Switched On

by John Elder Robison

  Aftermath

  WHEN MARTHA SAID that I wouldn’t need her anymore after that April 28 TMS session, her reaction came as a shock, and it took me a while to process. My fondness for her was not changed by TMS, but the dynamic of our relationship was definitely altered. They say that people either grow together or apart, and I think that is meant to apply to the normal gradual pace of change in a relationship. What happens when the emotional balance between two people tips overnight?

  I had always told Martha that she was my guide to the world of other people. She was my interpreter for what others were feeling when I was at my most oblivious. Sometimes this happened in real time, like when she’d say, “This is boring. Let’s talk about something else!” That would be my cue to stop talking and let someone else change the subject. Other times she would explain things afterward, telling me that Sam had been very interested in what I was saying, or that Doug didn’t seem to like me so much. But now I was picking up nonverbal cues on my own. I was responding better to strangers—not by practice but because TMS had precipitated a sudden change—and as a result I was talking to more people, and doing so successfully.

  Martha hadn’t shown much interest in what I did “out east” at Beth Israel Hospital. Looking back, I think she was probably scared and insecure. Improved as I thought my perceptions were, I didn’t pick up on that. All I saw was an increasing distance between us and I could not figure out what to do. So I did nothing, which was, in retrospect, my worst possible choice.

  Her lack of interest may have been based on fear, but combined with my sense of panic about what was happening between us it became a kind of self-perpetuating cycle as I began confiding in others when she didn’t want to talk. That too was a bad choice, but I couldn’t see it at the time. I was so taken with my newfound ability to relate to strangers that I could not imagine it might have a downside. Now I see that we only have so much time to spend, and that when we take hours away from family relationships to cultivate new acquaintances, family can suffer.

  I wished there was help for the relentless cloud of Martha’s depression, but neither of us knew where to turn. People sometimes described me as “suffering from autism,” and I’d feel offended because suffering was not the right word for how I lived my life. But Martha’s situation was different. She did suffer from depression and wished very much to be cured. Unfortunately none of the medicines she tried did more than partly lift the veil that hung over her so much of the time.

  I’d been able to live with her depression in my pre-TMS oblivious state. She was always good to me, and we worked well together, and that was enough. We built a successful business together and what I thought was a successful marriage—until TMS made her depression painfully apparent to me.

  It’s not that I did TMS and a light came on that said, “She’s depressed!” It was actually something far worse. The TMS opened me up to receiving the feelings of others, and when I was at home with her, I felt like I was being crushed beneath the weight of her depression. I wondered if the depression was in me, but when I went elsewhere, the weight lifted. Whenever I was with her I felt it was pulling me down.

  I was also having new feelings about myself. Before TMS, I seldom gave my own actions a second thought. Now I found myself looking back over things I said and did, and I felt tremendous shame at some of what I’d done. For example, Martha used to be so concerned about her weight and being trim that I nicknamed her Chub. Cubby and I thought it was funny, and she seemed to take it in stride. But now I saw my behaviour in a whole new light. It’s like the post-TMS me looked at the pre-TMS me and saw a bully. I felt so ashamed it was hard to face her. I now felt as if I was taking advantage of her weakness because she was depressed. Never before had I looked in the mirror and imagined myself as nasty. Now, I wondered if TMS was helping me see myself as I really am—at least a part of me—or if it made me imagine a monster that was not really there. I resolved to watch myself closely in the future and be careful not to be mean.

  Martha and I are partners in the car repair company and went to work together most days. But throughout our marriage we had gone through periods in which she didn’t get out of bed in the morning. On those days, I would get up and go to work alone, telling our staff that she was working from home, and return to find that she’d stayed inside all day. The staff never thought anything of it, and neither did I—until TMS opened my emotions. I’d always wished she wasn’t sad, of course, but her feelings didn’t drag me down. They just meant she wouldn’t go with me that day. In my autistic-oblivious way I just took the world and other people as I found them.

  Now I realize that autism had made us compatible. On the days that she was too sad for most people, I didn’t notice. “Come on, get going,” I would say to her, and sometimes it worked. But whether it worked or not, I went about my day whatever mood she was in.

  After TMS, our whole dynamic was changed. Just as I seemed to be soaking up the emotion in a newspaper story, the same thing started to happen at home. When Martha had her down days, I was no longer able to jump out of bed and go to work. As soon as I got up I’d feel panic over her sadness and then feel sad myself and wonder what I was going to do. Like her, I began to feel that I couldn’t go to work, and I was starting to see my life as a failure. I found myself not wanting to be at home, and that was very troubling, especially since we’d just built a new home together. My first instinct wasn’t to leave. Marriage handbooks claim that women listen to problems while guys try to solve them. I wanted to solve this problem, but I couldn’t. I found myself wondering how I could possibly go on. I kept absorbing the sadness that weighed her down. I’ll get used to it, I told myself, and things will go back to the way they were before. But that didn’t happen. I began to have thoughts like Maybe we’d both be better off dead. Then I’d get out of the house, and a few hours later, everything would be okay.

