John Elder Robison Quotes

Because speaking while watching things has always been difficult for me, learning to drive a car and talk at the same time was a tough one, but I mastered it.

When Martha first met me, I was anxious and jumpy. I was always tapping my foot, rocking, or exhibiting some other behavioral aberration. Of course, now we know that's just normal Aspergian behavior, but back then other people thought it was weird, so of course I did, too. One day, for some reason, she decided to try petting my arm, and I immediately stopped rocking and fidgeting. The result was so dramatic, she never stopped. It didn't take long for me to realize the calming effect, too. I like being petted and scratched. "Can you pet me?" I say when I sit next to her.

I tried to show him things, but he didn't seem to study what I showed him. Usually, he just put whatever I handed him in his mouth. He would try to eat anything. I fed him Tabasco sauce and he yelled. Having a little brother helped me learn to relate to other people. Being a little brother, Snort learned to watch what he put in his mouth.

Appearing as a character in my brother's books taught me something about myself. For most of my life, my history as an abused child with what I saw as a personality defect was shameful and embarrassing. Being a failure and a high school dropout was humiliating, no matter how well I subsequently did. I lied about my age, my education, and my upbringing for years because the truth was just too horrible to reveal. His book, and people's remarkable acceptance of us as we are, changed all that. I was finally free.

We do not naturally care about people we don't know ... If we tried to feel sorry for every death, our little hearts would explode ... I don't have any physical reaction to the news. And there's no reason I should. I don't know them and the news has no effect on my life.

(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.)

I named him Poodle, beginning a long tradition of functional pet naming.

Asperger's is not a disease. It's a way of being. There is no cure, nor is there a need for one. There is, however, a need for knowledge and adaptation on the part of Aspergian kids and their families and friends.

That was the definition of management - getting others to do your work for you. And we were the others.

The hard part was living the contrast between being rich and being broke. It was like being smart, and waking up one day to find yourself dumb as a rock, but able to remember your former brains.

There are plenty of people in the world whose lives are governed by rote and routine. Such people will never be happy dealing with me, because I don't conform. Luckily, the world is also full of people who care about results, and those people are usually very happy with me, because my Asperger's compels me to be the ultimate expert in whatever field of interest I choose. And with substantial knowledge, I can obtain good results.

There's this thing called the competence-deviance hypothesis," she explained. "It says that the more competent an individual is in his field - the more respected he is in the community - the more his eccentric behavior will be tolerated by others. "But the opposite is true for young people, because they have not done anything to earn respect in a community. So when they do weird things they are treated like dangerous animals and hustled into cages. It seems unfair when older, respectable members of the community do stuff that's even stranger and people just shake their heads and smile at their eccentricity." I

Last summer, when he thought I wasn't looking, I observed Cubby telling one of the neighborhood six-year-olds that there were dragons living in the storm drains, under our street.
'We feed them meat ... and then they don't get hungry and blow fire and roast us.'
Little James listened closely, with a very serious expression on his face. Then he ran home to get some hot dogs from his mother.

Bill Gates is said to be Aspergian. Musician Glenn Gould is said to have been Aspergian, along with scientist Albert Einstein, actor Dan Aykroyd, writer Isaac Asimov, and movie director Alfred Hitchcock. As adults, none of those people would be described as disabled, but they were certainly eccentric and different.

I needed to stop forcing myself to fit into something I could never be a part of.

Subtle brain differences often cause people like me to respond differently - strangely even - to common life situations. Most of us have a hard time with social situations; some of us feel downright crippled. We get frustrated because we're so good at some things, while being completely inept at others. There's just no balance. It's a very difficult way to live, because our strengths seem to contrast so sharply with our weaknesses. "You read so well, and you're so smart! I can't believe you can't do what I told you. You must be faking!" I heard that a lot as a kid.

And my experience in the music scene had shown me that there were places for places in the world where misfits were welcome.

One of the hardest things about my emotional awakening was the way it reshaped so many of my memories. It may sound crazy, but all too often, it turned formerly good memories bad. And there's no balance. There's not a single bad memory that's now turned to good. (Page 211, the first paragraph of the "Rewriting History" chapter)

Sociopath" and "psycho" were two of the most common field diagnoses for my look and expression. I heard it all the time: "I've read about people like you. They have no expression because they have no feeling. Some of the worst murderers in history were sociopaths.

