Autism and Asperger's Syndrome

There is a mild form of autism called Asperger’s syndrome. It is a very common ailment that certain famous people like Einstein and Thomas Jefferson all had. Not saying I am in the same league with these guys but we all had to learn to cope with the issues of it. One of the common thing I share with other afflicted people is poor grades in school. We often are not very good with managing money or running a business by ourselves. If we can manage to get help like a tutor for school or accountants for our business, we can get by. However for many people they do not have these resources and often fall victim to the condition to where continual employment even is hard.

A friend of mine with two autistic kids showed me a book called Pretending To Be Normal wrote by a lady who had Asperger’s. She wrote that as a child the teacher told the class it was nap time and to pull out mats to sleep on. She stood there as the teacher got more assertive in telling her to get a mat. She explained she could not. Frustrated the teacher called her parents and when they arrived her father asked her why she was not getting one of the mats. She responded because the mats are all gone. Her father asked what were all those sitting on the shelf. She stated they were not mats but rugs. Her father asked her to get a rug and take a nap which she did right away. That is one of the issues with Asperger’s is mental blocks. We have a hard time connecting the dots and what is a simple procedure for most people to assume and work out becomes a difficult and even impossible task for us. I will explain why this is later.

In one of my last jobs I had a number of employees working for me in an IT department for a software company. One of them was a shy guy about 30 years old who moved over from another department to mine. He had this autistic and had barely learned how to work with it. People would ask him if he would take a look at a computer issue for them. He was more than willing to do it and had no laziness about him however it might be hours or never before he would do the task sometimes. It was fairly disruptive to the point my upper management wanted me to let him go. I had to do a little more work with him but was able to get him on track. If you gave him a project he felt overwhelmed and had no mental roadmap to know what to do in what order. However if you outlined the project step by step he worked faster than anyone I have ever seen. For example I gave him a clipboard of blank paper and asked him to inventory the systems. The board sat there for days. I took it away and put another clipboard of preprinted papers showing blanks next to “name of system”, “operating system” etc. He had everything filled out in an hour. You had to get the logic straight in his head on what to do. After that, he was ok.

Let me start from my beginning and give you a peek inside my experience. As a young kid I seemed to pick up habits very easily. Now days people know them as OCD ticks. It is like an uncontrollable need to repeat something over an over. It varied from one habit to another but there would be at least one all the time. I learned to hide these habits and do them as part of normal movements or routines so that people would not notice. However it was noticeable no matter how hard you try. You always let your guard down at times. I managed to learn to focus the need to perform them to normal things like listening to certain songs. You would play a series of songs but always repeat your “favorite” one to get the feeling of relief. People would just think you like that song a lot. There is some kind of tactile feel to resolve a neuro need to repeat certain functions. The condition uses an emotion to give you “reward” feeling when you accomplish it.

Friends were tough to keep because the condition makes you very geeky in one respect and naive in another. I seemed to know a lot about astronomy, much more than my teachers. However some kids would tell a story and all of them would be conversing back and forth about it but I would be lost and have no clue what they are talking about. Often times you become the butt of a joke because they know you cannot keep up with them. However things that you decide to excel in go way beyond most people’s commitment to accomplish. You seem to have an unending drive to complete a task which stems from the OCD thing. If you learn to use it, you become single minded and able to get things done quickly and well.

School was very hard for me. If I like a subject, I could ace the class with little effort. However most of the time I was failing. In 7th grade it came to a head for me in school. I had a mental block about doing homework. I simply could not do schoolwork at home. I wanted to and felt motivated but would just stare at the school book doing nothing. Eventually I would put it away and play. It got so bad that even my favorite subject astronomy was an impossible task. NASA had sent me a giant poster of Mars with tons of data at that time. I was supposed to do a report on anything I wanted. I was trying to do one Mars. I could not get the words on the paper. My dad and just about everyone else in the world had no idea about this condition and he thought I was just being bad by not doing my work. He kept telling me to do my work and I finally lost it and began to bang my fists on the poster crying. He got mad and whipped me with a belt. As I just laid there helpless he realized something bigger was wrong. He then sat down and started asking me questions. I was able to do the report and did it well once he connected the dots in my mind for me.

