Last night, John gave me an advance copy of his latest book, “Be Different: Adventures of a Free-Range Aspergian. With Practical Advice for Aspergians, Misfits, Families, & Teachers.” Although it’s got a color print of the actual cover, it’s a spiral-bound copy of his computer print-out, so I guess it’s actually an advanced advance copy, because real advanced copies are more like trade-paperbacks, with real book binding and pagination. Of course, I polished it off before I went to bed. Since we had another big snow storm last night, I’m writing this to avoid going outside to clear the driveway of a LOT of snow for the third time in eight days.
I went up to John’s house last night, ahead of the storm, to show him all of the photographs that I could find of him that I took in the 1980s and 90s. The Discovery Channel wants pictures for the show that they are doing about him. I don’t have many pictures of him without Jack. When Jack was an infant, I took at least a pair of pictures of the baby every week because I knew that babies change dramatically in their first year and I wanted to document it. I was the youngest of five children and my parents had only a single picture of me as an infant. It was something of a family joke but I felt enough like an afterthought while growing up that this just confirmed my feelings of being invisible.
I’ve got five albums of pictures of Jack and the places we went in his first two years, and another, bigger album that spans the time up to age five. And I’ve got a bunch of loose pictures of other times. I just didn’t have many pictures with John as he wasn’t around very much in those days. I also found our wedding pictures. John took digital shots of the things that interested him and he will send on the ones that might appeal to the producers. Whiles I was there, I saw a stack of his books and asked for one. He had given me a similar copy of his first book. This time, I told him to sign it for me as someday, I might need to put it up on Ebay! I then reassured him that I doubted this would happen, but our great grandchildren might want to sell it. He inscribed it to me. Who knows what the future may bring. I’ll sign it, too, for the sake of posterity and perhaps to further enrich those hypothetical great grandchildren.
As I read the book, I was struck by a couple of things. John explicitly thinks about the types of behavior that I usually want to conceal or forget. He comments on some of his own behaviors that I only noticed in myself after he mentioned them. And I can see them in him, but had not noticed them in myself until he described them. I think this may be part of a decreased notion of individuality in people on the autism spectrum that he talks about in the book, but I also think that people on the spectrum want to see themselves as normal and may subconsciously ignore the things that they do that do not conform to neurotypical norms.
He also coins a new term for neurotypical, nypical (rhymes with typical). I liked the contraction as easier to type and think and, as he says, it gives a technical term for the vast majority to deal with just as people on the spectrum must deal with a tag. It evens the score, pejoratively speaking.
John also talks about the smile reflex, where nypical babies smile back when someone smiles at them - it is part of mirror neuron activity. People on the spectrum have impaired mirror neurons (probably over-regulated) and so they often do not smile, or react very weakly to facial expressions. In the Great Picture Hunt, I ran across some photos of myself (and my siblings) - I look like I’m about four years old - and I’m pretty grim, despite a party setting. As a high school student, someone told me that my peers thought badly of me because I never smiled - they thought I was stuck-up. When I decided to stop being shy, I went out of my way to start smiling at everyone and I started to feel happy as a result. Now, smiling is my default facial expression. I suspect this has something to do with why I’m not chronically depressed (although anyone in their right mind MIGHT be in my place!). And it is a major part of how I mask my social confusion. As I’ve said before, people are either naturally nice to you if you smile at them or else they think you are up to something and they’d better be nice to protect themselves! In any case, I like to have poeple be nice to me so I start the ball rolling by smiling at them.
Temple Grandin said that she was like a Martain anthropologist, studying those peculiar humans; I always assumed that I was the only Martian in my family (I often wondered if I was adopted despite looking just like my dad). I had a long chat with my big brother a few months ago and discovered that we have very similar sensory deficits and that he has always carefully hidden his inability to remember faces! I had taken an online test for autism spectrum traits and came out pretty definitively on the spectrum. I was distraught. The study wanted to see if the spectrum was familial, so I had sent him the link. My brother took the test, too, and I was happily relieved when he tested even more autistic than me! We talked about other family members. We belong to a very eccentric family on our mother’s side; we believe that we have lots of relatives who share these traits. It had made me feel a lot closer to him even though we live on opposite coasts and rarely chat, but neither of us is alone, hiding it, any more. It is interesting that we both started our academic studies in the sciences but ended up getting graduate degrees in disciplines that study the human condition; he’s a lawyer and I’m an anthropologist. And I don’t come from Mars any more.
This book is very different from “Look Me in the Eye.” This is a much kinder book. I suspect it reflects how John has changed as a result of talking to lots of parents of kids on the spectrum, and his realization that he is held up as a role model for those kids. And that’s a good thing, as he tries to live up to the status. The book is also a how-to guide for people on the spectrum and those who interact with people on the spectrum,. I suspect it comes out of his work at Elms College.
I’ll talk about other chapters in later posts. I finished snowblowing and shoveling the driveway and sidewalks in the middle of writing this post. Again. I’m so tired of winter. It’s going to get REALLY cold this weekend. I missed last spring and summer from being sick; I want my warm weather and all of this snow and cold isn't helping!
No comments:
Post a Comment