  I tried puzzling it out. Maybe the changes from TMS are like the changes when you quit drugs or drinking. I’d never kicked a drug or drinking habit myself, but there was plenty of that in my family and I’d certainly seen how relationships could change very quickly when habits changed, drinking buddies evaporated, and there were no new friends to take their place. Ex-drinkers could find a supportive community in AA. What sort of supports might I need, and where was I going to find them?

  Martha was not the only person I saw differently. Thanks to my newfound power of perception, so many of the people around me seemed changed that I began to feel lost. First there was the sadness at home. Then I began to get the sense that people I’d come to know in the course of my business and my daily life were different. Logically, I knew they weren’t (I was the one who had changed), and there were friends like Bob and Dave who felt constant, but my perception was altered and there was no going back.

  Richard,* for example, had been one of my best friends. We first met when he was a customer—he’d taken a special midlife interest in our kind of motor vehicles. He’d sit in the waiting room and talk to me while his car was in for service, and we got to know each other fairly well over the years. Our friendship expanded into other areas and we began getting together regularly outside of work and going to dinner with our wives.

  Richard worked with teenagers, and he had a way of understanding people that I found fascinating. Over the course of our friendship he had often helped talk me through social interactions with others. We got to know each other shortly after I learned about my autism, at age forty, when I was feeling especially in need of counsel. It seemed like relationships—no matter how casual—were always full of mystery and missteps.

  Our friendship came to symbolize the social success that my newfound knowledge of autism had given me, and we’d known each other for some time before I met Alvaro and Lindsay. I was excited to tell him about our initial conversations and the promise of TMS, but to my surprise, he dismissed them with a harshness that took me aback.

  “Stay clear of people like that,” he told me. “I know
the kind. Neuroscientists have no heart,” he said. “They just want to study you and they don’t care what happens in the end. You’ll end up a wreck, but they will get to publish their paper, and that’s all they care about.” My first thought was that he was concerned for me. But the way he vilified the neurologists—even though he’d never met them—and his need to bash them every chance he got seemed strange.

  He was not the only sceptic among my friends and family, but he was the one with the most carefully thought through objections. Everyone else just said, “Zap your brain? You’re crazy!”

  When I asked Richard why he was so dubious, he said he was just looking out for me, and sometimes that included telling me things I didn’t want to hear. A true friend might do that. But I’d also known instances where people who weren’t friends at all told me things “for my own good,” when in truth they wanted to take advantage of me. So my antennae went up a bit even though I could not zero in on what was bothering me.

  His refrain—“They are just using you and don’t care how you feel”—did not seem right. I tried to defend what they were doing with my budding knowledge, but my defence became a provocation. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he told me. “You’re well qualified to talk about your life as an autistic person. But when you start talking about how your brain is working, or giving people advice . . . you’re out of your depth. That’s a job for experts and you are not an expert in the brain or how it works.”

  I wasn’t sure what to say. I was very confident of my understanding of how TMS delivered energy into the brain. Beyond that there was much that I, and the scientists, didn’t understand. But was I truly out of my depth in expressing dreams for what a technology like TMS could accomplish? Richard’s criticism left me at a loss. I knew my ability to read people was weak, and I had always trusted his opinions.

  Since the TMS, I had been noticing new things about my interactions with others. I found myself sensing what they felt or what they wanted out of an exchange. Or rather, I believed that I was. But since I had lived life up to this point misjudging and being emotionally oblivious, I could not be sure that the new signals I picked up were right.

  I monitored these changes closely, as much to evaluate myself as those around me. What I saw and felt from Richard was very troubling. He would belittle me in front of people, seemingly for his own amusement. Often, when I met him with a group of other people, he’d greet them and then me with some remark like “And you too, John.” I’d never made anything of that before, but I now realized he was singling me out, separating me, and that kind of separation had been a pain I’d felt all my life. Why did he do it, especially with what I now recognized as a little smirk?

  He’d tell stories right in front of me about how I’d overcharged him for fixing his car, or fixed his car wrong, but then he’d smile and say, “We’re best buddies anyway.” He’d look at me as if it were a joke, but there was nothing funny from my perspective. If that was how he felt, I reasoned, he had no business having us fix his car. The realization that he’d been saying that kind of stuff for a long time—years—made me feel even worse. I felt like a boy again, when the older kids would say, “Get out of here, retard! We don’t want you around!” Then a few minutes later they’d say, “We’re just kidding,” and I would smile my biggest smile because I wanted so very much to be liked.

  Things came to a head on New Year’s Eve, when Richard joined a few of us for dinner and revelry. Cubby was with us that night, along with his friend Masha. Cubby and Masha had gone to high school together, and she lived a few miles away. Masha was born in Russia, but you’d hardly know her from your average American teenager. Her mom taught Russian at Amherst College and her grandmother had taught there before her. Growing up, my friend Aaron had Masha’s grandmother as his Russian teacher, and he used to tell me stories she’d shared with the class about her husband, who was a refugee from Stalin’s gulags.

