Be Different

by John Elder Robison

  At times like that, I remind myself that friendship works both ways. Some people will reject me, but there will be others I will reject. It’s a two-way street. That’s a powerful realization, because I used to think I had to accept everyone. I’m a lot happier now that I know that isn’t true. I have the right to choose my friends, and I do.

  Feeling Bad News

  When I was seventeen, I spent a lot of time at my friend Adam’s garage. It was an old carriage house, with a greasy wood floor, out behind his parents’ place in Amherst. There were motorcycles and motorcycle parts everywhere you looked, even downstairs under the floor. My own bike sat out front next to Adam’s. We were two misfits surrounded by stacks and piles of wonderful machinery.

  We’d sit there in the shade and polish our engines with old bits of oily rag and pink Simichrome polish. There were always carburetors to tune, chains to oil, and brakes to adjust. It was a nice, peaceful way to pass the time. Adam even had a few other friends, some of whom would pop in to visit or share the latest tidbits. One day, Adam’s friend Charley stopped by with some bad news. “Did you hear about Peter Pepul? He was in a bad crash on his bike last night. He might lose his leg. What if he ends up crippled? It’s scary. He’s over at Cooley Dickinson Hospital right now. They took him there last night, after the accident.”

  “Woof. That sucks,” I said, as my mind started churning. Both Adam and I were thinking about Peter as Charley continued with his story, but our thoughts couldn’t have been more different. Adam was wondering if Peter would recover, while I was thinking about whether I too would lose a leg in a motorcycle crash. After all, I’m the same age, I also ride a bike, and we have other similarities. Are motorcycle crashes contagious? Would I be crippled? How would I be able to work and support myself? Would I starve, in addition to getting mutilated? I started feeling more and more worried. I was actually becoming physically uncomfortable. A psychologist might even say I was having a panic attack.

  How did Peter’s disaster become my disaster? The more I listened, the more I felt like it was me, bound up in a cast, over there in the hospital. Moments before, I had been enjoying a beautiful spring day. Now, it had all gone bad. All I needed was an IV in my arm to complete the nightmare.

  In a matter of moments, my friend’s accident had turned into a deadly threat hanging over my head. And it was all in my mind. Peter had been riding at night, fast, in the rain. I was parked, on a milk crate, in a garage in the daylight. Any reasonable person would say I was perfectly safe. The motorcycles around me weren’t even moving. There was absolutely no reason to think I was about to lose my leg in a bike accident. Yet I felt scared and worried. Was I worried for him, or for myself? And why did I feel threatened?

  Perhaps the answer lies in empathy: how it works for nypicals, and the way it works for me. For example, I can see a person crying in the street, and feel nothing but puzzlement. But tell me a story of a motorbike crash, and I get all anxious imagining myself in the same situation.

  I got a clue to that when Adam’s girlfriend, Brya, came out of the house to hear the story. First, Brya expressed sympathy. She said something like, “Oh! That’s terrible! I feel so bad for him. Poor Peter!” As she said the words her face contorted into a sort of sad, crying expression. That’s the mirroring mechanism I described a few chapters back at work. Charley felt bad, and Brya mirrored his distress. Then it was time to respond. She instantly turned upbeat in her tone and expression.

  “I’m sure he will be fine. It’s probably not as bad as it looked, and even if it is, they have good doctors over there and he’s young and strong. He’ll be okay!” And that last was said with a smile, a total transformation from a few moments before. So Charley’s bad news was received, acknowledged, and countered with a positive and upbeat prediction. Peter was going to recover.

  It was quite a performance! The word “performance” makes Brya’s behavior sound made up or insincere. Yet I’m quite sure it wasn’t. I’ve known her for many years and I am convinced her feelings and actions were genuine. I am fully confident that her words of encouragement were just as real to her as Charley’s distress was to him.

  The whole exchange played itself out in just a few seconds. Let’s recap what happened:

  Charley looked distressed as he told us about Peter’s accident. Brya mirrored that distress and expressed sympathy. Brya turned upbeat and offered Charley words of encouragement.

  Charley felt a little better and Brya continued on her jolly way.

  My response was totally different. I could never feel or express the range of emotions that flowed between Brya and Charley in that short period. I could say some of the words, but it wouldn’t be natural, and her range of expressions was totally beyond me.

  Like I said in the beginning, when I heard Charley’s news I furrowed my brow and said, “Woof. That sucks.” My words summed up the situation nicely, and my serious demeanor was acceptable, even if it wasn’t as expressive as Brya’s face. However, it didn’t sound very sympathetic or comforting to Charley. And that wasn’t all. I continued, in a realistic vein. “I’d be worried about his leg, too, with what you said. What would he do if they had to take it off?”

  Some people would say I’m a pessimist, always looking for the worst case, but that’s not true. I’d say I’m more of a survivor, and my instinct is to anticipate the worst and plan for it. That way, the final outcome is always better than I planned for. Perhaps my brain design makes me that way.

