I was driving home the other day and caught this interview with Temple Grandin on the radio. I knew of her, mostly because of the Errol Morris documentary she was in, but I'd never read or heard anything long-form with her. I listened sort of half-interested at first, but by the time it was over, I was sitting in the driveway listening in the car, trying to find a good stopping point so I could run in and catch the rest on the radio in the house.
It wasn't her life's work that fascinated me, though it was very interesting to hear how she arrived at the innovations that became her life's work. Rather, it was her descriptions of a life with autism, and the realization that comes one day when you realize that your brain works different from other folks' brains. It really hit home. I know what that feels like.
They say there's this wide spectrum of autism, and that the folks we call "geeks" and "nerds" probably fall at the high-functioning end of the spectrum. I imagine if I were growing up these days, with all the awareness and detection, I'd probably be placed somewhere along the really high-functioning end of that spectrum. But I grew up in a different time, and I wasn't. That had both a good side and a bad side. Fortunately, it didn't have any long-term ill effects, but it did lead to some awkward moments with a teacher or two who didn't understand me, and generally being around other people who didn't realize that my mind was just plain different from theirs, both in what I thought about and how my mind functions.
If you came across me, you may not suspect anything's that different. Although I dread social settings, I function well enough in them; I hate small talk, but I can smile and small-talk and turn on some charm in spite of it. (Even though I'd much rather be in someplace like a library the whole time.) I really have no communication problems, nothing really that would tip me off. I've never really had any problems with detecting nonverbal communication. Any problems with that, I've pretty much learned through self-awareness and self-instruction how to counter them.
Rather, it's all in my brain and how it works. There are goofy little things, and when I was listening to the interview some things rang the bells upstairs. For instance, I think visually and even run things through processes in my mind before I commit them to words or drawings, sort of "wargaming" them out. Sometimes I really have difficulty putting the vivid pictures in my mind into words, to the point that it's frustrating. Plus, it's very easy for me to be adversely affected by sensory things, to the point that I literally have to leave a room if there's something in that environment that bothers me, like loud music or doors slamming or somebody sniffling repeatedly or whatever. It literally gets me agitated and messes up how my mind works. There are other goofy things that run through my head that I won't share here (for instance, things involving the way my mind plays with words and what not), but they are things that, as I heard the interview, it was like I knew her, and that in some ways her life is not unlike my own. Or I can read an article like this one and know exactly what the guy's talking about, because to some extent I've lived it. (The thing about imagining how those poor pinatas must feel? Too close to home.)
I spent so much of my early life being frustrated because I would try to communicate with other folks, but they'd either laugh (when I was young, because I seemed precocious and it was cute to them) or get frustrated with me because they literally couldn't understand what I was trying to get across. Sometimes it was amused frustration; other times, it was irritated frustration. To this day, the word "dense" still carries a lot of freight, because I was described that way more than once. And, of course, I'd get frustrated right back. I could understand myself just fine; they couldn't. We may as well have been speaking different languages. Of course, I didn't know what was up at the time, and I spent so much of my youth wondering if I was stupid or something. But one day the light went on in my head: I'm not stupid. It's just that my brain works in a different way. And that's good.
As one caller to the interview show said: your brain isn't broken. It's just different.
