Adult Aspberger's

This article, by Tim Page, appeared in the August 20, 2007 issue of the New Yorker. A personal memoir and an eloquent description of life with Aspberger's, I found it deeply moving.

I received a grade of “Unsatisfactory” in Social Development from the Mansfield Public Schools that year. I did not work to the best of my ability, did not show neatness and care in assignments, did not coöperate with the group, and did not exercise self-control. About the only positive assessment was that I worked well independently. Of course: then as now, it was all that I could do.

In the years since the phrase became a cliché, I have received any number of compliments for my supposed ability to “think outside the box.” Actually, it has been a struggle for me to perceive just what these “boxes” were—why they were there, why other people regarded them as important, where their borderlines might be, how to live safely within and without them. My efforts have been only partly successful: after fifty-two years, I am left with the melancholy sensation that my life has been spent in a perpetual state of parallel play, alongside, but distinctly apart from, the rest of humanity.

Many who are now adults have had similar childhood experiences, the feeling that something is not quite right, but never knowing exactly what it is.

In the fall of 2000, in the course of what had become a protracted effort to identify—and, if possible, alleviate—my lifelong unease, I was told that I had Asperger’s syndrome. I had never heard of the condition, which had been recognized by the American Psychiatric Association only six years earlier. Nevertheless, the diagnosis was one of those rare clinical confirmations which are met mostly with relief. Here, finally, was an objective explanation for some of my strengths and weaknesses, the simultaneous capacity for unbroken work and all-encompassing recall, linked inextricably to a driven, uncomfortable personality. And I learned that there were others like me—people who yearned for steady routines, repeated patterns, and a few cherished subjects, the driftwood that keeps us afloat.

Although most people would greet a diagnosis of Aspberger's with dismay, it seems clear that it is no hindrance to a successful, if not entirely happy, life. Even happiness, I think, is not impossible, especially living in a world where these conditions are recognized as something we can work with, beginning in early childhood.

I'm very glad to have stumbled across this article; I hope you find it worth reading as well.