  To me, there just wasn’t anything to smile about. I knew Peter might well be crippled. His bike was almost certainly a total loss, too. He was in serious trouble over there at the hospital. And to top it off, he might be facing charges from the police for causing a crash. It was one of those stories that just got worse the longer you listened. At least that’s how I saw it. A flowchart of my exchange with Charley would look rather different from Brya’s:

  Charley looked distressed and told us about Peter’s motorcycle crash.

  I mirrored his distress and expressed understanding.

  I agreed Peter was in big trouble.

  Charley felt a little worse, and I felt anxious as I absorbed Charley’s distress and made it my own.

  Meanwhile, Brya maintained a smiling, upbeat attitude. How could Brya and I possibly see the situation so differently? We both felt bad about Peter’s accident. But from that starting point our responses went in totally different directions. Brya’s response was more productive, because both she and Charley ended up feeling good at the end. After my exchange, both Charley and I felt worse.

  I think the difference was that Brya responded emotionally and I responded logically. Emotion told Brya, Charley’s in pain. Try and say something to make him feel better.

  Logic told me, Peter’s in trouble. I should acknowledge his predicament and plan for the worst case.

  And why did Brya feel okay at the end, while I ended up feeling so bad?

  I’ll lay that one at the feet of those mirror neurons. They seem to have operated very differently in the two of us. Brya mirrored Charley, saw a response, and made a happy face to cheer him up. Her happy face cheered her up, too, allowing her to recover from mirroring his worry over the accident. So in the space of an instant she mirrored his distress, countered it with a smile, and felt better herself. That’s a successful and powerful system. I wish I had access to it.

  My mirror neurons moved slower, and maybe deeper and stronger. I frowned as I acknowledged Charley’s sad story. I expressed agreement that Peter might be in real trouble. All the while, my mirror neurons were assimilating Charley’s news. The more they took it in, the more I mirrored his feelings, and the worse I felt.

  Since I have trouble taking in other people’s perspectives as separate from me, I began relating this new bad feeling to myself and the world around me. I was mirroring “bike crash” so naturally that my mind turned to my own motorcycle and the imminent prospect of a wreck. Was I going to get run over by a car the moment I left Ad
am’s? My logical mind veered off track into a world of emotion. But it was wrong emotion, just as it was illogical.

  It’s also possible that autism makes my sense of self weaker than Brya’s. Recent neuroscience studies support that idea. The distinction between the concepts of “me” and “you” may be a little more blurred for me at times. As often as I’ve been criticized for lacking empathy, exchanges like this leave me feeling like I have more empathy than nypicals. My feelings of empathy move a lot slower than Brya’s, but once they get going, look out! They’re very real.

  My empathy reaction seems to have been triggered by my absorption of Charley’s words. I’m not sure if the same can be said for Brya. I think she picked up Charley’s worried facial expression and his body language, and she responded immediately. I totally missed those things, but his words affected me powerfully, albeit a lot more slowly.

  Now that I understand that difference, I feel a little better. But there’s still not much I could do if the events happened again tomorrow.

  And the result is, bad news knocks me down. I get back up, but it takes a while. I wish I could explain how I turned this particular Aspergian trait to my benefit, but I can’t. It’s a weakness, pure and simple. The best I can hope for is to know it’s there, and understand it, and work to minimize its negative impact on myself and those around me.

  When I was younger, I used to think words like “empathy” were easily defined and their meaning was clear-cut. Today I understand that the ideas are not so simple. My Aspergian brain processes news like Peter’s differently than a nypical’s brain, and the result is that I feel bad in a totally different way.

  Some psychologists would say that whatever that is, it isn’t empathy. But I beg to differ. It may not be nypical empathy, but it is one aspect of what empathy is to me. And it’s just as real as the feelings imagined by the nypicals who wrote the dictionary definition.

  I hope Peter isn’t crippled too badly.

  No, that’s wrong. I’m sure Peter will make a full recovery.

  A really speedy recovery.

  Hopefully.

  Keeping Cool in a Crisis

  So I don’t respond the way people expect, and that’s put me at a disadvantage more than once. But there are times when my Aspergian logic gives me a leg up on the nypical population. One example would be during an emergency response, like what happens when cars crash and bodies are lying in the road.

  If you are going to be helpful in a crisis, technical knowledge isn’t always enough. Sometimes you need something else—what some people call a cool head and a strong stomach. That can be extremely valuable when bad things happen.

  You read about people getting hurt or killed in car accidents, and it’s kind of an abstract thing. It feels very different when it actually happens to you. What you do in the moments after a crash can spell the difference between life and death for someone, and it’s in those situations that some Aspergians can really excel.

  I got into a bad car accident with my geek friend Jim Boughton when we were both in our early twenties. We were driving over the bridge from Northampton to Hadley on a Tuesday night, when an oncoming car swerved out of its lane, crossed the double lines, bounced off the car in front of us, and rebounded straight into my grille.

  Everything happened in slow motion, though the crash played out in a fraction of a second of real time. Jim saw a rainbow as the other car’s window glass exploded in our headlights. I remember a tremendous jolt, and struggling to twist my wrecked steering wheel as our car slid to a stop. When we stopped moving we both looked back and forth for a moment, and wiggled our arms and legs to ascertain that we were still alive and intact. I realized my glasses were missing, and Jim reached forward and pulled them from the dash, where they had jammed at the base of the windshield. As I unbuckled my seat belt I saw that it was stretched and the metal was bowed where the shoulder belt exited the door pillar. The brake pedal was pushed right into the floor from the impact, and the steering wheel was bent forward into the dash.

