Switched On

by John Elder Robison

  So while my new awareness didn’t make my relationships easier, it did make the majority of them more successful. I like to think that the experience in our shop is more satisfying than ever today, for all of us, and I’m grateful for the TMS insights that pointed me onto that path.

  Rewriting History

  ONE OF THE HARDEST things about my emotional awakening was the way it reshaped so many of my memories. It may sound crazy, but all too often, it turned formerly good memories bad. And there’s no balance. There’s not a single bad memory that’s now turned to good.

  Sometimes as we mellow with age, we think back on hard times and say to ourselves, Yes, it seems funny today but it sure wasn’t funny when it happened. But that’s not what I mean. I’m talking about scenes of daily life that had been written into my memory banks and recalled without discomfort for years that now took on a new, disturbing meaning. There were the memories of former friends like Richard that turned bad as I interpreted the remembered scenes in a new light. But there were other incidents too.

  When I was a teenager, my mother began seeing a new psychiatrist and started spending days on end at his house, which was populated by an ever-changing cast of characters, some of whom were pretty strange. Most of the doctor’s hangers-on were creepy, but there was one fellow I felt a real bond with. His name was Neil, and he was a patient of the doctor’s who was also renting a room in his house.

  “You should get to know each other,” the doctor exclaimed in his booming voice, and I decided to follow his advice. Neil and I started hanging out and talking about cars and music. Neil was twenty-one—old enough to get into bars—and I was thirteen. He even had a car. We began driving to rock and roll and blues shows, and he would help me slip past the doormen, who were always on the lookout for underage drinkers. Once inside, he bought me drinks while I stayed in the shadows and took in the scenery.

  As we saw the same local bands night after night, I began thinking about how I could improve their sounds. I wasn’t an audio engineer yet, but the notion that I could become one was starting to grow in me. The first few times I was timid as I walked up to the sound men and made suggestions. They were real adults, while I was just a kid pretending to know something. Some of them dismissed me, but others tried my suggestions, a few of which even worked. That success gave me credibility, and it was how I got my start working with musicians. I moved on to fixing and then designing sound equipment, and in the space of ten years, I was working with some of the biggest bands on the planet.

  But that was all far in the future when Neil and I sipped drinks at the Rusty Nail and other local dives. Back then I was just a teenager exploring a big new world. Everything was exciting, but there was a dark side, one I’d totally misunderstood until the TMS-induced changes shone a new light on my memories.

  Neil and I talked a lot in those days, and one of the things we talked about was sex. That wasn’t something I had experienced personally, but I’d heard stories and I wanted to know more. I fantasized about having a girlfriend one day, and what it might be like. I never considered the idea of a boyfriend, until Neil raised the possibility. He was a fairly educated fellow—at least I thought he was—and he liked to tell me stories about history. Many of those stories involved sex, and most of the sex was between men, though there was an occasional female in the orgy.

  “What do you think sailors did, crammed together in the fronts of sailing ships?” he’d ask me. I assumed they ate, slept, and worked the rigging. It was a surprise to hear that the thing they looked forward to every night was the sex. And then there were the Roman centurions and the Spartans. Who could forget those great soldiers of antiquity, famed for their manly sexual feats? Neil was happy to enlighten me about the role of gay male sex among the ancient Greeks and Romans.

  Eventually the suggestions became personal. He told me I was a handsome young man. According to him, lots of older guys would be honoured to take me under their wings and teach me what I needed to know. I didn’t completely understand what he meant, because guitar amplifiers were what I needed to know right then, and they weren’t even part of his conversation.

  Finally he offered to teach me himself. “We could go back to my place,” he would tell me. “You’ve never had real sex, and you know you want to try.”

  “I don’t think so,” I told him. “I want to wait and get a girlfriend. Maybe I’m not the same as those Romans.”

  Nothing sexual ever happened between us. Neil never introduced me to the joys of orgies or Spartan conquests and I forgot those conversations as I found success in musical electronics and then with that girlfriend I had hoped for for so long.

  I didn’t think of Neil again for a long time, and I can’t remember exactly what triggered my recall of that story, but this time—after TMS had awakened that emotional response system in me—I saw the whole thing differently. Now Neil seemed like a crafty paedophile, reeling me in by taking me fun places, all the while waiting for his moment to take advantage of me. Back then I thought we’d drifted apart when I got older and became more independent, but the truth is, he probably found another teenage boy to prey on. What once seemed kind and caring now felt corrupted and awful. It was like a negative version of the new, expanded way I heard music or the heightened expression of colours I now saw.

  It made me sad to see the truth. But with a bit of reflection, it also made me question what the truth was. Was it the fun I had when Neil and I were together, or was it the imagined ugliness of his intent? And am I right to even say his intent was ugly? Maybe he was like me, just a bigger lost kid, looking for love. After a time I came to see that it might be all that; the fun I had was real, and though it’s easy to say he was an evil sexual predator, the truth is, I have no idea.

