As I get older, I think that some things about having Asperger’s syndrome get easier to deal with, while other things get more difficult, and still others remain the same. This post is about a skill in one of the latter two categories.
Executive function is a term I wrote about years ago on this blog, a sort of mental flexibility that I seem to be particularly bad at. It’s the ability to organize multiple tasks according to priority, to keep a mental list in the back of the mind while you get to work on the first task.
That doesn’t tend to take place in my brain, at least not the way it’s supposed to. Instead, I tend to get bogged down almost as soon as I begin. Let me give you an example from a couple of months ago.
a thinker and explorer, studying everything around me from blue eyes beneath a blonde bowl cut.
My world was made of… corduroys and crayons, Transformers and Duplo blocks, days that stretched out beyond what I could see.
I liked… traffic lights and street signs, trips to the library to check out new books, walks in the woods with Daddy to see if there were any snakes hiding under the old board someone had left there.
I hated… bug bites, earaches, and early bedtimes.
I feared… loud shouting on the TV, distorted music from a broken tape, the unexpected disruption to a neat pattern.
Happiness for me was… my shelf of books at my back, maps and drawings unfolded on the soft carpet before me, with room to spread across the infinite floor. Everything had its place.
I thought that… everyone wanted to hear me share what I had learned. They always seemed so impressed.
I learned… the names of the countries, the planets, and the stars around me. The counting of days, months, and years, and the God who made them all.
When I was 10, I was…
small for my age, the kid skipping down the sidewalk with tortoise-shell glasses and a sheepish grin on his face.
My world was made of… pencils and erasers, rulers and dictionaries lined up carefully inside my desk, textbooks wrapped in brown paper and tape that I’d read on the long bus rides home from school.
I liked… pedaling around the driveway on my bike, exploring the yard with my brothers, then running inside to draw pictures of the adventures we imagined.
I hated… when the kids around me at church or at school talked about things that were disgusting or mean.
I feared… not knowing the right thing to do, being caught in a situation where everybody but me knew the rules.
Happiness for me was… soaring over the playground at recess on the swingset.
I thought that… if the teacher had to scold the class for any reason, it meant that I must have done something wrong.
I learned… that the way to make a friend was to be a friend.
My parents had explained to me from an early age that I was growing every day, too slowly to see, but that after a number of years, I would eventually become a grownup like my Dad. That was a good thing, I thought! My Dad was the smartest person I knew.
Like most children, I was asked “What do you want to be when you grow up?”, and like most children, I had some pretty funny answers to that question based on whatever interested me most at the time I was asked. When I was fascinated by road maps and traffic signs, I thought that I’d like to be the person who makes all of the stop signs, street name signs, and exit signs. There must be someone who does that, right? Well, then, maybe I could be a cartographer. That was a person who made maps.
When I was fascinated by learning the bones and organs of the human body, I thought I might like to be a doctor just like my father. He took me to work one time and showed me an actual skeleton they had there for medical students to study (I guess?), and I amused my Dad’s coworkers by pointing out and listing the names of all of the bones I had learned.
When I was fascinated by learning about the stars and planets, I thought I’d like to be an astronomer. Then I could write the books I enjoyed reading so much.
But as I began to get a little older, I started hearing some things that made me worry. My aspie brain was constantly taking in information from what I heard people say, from what I read, and from what I saw on television. I learned that before I became a grownup, I would first become a “teenager.” And I didn’t think I wanted to be one.
Why? Well, the first thing most people seemed to say about teenagers was that they didn’t get along with their parents. I heard it wherever I went.
Adults would warn/tease their friends with young children: “You think being a parent is tough now– just wait until they’re teenagers!”
At a Christian concert, the singer joked about how it’s hard for parents to watch their children grow up and leave home when it seems like the time goes so fast, but that God had provided something to make it easier for parents to let go: “It’s called the teenage years.”
In stories and TV shows about families, the teenage characters always seemed to be either arguing with their parents or trying to get away with something without their parents knowing.
Teenagers often seemed to be portrayed as a bad influence in morality tales for younger children. (And in the 1980s and 1990s, even some of the most mindless children’s shows tried to present themselves as morality tales!) If a story was about the evils of alcohol or drugs, or just trashing the house with a party while your parents were away, one of the first signs of trouble was getting the “big kids” involved.
It’s pretty silly, but I began to dread becoming one of these teenagers.
