Isolated Amidst the Crowd

This post is very different from the other essays I've posted.  It's very personal and not at all having to do with business or economics or politics.  It's just me.

I was 42 when my therapist and I concluded that I have Asperger’s Syndrome.  The most unfortunate part of this diagnosis is that there is little research on adults that have it, and even less on therapies for adults.  If you’re over the age of 15 when you’re diagnosed, the suggested course of treatment is that you’re on your own.

Asperger’s is defined by a lack of empathy.  This does not mean that Aspies, as we call ourselves, don’t care about other people’s feelings.  Like many others, I care desperately about the mood of those around me.  I just have a hard time telling what it is.

It was only after four months of questioning whether I had Asperger’s that someone explained what is meant by “lacking empathy.”  Empathy allows people to experience the emotions of other people.  When neurotypical, or “normal”, people witness someone else experiencing a strong emotion, they tend to feel it as well.  This allows them to sympathize with that other person if it is an emotion such as sadness, or to share in the joy if it is a happier emotion.

One place to see empathy occurring is at a funeral.  There are usually people present at the service who knew the deceased only poorly or not at all.  Despite the lack of a personal connection, such attendees often find themselves crying.  They aren’t experiencing sorrow directly.  Instead, they are empathizing with the mourners who did know the departed and are strongly experiencing the emotion of sorrow.

It was this definition of empathy, and the example given, that definitively settled in my mind that I am an Aspie.  My maternal grandmother died when I was 21.  This was a woman I both loved and liked.  During her funeral, I thought about the fact that I’d never be able to visit with her again.  What I was not filled with was sorrow.  Nanny had lived a wonderful life and, when she had a stroke in her 80s, she passed away very quickly.  I knew that I was supposed to be sad, but I didn’t feel it.

What really struck me was that I was the only one who wasn’t crying.  As we were leaving the church, my father’s sister even commented on it, saying something to the effect that I was so strong.  I didn’t tell anyone that being strong had nothing to do with it.  I just didn’t feel any sadness.  It wasn’t until two decades later that the significance of being unaffected by the emotions of the rest of my family really sunk in.

This lack of empathy, and some of the other symptoms that go along with it, often leave Aspies on the outside looking in.  For instance, we can’t read body language or most other non-verbal communication.  Most people aren’t aware of just how much information they transmit to other people through means other than their words.  Much of this information they subconsciously expect other parties to pick up on. 

This can make interaction with an Aspie a frustrating experience.  A neurotypical thinks that they are sending a very clear signal not to take their words literally, but the Aspie does not receive that signal.  With a lot practice, we can learn to recognize some non-verbal communication, but we can only do so explicitly, consciously recognizing what others process automatically.  Sometimes we can at least recognize that there is information that we are missing and at least try to guess at what it is.  At other times, we miss even that, and simply respond to what we are told by taking it literally.

It is said, in a bit of revealing hyperbole, that one shouldn’t ask an Aspie whether or not these jeans make your butt look fat unless the goal is to get the answer to that question.  To us, you wouldn’t ask a question unless you want the actual answer to it.  It’s not that we are uncaring.  I can’t speak for other Aspies, but if you instead ask me, “I’m worried that these jeans make me look fat.  Would you please reassure me that I’m still attractive?” I am more than happy to respond, “Honey, you’re gorgeous.”  The trick is just to ask me the question that you really want answered.

If you peruse online personals ads, one of the things many women say they are looking for is someone who is honest.  I can state with almost 100% certainty that most of them are wrong. Most people don’t want to be around someone who is truly honest.  And it’s not just the little white lies we tell each other out of courtesy, it’s also that we need to be less than candid if not outright dishonest, when we talk about our motivations and personality. 

In relationships, it is usually important that we each be allowed to project our own desires onto the person that we are with.  So long as it is kept within certain restrictions, this is not only necessary to social functionality but even healthy.  An Aspie who is habitually honest and complete in answering questions can be akin to a social terrorist, blowing up the web of misconception that we all need to stick together.

We are also at a disadvantage in that this lack of ability to read other people leads to an inability to send non-verbal signals the way neurotypicals do.  The frustration of communication runs both ways.  Someone talking to an Aspie often finds it hard to figure out what we are saying, because none of the cues they expect to accompany the words are forthcoming.

I spent the first 42 years of my life not realizing that these problems existed.  It simply never occurred to me that most other people talk to each other so much in a language I don’t understand.  I’ve always had a hard time introducing myself to other people, but I didn’t know why.  I spent time eavesdropping on people around me, trying to figure out how they do it, but I didn’t learn anything useful. 

