Special interests: history

One of the signs you have AS is you fill yourself up with facts about a given subject. It's how we learn. Of course we don't all have the same special interests. A famous one, going back to the boys in Dr. Asperger's care in 1940s Vienna, is trains (what they look like, how they work, even, famously, their schedules - we're comforted by routine); there's a man in New York famous for it (since he was a kid he's sneaked on board subways and driven them, successfully).

Basically when you have AS but don't understand it, when your brain focuses on something like that, and it can be just about anything, you think you've found the Rosetta Stone, the Lost Ark, the Holy Grail, the Key to the Secrets of the Universe, the Unified Theory of Everything. (Which is why some of us fixate on religion, the topic of future posts.)

(Normal people can be like that too. Thomas Merton wrote that when he was around four, to the consternation of his mother he insisted on worshipping the kitchen light. And look at many normal people's obsession with sports.)

Of course most of the time those things fall far short of that. (The instruction manual to the marvelous deep fryer doesn't tell you how to keep a job or a marriage.) But as metaphors or even as gateways to learn other things such as coping or job skills (like the man who loves trains ought to get a job driving them) they're useful.

Our brains are like computers with tons of memory but a relatively weak central processing unit (so we don't do executive functions or multi-task well); that's just how they're made. (A lot of us are computer geeks and successful in careers because of that.)

A lot of us, including me and the other writer of Finding Center, are nostalgic for things we hardly if ever experienced. We love history. Why? Like a lot of normal people we see or imagine a simpler society with comforting, easier-to-learn-and-keep rules and an elegant style hard to find today. Some have said AS kids wouldn't have been seen as behavior or learning problems but model children in a Victorian classroom (where the stress in the younger grades was to discipline the kids enough to stuff their heads with facts, where we excel). At least some of mental illness is relative/a social construct. (BTW AS is not a mental illness. It's like being dyslexic, a learning disability hard-wired into your brain you learn to live with.)

Of course our way of learning - reading up on all the facts about something - falls short in relationships. People are more than the sum of their facts (or why, by itself, learning everything you can about Puerto Rico including the language, for example, probably won't impress the hot Latina you want to date) and are famously unpredictable which of course makes them fascinating... but often frustrating for AS people to try to get to know.