One by one, the penguins steal my sanity

    I once saw this on a bumper sticker and, like inside jokes, it has become meaningful only to me. I’m not sure exactly what it means, it just makes me feel better when life is going out of control. I’ve often tried to pretend that I’ve got control over my life. More recently, I’ve given up the pretense and now just try to roll with the punches.
    One of the things over which I have no control but pretended that I did, is autism spectrum. I’ve finally come to accept that I, like my son and my ex-husband, have Asperger’s Syndrome. It was a traumatic revelation for me. Females, much more than males, are socialized to conform. As a female on the spectrum, I’m better at hiding my utter confusion over most social situations than the boys do; sometimes I even revel in my bewilderment.
    I’m all right with one person; I can narrow my focus to comprehend many of the unspoken cues from a single person but I start to feel lost with a small group and a large group is overwhelming. Even with one person, I overthink what is supposed to come easily. For example, in “Parade” magazine a few weeks ago, there was a picture of a person with a tightly rounded mouth and wide-open eyes. The text said that up to half of teenagers had difficulty identifying the emotion portrayed but that “all” adults got it.
    So, I looked carefully at the picture. Initially, I decided that the person was angry but, after consideration, remembered that angry eyes are usually narrowed. These were wide open. Open eyes could be surprised but the mouth was wrong. I copied the expression with my own face. As I considered the emotions evoked by my own expression, I finally thought the person might be scared. Fear could result in a tight mouth and open eyes. I turned the page and discovered that I was correct. It only took me ten seconds to run through this difficult thought process but I was pleased to discover that I thought like one of the grown-ups! But, do most adults have to copy the face in order to identify it? I think not. I’m an adult, but one who must analyze carefully rather than simply “know”, almost by instinct.
    As a kid, people said I was shy. In retrospect, I wasn’t shy so much as terrified because I could never figure out what people were thinking, the way other kids could. When I decided to stop behaving shy, I still found myself occasionally paralyzed by fear when in new situations. Just as people can decide that pain is sexually exciting (yuck!), I decided that total bewilderment was not frightening, rather, it was fun and entertaining. I conflated my acceptance of confusion with believing that everyone else was as confused as I was. This meant I was “normal” in my confusion.
    Being “normal” meant a lot to me. After all, adolescence is all about trying to fit in. Before I gave up my “shyness”, I found the AV club. I didn’t fit in anywhere in my high school but the AV club gave me some measure of acceptance, but the other girls in AV understood the rules of high school girls; I never did. At best, I was invisible to the rest of the high school. I liked it that way. When I started college, I decided that being invisible wasn’t going to work as I had no support group and was unlikely to find one if I was shy. Abandoning shyness. I’ve sought out and found a corps of geeks to join, wherever I’ve gone.
    I was willing to accept that I was smarter than a lot of people, I just didn’t think I was that different, particularly in a group of mixed smart people like my geeky friends. I have lots of smart friends but many of them are probably on the spectrum, too. My neurotypical friends generally don’t have the all-consuming drive to read everything they can lay their hands on or to take apart their “toys” to discover how they work. I used to believe that all of the people that I admired for their expertise in one realm were equally knowledgeable across the board (like me).  Occasionally, someone would surprise me by telling me that they didn’t know something that I considered common knowledge.
    For example, yesterday, a neurotypical friend thought the word “complement”(used appropriately) was “compliment,” merely misspelled. I don’t know what to make of this.
    Margaret was surprised but gratified to discover that I could fix her wheelchair when its wheel kept jamming on her. I can’t see why no one else around her was able to do anything. It was simple. All it took was a willingness to figure out how the brake assembly worked, then to loosen (and tighten) a single bolt to make a minor adjustment! I still can’t imagine why anyone who can use both hands couldn’t do such a simple thing.
    I was in Walmart last night and saw a woman laughingly purchasing an inexpensive purple tool kit for a Christmas present. She chuckled to her (older female) companion that her daughter had recently moved into her first apartment and would need it. This pleased me, although the tools were crappy and a better set could be had at Home Depot for the same price. It suggested to me that perhaps this mother also experimented with home repairs so maybe I’m not such a weirdo after all!
    “Normal” means average - something that the majority of people can and will do. But, if your peer group is not representative of the population as a whole, your ideas about “normal” are skewed. I think my peer group (for almost my entire adult life) has been far above average in most things so my ideas about “normal” have a much higher standard than the average American. Even in this group, I’m not “normal,” although I’ve sought it in social venues and often discounted my gifts in intellectual areas. “Normal” was something that I sought and deeply desired for myself. I never wanted to be the outlier, but I guess I am. AS makes me an outlier, but, according to the people from the Discovery Channel who interviewed me about John, being able to articulate the differences between AS and the neurotypical minds makes him (and me!) an outlier amongst outliers. The main difference is, he had less of a need to fit in. He has reveled in his diagnosis, whereas I agonized with mine.
    I’m gradually coming to the conclusion that I wouldn’t change myself, though. I like being a geek amongst geeks. It’s all the neurotypicals who make me insecure.

    I’ve been thinking a lot about how I think; I require words to help me with visual input. Reading gives me both visual input and words. I cannot go for a single day without reading for a significant part of that day. I read when I’m stressed; I read when I’m at ease. When I’m reading, I fight to stay awake despite sleepiness and forget when I’m hungry. I read the way a glutton eats. I don’t read word-by-word, I read in chunks of text, consuming entire paragraphs, whole and intact, slurping down pages and eagerly looking for more. When I read fiction, I see the action unfold before me, like a cross between a cartoon and a movie with live actors. I hear the dialog and smell the odors. Reading is better than real life, as books are predictable. Oddly enough, it is the people who turn into blurry cartoons unless I actively keep their descriptions in the front of my mind, while the locations, background, and objects remain crisp and lifelike.
    I cannot remember what people look like in real life unless I explicitly and deliberately describe them to myself, verbally. It isn't enough to just think a general description, I have to slow down and articulate every word, individually. Real people don’t actually turn into cartoons, but my reading memory of fictional people echoes my perception of real people. The real people all blur together - to me, almost everyone looks like everyone else. If I am confronted by people that I’ve met at the same time, I usually can’t tell them apart. I think in pictures, but I cannot remember the people in them without explicit words to describe their differences. I think this is why I read so much. Books give me the words I need without any additional effort on my part. In addition, the act of reading mediates between the external world and me.
    I also think that my difficulty in visual memory of humans underlies why I was “shy” as a kid. I never knew if I’d met someone before and didn’t know how to react to changes to my routine, in addition to not knowing what their expressions meant.
     I"m still going to watch out for those penguins, though.