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Date:         Sat, 26 Sep 1992 14:17:00 EST
              <AUTISM@SJUVM.BITNET>
From:         Speed Bump <DNWIEBE@OWUCOMCN.BITNET>
Subject:      Re: New Reader

        Hope I'm not getting too special-interest here...

Debbie writes:
>Some of the kids I've seen described on this list seem to have similar
>problems.  I would like to know how the parents, siblings, and kids are
>dealing w/ such issues as being too self centered and how autistic adults
>intereact w/ jobs and such.

        I think I'm autistic.  I haven't been professionally diagnosed or
evaluated, but I seem to fit many of the criteria.
        I'm 25 years old, single but engaged, with a BA and MS in the
computer and information sciences, emphasis on computer architecture and
3-D photorealistic image generation.  I have a full-time job as a
software engineer in a company that makes telecomm diagnostic equipment.
I live alone, except for two cats.  I grew up on a farm in a Mennonite
family.  I'm a reasonably fundamentalist Christian with one or two
somewhat liberal leanings, and I am active in a Messianic Jewish
congregation and somewhat less so in an Episcopal church.  I'm
politically quite conservative.  Major hobbies include music
(performance and arranging, instrumental and vocal) and computer
programming.  That's a fairly sketchy autobio, but with fairly wide
coverage.
        I'm the oldest kid in my family, and my parents were predisposed to
ignore most of the pop child psychology of the late sixties and seventies,
so, while I frequently frustrated and befuddled them, I don't think they
thought of me really as different, because they didn't have anybody to compare
me to until my younger siblings (I have three) came along.
        My next-younger brother (five years younger) and I never got along
until we were both in our teens.  Mom tells stories about him chasing me
with a sledgehammer (which I don't remember, but she swears happened) and
me slashing his throat with a wood chisel (which did happen, but not quite
like that--I was working with the chisel, and he unexpectedly yanked my arm
away from the workpiece, and the chisel took a small chunk out of his neck).
        My youngest brother (seven years younger) and I got along famously,
and he holds me in a sort of hero-worship to this day.
        My sister (nine years younger) never really understood any of her
brothers, but she got along with all of us reasonably well; just recently
she and I have begun getting much more closely acquainted, and I think
both of us like what we see.
        I had some reasonably tough times in elementary school and some
really tough times in high school with physical abuse from my peers, I assume
because I was just different enough from the norm for them to detect, but not
different enough for my teachers to anticipate trouble.
        I had a mediocre GPA in high school, a low GPA in college, and a
just-barely-squeaked-by GPA in grad school (made it by a hundredth of a
point), not because I was stupid, but because I had lousy study habits, and,
as my fiancee puts it, I didn't much care to jump through all the hoops they
lined up for me.  Also, grad school was somewhat intimidating for me because
it was at a huge place (Ohio State University) where nobody knew me and I
didn't know anybody.
        People I work with are often frustrated by my inability to understand
some explanations the first time around and by my lack of imagination, but
they tend to understand because my supervisor is also autistic (I think),
and they have learned to deal with him.
        However, I don't think I'm chronically self-centered.  I may appear
haughtily aloof to some people, but that's because it makes me uncomfortable
to be in social situations with unfamiliar people, not because I think I'm
better than they are.  Lauren (my fiancee) and I get into arguments every
now and then because I'm perfectly willing to be unhappy in order to make
her happy, but she can't be happy if she knows I'm unhappy.

>her problem is that she cannot interpret body and tonal language correctly.

        I also have trouble with this; however, I find that people who get to
know me learn eventually that I don't accurately throw or catch subverbal
cues, and they learn to be very literal with me, and to take what I say very
literally.  Every now and then I run into a non-autistic person who actually
likes it better that way.
        When I say that I don't accurately throw subverbal cues, I mean
standard ones.  I have my own set that doesn't match everybody else's, and
Lauren can pretty well understand them.  Likewise, I can sometimes understand
hers, although it's very difficult for me to generalize from hers to somebody
else's.

