Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's

by John Elder Robison

  The whole concept of management was different down there. We had read books about manufacturing, labor relations, and the history of American industries like coal mining and steelmaking. We weren’t sure how similar our factory was to a turn-of-the-century steel mill. And we didn’t want to find out.

  In our departments, managers motivated us with encouragement and inspiration. They smiled and had good manners. In the mill, manners and encouraging words were like a foreign language. Successful managers had bruised knuckles; some had brass knuckles. The bosses had worn and dented baseball bats leaned up against the insides of their doors.

  The pizza was gone, but we had a plan. We returned to the dock as we pondered the next step. Would a better ground help? I had some adhesive-backed copper foil that I was using on another project. Perhaps I could use the foil to dissipate the static charge harmlessly. I stuck a piece to the front of a Microvision console. I attached the foil to the ground trace on the circuit board. Then I put a similar piece of foil on the cartridge door, and attached it to the cartridge’s ground plane.

  It worked. Whenever you plugged the cartridge into the console, the foil pieces touched before anything else, and the static charge was dissipated harmlessly. It was time to test the idea on some real games. I requested a box of new games, fresh from the production floor. They arrived moments later, reaffirming the importance management placed on our work.

  I pulled my sweater off and on, and I shuffled across the floor in rubber-soled shoes. When I touched the light switch, a spark snapped from my finger to the wall. Satisfied with my static charge, I pulled the sweater off and on a few more times, then picked up an unmodified Microvision. It was dead in my hand. I then picked up my modified game, and it still worked.

  I did this time and again, until I had filled the trash can with Microvision consoles. Not one of my modified units failed. I was elated. I knew then I would not be shot. I had found the answer.

  In the end, it was such a simple thing. Paper clips are simple, too. Some of the finest engineering creations are in fact the simplest. At times, we are truly masters of the obvious.

  From that moment on, the Microvision war was won. All the rest was just mopping up. I added some circuitry to toughen the circuits against static. The production engineers got antistatic materials to line the assembly areas. And the factory was fitted with a system that sprayed a fine mist of water into the air above the workstations to keep static from forming in the first place.

  Bob and I had a better source of water mist: the Connecticut River. We continued to meet there, on that project and others to follow. I was hard at work on Milton, the next electronic marvel, and Bob was back to Super Simon. Milton was to be the world’s first talking electronic game. Toys had spoken for years without electronics, using mechanical gramophone technology like the trumpet-horn record players of the 1900s. Dolls like Chatty Cathy would utter a phrase when a child pulled a string. But an interactive talking game would be a first. As it turned out, Milton did talk. Unfortunately, game buyers didn’t seem to want to listen, and Milton vanished without a trace a year later.

  I’m sure my solution to Microvision’s static problem saved the company hundreds of thousand of dollars, maybe more. But, like Bob’s experience with Dark Tower, the award never made it to my desk, and the bonus didn’t reach my bank account. The bucks stopped a bit higher up the food chain.

  We never did achieve that coveted country club membership, either. A decade later, Bob achieved renown as the designer and coinventor of Mattel’s Diva Starz and Cabbage Patch Kids Kick ’n Splash and Milton Bradley’s Whac-A-Mole electronic games. And that fall, I was offered a new job as director of R&D for a manufacturer of fire alarms and time clocks. I tramped off to climb the corporate ladder, leaving Bob in his world of toys. The trouble was, the higher I advanced in the corporate world, the more I had to rely on my people skills and the less my technical skills and creativity mattered. For someone like me, that was a formula for disaster.

  I moved on to my new job at Simplex in Gardner, about an hour’s drive away. At Simplex, I wore a suit to work. I had an office with a door, and my own secretary to guard it. And after a year, I managed a staff of twenty people. But it proved to be a mistake. I wasn’t happy. I felt I was surrounded by mediocrity, both in my own work and in my choice of employment. I had gone from designing toys (a fun thing) to overseeing the design of time clocks to keep track of America’s factory workers (not a fun thing).

  Unfortunately, there was no going back. Things had gone bad at Milton Bradley Electronics shortly after I left. The company wrote off a $30 million investment in computer games, and Bob and most of my friends lost their jobs. A short while later, the company was sold. I was beginning to realize that executive job did not equal job security.

  In the midst of my struggles to become part of corporate America, I got married. Little Bear and I tied the knot in the summer of 1982. I was twenty-five years old. We were happy at first, but as things worsened at work, I brought my problems home. I was upset about work, and Little Bear was wrapped up in the world of the Science Fiction Society, a club at the university. She was once again a college student after having taken the previous few years off. After seeing Bob lose his job, I was laid off from Simplex in 1984. They, too, were experiencing financial troubles. It was a scary time for Little Bear and me, since I was the sole breadwinner while she was in school. And to make things worse, while I was out of work, her brother Paul died in a car crash. With the stress of all those things, we began to grow apart. It was not a happy time for us.

