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

by John Elder Robison

People with Asperger’s or autism often lack the feelings of empathy that naturally guide most people in their interactions with others.

How do normal kids figure this out? They learn it from seeing how other kids react to their words, something my brain is not wired to do. I have since learned that kids with Asperger’s don’t pick up on common social cues.

My parents bought me books they hoped would help: Basic Electronics and 101 Electronic Projects. My favorite, The Radio Amateur’s Handbook, was recommended by the salesman at RadioShack. By reading those books, I figured it out. On the way, I learned to solder, and I began to understand what the different electronic components were, and how they worked. Resistors, capacitors, transistors, and diodes all became real to me—not just words

the brand-new Research Computing Center, where they had a Control Data 3800 computer system in a huge air-conditioned room.

“Son, why don’t we build you a work area in the basement?”

I charged the capacitor to a snappy but nonlethal level from a power supply I’d recently removed from our old Zenith television.

Varmint would often go along with my experiments because he had fun sometimes and didn’t usually get damaged.

“We don’t call ourselves garbage collectors. We are Sanitary Engineers.”

“It’s a number forty silicon carbide crucible. It holds forty pounds of aluminum or a hundred and twenty pounds of bronze. Molten, that is.”

Luckily for me, most of the shocking scenes that played out in front of my brother (described in his memoir Running with Scissors) were still a few years in the future, and by the time they occurred, I was well out of the doctor’s orbit.

came over to me. “What a great sound you guys have tonight. So clear!” I smiled. The five-way idea had really worked. Britro had plenty of work for me after that night. It seemed their sound systems were everywhere. Whenever I’d go to Long Island City, they’d be setting up a new tour, always using equipment I had designed or fixed or built or modified in some way. All different kinds of music—Judas Priest, Talking Heads, Blondie, Phoebe Snow. And I was the sound engineer. By the summer of 1978, Britro had several sound systems touring at any given time. That August, I got a call about a system we had put together for a band called April Wine.

When my creations came to life, I felt exhilarated. I loved to see and hear them run in a live performance. People would stare in amazement and roar with applause and cheers at the things I dreamed up. At times like that, it was fun being a misfit. When I looked around me, the creative people in the music scene all seemed to be misfits, so I blended right in. The only normal people

We had transformed a stock Les Paul into a fire-breathing beast.

Depraved, orgiastic sinners waiting to be smitten by a vengeful God.

Just basic engineering principles. You’ve taken thousands of lifeless individual parts—lightbulbs, reflectors, circuit breakers, dimmer packs, power cables, clamps, and trusses—and turned them into a living thing. And you are its master.

watched it all with the same detachment I had learned to feel when I was excluded from playing with kid packs when I was five. No one made fun of

I realized that my coworkers had no idea how lucky they were. They took it all for granted. During that first week at work, I resolved that I would never again return to life in the gutter.

Normal people seem to learn certain stock questions and utter them to fill a conversational void.

It was a Rube Goldberg kind of contraption, with hundreds of parts tied together with wire wrap and cables, spread across a bunch of breadboards on a

After all, puzzles and chess sets never broke down. Electronic toys were a new concept at Milton Bradley. The old-timers in the company thought longingly of the days when “new product” meant making blue

the more I had to rely on my people skills and the less my technical skills and creativity mattered. For someone like me, that was a formula for disaster. I

have children who are turned completely inward from birth. They go through life thinking their own thoughts, and parents and other outsiders can barely connect with them at all. At the other end of the spectrum, you have kids who are turned completely outward. They have scarcely any ability to be introspective or to perform difficult mental calculations. People like that might not make good engineers, but they often go far in life because interpersonal skill is one of the

Some Aspergians can focus their minds extremely sharply, and those of us who cultivate this gift are sometimes called savants. Being a savant is a mixed blessing, because that

laserlike focus often comes at a cost: very limited abilities in nonsavant areas.

Looking back on my childhood, I think the ages of four to seven were critical for my social development. That was when I cried and hurt because I could not make friends.

can easily imagine a child who did not have any satisfying exchanges withdrawing from people entirely. And a kid who withdrew at age five might be very hard to coax out later.

My life today is immeasurably happier, richer, and fuller as a result of my brain’s continuing development.

The message was clear: Managers are more valuable than engineers. That made me mad. I wasn’t going to consider going down the ladder and

I also learned a lot about how to succeed in life from the people who patronized my business. My clients taught me about real estate management, banking, investing, and general business principles.

A lack of spontaneous seeking to share enjoyment, interests, or achievements with other people (e.g., by a lack of showing, bringing, or pointing out objects of interest to other people).

Lack of social or emotional reciprocity.

and for the sake of other Aspergians with relationship troubles, I will share the things she does that have kept us together: First, she watches me very carefully. She has learned to tell if I am sad, or anxious, or worried. Some people say I never smile and I don’t have many facial expressions, but somehow she can get me to smile, and she can read what

Every night, when we go to bed, she puts an arm or a leg on me, or lies up against me until I fall asleep.

Nowadays, for the first time, I fall asleep quickly and I seldom have bad dreams.

I felt comforted knowing this exposure to the practical application of technology at an early age would benefit Cubby for the rest of his life.

the bad things that have happened to me in my life have simply increased my resolve to overcome the obstacles that are thrown in my path.

always figured I’d be better off solving a problem as opposed to taking medication to forget I had a problem.

They were both damaged as children, and my brother and I grew up damaged as a result. But damage is not always permanent, nor is it always passed down from one generation to the next.