I have an irrational fear of imposing on people.  Like many of the manifestations of Asperger’s, when I describe this to people, they usually respond that they, too, experience what I do.  Really, they don’t.  I experience this fear with an intensity far beyond what most people do.  People tend to say only nice things to those they talk to, even those they find annoying or uninteresting.  They send the signals that they don’t really want to talk to those people non-verbally, and those people are expected to respond to those signals by moving on.  People who don’t do so are rude and boorish.  I am one of those people, not because I’m trying to annoy anyone, but because I can’t tell that they’re bored.

It goes the other way, too.  One of the reasons I’m so sensitive about intruding on others is that people often intrude on me.  When they do, my body language does nothing to indicate that to them.  This leads to the ironic situation of a chronically lonely person trying to get out of a conversation with someone.

All of this leads to a sense of isolation.  There are places where I feel comfortable, and in those, I can’t shut up.  Having grown up in an academic household, the classroom is one of those places.  Most of my professors and fellow students would be surprised to hear the way I describe the rest of my life.  There were classes in which I spoke more than the instructor did.

Outside of those few settings, I’m far more an observer of life rather than a participant.  I am terrible at small talk, and I’m afraid of irritating others.  I watch people. 

Many Aspies are comfortable in their solitude.  They don’t need an active social life.  A lack of people around them means that they are more productive.  I’m not one of those Aspies.  Maybe I would be if I were still married, but that’s not the case.  I watch the world around me, and I want to be a part of it.  I just can’t figure out how to fit in.

As with many medical conditions, there is a vigorous argument within the Asperger’s community as to whether or not it’s a disability.  I largely step aside from the disagreement.  I consider it to be largely a semantic debate, and I have little interest in those.  For some people, it is not a disability.  They manage to function perfectly well and are happy. 

For others, including myself, it clearly is a disability.  In reference to myself in particular I don’t think that there is any sense in looking at it in a fashion that excludes that element.  [MU1] It is not merely a disability.  It has other features, such as strong quantitative skills and strong pattern recognition that allows me to see small flaws in data, but to exclude the social awkwardness it brings would be to leave the description of what Asperger’s is [MU2] incomplete, given my desire to interact as neurotypicals do.  I’m 43 years old, and it’s too late to find a way to be satisfied with the abilities I have.  Instead, I quest to find a way to overcome or at least bypass the disabilities.[MU3] 

Parties are usually very stressful for me.  I stand on the fringes, trying to find a way to insert myself into the action.  Even if all of the attendees are people I know, I generally become frustrated.  I tend to leave early, and often make excuses not to show up in the first place.  One reliable strategy to cope with the stress is to find some empty room in the host’s house and sit there by myself.  Sometimes I’m joined by their pets, and we have a nice quiet time to ourselves.

When I was getting my master’s degree in accounting, before my diagnosis, I went to the Career Center for help in getting a job.  They advised me that I needed to network and build a list of contacts.  I asked them for advice on how to do that.  They told me about the meet-and-greets  they hold with members of the local business community, and suggested I should attend and get to know people.  When I tried to explain to them that I would just stand in a corner and watch everyone else, their response was that it was a skill I would need to build. 

If only I knew how.

I spend a lot of time in bars and restaurants.  Like a lot of people, I’m more productive when I’m not at home, but I also need to be among people.  I’m prone to just sitting at home by myself and feeling very lonely, but I am a social creature.  A frustrated social creature.

The problem that arises is that simply being around people isn’t enough.  I get frustrated, because I badly want to be an active participant.  There is a catch-22 involved: watching other people interact is better than being alone, but feeling that I am unable to interact in the way that other people do produces feelings of jealousy. 

I have an acquaintance who describes herself as “an extroverted hermit.”  I’m almost the opposite: a gregarious introvert.  I want to talk to people.   I want to get to know them.  I want to be able to help them, and I really want to learn how to better let them help me.  Goodness knows I could use help.

I don’t want to be the life of the party.  The idea of being surrounded by a lot of people hanging on my every word is as frightening as being alone.  I like being the center of attention as much as anyone, but I’m much more comfortable if it’s in a more intimate group of three or so other people.

The key word in that last sentence is really “intimate.”  Intimacy, in all of the various ways it can be defined, is what I really crave.  When my wife of ten years left me in the summer of 2006, I lost that intimacy.  I have a very good friend that I would trust with anything I have.  We go out to lunch once a week.  As good a friend as he is, he’s an intensely private individual who doesn’t want to share a lot of deeply personal information.  He isn’t comfortable listening to anyone else’s, either.

