A Touch of Asperger's
A few weeks ago, music critic Tim Page published an essay in The New Yorker, “Parallel Play,” in which he described the suffering that he endured as a childhood victim of Asperger’s Syndrome – suffering that might have been alleviated had he known that he was afflicted with it. (He was not diagnosed until a few years ago, at the age of fifty.) Much of his misery seemed very familiar to me.
We are informally referred to as “Aspies,” and if we are not very, very good at something we tend to do it very poorly. Little in life comes naturally – except for our random, inexplicable, and often uncontrollable gifts – and, even more than most children, we assemble our personalities unevenly, piece by piece, almost robotically, from models we admire.
Very familiar. I talked about this article with my therapist. He had read it, too. At the end of the hour, I asked him to tell me if it had made him think of me. He said that it had.
So, a mild case, perhaps. As Mr Page implies, you can “learn” your way out of Asperger’s. It never goes away, but you learn how other people are likely to expect you to behave. That may be why I have such great faith in learning; knowing how much good it can do has enabled me to take an interest in things that were not at first appealing – most notably, politics. But the disorder, to the extent that I suffer from it, generates a kind of hyperconsciousness that can be exhausting. (I know that I drink martinis in order to shut it down for the night.) The dread of being exposed as an emotional fake never vanishes altogether. My feelings may be genuine, but they’re tainted by the fact that I learned to have them. I daresay that that statement makes no sense to some people: how can you learn how to feel? I must be mistaken – or so they might argue, at least in my imagination. I hope that the matter won’t come up.
It’s probably typical of my touch of Asperger’s, though, that I find it so interesting that I’m (inappropriately) telling the world.