Asperger Syndrome is relatively new in the public awareness, which is probably why no one had a clue what the hell my problem was growing up. Maybe they just thought I was an asshole or, in the terms of the high school psych evaluation, "emotionally troubled." The idea that I just didn't understand what people wanted from me, and was easily confused by all the mixed signals and hypocrisy in a real-world social environment was apparently too wild to imagine. I was equally penalized when I tried or didn't try, and treated with equal disdain when I behaved as myself or when I tried to be what I thought was expected, so ultimately I grew to be something by necessity that most others never even know to be possible: Free.
A person with normal social functioning grows like a plant during childhood, drawing sustenance from all the people around them - their soil and sunshine, shaping and honing their character while continually feeding their growth. But not me. Apart from a few rare instances of people whose hearts shone so brightly they found even me, I was alone in an inexplicable world, surrounded by people who all seemed capricious and unknowable.
I knew things instinctively that had to be patiently taught to other children, and felt insulted when my parents didn't appear to realize it - e.g., putting child-safety locks on the cabinets housing cleaning products. Although I didn't have the words to think verbally, I remember my feelings about the precautions my parents took for my safety: I thought they were impugning my intelligence, both because I could see quite plainly how the child safety locks worked, and because they had already told me the cleaning products were poisonous - did they think I had forgotten? This was how my thoughts tended to run while I was still in diapers.
Things got a lot stranger when it came time for school, since it involved the divergence of life into three utterly unrelated domains: Home, school, and after school. Home was family, and had the same environment I was used to, but school and after school overlapped: One was dominated by the expectations of the teacher, and the latter by the expectations of peers - two sets that had nothing whatsoever to do with each other, and yet had to both be satisfied somehow.
Satisfying teachers was straightforward: Do what they tell you. But other kids were puzzling, and seemed to have no clear will, judgment, or standards, and their interests made no sense to me. I wanted to explore and test in every way, pushing boundaries, discovering new places and paths, and occasionally breaking rules just to find out what would happen (though the result was usually not very surprising).
Other kids seemed content to throw a ball back and forth, while I preferred to see how high and how far I could throw it. They enjoyed swings, and I loved jumping off of swings at the 45-degree arc for the freedom of flight, to see how far and how high I could go. They enjoyed riding bikes back and forth, I rode mine as far as I could to see how far or how fast I could go. I tried to get lost on a few occasions and failed, because my memory was just too good.
And yet, despite this seeming lack of boundaries, little things being out of place would disturb me. People doing things for no apparent reason would make me uneasy or even afraid, even if they were just having fun. And the level of anger I would feel at the slightest deviation from logically fair behavior by authority figures can only be described as overwhelming.
At school, I would face penalties for breaking rules that had never been explained to me in the first place, but I didn't have the eloquence to express this perception: I just naturally felt that teachers (with a few exceptions) and school administrators were chaotic, mean-spirited creatures with shifting, random standards, and assumed a hostile attitude I thought was simply reflecting how they were treating me. Other kids seemed to find this beyond crazy: You're not supposed to mouth off to Teacher. She's Teacher. She cannot be wrong.
It was bizarre to me, how they seemed not to recognize a world outside of what was defined for them. What I didn't know at the time was that the other kids had a relationship with the teacher, much as they also probably had a relationship with their parents that I lacked with mine: Their minds and personalities were not self-contained, but extended outward in a web of emotional connections that shaped their growth continuously, while I just had to stumble blindly around and think or intuit my way through everything. They didn't know or understand anything, but that didn't matter because they were part of something I was not: They were safe and connected. I was alone in a universe both beautiful and dangerous.
At first this was to my advantage, because I learned certain things quickly: I never got lost, never forgot something I intended to remember (within limits - I never had photographic memory), and was reasoning at a level a decade beyond my age group. No effort was required on my part to learn academic subjects: I would read or hear once and remember, and deeper connections would naturally congeal out of the information without my having to really think about them or revisit them.