I didn’t want to fight with my parents! I knew that the Bible said that children were supposed to obey their parents. Besides, I liked my Mom and Dad! I decided that I would try my best to make sure that I wouldn’t become rebellious. (The idea that I thought I was in danger of turning into a rebel is actually pretty funny now, knowing my personality.)
[I just thought of an interesting tangent I could follow here, but I’m going to try to save that for another post, because this one is taking me too long, and I’m ready to be done with it! 🙂 ]
I don’t know why I didn’t talk to my parents about my fears until much later (when I realized I hadn’t turned into a monster after all). Even then, I spent a lot of time thinking to myself, trying to figure things out.
I wonder if other kids worried about growing up the way I did. Hopefully, most people are not as literal-minded about it as I was.
There’s a neat story I want to share with you. I’m remembering it second-hand, so I might not have all of the details right, but I can explain the gist of it:
A while ago, my parents were visiting a church while on vacation. The guest speaker was a pastor from a sister church in Africa. One of the things they remembered from his message was that he spoke proudly about his teenage children, who were seeking to honor God and help others in whatever they did. He said that he was dismayed by how much he had heard the idea expressed in America that teenagers are lazy or a burden or always up to trouble. God can use anyone at any stage of life, and we should not let ourselves or others be defined by human labels and categories.
That’s such an encouraging message! I think it’s important to realize that even when an idea seems universal in our culture, that doesn’t mean it’s correct.
Hi! It’s been a while since I’ve posted here. There are some new things going on, though.
Probably the biggest is that I have a new part-time job! I’m editing articles for an online physics journal. Like my previous job reviewing English papers, it’s work I can do from home, but unlike it, I find it really interesting rather than stressful, so I have been able to get more work done.
I’m mostly doing copyediting for consistency in things like spelling, punctuation, and style of the reference list. It definitely helps to have some familiarity with physics so that I can recognize the terminology, but thankfully I don’t need to understand everything the writers are talking about, because it’s really advanced stuff!
My coworkers/bosses have been really patient and helpful with all of the questions I have asked about specific grammar and style rules. (I always have a lot of questions.) So it’s not full-time employment yet, but I think it’s a step in the right direction, and I’m thankful for that!
I have also been continuing to try to develop my social skills; there is a local young adults Bible study that I’ve started going to. It’s frustrating to me how little information I retain from talking to people, but I think I am beginning to remember a few names.
Other things that have kept me busy are watching our energetic dogs and following the crazy football season that’s been going on.
I have often thought about things I’d like to post about on this blog, but sadly most of those things fade from my memory when I don’t have time to write (or more often, the words to put them into). I’d like to get to writing again, and I have at least one idea of something new to try for the video game posts, but we’ll see about that. It seems that in order to write more, I need to think less, and the results are not always good if I do that.
CBS’s 60 Minutes ran a segment about face blindness last night, and I figured I’d share some thoughts about it.
If I could add captions to the movie, that would be fun, but I don’t know how to do that. So I’ll try writing a running commentary according to the time index of the video.
Part 1:
0:10 It’s been a while since I watched this program. Goodness, they are being dramatic, with correspondent Lesley Stahl giving her introduction from an endless black void with a creepy picture hovering behind her!
0:45 As you might expect, the report mostly focuses on some of the most extreme examples of face blindness, because… well, that’s more dramatic! My own face blindness is not as severe as most of the examples they will talk about in this segment. (Also, while face blindness is often a trait of autism/Asperger’s, many faceblind people are not autistic.)
I have never had trouble recognizing my close family members or myself in a mirror. And I was able to recognize my high school classmates right away at our reunion. But I’ve spent years with those people where I saw them on a daily basis and spent time getting to know them. I start to have trouble with people I only see from time to time.
1:20 This is something I’ve always wondered about 60 Minutes. Do they make sure that the stopwatch is always at the right minute and second based on when the commercial breaks come, or do they fudge things a bit? It looks like the watch is running about 20 seconds fast here, but I think that’s because they cut the “Tonight on 60 minutes…” part out of the video. What? Oh, face blindness. Sorry.
2:00 I have at least some facial recognition ability, because I can recognize most of these celebrities. And the ones I have trouble with are possibly due to unfamiliarity with the celebrity rather than face blindness. But this is easier than real life facial recognition, because 1) I already know it’s a celebrity, and 2) the faces don’t move or start to wonder why I’m staring at them.
