Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's

by John Elder Robison

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.

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.

And my inability to read body language or appearance meant—in an industry rife with discrimination—that I treated everyone the same.

Names have been a source of difficulty for me as long as I can remember because the names I use are often not the ones other people expect.

Humor and sarcasm often go right over my head. There are times when a person says something they expect me to laugh at and I just stand there.

I never did well at sports as a kid, and I was never a sports fan. A childhood of being the last one picked and the first one tossed hadn’t left me with very fond feelings about school sports.

For some reason, Aspergians like me experience “delays” in the transmission of those sentence fragments within the brain. That gives a slightly ragged cadence to our speech that’s quite distinct from that of normal speech. Once you begin listening for it, it’s quite recognizable. In addition to the unique cadence of our speech, our lack of social expression is actually audible. Folks without autism make subtle changes to the rhythm and pitch of their speech to convey emotion. Aspergians like me don’t have a natural ability to do that, at least not very well, so our speech has a flat, monotonic quality. Collectively, those traits are called prosody.