  Thanks to TMS, my head is now full of turncoat memories, and I have to confess that I’m not the first one to realize what happened. A few months previously Kim Davies had told me that TMS had shown her everything that went wrong in her life and why her relationships had run into trouble time and time again. When I heard her, I assumed her perception was like mine, and we had a “glass half full/glass half empty” sort of situation. I told her that TMS had shown me the same things, and I now saw what I could do differently going forward. I believed that at the moment, and I still believe it today. But I now understand that that’s not what Kim meant. What she meant is really what she said, and I know that because I feel it too—it just took me a little longer to understand what was inside me.

  Everywhere I look, there are memories of things that went wrong. And thanks to TMS, I now recognize that many of the events went wrong because I failed to understand someone else’s feelings. Kim saw the same thing. TMS may have given us a temporary ability to see feelings in others, but it’s given us a lasting clarity in interpreting the memories of life experience.

  I never asked Bob what happened to his daughter. . . .

  I hurt his feelings when I failed to thank him, and that’s why he never called back. . . .

  I should have asked her how her day went instead of walking in and boasting out about the car I just sold. . . .

  Individually, these memories are just little things. None of them are life-changing. But the weight of knowing what I did wrong, a thousand times over, is heavy. When I remember things I said or did, I cringe and wish I could go back in time and undo my blunders. Still, we can learn from our failures and with any luck not repeat those mistakes as egregiously tomorrow. It’s not easy. Knowing what I did wrong is not enough to undo a lifetime of learned behaviour, and my tendency to behave the same way is still strong. Yet I’m doing my best to change.

  It often takes me quite a long time to arrive at the more correct conclusions. Psychologists say autistic people have processing delays, and maybe this is one of them. Or maybe it’s just a very complex problem. It’s as if my emotional brain needs time to reflect before arriving at an understanding of what a particular scene or experience meant or means.

  Nowadays t
his happens to me all the time, as things I see trigger memories of the recent past. The trigger itself is usually something innocuous; maybe I’ll see a car that looks like one we had at work a few weeks back and the sight makes me remember what someone said or did, and the recollected scene plays itself back in my mind. When that happens, the meaning that had been confusing in the moment becomes clear, and I feel like I’ve been kicked in the stomach. You blew it again, the little voice in my head tells me.

  It took me quite a few years to come to terms with my autism, once I learned about it. The disability side was obvious to me from the beginning; it was the gifts that were so much harder to see. TMS worked a little differently. I saw the beauty in music and colour right away, and those things came to me like gifts dropped out of the sky. But there were also costs that took even more time to discover.

  Fear

  ALVARO HAD WARNED all along that the effects of TMS might not always be positive. I was changing—mostly for the better—and I’d been on a steady upward glide. For the first time in memory, I was free from the anxiety that used to torture me every fall. My first book had been a success in hardcover, and it was looking pretty good in paperback for the fall of 2008. But that all changed in the space of a few months, as the economy imploded.

  There had been some problems on the horizon to be sure. My marriage was unstable, and I struggled with Martha’s all-too-visible depression and my newly heightened awareness of it. My son was headed for trial over the chemistry experiments, and he might end up in prison. But the straw that broke the camel’s back was the economy.

  I’d lived through several recessions, and this one didn’t worry me much in the beginning. I didn’t feel a connection to the stock market or what pundits were describing as the real estate bubble. What does it matter to us? I reassured my staff. We are car mechanics, not stock traders. Being autistic, I had never felt connected to most of the goings-on in the outside world, except for those that directly affected me.

  My business had taken off in the 1990 recession, as new car owners looked for less costly alternatives to the dealer. I initially assumed this recession would be the same. It wasn’t. Old customers stopped coming in, and new ones didn’t arrive to replace them. There were days I thought the office phone was broken. When I called former customers to see what was wrong, I heard one scary story after another. Overnight, people who had looked after their cars faithfully stopped caring for them at all. “We couldn’t afford it and had to downsize” was a common refrain that winter. The stories in the newspapers got worse every day. Business sagged and then collapsed.

  By the spring of 2009 everything had changed. The stock market had tanked and millions of people had watched their retirement investments evaporate, sometimes overnight. My own stock portfolio—never anything to boast about—had lost half its value. Customers who had been very attentive to their cars neglected them and then became angry when that resulted in breakdowns. Some were actually abandoning vehicles when they couldn’t handle the repairs. Not only were they dumping their formerly treasured but now run-down cars on me, they were ignoring my phone calls and mail. When they did show up to service their cars, they were edgy and anxious, something I had not seen before. While it’s true that I was oblivious to my clients’ moods in years past, I still heard what they said to me, which was usually chatter about weather, kids, and other light stuff. Now they told me of their hard times: jobs lost and kids they could no longer afford to send to college.

  The realization that I couldn’t do anything to help my customers was very disturbing, and that was a new feeling for me. In the past, my response would have been to tell people that their breakdowns were a predictable result of inattention, and they should change their ways or they’d end up walking. Now I found myself feeling compassion as I realized some were in the position of choosing to pay for a car repair or last month’s mortgage. I’d always heard that compassion was a good thing and that autistic people like me were disabled by its lack. If that’s true, I told myself, I’m better off disabled, because feeling the pain of others is dragging me down.

