Be Different: Adventures of a Free-Range Aspergian With Practical Advice for Aspergians, Misfits, Families & Teachers

by John Elder Robison

  I could understand if outsiders said, “I need to visit my doctor. His office is in the Health Services Building.” That would be correct, but no one seems to say that. I wonder why.

  And then there are the names I give other people. When my newborn brother came home from the hospital, I watched him really closely and listened to him. I was eight years old, but when looking at my new brother, I remembered myself at an earlier age. I wondered what he would do, and what uses I might find for him as he got bigger. My mother told me his name was Chris, but I said that to him repeatedly and he never responded. He just kind of gazed with a blank expression.

  My dog knew his name. I’d say, “Hey, Dog,” and he’d look up at me. Dog was a perfectly sensible name, because he was a dog. I always knew he recognized his name, since he wagged his tail whenever I said it. And sometimes, he barked. My little brother didn’t do any of those things. I could say “Chris” or anything else all day long and he just lay there and made little snorts.

  So that’s what I named him. Snort. My mother objected right away, but I could not see why. My name was just as good as hers. Actually, it made more sense. Anyone could look at my little brother, lying there making noises, and see why I named him as I did. In comparison, there was absolutely no visible reason that my mother had named him Chris. He wasn’t like a car, where you could read CHEVROLET or TOYOTA across his forehead and know what kind of kid he was.

  It didn’t take too long for my brother to begin answering to Snort. Just as the dog would wag his tail when I called his name, Snort would look at me and make faces. I could tell he recognized his name, no matter what my parents said. When he got a little older and became self-propelled, he even came when I called him and followed me through the house. Just like Dog, but less obedient.

  However, as Snort got bigger, problems emerged that rendered his name inappropriate. Most significantly, he stopped snorting when he learned to talk. So the previous relevance of his name disappeared. My little brother was fun at first, but he became a nuisance. He took my toys and often broke them. He stole my coin collection and spent it on candy. That was why I decided he needed a new name, and the choice was obvious. Once again, I named him based upon his most obvious attribute. He became Varmint. That’s what he remained until he was about sixteen. At that time, I realized he was too old and too big to be called Varmint, but I never liked Chris, so I just stopped calling him anything.

  Now I just say, “Hey,” whenever I need to speak to him, and that’s worked fine for the past few decades. When I refer to him in conversation I usually say “my brother,” but occasionally I do use the name my mother gave him. Not often, though.

  There are many more examples of my naming conventions, which are often at odds with those of nypical society. In every case, though, I maintain that my names have a sound logical foundation and people are irrational to criticize them.

  I’ve found that people often have problems being named in relation to an employer or a place. For example, I call the people who live in Ludlow Ludlovians, which is entirely appropriate. Yet some Ludlovians object. Why? I didn’t put them there. If they don’t like being Ludlovian they should move to a place they can be proud of. Don’t blame me! The fact is, every town has its denizens. And a smart person knows what they are called. In the English language, “-ite” or “-ian” is added to where you live. It’s a language rule, so if you don’t like it, move!

  Long ago, I worked with people from the Xerox Corporation. They were Xeroids. Today, people who work at Crown Publishing are Crownites, and those at Penguin are Penguites. People who live in Longmeadow are Longmeadeans. A few miles away, Conway has Conwites.

  I’m not the only person to approach naming people in this way. Consider all the Star Trek fans who proudly call themselves Trekkies. They did that to themselves. I hear a lot of them have Asperger’s, so maybe that explains it.

  Sometimes my use of strange-sounding names is totally unconscious. It’s hard for me to regulate that. Other times, when I am with strangers, I am able to pay attention to my word choices and not call people by names or descriptors they don’t expect. That has improved my social success, but it adds one more bit of stress to an already difficult situation.

  As a grown-up, I have actually stopped giving names to people, except for those closest to me. Cubby, my son, will always be Cubby, not Jack, but George Parks will always be George, not Woodchuck, as he might have been thirty years ago. The only exception to that rule is when people name themselves. For example, my friend Moira Murphy joined Twitter. When she did, she sent me and all her other friends her new handle, and it started me thinking.…

  From that moment on, she became and will always remain: Murph Smurf.

  Mind Your Manners

  When I was younger, people often accused me of weird expressions and strange behavior. As a kid, I used to feel really bad about that, because I was just being myself. I didn’t know what I was doing wrong.

  Now I see things in a different light. I’ve learned that other people have certain expectations for how I should look and act. If I don’t meet their expectations, especially during a first impression, they won’t be friends with me, work with me, or even answer my questions. The onus is on me to act as expected and make a good impression.

  To accomplish that, I needed to learn exactly what was expected, how to act “normal” in the situations in which I found myself. The first step was to figure out what “normal” really meant. To my surprise, the answer to that turned out to be simple: To many people, normal means “well-mannered.”

  Manners were always something I lacked, according to everyone involved in raising me. I can still remember my mother turning to me when I had food on my face and saying, “Look at you! What would your grandmother say?” She meant to admonish me, but comments like that never worked. I don’t think I even grasped the idea that I had food all over me, much less that anyone else could care. With no understanding of those basics, how could I possibly make sense of what she said?