>Dana is now 21 years old and will be graduating from college soon (degree
>in Psychology w/ minors in Spanish and English).  She doesn't know what to do
>next, but is starting to think about it.  But eventually her schooling days
>willb e over and she will have to enter the real world.

        I majored in computer science with minors in math and music.  I've
known ever since I was three that I wanted to program computers when I grew
up, so my career choice wasn't all that big a decision.  Entering the real
world was slightly traumatic, but I got through most of it fairly quickly,
I think.  There are still some things that I'm not very good at (I hate using
the telephone except with Lauren, and I'm no good at mailing things either,
except bills that I can pay through my electronic checking service--but they
don't really count as mail.
        I'd recommend that you or somebody else be on hand to show her how
to do things that may cause her trouble, and not embarrass her about them.
She's liable to be completely lost doing everything from eating lunch on her
own to grocery shopping to renewing her license plates, until she has some
experience to draw on.  It's not that she's stupid, it's just that she doesn't
know how to do new things, necessarily, and it's liable to be difficult for her
to extrapolate a procedure for doing them from the procedures she already has
for doing other things.  At least, it was for me.

>However, Dana has a lot of trouble relating to the real world.  She has trouble
>empathising w/ other people, and can be very self centered.  She also has
>established routines that she will break only for exceptional reasons (her
>exercise club is a big part of her life and getting her not to go when she
>wants to is next to impossible.)  She is easily annoyed by others (especially
>loud kids in her dorm.)  As a result, she often has a great deal of trouble
>making or keeping friends.

        I have routines like that too.  For example, I go to the grocery store
on Monday.  It's very disorienting for me to go on any other day.  If I run
out of food on Thursday, I essentially just lose weight until Monday.  Now,
if I ran out of something really important, like cat litter or something, I'd
have to do it on some other day, but I wouldn't like it.
        However, I do have fairly good concentration, and so it's no trouble
for me to shut out outside events when I need to pay attention to something,
and extraneous noise doesn't bother me.  As a matter of fact, sometimes I
concentrate too hard and miss important outside events.
        When it comes to making friends, I'm weird enough that the standard
person-template that most people apply to prospective friends to help
understand them doesn't work with me, so people who want to be friends with
me have to come up with a new one for me.  Many people don't think it's worth
the effort, so after discovering that I'm significantly stranger than they at
first anticipated, they wander off and look elsewhere.  I don't have a problem
with that.  But a few of them decide I'm worth the extra trouble to get to
know, and the friendships that result tend to be really spectacular.  Jim
Sinclair said once awhile back that he thinks that probably autistic people
have closer friendships than normal people do, because the fundamental
differences between them mean that friends have to get to know each other
very well, while normal people are alike enough that frequently they can
get away with just assuming they know each other very well, when they really
don't.

>Dana now sees a psychyatrist weekly.  Beyond this, I'm not sure how aware
>she is of her condition.

        If she's got Internet access, you might want to point her at this
list.  I didn't know I was autistic until I got on this list; all I knew was
that I was different.  Just knowing that I'm different allows me to anticipate
that problems are going to crop up, but it doesn't tell me anything about how
to deal with them.  But getting together with a bunch of other people that
know more than I do about autism lets me take advantage of previous research,
so I know where to expect problems and approximately what to do about them.
That might be very helpful to Dana.
        One important thing that's been discussed on the list before but which
you may have missed is that it won't do any good for you to think of Dana's
autism as a curable disease--or even as an incurable disease.  Look at it as
a feature of her personality.  Accept it.  Help her learn to deal with the
real world, yes, but also take the time, as a representative of the real world,
to learn how to deal with her on her own terms.  It's likely to be a
bewildering and exasperating experience at times, but it can also be very
rewarding.  I'll bet you'll find that once you learn how to look at the world
through her eyes, the view will be fascinating.  I know that normal people
look at the world in ways that are strange and wonderful and unfathomable to
me; ask Lauren what she, as a normal person, thinks of the way I look at the
world.

Shalom alechem,
Dan Wiebe
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