That made me despondent, but it wasn’t really depression. It was more like a combination of absorbed emotion and a reasoned response to what was unfolding around me. A few years of growth had made me successful, and I’d been a fool to think it would last. Now, with sales falling at a precipitous rate, the only question was how long I should stay in the game. Was it time to concede defeat?
A year earlier, I’d thought of myself as a success. Now I was a failure. Whenever I tried to tell myself that was just unhealthy self-pity, my inner voice said, No it’s not! It’s reality. More and more, I came to believe that was true. And the endpoint of a worsening situation—I realized—was my own death. I began to think about that more and more as everything fell apart around me. I wondered what would happen. Would I lose everything and sicken and die? Or would I kill myself in a moment of misery? I tried to think positive thoughts, but I could not sustain them. Yet people still looked at me as a success, and at work they expected me to be a leader. That was the hardest part—going through those motions while feeling I was a fraud.
There were several times that summer when that voice in my head said, This isn’t going to get better. You should just end it now. Looking back on that time, I think suicide was an impulse that snuck up on me when I was overcome by what felt like never-ending psychic pain. In one of those moments I came an inch from shooting myself on my back deck, but at the last second I turned away.
As horrible as my life had become, I must have maintained some shred of hope that it could get better. Things probably didn’t look that bad to my friends and family, but they weren’t in my head. Maybe the market would improve. Maybe business would pick up. My friends tried to reassure me, saying business wasn’t that bad (it was), everyone else was in the same boat (some were and some weren’t), and that I was more than just a living representation of the money I had in the bank. But I disagreed. I had known what it was like to live on the street at sixteen, and I told them I’d rather kill myself than be on the street again.
Things didn’t get better that fall, but they didn’t get much worse either.
As winter closed in I realized I had to make some changes. I knew that I could not stay married to Martha; her depression was overwhelming me. But I felt horrible for even having that thought. She was depressed when we’d gotten together, after all, and I tolerated it fine till TMS changed everything.
Finally, I told her I would be moving out. That Christmas Eve I drove my car to the boat launch ramp on the Connecticut River. I sat in the car for an hour, looking out at the dark water flowing past in the light of my headlamps, wondering if I should drive into the river and end it. I felt I had failed everyone important in my life. I’d been oblivious to my son’s autistic detachment and allowed him to carry out dangerous experiments that had almost sent him to prison. I’d blindly pursued the TMS in the self-centred hope of making myself better, but the real result was that I felt the full force of Martha’s depression and I couldn’t handle being married to her anymore. And with the economy in a shambles my company was on the brink of insolvency. If it failed I had nothing left. There didn’t seem to be much to live for. The logical next step would be to floor the gas pedal to get the car far enough into the river so that it would sink. I had good insurance. It would take care of the people I left. At this point, the money would do them more good than I would alive. Yet I hesitated, just as I’d hesitated earlier with the gun.
I sat there in the dark, hurting. I wanted so much to make the hurt end. Being dead would end the pain, but it would end everything else too. And I wasn’t quite ready to do that, because some part of me knew that things might not be truly as bad as I imagined. Even as one voice in my head told me I was doomed, a quieter sense of reason remained to point out that it wasn’t over yet. There was still money in the bank, and I still had a reputation. Recovery might not be looking likely, but it was possible.
Time passed silently as I looked at the water, flowing by in little swirls and ripples. Putting the car in reverse, I backed up the launch ramp, turned around, and drove into town. I went to a local restaurant, where the economy had ensured there were plenty of empty seats, and ate a solitary dinner. Then I drove to Springfield and checked into the Sheraton hotel. I had decided to start again, though what I was starting wasn’t completely clear.
Movies and books have portrayed life in a hotel suite as a grand and glamorous thing. If only that were true. My room may have been comfortable, but it was unremittingly lonely. The restaurant didn’t offer much solace. There were some enjoyable dinners with the owner and his friends, but when the night was done they had families to go home to, and I was left to trudge upstairs alone.
Martha and I went to mediation and agreed to divorce while continuing to own the car business together. I hoped that would work, and so far, it has.
I began to imagine myself as different, and I fantasized that the social people who’d spurned me when I was younger might embrace me today. I might even marry someone like that, I thought. That notion led to dating disaster as I learned—quite painfully—that my enhanced sensitivity did not allow me to predict who would be a true friend, supportive and trustworthy, and who wouldn’t. After one woman left me I looked at some pictures of our time together. When I did, something peculiar emerged. In photographs her facial expressions gave off a clear message: she did not want to be there. In hindsight, I saw that while her words had been delivering one message, her face revealed another, and that reflected some inner conflict in her mind. Better that I got out when I did, I thought. TMS was instrumental in helping me come to that realization, even though it had not allowed me to see the mismatch in the first place. Before, I would not have sensed anything from the photos either.