A crying grown-up with no visible damage, who knew what that meant?

Nice people like them by children like him and raise them as pets. But he didn't want to be a pet today.

It does not matter what sixty-six percent of people do in any particular situation. All that matters is what you do.

And now I know it is perfectly natural for me not to look at someone when I talk. Those of us with Asperger's are just not comfortable doing it. In fact, I don'treally understand why it's considered normal to stare at someone's eyeballs.

Learning how to get along with other people is vital for our own success and happiness.

We began reading books together. He loved Dr. Seuss. I read those books so often I could turn the pages and say the words from memory. I became bored with repetition, and I began to make subtle alterations. The story turned into:
One fish
Two fish
Black fish
Blue fish
I eat you fish
And:
See them all
See them run
The man in back
He has a gun

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.

...delineated with signs reading:

TOWN OF AMHERST
WATERSHED
NO TRESPASSING

Which every boy in the neighborhood understood as:

PRIVATE PRESERVE FOR KIDS

My conversational difficulties highlight a problem Aspergians face every day. A person with an obvious disability - for example, someone in a wheelchair - is treated compassionately because his handicap is obvious. No one turns to a guy in a wheelchair and says, "Quick! Let's run across the street!" And when he can't run across the street, no one says, "What's his problem?" They offer to help him across the street. With me, though, there is no external sign that I am conversationally handicapped. So folks hear some conversational misstep and say, "What an arrogant jerk!" I look forward to the day when my handicap will afford me the same respect accorded to a guy in a wheelchair. And if the respect comes with a preferred parking space, I won't turn it down.

Simply making myself aware of others has remarkably improved my social life. People accept me much faster now that I ignore them less.

I knew I was some kind of misfit, but it was becoming apparent that some of the grown-ups who smiled sweetly and told me how terrible and fucked-up I was were complete fuckups themselves.

Girls are the trickiest and most unpredictable creatures a fellow like me will ever talk to.

Building up a weakness just makes you less disabled. Building a strength can take you to the top of the world.

Being lonely as a kid might well have been necessary for me," I told audiences in my talks. "If I'd had the friends I dreamt of, I'd never have spent the time to become the machine aficionado I am today. Now that I'm grown I can put that in perspective. The world is full of friendly people with no technical skills. The few of us who see into machines like others see into humans are singularly uncommon, and we're valued for that. If we use a technology like TMS to help a lonely teen today, will we be taking that exceptional ability away from him tomorrow? Should we trade friends in seventh grade for designing a working spaceship at age twenty-five?

In the first sixteen years of my life, my parents took me to at least a dozen so called professionals. Not one of them ever came close to figuring out wheat was wrong with me. In their defense, I will concede that Asperger's did not yet exist as a diagnosis, but autism did, and no one ever mentioned I might have any kind of autistic spectrum disorder. Autism was viewed by many as a much more extreme condition - one where kids never talked and could not take care of themselves. Rather than take a close sympathetic look at me, it proved easier and less controversial for the professionals to say I was just lazy, or angry, or defiant. But none of those words led to a solution to my problem.

When we discover and build upon our gifts it spurs positive feelings in us and those around us, and those feelings go a long way toward dissipating the burden of failure that many young Aspergians carry as kids.

In the past, when people criticized me for asking unexpected questions, I felt ashamed. Now I realize that normal people are acting in a superficial and often false manner. So rather than let them make me feel bad, I express my annoyance. It's my way of trying to strike a blow for logic and rationality.

I can't look at a stranger's face and think, She's smiling just like Amy. When Amy smiles like that she's happy, so this person is probably happy, too. Instead, I watch and evaluate, with a slightly anxious feeling. It's as if I have to build a behavior database for every single person I meet in life. When I encounter someone for the first time, the slate is blank and I don't know what to expect.

I am sure antidepressants, drugs, and liquor have their place. But so far, that place is in others, not me.

It has always bothered me that many people, doctors included, tend to view anything that deviates from the typical as being abnormal or broken.

They enrolled me in a group for troubled kids. We would meet each week in an old farmhouse owned by the university and talk about our problems getting along ... They didn't teach me to get along, but I did learn that there were plenty of other kids who couldn't get along any better than me. That in itself was encouraging. I realized that I was not the bottom of the barrel. Or if I was, the bottom was roomy because there were a lot of us down there.