  Yet I heard her, and at some level, at that early age, I knew there was a problem. But what?

  My grandmother Carolyn always complained about my manners. She tried to improve them whenever I stayed with her in Lawrenceville, down in Georgia, but I wasn’t very trainable. I found her instructions arbitrary at the time, and I’ve always been resistant to following orders I felt were foolish.

  She was forever comparing me to Leigh and Little Bob, my two first cousins. My cousins said, “Yes, ma’am” and “No, sir” to every grown-up who spoke to them, and she was always pointing out their resultant “good speaking manners” to me. I, on the other hand, tended to ignore or question adult commands that I didn’t think made sense. When Little Bob said, “Yes, sir!” and I said, “No!” or “Why?” it never went over too well with grown-ups.

  “Why should I talk like that?” I asked my grandmother. “It’s a way of showing respect for your elders, son,” she said. Carolyn had an answer for everything. But they weren’t showing respect, and I knew it. They were just acting, playing a game. As soon as the grown-ups walked away, Little Bob and Leigh made faces at them and laughed at what they said and did. Then when a grown-up reappeared my cousins straightened up and went right back to “Yes, sir!”

  I realized they were just like dogs who lay down where you told them when you were looking but, as soon as you turned away, jumped all over the furniture and ate food off the table. It aggravated me to no end when my dogs did that, and Leigh’s and Little Bob’s fake manners aggravated me, too.

  I wanted grown-ups to like me. I wanted to help my family. But I also wanted to play and have fun like kids my age did. And I was truthful. So that made it very hard for me to say, “Yes, ma’am!” when my grandmother asked me to carry the bags in from the car and I was in the middle of solving a complex puzzle. Couldn’t the food wait? My puzzle was far more important! “No!” I would reply, truthfully.

  After enduring years of continued resistance my gr
andmother eventually gave up on me ever saying “Yes, ma’am,” but she never gave up on the rest of manners. As she explained, “The whole thing—manners, behavior, and all … it’s called etiquette. And that’s what you need to get by in life, honey child.” She kept repeating that, even after I was fully grown.

  Carolyn kept at it long enough that a few things actually stuck. For example, she taught me the right way to hold a knife and fork. Maybe that worked because it made sense. I still don’t know of any better or more functional way to do it. Making a fist around the fork—like I did when I was little—is both inefficient and impolite. The polite method of holding a fork provides for better control of the tool. It’s a good idea that’s also good manners.

  (The only time making a fist around the fork helps is when you want to stab someone because he’s stealing your food. Now I know stabbing people is really rude, so I hold my fork in the grown-up way all the time, and I rely on discreet snarls to protect my dinner from predators.)

  If only all manners were so logical! Unfortunately, they are not. Aspergians like me are notoriously logical and straightforward, and much of the time, manners are neither. They are not “common sense,” nor are they “acting right.” That’s why manners didn’t come naturally to me.

  Consider, for example, the ingestion of soup from a bowl. When I was small, I used a spoon to eat most of my soup, and then I picked up the bowl, tipped it, and drank the rest. It’s obvious to me that the most efficient way to ingest soup is to tip the bowl and drink it. In fact, unless you have a spoon that’s specifically contoured for the bowl you’re using, that’s the only way to get every last drop. And common sense tells us not to be wasteful.

  Acting right—the moral imperative to treat others as you’d like to be treated—doesn’t say much at all about drinking from the soup bowl. I know it’s not right to throw food or jab the person next to me with a fork. But where’s the harm to anyone in drinking from a bowl that was given to me by the host or hostess? The answer is, there is no harm.

  And yet … my grandmother said it’s rude to do it. For many years, logic prevented me from complying with rules of etiquette like that. I thought they were illogical and foolish, and I refused to go along. Eventually I came to understand that I benefited from compliance with the social rules, even when they seem illogical, wasteful, or nonsensical. Today, I look at my bowl, realize that it’s better to act polite, and pick up a spoon. In our society of plenty, where I seldom go hungry, a person’s positive impression of me is worth more than the small amount of extra soup I’d get by tipping and drinking. I am sure things would be different if I were starving.

  And one more thing: I’m glad my family kept up the fight, trying to train me in manners even if it made no sense at all to me. Without their efforts, I’d never have acquired what little manners I have, and I’d have entered the adult world socially handicapped as a result.

  That was how I started adult life: with the few manners my family had hammered into me, and whatever innate sense of right and wrong I was born with or was able to evolve. Some people might call that a moral compass, but I wasn’t that sophisticated in my terminology. Whatever I called it, it served me well around close friends and family, and it always worked for the big decisions in life. Unfortunately, a logical, morals-based behavioral strategy breaks down in casual interactions, the sort one has at a party.

  I learned that as soon as I began venturing out socially as an adult. That’s when I encountered strangers who were critical of me and my manners. At first, I reacted with hostility to what I perceived as shallow, superficial posturing. So what if I don’t hold the door for you? Can’t each of us take responsibility to open our own doors? It eventually became clear that logical and ethical behavior just wasn’t good enough—I was alienating strangers with my failure to “act like everyone else.”