The promise of a new relationship had lifted my mood, but its failure a short while later knocked me right back down again. That left me in a pretty awful state, and people at work began commenting on my behaviour. “Are you having a problem with drugs?” our service manager asked me one day. She had watched my moody ups and downs—which I had never exhibited to that degree before—and concluded they must be the result of drug addiction. I assured her that I was not, but it took her some time to conclude that I was telling the truth. Her question rattled me and made me wonder how messed up I looked to the outside world.
“You get angry with people now, and you never used to before.” That was what Martha told me when I asked her opinion. I realized she was right. I used to bottle up all those feelings inside me; I didn’t know how to get them out. The result was that people assumed I was unflappable and on a permanent even keel. But all that had changed.
* “Touch Me in the Morning” was written by Michael Masser and the late Ron Miller, and first recorded by Diana Ross in 1973. It was one of the songs I loved to hear performed live.
A New Beginning
THE FOLLOWING FALL, with my divorce behind me and dating nightmares in the background, I ran into Maripat again when she brought her car to the shop. Quite a lot had happened since the last time we spoke, and I filled her in on all of it as I gave her a ride to work. I told her about moving out of the house, filing for divorce, and taking up residence in the Sheraton downtown, and then, once the divorce was settled, ending up back in the house, though now I felt kind of lost in that big place by myself.
It was out of character for me to have opened up like that; I don’t usually go on about my personal life with service customers who stand at our counter. But she was a friend too, not just a customer, and I guess I sensed there was something different about her that day.
To my surprise, Maripat told me she’d broken up with her boyfriend. She was quite surprised to hear I’d gotten divorced. And I was just as startled to hear she was unattached, since she’d always had her boyfriend follow her to drop the car off. But this time she didn’t have anyone with her, and she asked for a ride downtown. And at some point during the ride I got up the nerve to say, “We’re the same age, and relatively healthy. . . . We shoul
d go out on a date.”
A few days later we went to dinner at a Chinese restaurant in the Berkshires and talked for most of the night. We had many things in common, much more than I’d realized. We’d both dropped out of school and we’d both had alcoholic parents. Both of us left home as teenagers, and we’d educated ourselves as we went.
We were both very driven at work, but outside the office we had some differences. She was into yoga, meditation, and other ethereal things. She knew little of machines and engineering, but as she pointed out, I knew little about spirituality. Both of us liked hiking and the outdoors.
Things looked and felt promising, but one test for people our age is what the kids think. Maripat had three children—a teenage son who lived with her, an older son who lived with his dad, and a daughter who was on her own in New York. We were both relieved to find the kids quite supportive—even Cubby. When we got together she actually helped mend my wounded relationship with my son, and with my mother. I thought that was really neat.
On top of that, I am an eater and she is an excellent cook, so food has always played a role in our relationship. Maripat is also a very family-oriented creature, which meant we involved the kids in our dining. She began a tradition of cooking Sunday dinners and inviting all the kids and their friends. They didn’t all come every week, but at least one or two were usually there, and sometimes the whole pack.
We got married the following summer.
When our first Christmastime together arrived, she prepared for an even bigger crowd as friends from the neighbourhood stopped by, and her children invited friends from town and school. Cubby brought his mother, and I was amazed by what happened next.
Maripat and my first wife became best friends. In my self-centred way I assumed I was the only thing those two would have in common, but I was wrong. From the beginning, they shared many interests. Sometimes I thought the two of them were more compatible with each other than either of them was with me!
Maripat invited Cubby’s mom to dinner every week, and they jostled and joked, often at my expense. There were moments that made me uncomfortable, but it was the best thing possible for my son, having Mom, Dad, and Maripat all there together. My relationship with my first wife had always been tense, but that melted away when Maripat came on the scene. It was the most remarkable thing.
Through some stroke of great fortune, Maripat’s kids actually embraced life with me. Her son Julian, who lived with us at the time, used to help me out around the house every day, and his brother, Joe, would pitch in when he visited. Lindsay, away in New York, always welcomes me, and I know what a gift that is, after seeing other mixed families where no one gets along.
It was amazing what she did to bring our new family together.
With Maripat in my life, and a gradually recovering economy, I returned to a level of psychic equilibrium. I was certainly scarred by the events of 2009, but things were once again looking up. The car business survived the downturn and was regaining the ground that had been lost. I got back to writing and dove even deeper into autism science.
I’d taken the first steps in that direction shortly after the first TMS study, when I agreed to review autism research proposals for the National Institutes of Health. Now I was part of several research review boards. I’d started working with the International Society for Autism Research (INSAR), the professional society for autism researchers, and they had named me to two committees. I was lecturing at colleges and universities on autism and speaking at conferences and schools about my life experience as an autistic person.
Much of that work had come my way since the TMS project began. Good as that seemed, it also felt overwhelming, and I started to panic, wondering how I’d do it all, and run the car business, and take care of my family.
