An Alien from a different planet

I grew up wanting to be Superman.  I wanted to have been born on Krypton.  What I didn’t realize at the time was that I came awfully close.

I have Asperger’s Syndrome, in the Autistic Spectrum.  I was diagnosed in 2006, at the age of 26, after living more than a quarter of a century wondering why I didn’t quite fit in with the rest of the world.  I felt as isolated as Superman, living on a planet not his home, and never quite understood why.  It seemed like everyone else knew what to say, what to do, to fit in together.  I always felt like I was missing some private joke, like everyone else had all attended this big meeting about how to be a community, and left me out.  I didn’t understand people’s feelings or their jokes, didn’t grasp why they talked about certain things in certain ways.

Getting diagnosed made the world make sense.  I knew why I was different.  My brain was structured in a unique way.  It made me cry, with the fear that I could never learn to properly communicate with others.  There was some good news:  I’m extremely high functioning.  That’s why no one really had a problem with me for a quarter of a century.  There were little things, quirks, but nothing that screamed PROBLEM!  The misery was mine to endure alone, must people didn’t even suspect how clueless I was about day to day life.  In part, because “extremely high functioning” translated into a straight-A student who tests as a genius.  Who would suspect such a child had a disability?

No Man an Island was supposed to be my Lord of the Rings, a long epic story of good versus evil, and it was supposed to take decades to write.  It began in the past, with Raphael and Hannah, and was meant to go forward from there.  I started it in high school.  In university, my life became chaotic:  my friends were scattered to the four corners of Canada, I was alone, and in three years some twenty people connected to me died.  So many, in fact, that I missed at least five funerals.  So much chaos is bad for anyone:  for an autistic person, it’s maddening.  I nearly lost myself. 

To make sense of my life, I turned to telling myself stories, as I had as a child.  And my real-life stories started getting incorporated with my fictional ones, enriching and inspiring my imagination.  Pretty soon, my real-life history was influencing NMAI and making it better.  The Companions became based on some of my best friends, bringing them “closer” to me, despite being scattered.  Ethan started reflecting me, unintentionally at first, but then more and more.  Perhaps in a “Mary Sue” way, although I have deliberately appropriated that trope and subverted it.  

When I was diagnosed with Asperger’s, I looked at the story.  And it reflected my own mind back at me.  Ethan had Asperger’s and the story was as much about his struggle with that isolation, as it was about faith, love or adventure.  In fact, he sought all those things because of his isolation.  In a way, as much as Asperger’s made my life make sense, it made the book make sense too.  I don’t expect readers to know a lot about autism, so I have included some information here from Wikipedia for educational purposes.

Asperger’s Disorder is defined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) by six main criteria:

1. qualitative impairment in social interaction
2. restricted, repetitive and stereotyped behaviors and interests
3. significant impairment in important areas of functioning
4. no significant delay in language development
5. no significant delay in cognitive development, self-help skills or adaptive behaviors (other than social interaction)

As readers have noted, Ethan can be quite self-centred, and has no clue how to deal with the opposite sex or his friends.  His social impairments are obvious.  His repetitive interests include literature, movies, science and theology, and in fact are the framework for how he interprets the world.  He has sensory impairments, like not reacting to roller-coasters, staring at tail-lights or snow, standing too long in the shower, and not being able to handle the chaos of dance clubs.  His cognitive and language development is above average, so even he is not aware of his Asperger’s until this chapter.  He almost blended in. 

But it is the “almost” that is the tragedy of the story.

(If anyone has further questions, feel free to ask in the comments.  I am learning more and more about AS every day, especially since I live with it, and am happy to answer.)

~ by nomananisland on April 15, 2008.