— Here’s where I land on those basic online Asperger tests.
I want to give some background on my experience with Aspergers I haven’t given before anywhere else. People who start off with a self–diagnosis (before, if ever, making it official) are often suspected of having an ulterior motive in finding their diagnosis. So I want to start off by saying, I really didn’t like thinking of myself as an Asperger. Since discovering AS, I have had to accept that many traits I always thought were very uniquely me, are in fact very typical of people like me. In that way, it felt at first as though it were robbing me of some individuality, and that wasn’t something I was happy about.
On the other hand: I always had the deep seated fear growing up that I was really, deep down, just an idiot, because I couldn’t do all the things everyone else was doing. Like balance to ride a bike, for instance. Now, riding a bike is something where your efforts will be given feedback instantly: the second you fall off balance, you’re going to fall over. Obviously, intellectual subjects aren’t like this: even if you’ve got the most brilliant analysis of (say) the economics of immigration ever, there’s no way you can instantly put that theory to a test and know how accurate you really are (or aren’t). You can put it out for public criticism, but partisans on your side would agree whether your logic was right or wrong, and partisans on the other side would disagree in the same way. So I started to worry that maybe, I was becoming interested in all these intellectual topics just to have somewhere I would be given no feedback on the effort I put in at all, so that I could retreat there and soothe my ego from what a failure I really was by imagining my thoughts to be more accurate or important than they really are.
But Aspergers changed this. Once I accepted that my intense focus on topics of special interest was a basic part of the way that I’m wired and that this suspicion was only post hoc, and that the things I failed in were likewise rooted in this same cause, I could look at my weaknesses in a different light. Not only as a child but even on into my teenage years, I would not check something out of a store by myself because I was terrified of being alone with a clerk or cashier. Exactly what do I need to say, and in what order do I need to say it? What if they ask me something off–script? – And what if it’s something I don’t know? I just knew I would freeze in place if that happened — the thought of that terrified me in and of itself, and I just knew that’s how it would all go down: they would ask me something I didn’t know. I would freeze in silence, and then neither of us would know how to get out of the situation or make it any less awkward. Now, with years of conscious effort I’ve developed decent social skills. But thanks to now knowing that I’m an Asperger, I can look at this not as putting the basic effort in to become a decent human being like everyone else much too late where before I was just a ridiculous and embarrassing failure, but as overcoming an inherent weakness typical of people like me, some of whom don’t adapt nearly as well as I have been able to.
Nevermind that Aspergers helped me to discover that gluten and especially sugar royally fuck me up and are the real reason I thought I had severe depersonalization disorder and manic depression for so many years—although these discoveries are important too.… People often question the value of psychiatric diagnosis. If anyone ever expresses that common sentiment by asking, ‘What’s the point in getting a label put on your problems if solving them takes the same time and effort no matter what?’
This is why.
— A few notes about my ancestry.
I didn’t know a single thing about my ancestry, growing up. Mom never told me that the only family I ever spent time around and really knew was unrelated to me because she was the only one of her mother’s children who was the child of a secret third man that nobody but grandma, and her, and I now knew of. Nor did Dad tell me that I was only three steps removed from Margaret Mitchell—not even when I started to become known for my talent in writing.
I was only eleven years old when the Towers fell. It made no impact on me at the time. It was just a far away building to me, and while it was terrible how many people died, it was hardly more people than starve to death or drown to death or fall off cliffs across the world on any given day. I continued my eleven–year–old day as it was before the interruption.
It wasn’t until I was fifteen or so that I really began to take an interest in intellectual topics. And when I did, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were—for no good reason I can remember—what immediately became my first obsession. I read everything I could get my hands on, studying in inhuman detail the media’s role in the lead up to those wars, the history of the U.S.’ involvement with both countries, and so on. Coming from a very conservative environment, I was not being exposed to any of the arguments against those wars. I wasn’t watching the news. I wasn’t being exposed to the controversies surrounding them in any way. So I don’t know why my interest suddenly became so intense.
Before I even understood anything about what these wars really meant, I found that I was instinctively very offended to hear other kids at school mock Middle Eastern accents and talk about bombing ‘sand niggers.’ This, too, seems odd in retrospect because while I wasn’t racist, I never had any concern with being anti–racist either. Yet it wasn’t long before the things I began innocently saying about what I was beginning to think about those wars from my sudden interest in studying them had people around me telling me, ‘It sounds like you’re with them instead of us.’ ‘It sounds like you identify with them more than you do with America.’ And to tell the truth … I did. This, too, was inexplicable. It couldn’t have just been that they were the victims of our violence: I knew full well about U.S. aggression elsewhere, and to be honest, it never impacted me nearly as much.
I ended up joining online forums for the sole purpose of debating what I had learned. I had a complete database of citations and links and references for almost every conceivable point, and I had a rough map in my mind of where the arguments would usually go. While I had no expectation that anyone I was arguing with would teach me anything new, I was only trying to practice on average people to get better at proving myself right to them. Partially, I would do this by repeating the process dozens of times, and adding a new map in my mind for any new approach someone might take to trying to argue against me. Finally, I began writing my South Carolina State Senators. When the stock replies from their office returned, I debunked them—and I’m not simply gloating; I really did debunk them—point by point, with citations from State Department documents which flatly proved their statements unambiguously wrong. They finally stopped replying, and I’m sure the only thing the process earned me was a place on a government watch–list. But the point is: I never did this for our policies towards, say, Cuba, or the Cuban Five or Luis Posada Carilles, all of which I knew about and was at least vaguely interested in—and had these conflicts not occurred, I very much doubt that I would have had any strong interest in doing so.
Flash to a couple years later. I discovered a drink called yerba mate before it was popular anywhere around me, and soon it became one of my recognized trademarks. I knew it only as a type of tea from Brazil. Flash to a couple years later, and I discover that I do, in fact, have Lebanese–Syrian ancestry on my real maternal side. And very recently, I discovered that the only places outside South America where yerba mate is regularly consumed are Lebanon and Syria.
I don’t know what to make of those patterns. Even my process of deconversion from evangelical Christianity was set off by encountering Muslims giving dawah on a chat program called Paltalk. Those encounters set the first seeds of religious skepticism in my fifteen–year–old mind: how are we supposed to believe that God revealed himself to all mankind in one religion, when every religion on Earth is so localized within history and geography? If God wanted to reveal himself, why would he mix the one true revealed religion in as just another localized one among all the other localized religions which claim to be the one true revelation? And yet, even here, my first instinct was curiosity: before following that line of thought all the way to fullblown skepticism, I wanted to investigate Islam further. I never had the same urge to study Judaism, or any other religion. Again, in retrospect it seems very odd. I had no clue through all these periods of time that I had any Middle Eastern ancestry at all. So what am I supposed to make of that?
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