  “Good thing we had seat belts,” we said together. Amazingly, our doors still opened, and we stepped out into the road. Our car was cracking and ticking as the metal cooled, but it wasn’t on fire and seemed stable. We were a little shaky, but we walked all right and gathered speed and functionality as we moved. The destruction became more apparent as we stepped forward. The hood was folded up into the windshield, and everything beneath it was compressed and pushed back several feet. Where had the engine gone? It took a moment to realize it was now jammed under the floor. Clearly, my vehicle was a goner. We walked toward the car that hit us, wondering what we’d find.

  The attacking vehicle had been so totally destroyed that I could not even tell what make it was until I walked all around and read SUBARU on the deck lid. We were both stunned from the impact, but we figured the people in the Subaru were probably worse off, so we’d hurried to check on them.

  It took just a few seconds to reach the passenger side of the car, and when we did, the rider was obviously beyond help. He had been killed on impact, impaled by torn metal. It was an ugly scene. Blood dripped from the passenger door sill and pooled on the ground beneath the car. The whole right front was sheared off, from the grille to the passenger seat. Shards of glass and torn metal, empty liquor bottles, loose papers, and a bloody college notebook littered the road. The scene was lit with headlamps from the stopped traffic. Their shadows and glare made the scene even more macabre.

  We could see right into the car, because there was not a single piece of glass left in place, and what we saw wasn’t pretty. There was no one in the driver’s seat, but a weak moan led us to the operator, folded into some wreckage where the backseat used to be.

  Jim and I pulled as hard as we could to lever the twisted door out of the way, and we bent the seat frame aside to extract the driver. He was somewhat mutilated from shattered glass and steel, but he had all his parts, which was more than could be said for his passenger. We worked fast, because the front of the car was still leaking gasoline and oil onto the road, and we knew it could catch fire at any moment. If it did, the driver would surely die, because he couldn’t move on his own.

  Some people would be overcome by emotion at a scene like that. The wreckage, the noise, the blood. Not me. I saw a problem to be solved. There was a wrecked car in the road, and a wounded guy trapped inside with a dead guy next to him. It didn’t take two seconds to realize there was nothing we could do for the passenger, but the driver was in immediate peril, and we got him out and safe right away.

  We tied a shirt around his arm to stop the bleeding, and got him seated at the curb fifty feet from the crash. To my disgust, the driver began talking. He started mumbling, “I wasn’t driving. I was in the backseat.” Over and over, like he was rehearsing the lines he would tell the cops. I could smell the liquor on him from three feet away. I didn’t say anything, but I was revolted.

  With the driver secured, we both turned to directing traffic around the accident. By the time the police arrived, the situation was under control. One of the cops walked over to the car, encountered the dead passenger, and threw up on the hood. By then the crash scene was full of people, gawking and milling around.

  The ambulance arrived and took the driver to the hospital. He was cut up and had a few broken bones, but he made a full recovery. The medics said our home-brew tourniquet saved him from going into shock with his arm sliced open. We got in a wrecker and left with my car on the back. I got another shirt when I got home.

  In that situation, my Aspergian nature allowed me to remain calm and unemotional. When I saw blood and wreckage, I did not “see” emotion. Instead, I simply saw problems to be solved and I jumped right in. That was the best possible thing I could have done. Situations like that are best handled by a calm, logical person who keeps his wits about him. Some people would say I was cold and unemotional, but I think I showed great empathy by taking the steps to get the driver out of danger and to secure the scene. Wh
at more could anyone have asked, empathetic or otherwise?

  I helped because it felt like the right thing to do. The people in the Subaru had hit me and ruined my car; they were totally at fault and drunk to boot. However, I put that concern aside, because I immediately realized that their lives were more important than my car. I didn’t ask anything of the person at the scene, and I willingly and immediately placed myself at risk to save him. I didn’t have to do that; neither did Jim. What would you call that if not real empathy?

  I’ve often thought that Asperger people may be well suited to work as emergency responders for that reason. We may seem gruff and even uncaring, but our logical minds see the problems and the solutions fast, and our lack of emotional sensitivity protects us from the horrors of car crashes and fires. Asperger people can do well as military medics or emergency room doctors for the same reason. Those are a few examples of important careers people like me are suited for by virtue of a trait that’s regarded as disabling much of the time.

  Part 3

  Getting Along with Others

  Getting along with other people has always been a challenge for me. When I was little, the challenge was learning to play without ending up in a fight. That was tough, because I was sure the other kids played wrong and I knew all the answers.

  When I got older, the challenge was in making friends. That became critical in my teen years, when I wanted a girlfriend more than anything else, but I just could not overcome my shyness, social ineptitude, and fear.

  Challenges continued when I became an adult and I learned that no one hires a jerk. People have to like me well enough to let me into their circle, whether that circle is a job, or a club, or any other group in which other humans gather.