Autism and Me

I need to start out here by making clear that I will be describing my own issues and quirks.  Someone else's may be different.  There is actually a lot of variety among people on the Autism Spectrum.  One of the leading experts on autism today is Tony Attwood, an English psychologist now working at a university in Australia (the Brits and the Aussies have been doing better than the American med/psych establishment on dealing with autism for at least the last 40 years!).  Anyway, here's one quote from Attwood:  "If you've met one person with autism, you've met one person with autism."  Meaning--the second one you meet may seem totally different.  None of that "If you've seen one you've seen them all" business.  Even my own kids and grandkids are different from me.  But we are all on the spectrum. 

That said, autism is not just a disability.  It is a mix of traits, some of which can be detrimental and some that can be helpful, depending on the circumstances at a given time and place.  And sometimes the particular strengths and weaknesses cannot be separated from each other.  You just have to learn to cope with them.

One common autistic trait that I share is a basic clumsiness.  I was never much good at sports.  I wasn't just the last one chosen for a game at recess--it was like, "If we have to take him, then we get______!"  (One of the best players, to offset me)  Over the years, I found that I could learn some physical things--if I wanted to badly enough.  It was hard for me to learn to ride a bicycle, too.  I tried three times to learn to play guitar; I finally succeeded when I was 15.  When as a newlywed I was trying to put a shelf up in our apartment closet, my wife broke out laughing at how bad I was with a hammer; twenty years later she was amazed at the quality of my carpenter work.

I mentioned above that some traits may be both strengths and weaknesses.  One common autistic trait I have is called "hyper-focus."  On things I like and want to do, I have tremendous powers of concentration.  But the flip side of that is that I cannot multi-task.  When I first started doing interior trim on houses, the men I was working with were impressed with how precise I was; some would even bring me their measurements and ask me to cut the pieces for them to install.  But I can't lead a crew--unless I have nothing else to do.  One time the church we were attending put a new roof on the preacher's house, and as the most experienced, I was leading half the crew.  But then I got tied up in one of the picky jobs, putting flashing around a dormer wall, and my son had to run the crew for an hour (fortunately, he was up to the job!).

Partly because of the hyper-focus, I was very good at school.  Attending elementary school in a rural area, that did not endear me to the other kids.  But we moved when I started 7th grade, to a suburban district on the north side of Cincinnati, OH.  I was in every accelerated class they had in high school--English, math and science.  I graduated fourth in a class of 265.  I got a scholarship for college, and was salutatorian of my college class, and spoke at graduation.  A lot of people in high school and college thought I would end up a professor.  That did not turn out, in part because of my other traits.

One of those seems to be not doing well with bureaucracy.  I don't do well in corporate settings.  I managed to start a small business when I was 25, as a janitorial contractor.  Going into offices as an outsider in the late afternoon and evening, I did not have to deal with office politics--I sometimes saw it going on, but I was not involved in it.  In my late thirties I transitioned into working as a carpenter and remodeling contractor.  Occasionally I worked as part of a larger crew, but mostly I worked with a close friend for the first five years, and after that alone--with my son as a helper at times. 

One thing that helped me with my customers, and is probably related to the hyper-focus, is that I am very detail-oriented.  And that not only applies to the details of the work itself, but also to things like showing up when I said I would, returning phone calls, getting one job before I left to do another, and cleaning up after I finished my work. 

One area that is difficult for me is emotions.  When things get emotionally charged, it's like something inside me freezes up.  My ex-wife could talk rings around me, and I could not respond quickly enough.  And that was probably a factor in our divorce after forty-eight years of marriage.  It is still hard for me to express my feelings.  Sometimes I can vent the emotion through music--singing and playing guitar.  But in interpersonal communication, it is hard for me.

In other areas, I am often a bit of an oddball.  When I was learning to play guitar, the Beatles were the big thing; I was into folk music rather than rock.  Instead of sports, I went into Boy Scouts, where I could hike and camp and stay individual.  And as a Christian, I am no longer part of any organized church, but what some now call a "free-range" Christian.  Some, especially people in the clergy, may be bothered by that.  But just as offices have politics, so do churches, and it frees me from that aspect.

There are other things that are not necessarily related to autism that also affect me and add to the effects of autism.  For instance, I am very much an introvert--on the Briggs-Myers test I scored as a 9 or 10, the severe end of the scale, as an introvert.  The big difference between introvert and extrovert is not whether or not we like people; it is how we re-charge.  An extrovert re-charges by being with others; an introvert has to be alone to re-charge.  That is likely also a factor in why I have spent so much of my adult life working alone.

There was an event in my childhood that probably masked some of my physical issues when I was growing up.  During kindergarten, I came down with rheumatic fever, which is a complication of strep throat.  I was really sick--I was in a hospital and then in bed at home for eight months.  It gave me issues with my knees for a few years, and left me with a heart murmur.  They gave me so much of what was then a new miracle drug, penicillin, that I ended up allergic to it a few years later.  Because of the heart murmur, I was restricted on physical activity for some years.  For a long time I attributed my being behind in sports and other physical games to that.

