrass myself on every job by questioning anyone's right to bend the formal rules for the greater good that is quietly bespoken for by the (usually more relevant) unwritten rules.  Including the owner of the business, who has had the occasion to wonder who the heck I think I am.

Either that or I am the reckless rebel, the feisty little cuss, and breaking the rules IS the rule that must not be broken.

As a child, if the teacher was out of the classroom I was thrown into extreme anxiety by the monkey business that would go on.  I stood rigidly in line while others acted like kids and made noise and commotion.  Their attempts to get me to play ended at puberty when their play was to make fun of me: "Does that hurt?  Does THAT hurt???"  And fun it was, for it was the only attention I was going to get.

Once in the second grade my classmates got into trouble for doing the duck walk on the floor while the teacher was out.  We had just returned from gym class where we had been ordered to do the duck walk (much to my chagrin; we were even supposed to quack!)  Of course I was bolt upright in my seat, right as rain, when the teacher charged into the room and demanded that everyone who'd been doing the duck walk and quacking write their names on the board and stay in their seats at recess time.  I got up and wrote my name on the board.  Just in case.  Well I was doing the duck walk...in gym class!

I have a collection of photos from my childhood, all taken on Easter, in which I am pouting in every one because I hated to wear church clothes and I hated to pose for a picture.  I hated to be kissed and I hated to have my hair combed.  I would freak out if my mom threw away my favorite ragged jeans or sneakers.  My first girlfriend had to sulk to get me to kiss her.

My third girlfriend?  I had to sulk to get her to kiss me.

As a young child I developed the habit of rubbing soft cloth between my fingers while sucking on my tongue.  Guess what?  I still do!  Obsessively!  I can't wait to get off by myself so I can go into that soothing headspace I have always called "soffing."

When I was in elementary school my mother embarrassed me by slapping my hand when I was soffing in church.  Embarrassment is one of the few things that work with me; standard punishments (like physical assault or losing jobs) don't work to modify my behavior.  I gave up soffing for the balance of my childhood, and took up a long string of replacement mannerisms.  I clicked my tongue on the roof of my mouth for hours.  I tapped my feet.  I tapped my fingertips together in a certain pattern.  I said weird things in public, much to the embarrassment of my companions, who thought I should not holler out, "Shutup!" or "Get that phone!" while we were riding on the bus, just because I couldn't think of anything else to say.

Funny thing, when my parents sent me off to technical school at age 18, I went back to soffing.  Over the years since then I have fought and fought, and eventually proved I was able to stop this habit for months at a time, although unlike drug habits the craving never went away.  Finally I gave up.  Soffing is here to stay.  I'm tired of fighting it, and it doesn't hurt me.  Sure it makes me look like a dork.  So I'm a dork.  What me worry?

Parts of pianos, parts of speech, parts of emotions, parts of words, parts of bodies, what can I say?  Could anything be more fascinating than to mentally separate a whole phenomenon into its parts, put those parts in categories, and write many cross-referenced pages listing those parts?

Once I indexed Carlos Castaneda's Journey to Ixtlan.  (He HAD TO be an aspergeroid.)  Once I spent a week's vacation sitting on the couch at my friend's house going through her dictionary writing down every word I could find that did not describe a concrete object.  These "conceptual terms" were to become the basis of the language I wanted to create, whose vocabulary would be built off the way that combinations and recombinations of the few elemental concepts that can't be broken down into combinations of more elemental concepts combine with each other to form more complex concepts.  Know what I mean?  In my language, each sound would represent a particular element of meaning, and the combination of sounds would exactly represent the exact elements of concept making up the complex concept.  Right.

Unfortunately, my obsessions have never been backed up by self-discipline, so lacking sufficient obsession to carry a project through to its logical climactic demise, the project eventually limps to a halt and moves over for the next obsession, forevermore taunting me from the overflowing "incomplete" vault in my head.

I did not speak (ever) in kindergarten.  In the first grade I only whispered in the teacher's ear.  In the second grade I only spoke when I had to answer a question, or on the playground to my only friend.

I would not pee in a public toilet.  Instead I danced in my seat until the inevitable warm stream of relief/misery came to release/humiliate me.  This was an almost daily occurrence in kindergarten, first grade, and sixth grade.

I wet the bed every night until age 13 when I stopped sharing a room with my brother.  Apparently privacy helped with whatever anxiety I was trying to express by peeing in my bed when my normally steel-trap conscious mind was not there to repress me.

I had severe insomnia till age 16.  Even now, if someone mistreats me enough to get me talking to myself about it, I know I will not be able to sleep, and would rather start a screaming argument with the person who mistreated me, than to miss a night of sleep.  Nothing upsets me more than a threat to my ability to sleep at least eight hours.  And yet I hate to go to bed.  The older I get, the less I resist the tendency to stay up all night.  If I can get away with it, I will establish a routine of going to bed at 4-5 a.m. and sleeping past noon.  I find it almost impossible to get anything done, especially when compelled to spend hours each day writing about what it's like to be me.

But there was for me.  I was supposedly normal in every way (except I needed more diapers than most babies) until the age of 22 months when some traumatic experiences forced me inside.  My speech stopped developing until I was three years old.  I had to be dressed like a little baby and refused to socialize.  This anti-verbal tendency has been something to fight against ever since. 

My vocabulary and abilities developed but I did not use them until age three when I started talking at my own age level again.  But I have never really been able to function verbally outside of familiar social settings, like one would expect of someone with my intelligence, vocabulary, experience, background, abilities, and comprehension.  My third wife, who is a foreigner, told me early on in the relationship: "Honey, I do not speak English fluently."  I replied, "That's OK hon, neither do I."  She thought that was funny.  That's why I married her.  Most people don't laugh at my jokes.

True.  This has been my bane, because the superficial schmucks inhabiting this earth expect me to keep up, simply because I am not sitting in a chair rocking and mumbling and drooling on myself.  I am the same as them normals simply because I LOOK LIKE them???  I certainly HOPE NOT!!!  And yet it has been nearly impossible to figure out how to constructively represent myself as someone with special needs, because the attached stigma makes it a counterproductive endeavor so it's not worth the extreme effort of getting people to look beyond the exterior.  Eventually they figure out I'm different, and then it's my FAULT, it's my PROBLEM, it's my EXCUSE...there is no place in our society for noncompetitive people whose brains are wired for creating beauty if possible or settling for trying real hard to relax and not worry so much when beauty is not possible.

When they say that the only adaptive behavior I have problems with is social interactions...HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!  What else IS THERE but social interactions, in a world of people where the ability to mimic and parrot social convention is the only way to succeed unless one is extremely lucky in a multiplicity of various ways?

One psychiatrist claimed I was an undifferentiated schizophrenic, but my next set of tests a few years later made me out to have schizoid affective disorder instead.  Schizoid and Aspergers are superficially similar and back in 1978 Aspergers wasn't known and wasn't in the official diagnosis book.  Schizoid was as close as they could come without saying, look son, you're just a social cripple, a geek, and and and...

The psychiatrist who claimed I was schizophrenic also claimed I was hearing voices.

Excuse me?  May I please be the judge of whether or not I am hearing voices?  No, I am not schizophrenic, and the people who said I was schizoid specifically disagreed with that diagnosis.

THE BOOK I WROTE ABOUT MY LIFE BEFORE I HEARD OF ASPERGERS

SUPPORT ART BY AUTISTICS

HOME TO LIMBERLUCK EXPRESS

Send Me An Email