  Luckily, I found a new job fairly quickly. I started work at Isoreg, a small company that manufactured power transformers. Unfortunately, I now had a one-and-a-half-hour commute. Life as an executive was not turning out the way they portrayed it on TV.

  By 1988, I had moved through two more jobs, and I had swallowed all I could take of the corporate world. I had come to accept what my annual performance reviews said. I was not a team player. I had trouble communicating with people. I was inconsiderate. I was rude. I was smart and creative, yes, but I was a misfit.

  I was thoroughly sick of all the criticism. I was sick of life. Literally. I had come down with asthma, and attacks were sending me to the emergency room every few months. I hated to get up and face another day at work. I knew what I needed to do. I needed to stop forcing myself to fit into something I could never be a part of. A big company. A group. A team.

  When I was five, I had wanted more than anything to be part of the team. When I was a little older, I had tried out for Little League, but no one had picked me. I never tried out for a team after that. Maybe those rejections were still with me, twenty years later.

  “You need to be part of the team,” I heard over and over.

  What, be one more idiot in a suit? Not me.

  “You need to be a little more diplomatic when you point out problems in other people’s designs.”

  Well, the design is just junk. It will never work. I did better work than that when I was fifteen.

  “You may think your circuit is the greatest thing ever, but it’s not the direction we want to go in.”

  So you want to use the other group’s design—the one that costs twice as much and is half as efficient—just because Dan sucks up to you in meetings and doesn’t call you a jerk the way I do. Do I have that right?

  It took me four jobs and ten years to realize the folly of my efforts.

  And by the way, years later, in 1998, I was admitted to the country club. But I had no need for it by then. I wasn’t a part of management anymore. And I couldn’t play golf.

  22

  Becoming Normal

  I’ve thought a lot about how I made the transition from being an Aspergian misfit to seeming almost normal. It’s been a gradual process.

  I believe there is a continuum from autism to Asperger’s to normal. At one extreme, you have children who are turned completely inward from birth. They go through life thinking their o
wn thoughts, and parents and other outsiders can barely connect with them at all. At the other end of the spectrum, you have kids who are turned completely outward. They have scarcely any ability to be introspective or to perform difficult mental calculations. People like that might not make good engineers, but they often go far in life because interpersonal skill is one of the most important predictors of success.

  And in the middle you have people like me—some more functional, some less. We can focus our minds inward, and we also have some ability to relate to people and the outside world.

  Some Aspergians can focus their minds extremely sharply, and those of us who cultivate this gift are sometimes called savants. Being a savant is a mixed blessing, because that laserlike focus often comes at a cost: very limited abilities in nonsavant areas. I don’t think I’m a savant, just a highly intelligent Aspergian. But I suspect I was on the edge of becoming a savant when I was a small child, and my later ability to visualize mathematical functions and the operation of circuits was savantlike.

  Until recently, there were no widely available sources of knowledge about how savants or Aspergians actually think or see things. But recent books and studies have started to shed light on this. When I read Daniel Tammet’s book, Born on a Blue Day, I was amazed by the similarities between thought processes he describes and my own thinking. I’ve seen similar parallels between my thought process and Temple Grandin’s descriptions of thinking in pictures. As more firsthand accounts of lives like ours emerge, I sense we are on the brink of many exciting discoveries about autism and Asperger’s.

  When we are young, our brains are constantly developing, making new connections and changing the way we think. As I recall my own development, I can see how I went through periods where my ability to focus inward and do complex calculations in my mind developed rapidly. When that happened, my ability to solve complex technical or mathematical problems increased, but I withdrew from other people. Later, there were periods where my ability to turn toward other people and the world increased by leaps and bounds. At those times, my intense powers of focused reasoning seemed to diminish.

  I believe that some kids who are in the middle to more high-functioning range of the autism continuum, like me, do not receive the proper stimulation and end up turning inward to such an extent that they can’t function in society, even though they may be incredibly brilliant in some narrowly defined field, like abstract mathematics.

  Scientists have studied “brain plasticity,” the ability of the brain to reorganize neural pathways based on new experiences. It appears that different types of plasticity are dominant at different ages. Looking back on my childhood, I think the ages of four to seven were critical for my social development. That was when I cried and hurt because I could not make friends. At those times, I could have withdrawn further from people so that I would not get hurt, but I didn’t. Fortunately, I had enough satisfactory exchanges with intelligent grown-ups—my family and their friends at college—to keep me wanting to interact.

  I can easily imagine a child who did not have any satisfying exchanges withdrawing from people entirely. And a kid who withdrew at age five might be very hard to coax out later.

  I also believe considerable rewiring took place in my own brain in my thirties and even later. I believe this because I can compare my thought process today to my processes as expressed in writing and circuit designs from twenty-five years ago.

  Papers I wrote back then are flat and devoid of inflection or emotion. I didn’t write about my feelings because I didn’t understand them. Today, my greater insight into my emotional life has allowed me to express it, both verbally and on paper. But there was a trade-off for that increased emotional intelligence. I look at circuits I designed twenty years ago and it’s as if someone else did them.