The same thing happened at school with my 7th grade English teacher. He was a no nonsense Manhattan school tough teacher that moved to Texas in our little community school. I showed up with no homework so he sent me to detention after school. In detention I got my work down for the next night with no problem because I was still at school. However the next time I had homework to do at home I showed up at school with it unfinished. I got another detention and then another and another because he was going to show me who was boss. After so many of them he was about to issue another one and I started crying in frustration. He finally took me aside and told me if I get my homework to him before the end of the day he would take the detention off. I got it to him in no time. He then called a parent teacher conference and I tried to explain that I simply could not do homework at home and don’t know why. The school sent for an hour each day to speak with a psychologist. After a few weeks of that they sent me to testing one school day. It was my usual psychologist and a few others put me through a battery of tests. They checked my memory, hand strength, ability to reason and so on. Lots and lots of tests. Basically they told my parents that I had excellent memory and could reason out things extremely well. However I have something they do not understand although they have seen it before. I cannot seem to stay focused and have problems calculating certain tasks. The solution was I kept seeing a psychologist for the school. I continued to have bad grades and they actually passed me on to keep my with my same age friends in classes even though I did not pass certain grades.

By the time I reached high school I had started developing my own techniques to get around the issues. Since I had a hard time with homework I would excel in test and in school work so that it would offset the zeros I got for no homework. This was important in my sophomore year since my dad passed away of ALS and the shock of it caused me to not do any school work for a while. I had to make at least a 97 on my final exams to pass most of my classes, which I did accomplish with 98s on all of them.

I had to develop much more mental tools as an adult in order to exist in a job and deal with life’s normal renderings. Little did I know that shortly later these tools would be the instruments for my survival through some extremely hard times. They also gave me certain advantages over normal people. For example my friends that smoke have tried to quit and everything has failed them. Patches, hypnosis, counseling, scaling down, nothing seems to get over their physical and mental addictions. I smoked for two years and one day just quit. I felt the physical addiction tugging hard but was able to use my condition to ignore it. After a few days the tugging started going away. I simply used the mental blocks what kept me from doing school work to block me wanting a cigarette. Even my body’s cry for nicotine could not get pass that block.

The condition gives you a single-minded ability to accomplish things. It is like you are in a tunnel that pays attention to nothing around you except the destination or task you need to accomplish. If the task was to learn the piano, you could learn it a fraction of the time that normal people do. You simply will understand what it takes to play it do it with precision if your mind can put that task in the “tunnel” so to speak. If not then you have to learn it like everyone else at a normal pace. If a block develops about how to play like puts a condition in your mind to where you can only play white keys, then you have to figure a way around this block. Like a person who stutters learns to avoid certain “problem” words they quickly replace them with ok words and we never know they stutter. In like manner I learned to move around the blocks without loosing pace. At work I learned to put each job task in the “tunnel” and I get things accomplished fast. Often times I am done with a day’s work in an hour and spend my time goofing off on Yahoo waiting for something to break at work.

However because the condition allows relentless pursuit to work on things, I have literally worked for 30 hours or more on fixing server issues. Issues that would take weeks to do normally. I hired into the Men’s Wearhouse one time in their corporate office. They had a team of IT guys, about seven of them and were all very smart. I fixed about a dozen issues they all had been working for at least six months in a few days. My manager told me to take it easy and just cruise the internet for a week or so because I was intimidating the other IT guys. The other guys were actually smarter than me at this stuff but I had a vigilant ability to pound on the problem till solve and reason it in different ways. It is the ability of bypassing mental blocks I have learned all my life that gives me a new way of thinking of things. This is excellent in troubleshooting computer work or even writing stories and even telling jokes.

There are still many things that hinder me in this condition. I have had to learn a great deal about stress management because emotions can run high in people with Asperger’s. Like anything tools can be developed to deal with it. You cant get rid of it but you can work with it.