My Asperger's Syndrome Saved My Life

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.