I may
once have had Asperger’s Syndrome, but I no longer have it. Both because that diagnosis no longer exists
and because I’ve worked very hard at addressing the symptoms. But that’s a story for another post.
The
point of this post is that my Asperger’s arguably saved my life.
It
happened early in the summer of 1970. I
had just completed my junior year at the University of Detroit and was working
full-time as a student assistant at the U-D Library and living in an off-campus
flat with five other guys. One of them
(Dave) had just completed his engineering degree and was killing time before
going into the Navy in a few weeks. A
friend of his (H. Allen, a doctoral student at the University of Michigan) was
visiting us that weekend.
I don’t
know whose idea it was, but we decided to drive over to East Lansing to check
out the Michigan State University campus.
I drove. We parked and wandered around, ending up at a canoe rental
livery. The guys wanted to go canoeing,
but I was hesitant. I didn’t know how to
swim (and I still don’t) and didn’t want to drown on some stupid adventure. In those less safety-obsessed times, rentals
didn’t offer flotation vests or even require the renter to sign any paperwork
indemnifying the rental operator. “Don’t
worry about it,” the guys said. “We won’t
fall in. Even if we did, the water
wouldn’t come up to above your waist.
And the canoe will float, so just hang onto it if we tip over. Which we won’t.” All of those statements were to prove false.
Against
my better judgment, I carefully climbed into the canoe. Being a novice, I took the middle position
and just followed their instructions.
They were in charge of the steering and I simply paddled on command.
It was
kind of idyllic, floating down the Red Cedar river through the campus. The sun was shining, there was a nice breeze,
and the scenery was green with bird calling and occasionally making an
appearance.
After
an hour or so, dusk was approaching. We
decided it was time to turn around and paddle back upstream to the livery. The sky began to darken. In the lessened visibility, we somehow found
ourselves drifting toward overhanging branches on our left bank. Reflexively, all three of us leaned to our
right. And apparently that’s not a good
thing to do in a canoe.
I
found myself underwater, a place I’d spent my 21 years on this planet
endeavoring not to be.
Okay, I told myself. Don’t
panic. Just get your feet on the stream
bed and stand up. The water won’t be
above your waist. So I stood
up. And my face was still definitely
under water.
Well, they were wrong about that
one. Let’s try squatting down and then
jumping up to get your head above water. That didn’t
work, either. Nor did squatting down,
jumping up, and flapping my arms like an enraged chicken. In the process, though, I tripped over
something. It was the canoe. So much for their second piece of advice
about hanging onto the floating capsized canoe.
Don’t panic, I reminded myself. The
river isn’t all that wide. You can easily
walk to a shore . . . so long as you walk perpendicular to the
current and not parallel to it. But
for the life of me, I couldn’t detect any current. All the river felt to me was wet and totally
devoid of air.
My
options having dwindled, I tried the last one I could think of.
If I raised my arm high enough, I could feel the breeze. My hand was clearly above the surface. And maybe the guys had remembered that I’d
made it quite clear that I couldn’t swim.
So that’s what I did. Raised my
arm, waved it back and forth, and began reciting one final Act of Contrition.
And it
worked. A hand grasped my wrist. Being really desperate for air by this point,
I quickly climbed up his body to refill my lungs. Then I dropped back down. I remembered that a cousin’s friend had once
drowned trying to save a drowning person.
I didn’t want to spook my rescuer (he turned out to be Dave) into
abandoning me.
He
didn’t. He walked me over to the bank. While I calmed own, he went back to dive for
and retrieve the canoe. Meanwhile, H.
Allen was calling out, “Don’t worry, Dick.
I’ve got your wallet!”
Apparently, the wallet had gotten out of my hip pocket in the fracas.
We
never did find my glasses, though. So
after we returned the canoe, I drove us back to Detroit soggy and semi-blind.
I’d
learned various lessons:
- Don’t get into a canoe without a life vest
- Don't count on a canoe floating
- If I somehow find myself in a canoe with another person who's leaning one way, don't lean that same way
- Above all, be careful about being talked into going againt my own judgment
It wasn’t until decades later that my therapist brought to my attention that what had saved my life hadn’t just been my roommate, Dave. It had been my Asperger’s Syndrome
We
Aspies are wired differently than other people are. Our emotions and our intellect tend to
operate on separate circuits. Autopsies
even show evidence of this disconnect.
The corpus callosum (the bundle of nerve fibers connecting the left and
right cerebral hemispheres of the brain) of an Aspie contains fewer nerve
fibers than does that of a neurotypical person.
People speak of being left-brained or right-brained. In the case of Aspies, our left-brains and
our right-brains aren’t on as good speaking terms with each other as are those
of neurotypicals.
In my
case, at least, this means there’s a disconnect between my emotions and my
thought processes. And that’s what saved
my life. Thrown into an emergency
situation (actually, tipped would
have been a better word), I had been able to set the emotions aside (they clearly
weren’t of immediate survival value) and focus my attention on the practical
issue of getting myself out of the predicament.
Had the emotions been allowed to compete with the thought processes,
panic could have ensued and the outcome could have been bleak.
So in
a very real way, I owe my life to the autism spectrum disorder I was born with. While the case could be made that it’s a
disability (after all, the American Psychological Association classifies it as
a neurodevelopmental disorder), it also turned out to be a gift.