One thing that is common in autistic people is sensory issues.  There are an amazing amount of different ones we may have--and everybody has different ones.  My family members do not have the same ones I do.  Issues with foods are a part of this, but again, each person is different.  My ex-wife hated mashed potatoes; I was okay with them, but not peas or dried beans, even cooked.  One of my sensory issues that has protected me from becoming an alcoholic is that I cannot stand the feel of an alcoholic beverage in my mouth.  If a church is using wine instead of grape juice for Communion, I know it instantly.  As a teen, my father let me taste a beer one time (he was a very occasional drinker--about once every ten years he would get the urge to have a beer).  I could not stand it.  I never did have enough beer or wine to get a buzz on, and then want that enough to put up with the feeling in my mouth, so to this day I am a teetotaler--not for religious reasons, just because of my sensory issue.  But for years, I thought it was a result of that bout of rheumatic fever.  After that year, every time I got a sore throat, out came the prescription cough medicine--which, back in the 1950s, was probably about 40 proof!  I thought that caused my aversion to alcohol, until I began to learn about sensory issues with autism a few years ago.

This is just a start.  There are probably other aspects of autism in my life that will come to mind later.  Maybe I will post some more another time, after I think of them.  But this may give readers some idea of how being on the autism spectrum can shape people's lives.

I Dood It!

The title above is borrowed from one of Red Skelton's characters.  ( BTW, if you are ever in Vincennes, IN, there is a cool museum of his career, with his costumes, audio and video clips, and displays.  He was one of the few who started in vaudeville, made the change to radio, but then successfully went on to movies and TV--some, like Fred Allen, made it in radio, but went no further.)

And I have bit the bullet.  I have changed the name of this blog!  When I started blogging years ago, "postmodern" was a trendy term.  Now it is mostly forgotten.  And there have been changes in my life and situation as well.

The part that has not changed:  I am still a Redneck.  If anything, as I get older, my redneck traits seem to become stronger.  I get it from both sides of my family.  My father was born near New Richmond, OH, where his ancestors had settled in the 1790s.  It is now a small town east of Cincinnati, that's been turning into a Cincinnati suburb.  It is also historically considered the eastern edge of Appalachia in Ohio.  While the family had been farmers and small businessmen for generations, my grandfather pulled up stakes looking for work during the Great Depression, and ended up a cooper (making and repairing wood barrels) at a Seagram's distillery in Lawrenceburg, IN that had reopened with the end of Prohibition.  My father went through assorted blue-collar jobs over the years, but settled in Cincinnati (with a stay of 6 years in Brown County, OH, a rural area about 40 miles away from the Ford factory where he worked).

My mother was born at a coal mining camp called Blue Diamond, near Hazard, KY.  She was the fifth of seven children (the first two died before age 3).  Her father and her older brothers all worked in the mines in that area.  Her mother died of cancer, and her father died of injuries from a mine accident.  From the age of 12, she was passed from one relative to another depending on who could afford an extra mouth for a while.  This was also during the Depression.  When she was 16, she and a friend hitch-hiked to Cincinnati to live with her older sister.  A couple of years later, she was out with a friend (also from KY) and met my father.  They got married in 1940.

On the Autistic side, I first found out about what they then called Asperger's Syndrome in 2005.  The lights came on for a lot of things in my past life.  I was fortunate enough to be good at school; a lot of autistic kids struggle there.  But over time I learned I did not fit well in most corporate settings.  I found my way into the world of small business and have been self-employed since 1976.  I didn't get rich, but I usually made a living; there were a few rough stretches.  But as my three kids grew up and got married and had their own kids, the autism matter came into sharper focus.  The schools never diagnosed me as autistic or Asperger's, nor my kids; but they have been finding my grandchildren.  So far, at least 8 of my 10 grandkids have a diagnosis.  The rest will probably get identified sometime.

Why so many?  Some families go along for generations, and then suddenly they get an autistic kid.  In my family, from what we have figured out, we have been marrying other autistic people for at least three generations that we can tell.  We don't know enough about the people to go back farther than that.  So the genetics have gotten a bit more concentrated than usual.

How many are there of us?  Nobody really knows.  In the first place, autism was not even recognized by the medical and psychological professions until the 1940s.  Even after that, for many years they weren't that good at finding us.  It has picked up a bit in recent years.  The conservative estimate is that there are roughly as many of us in the US as there are Jews--2-3% of the population.  The number of school-age children seems to conform to that these days.  The wild-and-woolly estimate is that we may be as much as 15% of the population.  And we aren't just rednecks--we are found anymore in just about every ethnic group and every skin color.

Autism is a complicated thing.  Psychologists in the US are now calling it a spectrum, a range of characteristics.  Many autistic people have adopted the name "Neurodiverse" because we are not only diverse from the "Neurotypicals" but also diverse from each other.  In my own family, we have musicians, artists, science geeks, a computer programmer, a high-tech repairman (who is also a musician), and more.  I will probably be posting about some of the things I have learned about it in the past few years.

I will also keep posting about Christian matters as well; I have done that for years.  I probably will not add much political stuff--I will likely keep posting that at a group blog I am part of, "Alexandria--Crossroads of Civilization."    (https://www.aleksandreia.com/)

I may come up with other things to write about as well.  We shall see.