Experiences that a normal child might find somewhat captivating, like hearing a story, I would find profound beyond my ability to describe - almost like a spiritual epiphany, because in my mind I would experience the story. So, despite my being alone and other people being so frightening, and despite what sounds superficially like a rigidly logical mind, the universe was magical and beautiful to me, and I loved touching that magic everywhere I could find it: In books, on TV, and occasionally just by seeing what was over a hill I'd never crested before.
But these advantages began to fade with time, as the other kids in their connected world began to grow and change, and I did not. Yes, my body grew and changed; my vocabulary expanded; my knowledge of the names for things, their inner workings, and their history grew; and I started to understand at least the basic impulses that drove teenage characters on TV and in movies; but I lacked the social instincts and the long years of emotional relationships that had allowed the others to be formed in new ways by their changing bodies.
Suddenly I no longer felt like a prodigy, but a kind of cripple, and the more time passed the further behind I seemed to be. I don't want to rehash all the embarrassments I experienced, as I'm sure they're no more pleasant to hear than to feel, but in general I will say that people's emotional connections throughout their lives up to that point allowed them to grow further into personal relationships.
But I, still alone, was an isolated and motionless puddle to the side of the great river that is mankind: Though I grew in my own way, in my own isolated environment, the people whom I had been around most of my life just moved further and further away, becoming Men and Women while I circled my little pond and vainly tried to think my way to joining them. The changes that took place in them fed on each other, with people constantly forming and breaking bonds, yet always toward the larger and stronger whole despite the occasional heartbreak or social disgrace. And I watched this happen, as if through glass.
I began to dream of coming to school one day and finding that I was still a child while everyone else had grown up and started families; that I was still a child while my parents were old; that time had erased what I had known, but I continued unchanged, like a living statue of an adolescent perpetually in the process of becoming, but never having become: A joyless Peter Pan, no longer permitted the simple life of a child, but denied the bonds of adulthood that make life meaningful. At 26 years old, I still have these dreams.
Girls were a source of terror and awe, and I mean that literally - I am not exaggerating through the lens of nostalgia as you may hear socially normal people do. Because my emotions were suddenly tied to people I couldn't communicate with or understand, I developed a one-sidedly worshipful and submissive attitude toward women. The slightest hint of disapproval would send me spiraling into brutal cycles of self-loathing and doubt, because usually I would miss such "hints" unless they were already extreme - i.e., unless I had been making a complete fool of myself for some time, and had exhausted a girl's patience.
To me, at least in the early years, it seemed like it should be a straightforward matter of mutual needs - I'm horny, you're horny, why is everyone making this so complicated? After being kicked in the balls a couple of times (lightly though), slapped several times in a row, threatened with the specter of having brothers sent to beat me up, and receiving disgusted looks that even I couldn't misinterpret, from various girls over a period of a few years, I began to suspect that maybe things were in fact more complicated, and that I wasn't being singled out for mistreatment by a cruel and unfair universe.
You see, real social interactions involve a constant dialog on multiple levels, including a continuous feedback of nonverbal and even chemical cues, but with me "social" meant one and only one thing: Literal words. Other people had been engaging in these complex dialogs since they were born, and aren't even aware of them most of the time, so when their hormones kicked in they began having them on an even deeper and more profound level, whereas I...didn't.
Now, don't get me wrong, I wasn't so crippled as to be incapable of seeming normal on a very superficial level: I wouldn't walk up to a girl and just randomly start talking about sex. But it seemed to make sense that, once I had some level of acquaintance with a girl I was interested in, the subject of sex could arise and we could talk about our mutual needs, and this process should naturally end up with us retiring to a secluded spot and making each other moan, right? Needless to say, I had woefully underestimated the emotional aspects of female sexuality.
In other words, the female side of the equation was at the extreme opposite end of the spectrum from where I was - their social signaling process is the most complex of all, and yet here I was seeing practically none of it, and not even knowing that I was missing something. The idea of "just friends" made absolutely no sense to me, and yet I kept running into it: If we're friends, then why wouldn't you want us to make each other feel good? So, as a result, even friendship with girls was a rarefied and treasured experience. Eventually I just stopped trying, and contented myself with the ephemeral enjoyment of trying to please women platonically, although even that was difficult.
