Autism: Sometimes I have a suspicion

April is National Autism Awareness Month. I happened to read an article on Cracked last week, 6 Things People with Autism Would like you to Know. Something mentioned was that pop culture depicts people with Autism Spectrum Disorder being sarcastic. This is, at least, unrepresentative of ASD because most people with autism can't understand sarcasm.


That got me thinking: part of what made grade and high school difficult for me was exactly that. I couldn't understand sarcasm, couldn't understand the meaning nor the motive behind it, and had trouble interpreting it; therefore, I couldn't come up with any effective reply for it. Since I attracted a lot of it, that made my stint through school much harder.



However, a snappy comeback wasn't really an option anyway, because I also couldn't talk a lot. I'd say one to three words, but sentences were a problem, so was my intonation. I was especially ashamed, until I was nine, that I couldn't pronounce my name. That r-l in them middle was just a phonetic hair-pin turn, and I'll admit it scared me. That was part of a general problem I had with speech.

When I was a toddler, my Dad used to make fun of how literal-minded I was. (He made me so angry.) I would miss sarcasm and would take the literal meaning of what people said. I remained that way into college, to my frustration. I also couldn't understand why people lied about things. It made me an easy target at school (and later in the military, where the problems lingered).  

Yet despite my speech problems, it wouldn't be accurate to say I was silent. Sometimes I would talk a lot, but I wouldn't really converse. I would simply say what was in my mind. It was like a manic, with broken sentences, and if anybody said anything back, I never could form an answer much less keep interest in what they said.  

I've already written about my ADHD, which is diagnosed, which I'm taking medicine for, and there's debate in medical science about whether that's an autism spectrum condition.

I was terrible at names and faces, and couldn't read people's emotions. I had those problems into adulthood as well.

Another hint of autism is I preferred to play alone, something that vexed my mother. She fought me to stop the solitary games I played and to play with my brothers and sisters. That caused a lot of stress between me and her and between me and my siblings.

The games I played looked odd and disturbing to her, arranging and rearranging pieces of paper, or rolling dice repeatedly and tabulating the results.   

Also:

-I hated to be touched, which made getting a haircut an especially high-stress activity. This also caused a lot of turmoil for me when I reached puberty and suddenly I had to work out a desire to be touched with a dread of it.

-When I got to be a tween and was entrusted with choosing my clothes, I never paid attention to the colors at all. To me, the complete purpose of clothes was to cover your body. I didn't pay any attention to how my clothes looked right up into my mid-thirties.

-I remember at age six going to get my eyes checked. I had the idea that the object was to get glasses. So, I did my best to blur my vision, frustrating my mother and the eye doctor.

There are other things, but I've already gone on too long. That's my memory of
why my childhood was so difficult, and why I came out of it beaten up, traumatized, and depressed.


My parents already had a kid with Angelman Syndrome, something as devastating as the most serious autism. Part of what make me reluctant to say I had Autism Spectrum Disorder is that it would mean they had incredibly bad luck.

Or was it? They both grew up in highly polluted central St. Louis city, long before the EPA. I've often thought that the cause of so many diagnoses of autism is exposure of the population to all the chemicals we use. I remember a study that said exposing a a female rat to toxic chemicals could continue to effect her offspring for at least five generations. Now, imagine for humans if that were cumulative from all the chemicals we've been adding to our environment.

My extended family has had a lot of cases of cognitive, psychiatric and developmental disorders.  

For myself now, I still prefer to work and play alone. The idea of being observed stresses me out. I often have to pretend I'm invisible to move around in public. Also, making thousands of notes on index cards from my novel, while not my favorite activity, sounds extremely valuable for my rewrite, and doable. So I'm doing it.

I've made it to middle-age and diagnosis of Asperger's or ASD offers neither reward nor help. I've adjusted to my limitations, and I've learned to cope. As I said, I'm not self-diagnosing, but I have self-suspicions.