  Still, the troubles of our service customers were probably a good distraction for me. As spring approached, Cubby was headed for trial in Hampshire County Superior Court in Northampton. Of all the thousands of criminal complaints in our county every year, only about fifteen of them are serious enough to turn into full-blown superior court trials. Cubby’s case was one of them. The other trials were for rape, murder, armed robbery, and arson. We still could not believe that the prosecutor had lumped Cubby in with people like that, especially since there was never a victim or a complaint. We were watching the court closely, and it was frightening to see one trial after another end in conviction. The Superior Court was looking more and more like the anteroom to the Concord state prison. Most criminal cases are resolved by pretrial negotiation. Not this one. My son was still facing up to sixty years and we were all on the edge of panic, wondering what was going to happen.

  My search for good news—or something to buoy my spirits—was becoming desperate. The only feelings in the air seemed to be anxiety and fear, and all the news was bad. Before TMS, war might break out in Europe and thousands could die of disease in Canada, but I would be unfazed as long as none of tomorrow’s service appointments cancelled. Now everything I heard, saw, or read was fraught with feeling, almost all of it negative. Everywhere I looked people were scared. It was impossible for me to stay on an even keel in the face of such overwhelming unpleasantness, and I wished I had my autistic emotional oblivion back. Great as the TMS-derived insight was, it came at the cost of losing a powerful protection. Without it, I was essentially naked in a hostile world.

  I expressed that sentiment to Alvaro, and he said, “That’s a very astute observation. There is a body of research that shows we can ‘catch’ emotions from other people—principally anxiety and depression. That didn’t happen to you because your autism acted like a protective inoculation. I feel sorry for your present distress, but at the same time I am thrilled that the therapy unlocked all these feelings in you. You’re feeling a new kind of empathy, and it’s surely a big strain to adjust.”

  Unfortunately, Alvaro’s explanation and enthusiasm didn’t make me feel much better. It gave me a momentary smile, but that didn’t last. Life was just too painful.

  My marriage was all but dead, as I kept failing to deal with my newly emergent response to the cloak of Martha’s depression. I had been oblivious to it for so long, and I felt horrible because I’d turned on her without warning. There was nothing to say, because this wasn’t something talk or even counselling could change. She thought our troubles were an incompatibility precipitated by science. Unpleasant as that was, it was magnified by the guilt I felt for letting her down; they say it takes two people to make or break a relationship, but in this case both of us were keenly aware that it was me and TMS on one side and her on the other. I was different and she was the same, and things had ceased to work between us.

  Now that I was more able to read the feelings of people around me, I recognized my impatience with Martha’s sadness and saw that my pushing her to do things she didn’t necessarily want to do was mean. Before TMS I told her that having Cubby and me around was good for her because we wouldn’t put up with depression. We’d insist she get out of bed and join us out in the wider world. After TMS I found myself looking in the mirror—metaphorically—and thinking, What am I doing? My expanded sense told me she wanted to be left alone, which must mean I was the one who wanted her out and about. If that was true—and my logical brain insisted it was—then the whole effort to get her out from under depression was just self-serving, and I felt ashamed.

  Another thing that bothered me was realizing that I was driven to do something all the time, while Martha was content just to be, sitting quietly with a book or a glass of wine. No one had ever taught me how to relax, and the excitement of the TMS made me even more energized. But she wasn’t like that, and I saw how I’
d been jabbing at her constantly, trying to make her more like me, even as I wished I could sit quietly and relax like her. My behaviour was making her depression worse.

  I thought about it all as I listened to Diana Ross sing “Touch Me in the Morning.” Thirty years before, all I would have heard in the music was a river of golden sound pouring through the crossovers, limiters, and amplifiers. All music was beautiful when the sound system worked and horrible when it didn’t. Now, I didn’t even notice the sound gear. She sang the lyrics and their meaning hit me like a punch in the stomach, as if I’d never heard them before.

  We don’t have tomorrow,

  But we had yesterday.*

  My mood took a brief upturn when Cubby was found not guilty on every one of the prosecutor’s overblown charges. We could call them ridiculous now, having won, but they’d been very serious until that moment. But even that wasn’t enough to lift my mood for long. And Cubby didn’t stick around to celebrate. He hated the stress in the house and wanted to be on his own. At age nineteen, he was an adult. He moved thirty miles away to Vermont, enrolled in community college, and took up with a new girlfriend. He was off to a good start as a young adult—or at least a better one than he’d have gotten in jail—but I missed my little boy.

  The economy remained terrible throughout the summer. Our revenues at the garage declined by 25 percent—something I’d never seen in twenty years in business. After almost a year of bad news, I began to lose hope. Until then I had been a generally optimistic person, assuming that tomorrow would be better than today, and events had generally shown that to be true. I’d had down moods and periods of depression, but I kept going because I still believed in tomorrow, even if I was sad or lonely. Now that faith was shattered. In its place was the realization that tomorrow would be worse, and next year would be awful, if I even made it that far.