Maripat made all that possible by turning my empty postdivorce house into a home. Her creation of a safe place I could return to makes it possible for me to venture out and do the things I am called on to do today.
Then something even more remarkable happened. After observing the lecturing I was doing, Maripat joined me on the road—not as a travel companion, but as a partner in reaching out to neurodiverse people and their families. We began doing joint workshops on life with autism, and she was immediately swamped with people who wanted her perspective.
Her first presentation received a standing ovation. She turned out to be a really good speaker, with a message the audiences were eager to hear. As I embraced the science, she took on the emotional issues. Her counterpoint to my logical reasoning made for a good combination. Both of us together became much more powerful than either alone. That was a new experience for me, one that is still unfolding.
Tuning Out the Static
IN THE SUMMER OF 2007 everyone in my family had been thinking hard about how to promote my first book, Look Me in the Eye, which would go on sale that September. My brother, Augusten, got the idea that we should make a video, and he walked down to the meadow where I was working with my tractor and accosted me with his camera for an interview. The resulting “tractor video” ended up on YouTube and other websites, and it attracted a lot of attention. At that time, there were very few videos out there of autistic people talking about anything, let alone a memoir.
It all seemed pretty ordinary to me, but I guess the responses I gave to my brother’s questions were not what the average person expected. (You’re welcome to go online now and watch it yourself.) Some of the comments that viewers left were funny, and others seemed hopeful. A few hurt my feelings. One commenter in particular had said, “He looks and sounds like a talking robot,” and I burned with shame.
My book came out, nine months passed, and I forgot all about the video. Then the doctors did the TMS experiments on me, I began speaking widely, and new videos appeared, with new comments. Now the tone was different. “Wow,” people said. “You sure have changed. Look at the comparison between that tractor video and the film of you now! What a difference!” When I went back and looked at the film my brother had made, I saw it in a whole new light. I realized I was totally devoid of expression or animation throughout the entire clip. Hurtful as it seemed at the time, “talking robot” really was an accurate descriptor. What’s remarkable is that I’d totally missed that before, but I got it instantly when viewing it after TMS.
Interestingly, when I look at the video now, I don’t feel hurt by the comments. Instead I marvel at how much I’ve changed and how fast it happened. When I look at myself in videos made after TMS there are smiles, eyebrows lifting, and many hand gestures. None of those things were visible in the earlier tractor video.
Halfway across the country, a man in Minnesota watched the videos and read my online musings about TMS. Timothy Taylor was the editor of an academic journal and the father of a teenager with autism. He’d come across my posts by chance while researching another topic. Fascinated by what he saw, he shared the videos with his wife, Kimberley Hollingsworth Taylor.
Nick, their son, was a lanky eighth grader, kind and smart, with a large vocabulary and A’s in most of his classes.* With diagnoses of autism, attention deficit disorder (ADD), and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), he was still doing a lot better than I ever had in school, but his good grades didn’t insulate him socially. There, he ran into the same challenges that I had at his age. As Nick moved through junior high, he took to saying he was “just not a friend person,” spending his free time playing Minecraft and watching YouTube videos rather than hanging out with other kids. His parents watched him struggle to connect with other people and to function in his daily activities.
As Kimberley described, “Although Nick is very smart in terms of vocabulary or math skills, it took him much longer than others to complete class work and homework and activities of daily living. He wrestled with OCD-type compulsions—he would write, erase, and rewrite letters over and over until they looked ‘perfect,’ so writing a few sentences or a few math equations could take an hour.” As time passed and Nick got older, he
seemed more and more “stuck.” In conversations, or when asked about anything, even about activities or topics he’d enjoyed in the past, his favourite word became “no.” Any change in his routine could become a high-stress event for the entire family, including his brother and sister. Nick’s tendency to stutter and repeat the same phrase or question also seemed to be worsening as he got older.
When his parents watched my videos and the changes in me, they saw hope—that something similar could be possible for their son. Nick’s mother tracked Lindsay down through Harvard, only to be told there were no current studies involving children. “I’ll keep your name in case we start a teen study,” Lindsay offered. Meanwhile, Nick continued to struggle with school and social life. He tried ADD medications, but those didn’t really help with his core social issues.
When I was a teenager, the thing that had helped was simply growing older and having people around me recognize my value. Nick was on the same track I had followed, and that’s a scary place to be in the beginning. When you don’t have friends and can’t do what people ask of you, it’s very hard to imagine that things will magically get better in the future.
If medication didn’t help, and counselling didn’t do much, what else was there? It took a few years, but Lindsay eventually called Nick’s parents back in the spring of 2012 to tell them the lab was beginning a study to look at the short-term effects of TMS on teens with autism at Boston Children’s Hospital, another of the Harvard teaching hospitals. After talking with Lindsay and the other researchers, Nick decided to give it a shot, and over spring break, he and his mom travelled to Boston to meet the researchers and learn more.
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