Different . . . Not Less. Temple Grandin
gave five of my friends “positions,” such as repair manager, sales manager, and chief mechanic. Properly credentialed, we piled into the car I got from my grandfather, drove to New York City, and got into the show.
All was well and good with repairing bicycles in my dorm room, and at least I didn’t think my roommate had a problem with all the bicycles I kept in our room. However, my older (wiser) sister thought differently and made me promise to have no more than one bicycle on my side of the room at a time.
I found that tutoring was another good way to make money in college. After learning that I could do well in statistics, I decided to help other students who had difficulty in this area. I tutored in other subjects, as well, including accounting, computers, and music theory. Because I was an accounting major and had an interest in taxes, I began doing simple tax returns in undergraduate school.
After graduating with my bachelor degrees, I interviewed for jobs in accounting firms without success. Finally, the school career counselor referred me to an outside placement consultant, who found me a position in a medium-sized accounting firm where they audited mutual funds. Since I had an interest in mutual funds, this seemed to be a good idea.
A Sensory Nightmare at an Accounting Firm
Getting to work on the first day was a sensory nightmare. Again, this came at a time when I knew nothing about how autism affected me in any way. It took getting up at 5:15 in the morning to arrive at work on time at 8 o’clock. Returning home meant reversing the process and having dinner at about 8 or 9 in the evening. This was way too much travel time.
The second day on the job, I neatly folded up my suit (which was another sensory violation with the binding jacket and tie), rode my bicycle, and got to work in less than 45 minutes! Within days, I had arranged with the superintendent of the building to store my bicycle. I kept a selection of business clothes in the basement, where I changed into appropriate work attire before taking the elevator up to the office.
Shortly thereafter, the personnel director pulled me aside and indicated that I was seen entering the building without a suit and that it would be better if I took public transportation. I also had difficulties blending in with the other accountants.
After 3 months, I was let go from that position. The director of personnel said, “Perhaps you have a disability you have not disclosed. It’s just not working out.” It never occurred to me at that point that difficulties I’d had with autism as a child played any role.
Within another 3 months, I found another job at a bank, working as a portfolio accountant. Because the organization was so large (with 5,000 employees), I could ride my bicycle to the far end of the office building, do my Superman routine to change into business clothes, and walk across the expansive building to my desk without anyone being the wiser.
Although I performed my job in a satisfactory way, I still did not seem to fit in with the people working there, and I soon grew bored of the routine. I managed to locate a position at a vocational school, teaching computers, mathematics, and other business-related courses, before leaving my job at the bank.
I Like Teaching
I found that teaching worked well for me. My colleagues were intrigued that I rode my bicycle to work and didn’t see it as a negative at all. About a year into that job, I realized that I preferred to teach music rather than business, so I negotiated my hours down by a third and started working toward a master’s in music education at Boston University.
The vocational school shut down after about a year, and I began teaching as an adjunct faculty member in several colleges and universities in the Boston area. At first, I taught business and computer classes, and then music. I even taught classes in both accounting and music at Boston University while I worked on my master’s and doctoral degrees. I began a doctorate in music education but switched to special education instead.
Academically, I thrived. Most of the work I did to support myself came from teaching adjunct courses. I even managed to get a full-time teaching position at a secretarial finishing school, and then later as a professor of music at a community college in Boston.
Unfortunately I lost that job, most likely because of a failure on my part to pay careful attention to office politics. When I started the position, I proposed a restructuring of the course offerings in the music department. While I had the support of my dean, I neglected to get an official “OK” from a long-term faculty member from another department, who taught a single course in the music program. From that point forward, he was always at the ready to oppose future proposals of mine and eventually convinced the school to close the music department.
RELATIONSHIPS
Making Friends
As a young child, making friends in elementary school was difficult. Sometimes I had one or two friends, but the school seemed mostly full of bullies. Sometimes I’d make friends with someone who seemed different than the other students. Additionally, the friends I had were all older—they were either my sister’s friends or adults. Thinking back, they may not have really been true friends, but since they were nice to me and listened to what I had to say, I considered them friends.
As a teenager, again I was friends with older people. I still had very little in common with my classmates, and there was some bullying, but less so than in elementary school.
Finding Friends with Common Interests
In college, I built more friendships with my peers. This is probably because classmates seemed more interested in who a person was, rather than how much they were like someone else. Also, since my school had 25,000 students, it was much easier to find people with common interests. For example, if I wanted to ride my bicycle at midnight, I could find someone just as strange as I was to ride with me.
In my first adult job as an accountant, I had no friends there. I did make some friends at the job that followed, at the bank. However, all of my friends were from other countries, such as India, Eritrea, and China.
Even now, I find that most of my friends are from other countries. My theory on this is that people of a given culture intimately know how another person from their culture is supposed to behave. Deviances from these behaviors are disliked. In grade school, these differences are met with teasing and bullying. In the adult world, the more likely outcome is being shunned. Additionally, people in other cultures don’t pick up on differences as much, owing to their relative lack of familiarity with your own culture. Differences that they do notice may be misattributed to your culture instead of your individuality. I have also found that people in other cultures have their own challenges with integration and may be more tolerant or even appreciative of differences in others. This may explain in part why I married a Chinese woman. I still feel more comfortable with people of different ages and cultures than my own.
Dating was always confusing to me. There was too much nonverbal communication and hidden curriculum. There were times when someone told me that a woman was interested in me, but I never picked up on the signs. I just considered myself hopelessly clueless in this arena.
In undergraduate school, after spending a lot of time with a particular woman, she suddenly told me that she really liked hugs and backrubs. My interpretation of that was, “Great! I have a new friend, and not only that, but now I can get the deep-pressure hugs I’ve always craved!” However, she evidently had a very different idea of what our relationship was, and after a lot of conversation, I realized that in addition to wanting to be my girlfriend, she thought she had been dating me for a month! Because the feeling was not mutual, the encounter does not qualify as a dating experience or having an intimate relationship. It goes beyond the typical male cluelessness that is often espoused to my gender.
What this experience did do was inform me that there was a “secret channel” of communication, consisting of eye and body movements and postures, which led me to spend hours in bookstores, reading up on body language and nonverbal communication in general. I got so interested in this subject that I even did a paper on nonverbal communication for a psychology class.