2:22 This camera shot is a more accurate representation of the task in real life. All those faces going by– how can I pick out the ones I’ve seen before? Do other people’s brains really do that automatically? If so, that’s amazing!
3:20 There’s no “Aha!” moment for me when the faces go from upside-down to rightside-up. It’s just the same image flipped. Most people don’t have to turn their heads to read words that are printed upside-down, do they? It’s the same for me with faces– if I don’t know them upside-down, I won’t know them rightside-up. But flipping the image seems to cause instant recognition for Lesley Stahl.
4:00 Those poor people… I feel terrible for me too. (Just kidding.) : )
4:45 When you don’t automatically recognize faces, you use context to help you keep track of people. If I understand what Dr. Novotny is describing, she can become familiar with a person as her current patient, but when they step outside into a crowd of people, their context is completely changed. Now they are just one of many people visiting the hospital. She might remember that the patient was a young woman with medium brown hair, but now there might be three other people in the room who fit that description, and if she makes an assumption, it could be wrong.
5:08 This is a nightmare scenario for me. I would have to ask for the coworker’s e-mail address or try to text them, because even if he tells me his name, I will probably not recognize him in a different context.
Whenever I arrange to meet someone, I am usually not looking for a face I recognize. I am looking for someone who fits the general description of the person I am meeting (age, gender, skin color, hair color, hair style, etc.) and who appears to be looking for me (by making eye contact or smiling when they see me). Until I am sure who they are, I hedge by pretending to recognize them in a way that is hopefully also plausible as simple friendliness if they turn out to be someone I don’t know.
6:00 This exact thing happened to me with a friend who changed her hairstyle between school quarters. She no longer had her hair in a ponytail, and that was enough to make me unsure that she was the same person until she greeted me by name!
I don’t experience quite as much dissonance as Jacob Hodes appears to, though. If I saw a person change their hairstyle in front of me, they wouldn’t “disappear.” I know they’re the same person because they haven’t gone anywhere.
8:00 The interview with artist Chuck Close is probably my favorite part of the segment. I think he does a good job of explaining the thought processes a faceblind person uses to identify people, and showing how you can still be good at recognizing people by paying attention to details. I think I also recognized the picture of Leno by the chin and of Tiger Woods by the lips. I thought Tom Cruise was Doug Flutie, though.
Until I read about face blindness, I thought this was how everyone recognized faces.
10:00 I can echo what these people are saying. The idea that most people have a mechanism that instantly and automatically “labels” faces for them seems as weird and unexpected to me as face blindness appears to be to Lesley Stahl. Half the people I know say they are bad with faces, so I just figured I fit into the same category. Maybe I do, and it’s a spectrum like autism rather than a sharp divide between “normal” and “not normal” the way the segment makes it appear.
11:05 Thanks, Ms. Stahl. What a cheery thought! (sarcasm)
12:00 I haven’t had the experience of not recognizing my own face, but I don’t really need to recognize it very often. I mean, when I look in a mirror, the person in the mirror is going to be me, right? Other people stay on my side of the mirror.
I drive from Danville to Bloomsburg, along the same path the school bus took me for twelve years. The trees crowd in beside the road, and it feels so quiet– I’m amazed at how little traffic there seems to be. I guess I’ve gotten used to Cincinnati. But this definitely still feels like home.
I’m going to the park for my 13-year class reunion. Why 13 years? Because we’d never had a reunion before, and we wanted to have one. I worry a little that I won’t recognize some of my classmates. That could be embarrassing.
But as they arrive one by one, I know them instantly without a doubt! This so rarely happens to me anymore even with people I know well. It really feels nice.
Eight of us were able to make it out of a class of 26. I’d say that’s pretty good, considering how many of us have spread out all over the country and how many are busy with family and job obligations.
I get to meet their spouses and children, and I do my best to remember their names, but it will take me a while. I’m thankful that I’ve had the chance to learn some of them from Facebook.
We talk while the children play on the playground– there are so many stories to tell. I stand in between two conversations, listening to both and smiling. My friends are so very much the same people I knew from school. They’ve been to some amazing places and lived through some tough times, but God has preserved what is good in each of them.
I don’t think I have a lot to add myself. My experience is still mostly as a student. I’m still trying to find a career, still hoping to start a relationship with someone.