Not having anyone local I can talk with about serious problems with is frustrating, but not terribly distressing in and of itself.  It’s other sorts of intimacy that are the real problem.  Touch is critically important to me.  Being touched by another person is soothing.  It can communicate things that I don’t pick up otherwise.

One of those things is sympathy.  I have always found the sympathy offered to me when I am struggling to be unsatisfying, even irritating.  Expressions of sympathy seemed hollow, as if they are offered just to be polite, a poor substitute for being able to do something that is helpful.  It only recently occurred to me that expressions of sympathy really are helpful to neurotypicals.  The emotional connections they make with each other allow some of the sufferer’s pain to flow into the offeror, easing the burden.  Because I don’t form those sorts of bonds with people, it doesn’t have that effect for me.  Sympathy is just words.  I think back to all of the people who genuinely thought they were helping me, with no knowledge as to what really happened in my brain.

For me, the sensation of touch can help me experience some of the relief others get from verbal sympathy.  It still doesn’t produce as much effect as it would in someone who is neurotypical, but it’s a start.  I need it.  Without it, I start to feel phantom sensations of someone touching me along the backs of my shoulders.  It is a distressing, depressing feeling. 

Touch can communicate much more than that.  It is this physical intimacy that I miss the most.  Its absence is perhaps the dominant factor in my life.  It shapes how I think, and often how I behave.  Unable to find it anywhere else, I pay for it.

We all play roles in our lives.  Sometimes we’re an employee.  Sometimes we’re a parent.  For me, the role of being a customer is very powerful.  My biggest fear is of imposing on people.  If I am a customer paying someone for their time, this anxiety is much reduced.  It becomes their job to pretend that they find me interesting, even if they don’t.  If they are even modestly skilled at acting, I can’t tell the difference between fake interest and the real thing.  It works out perfectly so long as the money is still there.

I pay a lot for my haircuts.  It isn’t even the cut that I’m really paying for.  I’d be just as happy with a cheap crew cut as I am with the very nice style I get.  No, it’s the scalp massage and the shampoo that really attract me.  Every two months or so, I pay $50 to have a very nice young woman at Juut ease the tension out of my head and neck.  She’s nice enough to give me a free haircut afterwards.

I do focus on establishing these relationships with women in particular.  What I’m looking for isn’t sexual, exactly.  There is certainly a component of it that is, but it’s a separable element.  Simply having verbal and non-sexual intimacy would be a huge step forward.  I find it much easier to achieve that with a woman.  It’s less, I think, that I would have a problem being intimate with a man, so much as that I am, as always, afraid of making the other person uncomfortable.  It is easier for me to imagine having this kind of relationship with a gay man rather than a straight one, really.  I have tried therapeutic massage as well.  It’s very nice.  It’s relaxing in a number of ways.  But in the end, it doesn’t do the job either.  I’m relaxed, but it’s still businesslike.  The intimacy is fleeting and limited.  While it includes touching, there is little verbal closeness.  I certainly can’t open up about all of my problems.

It’s also a problem that the physical contact is all one way.  I feel like I communicate by touching someone as much as I am soothed by being touched.  I have been told that the way I touch people, and women specifically, sends a signal about the warmth of my personality and basic consideration for others that my demeanor can’t. 

Without some outlet that allows me to touch and be touched, I might no longer be on this earth.  I have suicidal impulses sometimes, and I’m convinced that physical isolation from the rest of the world would have pushed me over the edge at some point.

Fortunately, I have found an outlet for this.  Unfortunately, it costs than someone who is unemployed should really be spending, but I have concluded that, expensive or not, it is essential to my life.  About once a month, I go to a strip club in downtown Minneapolis.  I found it a year ago.  The marvelous thing, quite unlike any club I had visited locally, is that it is okay to touch the dancers, except for certain obvious places. 

When I’m there, I just sit and talk with the women.  I pay them for their time, of course.  They sit next to me, or in my lap, and I touch them.  Mostly, I just touch their backs, anywhere from the shoulders down to the small of their back.  I love the feeling of touching skin-to-skin, but I tell them that I’d be just as happy if they were wearing jeans and a t-shirt.  That’s mostly true, and if we’re sitting in a private area, those I sit with regularly know that they can bring a sweatshirt with them on the frequent occasions that the establishment is too cold for their style of business attire.

I’ve met some fascinating women there.  One has a master’s degree in family and marriage therapy, and is trying to set up her own practice.  Another, the one I enjoy being with the most, has a degree in linguistics.  We have discussed topics as diverse as politics, our favorite authors, epistemology and the shape of the universe.  She is almost my age, so we have a lot of the same nostalgic feelings.  Most of the other eight or so dancers that I have gotten to know are much younger.  I must compliment the management of the club on their hiring abilities.  The $9.00 bottles of water I buy are almost worth it given the intelligence, conversational ability, and general friendliness that their employees possess.