Meanwhile, among my male peers, the way they increasingly acted seemed like rank hypocrisy: One minute acting as if uncouth behavior was "cool," and the next like it was just pathetic and disorderly. I could not, for the life of me, see the nuances that for them distinguished hip disdain for authority from idiotic asshattery.
As always, the distinction lay in the domain that was hidden from my view: In the silent language of relationships. It was not the quantum of what a person did that mattered, but the relational context between people. I had a vague intuition of this, but it seemed like just another example of unfairness and hypocrisy, not of my missing some huge ocean of meaning that other people perceive instinctively.
So, after a few years of vainly trying to impress male peers by pretending to be a criminal - something I actually thought would improve my social standing, given that many very popular kids were also flagrantly criminal - I just retreated into bitter indifference, and only got together on rare occasions when I would have an opportunity to get drunk or high. Strangely, drinking tended to improve my relative social skills, since it made me uninhibited and caused other people to find me entertaining rather than ridiculous, but it wasn't much of a substitute for a life.
Finally I just gave up trying to be anything other than myself, whatever that happens to be, because I seemed to have the same results no matter what I did or didn't do. After years of struggling through community college (struggling to stay motivated, not to get straight A's - that was easy) in a complete social vacuum, I ended up transferring to UC Berkeley, and suddenly found myself surrounded by intensely vibrant people in a seemingly magical new environment.
I was a kid again, suddenly in a new world I could explore, and the other transfers who lived in my dorm all seemed to share this sense. For an all too brief time, I deluded myself that I really had made a connection, and was finally Home...but as before, the other people I knew just kept on growing in their thriving tree of relationships, and I didn't. They kept moving, propelled by their rich social environment, and I was static, trying to nourish myself on the fading brilliance of initial experiences I didn't and still don't know how to repeat. Alone.
And now, due to unrelated events, I am out of school (having not graduated), living in SoCal, and despite having a cerebral understanding of the systems and processes that drive humanity, civilization, and individuals that a professional might envy, I remain on the same side of the glass that I have always been on, observing and being unable to touch. Though I have been in love and felt its warm glow inside me, and it glows still in my memory, I have never known what it is to feel loved in return: To join with another and connect outward.
But I have my consolations, in this fishbowl into which I was born. One of them is that I am immune to peer pressure, because you cannot take away from me something that is already denied to me by nature. Another is that I am not impressed by official authority, because if even the most personal connections are difficult for me, then the approval of someone whose superiority to me exists only on paper is not something I'd especially care about.
As a result, I say what I think, always, though I may try to be more solicitous in person than on the internet. If other people like my ideas, I am encouraged, but I'm not discouraged if they don't: Disapproval from others is my default assumption, and everything over and above that is pure bonus.
This is why I love the internet - because I can say something wildly inappropriate and, though I may be momentarily embarrassed by my idiocy, I can move on and not feel the least bit constrained by failure. A joke falls flat, so be it. If I offend someone, and find that I shouldn't have, then I apologize. If I offend someone and find it justified, then I tell them where to shove their complaints. And, if I feel like it, I can say egregiously sophomoric things or give TMI for my own amusement (e.g., I love being tied up and spanked by dominatrixes in boots and corsets...tehehe) because there are no consequences that can equal what I have already experienced just reaching this point. This is my Asperger Prerogative.
Because of these things, I am free. Perhaps only free in the way of Janis Joplin lyrics, to be who I am though less than what I would be otherwise, but perhaps that can be of value to mankind. Perhaps I am merely taking a more roundabout way to joining that great river of life, and will add something special to it for having taken such a wild path, chosen or not. And if not, I can at least say it with the same truth as Frank Sinatra: I did it my way. Though he, at least, had a choice in the matter.