  Some of my designs were true masterpieces of economy and functionality. Many people told me they were expressions of a creative genius. And today I don’t understand them at all. When I look at those old drawings, I am reminded of a book I read as a teenager, Flowers for Algernon. Scientists took a retarded janitor and made him a genius, but it didn’t last. His brilliance faded away before his eyes. That’s how I feel sometimes, looking back at the creative engineering I’ve done. Those designs were the fruit of a part of my mind that is no longer with me. I will never invent circuits like that again. I may conceive of something like Ace Frehley’s light guitar, but someone else will have to design it.

  My story isn’t sad, though, because my mind didn’t fade or die. It just rewired itself. I’m sure my mind has the same power it always did, but in a more broadly focused configuration. No one would have looked at me thirty years ago and foreseen that I’d have the social skills I have today, or the ability to express the emotions, thoughts, and feelings you read in this book. I would never have predicted it, either.

  It’s been a good trade. Creative genius never helped me make friends, and it certainly didn’t make me happy. My life today is immeasurably happier, richer, and fuller as a result of my brain’s continuing development.

  I suspect that grown-ups drew me out enough as a child to keep me engaged and on a path that led to being functional in society. Adults were able to deal with my conversational limitations better than children. They could follow my disconnected responses, and they were more likely to show interest in anything I said, no matter how bizarre. Had I not been drawn out by interested grown-ups, I might well have drifted farther into the world of autism. I might have ceased to communicate.

  Even at sixteen years of age, it would have been easy for me to retreat from dealing with humans and move into the world within my own mind. Looking back, I can see a path that might have led somewhere far away, perhaps to autism, perhaps to the place where the savants who can multiply ten-digit numbers in their minds live. After all, I got along well with my circuits, and they never ridiculed me. They presented me with tough problems to solve but they were never mean. Around the time I dropped out of school, it was almost as though I stood in front of Door Number One and Door Number Two, as perplexed as any game-show contestant and with much more at stake, and was forced to make a choice.

  My crazy family situation and my need to run away from home and join the working world in order to survive kept me from making that choice. So I chose Door Number One, and in doing so moved farther away from the world of machines and circuits—a comfortable world of muted colors, soft light, and mechanical perfection—and closer to the anxiety-filled, bright, and disorderly world of people. As I consider that choice thirty years later, I think the kids who choose Door Number Two may not end up able to function in society.

  As a functional Aspergian adult, one thing troubles me deeply about those kids who end up behind the second door. Many descriptions of autism and Asperger’s describe people like me as “not wanting contact with others” or “preferring to play alone.” I can’t speak for other kids, but I’d like to be very clear about my own feelings: I did not ever want to be alone. And all those child psychologists who said “John prefers to play by himself” were dead wrong. I played by myself because I was a failure at playing with others. I was alone as a result of my own limitations, and being alone was one of the bitterest disappointments of my young life. The sting of those early failures followed me long into adulthood, even after I learned about Asperger’s.

  As a young adult, I was lucky to discover and join the world of musicians and soundmen and special-effects people. People in those lines of work expect to deal with eccentric people. I was smart, I was capable, and I was creative, and for them that was good enough.

  In some ways, it was a mistake for me to have left that world, because I was accepted and made to feel welcome there, something I seldom felt in corporate life. But I could not afford to keep moving ahead with my work in electronics with my nonexistent resources. I had to get a job.

  In the corporate world, I had started out as an engineer, making $25,000 a year. Back in the 1970s, that was pretty good money. As
I moved up, the pay increased. Staff Engineer, Manager of Advanced Development, Assistant Director of Planning, Director of Engineering. And, finally, General Manager of Power Systems. After ten years, I was making $100,000 a year. I was the envy of all the people below me in the food chain, but it was a vicious trap.

  In the beginning, I created circuit designs. That was something I loved to do, and did well. Ten years later, my job was managing people and projects. I enjoyed the status and respect, but I wasn’t good at management, and I didn’t like it. The problem was that if I wanted to be an engineer, I’d be looking at a 50 percent cut in pay and a job in some other company. The message was clear: Managers are more valuable than engineers. That made me mad. I wasn’t going to consider going down the ladder and down the pay scale just to be creative. I wanted it all—good pay, independence, and creativity.

  “You should really be working on your own,” I was told by my bosses.

  Was that a precursor to “You’re fired”? I had already been laid off—rejected—twice. In 1983, I went from a seemingly secure $60,000 salary to a $197 weekly unemployment check. And I had to stand in line for an hour and fill out two forms to get even that. I resolved in 1983 that I would never again collect unemployment.

  I realized the comments were right. I was not a team player, so I needed to work on my own. But what could I do that might make money? I thought long and hard about how I could control my own destiny. I could design electronic circuits, and I could fix cars. Those were the two great loves I had grown up with. Either might offer a career. Could I exchange my suit for overalls and start fixing automobiles instead of supervising engineers?