I probably seem a lot like I did when we were all in high school. I lagged behind socially then– at a middle school or elementary level– and as a result, I didn’t interact much with my peers. Now, I’m probably up to a college or high school level socially, but I don’t always feel fully a part of the adult world.
When someone asks me what I’m doing currently, I stammer and pause for a bit as I try to answer. A nasty part of me is telling me “You don’t belong here. You don’t have anything to talk about,” but I know that’s not true. We go out for drinks, but I haven’t developed a taste for beer or wine, so I order soda. I hope they don’t think I’m looking down on them by not sharing a drink– it’s such a symbol of friendship.
Before I came to the reunion, I was worried a little about negative thoughts like these, but they are no match for the joy I feel. I sit and listen to all the stories as my friends share– about meeting their husbands and wives, about funny or sad things at work, about pregnancy and childbirth and picking names for children and the unpredictability of two-year-olds. I imagine that my parents had conversations like this about me when I was little. I hear how God has blessed each family and prepared them for the things He brings into their lives. Everyone’s story is different, but also the same.
I realize that I have grown in thirteen years. When I was a senior in high school, I was afraid to drive a car. Today I made two trips by myself, and I enjoyed them. Even though social interaction is tiring, I am seeking it rather than avoiding it– planning my weekend around it and learning how to get enough rest in between so that I can be fully present and part of the conversation.
I wonder if my classmates know what a blessing they have been to my life– both those who are there and those who could not come.
At times, others find it hard to believe that I have Asperger’s just from observing me. I think some of this may be due to personality– my strong desire to avoid confrontation has likely kept me from clashing with others.
But there was another big difference in my life, the people around me. In so many of the stories I read online about people with Asperger’s, their years in school are not remembered fondly. Stories of bullying seem almost universal, and in a lot of cases, the best advice people can offer is “Wait until you graduate; it will get better.” I read about people who still deal with the effects of bullying decades later.
I wonder if my classmates know that they are proof that it doesn’t have to be that way– that kindness can have just as much of a positive impact on a life. None of us knew about Asperger’s, but anyone could see that I was different in some ways, lagging behind in others. But I wasn’t given grief for it. I was just given friendliness, time, and a safe place to grow.
I finished up the courses I was taking for my Web Programming certificate last week. Overall, I really enjoyed my classes– it was nice taking courses with no writing assignments to stress over. The programming was fun; I actually had to be careful not to try to do too much in my projects, which was a new experience. Best of all, I made several acquaintances and at least one friend. : )
Now I’m faced with a task that I find a whole lot more daunting, though– searching for a job. I know how to do school, even though it has often majorly stressed me out. It’s like walking a path, one step at a time. Trusting God as a student meant trying my best at the tasks immediately in front of me and not worrying about the future. It wasn’t easy, but I was glad to be able to leave the big uncertainties in God’s hands.
But it seems like it doesn’t work that way once school is done. There is no clear path to walk now. I have to make the decisions, or nothing will happen. And that really scares me a lot. But when I try to put the decision in God’s hands, he keeps giving it back to me.
I’ve been looking at job postings, but with each of them I have to fight the fear that I won’t be able to do what the job asks for, or that I’ll find it to be completely different from what I thought I had prepared for.
Especially with the way many job postings are written. Some of them seem to be looking for a superhero. “We are looking for the best and the brightest web developers in the world. We need innovative, self-starting, energetic people who communicate well without asking dumb questions. Should have 2-4 years experience doing this job before starting.”
Others are written are written vaguely enough that the job could conceivably be almost anything: “The web developer position uses technology, electronics, and/or computers to actualize the company’s three core values in line with its mission statement, taking into account the views of all major stakeholders.”
(Those quotes are exaggerated a little.)
I’ve heard that I shouldn’t take job postings literally because they have to be written in their own sort of language. For instance, maybe some job postings are unspecific so that if the supervisor needs to ask the employee for help with another area, they can’t say “That’s not in my job description” and refuse to help. Others may name their imaginary best employee possible knowing that he or she doesn’t exist in real life; they just want to see how close they can get. So they are actually expecting people to apply without meeting all of the “requirements.” Very confusing.
As I said, this is a different challenge. The other times I’ve been faced with it, I fled back to school, but I can’t do that forever. I’ll see what I learn and post about it if I can.
Land of My Sojourn 