  As the evening progressed, Richard began telling jokes about Masha and Russians. The longer it went on, the nastier they became, and the more he drank, the worse his behaviour was. Another of my friends actually got into an angry exchange with him. By the end of the night I’d come to a decision. Swallowing my anger and hurt, I went home quietly, as did Cubby and Masha. But I would never speak to Richard again.

  A month later, Richard sent me a long, rambling email. In it, he said he had been drinking a lot lately, and that when he drank, he said things he should not say. He reaffirmed his fondness for me and said he missed our friendship. But it was too late. With the light of TMS illuminating the history of our relationship, I saw a pattern. There had been too many little digs over too many years. Could I forgive him? Sure. But that didn’t leave a basis for restarting the relationship. Humiliating me for his own amusement was bad enough, but realizing that he had done it when I’d been too oblivious to understand what was happening was even worse.

  Losing friends hurts, and even writing the story years later is painful. TMS took away my emotional innocence, and I’ll always be sad for its loss. But part of the cost of getting smarter emotionally was seeing people as they actually were, and not as I imagined them to be.

  I didn’t feel any different about my son, Cubby, but I did see his place in the world in a different light. When I watched him interact with other people I now saw his autism clearly—when he failed to respond to a social cue that I recognized, or when he went on and on about something and his listener was bored to distraction. Watching him made me realize that I must have been similarly oblivious to my own behaviour—perhaps even worse. And it made me wonder if I was still doing those things today.

  As I pondered what was happening, the summer of 2008 arrived, and the initial TMS-autism study came to an end. Almost imperceptibly, the effects of the sessions faded. There was a gentle leaving as I stopped noticing emotions in others. It’s funny—I had been oblivious to other people’s emotions my whole life, but now, after a brief taste of this new sensitivity, I felt a huge sense of loss as seeing feelings slipped away. And every now and then I felt a flash of fear too. If my emotional intelligence had been ratcheted up by TMS, might the rebound take it even lower than it had been at the start? “I doubt that would happen,” Alvaro said, but his reassurance was limited because none of us knew for certain. The effect they’d seen in me was, in his words, “hoped-for but unexpected,” and it was impossible to predict what would come next. I remembered what I used to tell my son when he said he didn’t believe in monsters. “The kids that know the truth are all gone,” I said. “Eaten.” He said he didn’t believe me, but he wasn’t completely sure. Should I be worried now?

  I decided the best thing to do was to fight the loss. I would look deeply at every person I encountered and will myself to read and feel his or her emotional state. I was of course using logic to force emotion, and it didn’t work. The feeling of emotional ESP evaporated despite my best fight to keep it. But as the summer wore on, something different, and more subtle, started to happen. An improved ability to read and engage other people was again building in me, slowly but surely. I was left with the sense of a new primal connection to my fellow humans, a feeling that was unfamiliar to me, yet also perfectly natural. There was a new current of emotion in stories I read, and movies and television shows became such a roller coaster for me that I finally stopped watching. The people at work said I seemed more expressive. They’d say, “Customers have noticed!”

  I asked Alvaro what it might mean that I was still changing, though any energy they’d put into my brain was surely long dissipated. “The TMS might have opened some doors for you, and now your mind is passing through them. The TMS energy is gone, but perhaps you used the paths through the doorways enough while it was there to keep them a little bit open. Let’s see what happens as time passes.”

  “Has anyone in your studies had permanent change?” I asked him.

  “The closest would be the depression patients,” he told me. “Some of them can go s
everal months before the stimulation needs to be repeated. And there’s some sign that the effects may last longer the more we do them. It’s too early to tell. Also, at some point, the effect of TMS becomes indistinguishable from the brain’s own process of plastic change. You’ve already shown a remarkable ability to change, and this may be more of that.”

  My newfound ability to look into people’s eyes without discomfort lingered much longer, perhaps six months, and left me permanently altered, though today this ability is much more limited than what I had under the direct influence of TMS. Today I can do it well enough that no one describes me as looking at the floor or ignoring them in conversation. Seven years later I feel I can call that a permanent change.

  The other thing that’s permanently changed is my ability to converse with strangers. When I meet someone new I’m able to follow and mirror her conversation far better than I ever could before. When I was a boy, kids would approach me and say things like “Look at my new dump truck” as they held out a shiny toy. Instead of admiring it and saying, “That’s a nice truck,” I’d answer with something inappropriate like “I like helicopters” or “I like elephants.” Needless to say, those early social exchanges mostly ended in failure.

  Maripat Jordan was one of the first to notice my transformation. Maripat was a well-established figure in the Springfield media community when we first met twenty-some years ago. She published a regional business magazine and had headed up sales for several big TV stations. Most business owners in my area knew her, or knew who she was, because they bought advertising. But I didn’t because I was still new in business and I’d never advertised.

  One day, Maripat drove up to Robison Service in the hope of changing that situation. I walked out into the yard as her car pulled in—a minivan. As a specialist in luxury cars, we didn’t get many of those in our parking lot. As there was no telling who or what might be inside, I approached cautiously. Out stepped a petite, short-haired woman.