  I was nice on the inside, but new acquaintances sometimes never stayed around long enough to notice, because they were aggravated or disturbed by my lack of manners. “You’re acting like a hillbilly, boy,” was how my grandfather said it. I never really lived among hillbillies—the closest I came was my grandparents’ place in rural Georgia—but I got the idea. If I changed my behavior, people might like me better. I might acquire more friends. It seemed worth a try.

  I made that decision in my mid-twenties. That’s sooner than some, but later than many. In retrospect, I see that my life would have gone a good bit smoother if I’d made some changes in my teens, and if I’d paid a little more attention to those illogical rules of behavior.

  Once I resolved to change, the course was clear. I was now an adult. My grandmother had passed away, so there was no one left to train me. I would have to train myself. As I’d done so many times before, I set off for the bookstore to look for guidance. I thought manners would be simple, but I was wrong.

  The gold standard for manners and etiquette is the Emily Post book Etiquette. To my great disgust and amazement, it ran to eight hundred pages! It looked as daunting as the Internal Revenue Code. Still, I bought her book and carried it home.

  Emily seemed to have a rule for every possible social situation—thousands and thousands of them. How to act at dinner, at work, in a bar, or at the theater. How to dress, how to walk, and even what to say and when to be quiet. The complexity was just overwhelming. Does everyone else in the world already know this stuff? I wondered. Whether they did or not, I quickly realized I needed a simpler system. I remembered what my grandfather used to tell me long ago about watching the older people. Starting with that advice and fortified by snippets of Emily Post, I made my own set of rules. I based my plan on advice from people I trusted, how Emily said I should behave, that moral compass, and a lot of careful observation and contemplation about how I interacted with other people, successfully and otherwise.

  First of all, when in a strange social situation, I watch the others and do as they do. This applies to wearing a suit, handling silverware, eating food, going through doorways, and many other situations. I do a lot better when I watch, wait, and imitate. My grandfather taught me this.

  When I speak in casual conversation, I try to start a mental clock in my head. I actually learned this from Marty Nemko, a San Francisco career coach. He told me, “For the first thirty seconds after you start talking, imagine a green light in your head. After thirty seconds the light turns yellow. At sixty seconds, it’s red.” That’s a good piece of advice for most any conversational situation. It takes some mental energy to monitor myself, but it works.

  I used to feel that I should say everything as soon as I got a chance to talk, because my contacts with people were so fleeting. After all, I might never get the chance to talk to them again. Today, I realize that my contacts were fleeting because I went on and on, bored people silly, and ran them off. It was a sad day when I finally realized that most people do not care about the 66,000-horsepower MAN B&W diesel engines in the big American President Lines containerships. The world is just filled with important and fascinating facts, yet nypical people just choose to remain indifferent. So I stopped running on at the mouth, or at least I try to.

  I’ve learned to say “please” and “thank you” fairly often. That’s a simple rule that delivers good results. I don’t always remember to do this, but I know should. There’s nothing false or objectionable about “please” and “thanks.” Even if I don’t like someone, I can thank him for handing me the hammer, and I can say, “Please move over so I can get past you.” Those words just make things smoother. People seldom refuse to step aside when asked, and shoving them out of the way without asking almost always leads to a bad outcome, unless you are at a sporting event where manners are not used.

  Manners mavens often advise us to go beyond “please” and “thanks,” to actually make up nice things about the other person. For example, they suggest things like, “Susan, your dress looks lovely tonight!” I don’t usually follow that advice, because I think it results in conversation that’s shallow and contr
ived as people trade fake compliments and false smiles. Some of my relatives act like that, and it aggravates me to no end because I can’t ever trust what they are saying. How can I tell if they really mean something, or if they just made it up for the sake of conversation?

  Then there’s the matter of “polite” clothing.…

  Nowadays, when I go somewhere, I try to find out how people will be dressed before I go there so that I can put on appropriate clothes. In my antisocial days, dress didn’t matter, because I was an outcast everywhere. Now, when I join social groups, I realize it’s a lot easier to fit in if I’m dressed in a style that’s at least generally compatible with that of the other people. Also, I never go out in public in my underwear.

  That simplified code of manners may not seem like much, but it transformed my social life. Today people invite me to events and parties and then invite me back again. Given my social standing in high school, that’s something to be proud of. And I accomplish it all with a minimum of posturing and false behavior, and just a little compromise of efficiency.

  When I first began studying manners, as a teenager, I assumed they were nothing more than a code of behavior written by and for self-serving adults. From my perspective, therefore, they were pretty much useless. Now, years later, I understand that manners are a code of behavior that makes life smoother and better for all of us. There are times when I am inconvenienced, like when I hold a door for ten people, but at other times I am paid back when strangers do the same for me. I can’t always foresee how kindness and consideration will pay off, but they usually do. I believe that because of my manners, strangers observe me and make subconscious decisions to be nice, just as other strangers in earlier years had observed and rejected me as an ill-mannered child. When I act politely, I build a reserve of goodwill in others. That reserve allows those people to cut me some slack when I do something annoying.