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

by John Elder Robison

He shaped my young life. First, he taught me how to walk. Then, armed with sticks and dead snakes, he chased me and I learned how to run.

Everyone thought they understood my behavior. They thought it was simple: I was just no good. “Nobody trusts a man who won’t look them in the eye.” “You look like a criminal.” “You’re up to something. I know it!”

By then, I knew I wasn’t being shifty or evasive when I failed to meet someone’s gaze, and I had started to wonder why so many adults equated that behavior with shiftiness and evasiveness. Also, by then I had met shifty and scummy people who did look me in the eye, making me think the people who complained about me were hypocrites.

Many have such exceptional verbal skills that some people refer to the condition as Little Professor Syndrome.

Asperger’s is something you are born with—not

Asperger’s is not a disease. It’s a way of being.

Somehow I figured out that whacking does not foster lasting friendship.

They didn’t make me better. They just made me feel worse.

Someone got killed. Wow! I’m glad I didn’t get killed. I’m glad Varmint or my parents didn’t get killed. I’m glad all my friends are okay. He must have been a pretty dumb kid, playing on the train tracks. I would never get run over by a train like that. I’m glad I’m okay.

I understand intellectually that it’s sad, but I don’t feel sad.

I have what you might call “logical empathy” for people I don’t know. That is, I can understand that it’s a shame that those people died in the plane crash. And I understand they have families, and they are sad. But I don’t have any physical reaction to the news.

I feel I must put things like this in perspective and save my worry for things that truly matter to me.

As I got older, I found myself in trouble more and more for saying things that were true, but that people didn’t want to hear. I did not understand tact. I developed some ability to avoid saying what I was thinking. But I still thought it.

Getting abused or beaten up or bullied is humiliating, even more so when it happens at home.

Some of the things she said were so disturbing, I blocked them from my mind and can’t repeat them today. My memories of that time are like blinding flashes of harsh, actinic light. They hurt to recall.