Or at least that they pretend to possess.  That I feel free to discuss anything, even extremely personal things that would distress people in other situations to discuss, does not change the fact that I still can’t tell whether or not someone genuinely likes me and is interested in what I want to talk about.  For all I know, they aren’t really friendly at all, but just good at faking it. 

It is a sign of how my sense of self esteem has improved over the last two years that I would guess that, out of those eight dancers, five or six of them genuinely like me and do find what I’m saying worth listening to in its own right.  The other two or three are probably only interested in the money, and are faking the rest.  I could be completely off on that ratio either way, but that’s the feeling I get.  Of course, even if I’m right on the figures, I can’t tell which woman falls into each category.  I have no clue on that matter.

So long as I have the money to make those trips to the club, it really doesn’t matter to me which is which.  By simply assuming that each dancer is genuine, I receive the same benefits either way.  Once a month is sufficient to keep those ghost sensations away, and to keep my anxiety and sense of loneliness in check.  They are not eliminated, but they are much less of a threat to my well being.  I even make impromptu trips when I am in a particularly bad mood.  Going to the club is the one sure-fire way to turn that mood around.

It’s more than a little bit sad that a strip club is the only place I can really feel connected to the people around me.  Still, better to have such a place, regardless of its nature, than to have none.  Because of those connections, the compliments I receive from the dancers mean more to me than those I get from almost anyone else.  I understand that I am paying them to compliment me, and recognize the flaws of putting too much faith into them, but they still feel more real.  Then again, given the appalling way so many men behave in a strip club, being one of their favorite customers is a very low bar to clear.  In addition to everything else, it makes me feel good to provide a place in their workday where they can come to take off their ridiculous platform shoes and complain about the mundane problems of life.

It’s a haven for me.  A place where I’m not sitting in a sea of people, watching but unable to jump in and swim.  There is a deep, fundamental loneliness to my life that the club can ease.  The walls of isolation tumble down.  For a time, I can pretend that my brain works the same way neurotypicals’ do.  There, my Asperger’s is not a disability.  It’s quite the opposite, really. 

Several of the dancers have said that they really like how honest I am.  It’s a freeing atmosphere, where I can say what I really want.  I felt confident that it wouldn’t harm our relationship when I told the family therapist that I didn’t like the results of her breast enhancement surgery.  Part of it is the customer relationship, where I know that she has a financial incentive to stay friendly, but that’s  only a part.  I also have the confidence that I have been able to communicate, with both tongue and fingers, that I not only really like her and enjoy spending time with her, but that it is not a case of liking her despite the enhancements.  It doesn’t even rise to that level.  I just like her, full stop.  My opinion of boob jobs is almost ancillary to that.

I understand that this view of my opinions may not be shared by my counterpart.  Most people aren’t able to separate details the way Aspies are.  If someone tells me that they don’t like my hair, that has little bearing on whether or not they like me.  So long as they aren’t offering their opinion in a hostile fashion, obviously expressing a deeper contempt than the literal words indicate, it remains what it is: an opinion that my hair looks awful and nothing else.

The club offers an atmosphere in which I feel that conversation takes place under my ground rules, not those of society at large.  That dancer might, inside, interpret my comments in a way different than I intend, but that’s almost irrelevant.  When I’m there, it’s safe for me to assume that she doesn’t.  On a rational level, I think that I have conveyed the way that I use language.  Those dancers who are genuine understand what I mean, and can accept my intent.  My observations incline me to believe that they find it freeing in a way, too.  At a minimum, I can feel a bit of payback on the world at large by making other people conform to my world, rather than constantly having to adapt to theirs.

The trick is to figure out how to take the way that I think and behave outside of that single environment.  I don’t anticipate that it will ever be that I can make the world transform itself in my presence into what it would be like if Aspies were neurotypical, and we had to create a name for the condition everyone else has.  I just want to develop the ability to force it to meet me halfway.  Demanding that it change enough so that I’m not isolated in the crowd is not too much to ask.  I am trying to learn how to make this compromise.  Everyone else needs to step up and do their part.

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 [MU1]In the preceding paragraph you state you step aside from the disagreement, but here you say you have a definite opinion. I understand what you’re saying, but it may be unclear to readers that choosing not to overtly “take sides” is the difference from having a strong opinion. Perhaps a clarify sentence to pull the seeming opposition together.

 [MU2]What is “it”?

 [MU3]Non-agreement here. Read straight, it indicated you’re trying to overcome your abilities instead of trying to overcome your disabilities.