My Guitar was Made in Indonesia

        As an undiagnosed, autistic, teenager I couldn’t find love even when it grabbed me and kissed me. Or, at any rate, I couldn’t keep it. I was a true Peter Pumpkin Eater. After a few hours, or days, or weeks, whoever came looking for love in this wrong place would lose interest, or feel rejected, and look elsewhere. 

And yet, despite my lack of success, I always had hope—and always expected that I would find love or that it would find me.

 

        Looking back I credit my parents and my family. We were a dysfunctional crew, drenched in alcohol, but we were creative, smart, interesting, interested, and accepting. My six older siblings provided built-in playmates, my mother provided constant encouragement, and the whole family—even a dad who lost his way due to alcoholism—provided love. It was the first thing I told each of my two therapists when I sought help understanding why my youthful life was so different: that I was loved as a child and knew it.

Which means I knew that I was lovable. What a gift for an autistic child.

In my book, My So-Called Disorder: Autism, Exploding Trucks, and the Big Daddy of Rock and Roll, I quote some of the songs I wrote as a teenager, pointing out that most of them are very “autistic.” When I bought a new electric guitar a few years ago it inspired me to write a song that celebrated the guitar and all of my other special interests (stars, telescopes, Chuck Berry and the blues) and also the love that eventually found me when I knew how to hold on: my wife, my grown children, and my granddaughter.

As a child I lusted for

Those old Silvertone guitars.

I used to lie outside in the dark and wonder

At the mystery of the stars

I played the same kinds of records then

That I listen to today

And even then I knew in my heart

I’d be with you someday

Didn’t know what you’d look like

Didn’t know how you’d sound

Just knew life was better when

You were around

I had more hopes and wishes then

Than I have today

Cause a lot of them were granted when

You came walking my way

Life’s full of mystery

Life can be so hard

The people we love are lost

You can be dealt an awfully difficult card

There are times when life is full of joy

And then such deep despair

But I can make it through it all

As long as you are there

The stars are harder to see these days

Washed out by all those city lights

My guitar was made in Indonesia

But it looks and sounds just right

About to hit the road again

Memphis, Clarksdale and St. Lou

Sitting on the banks of the great Mississippi River

I’ll play this song for you

                                                                            c. Peter O’Neil

        I wrote the song about my wife, Rebecca and my Indonesian copy cat Silvertone but I immediately saw that it applied to my children as well. We never know what our loves will look or sound like, but like a copy-cat Indonesian Silvertone, they make life better.

Having studied what it means to be autistic for a few years now I realize how lucky I was lucky to have a family who loved and supported me, and a mom who encouraged my many, many quirky interests, and fought for me whenever she saw some injustice.

The Blessing of Neurodivergent Company (and Neurotypical Allies).

It's a blessing to meet other openly autistic people. We're all different, and yet we get each other. In fact, it turns out that several of my lifelong friends (there aren't that many) are autistic or otherwise neurodivergent.

What I'm coming to understand more and more each day, however, is how important "allies" are. My career would never have taken off if I hadn't found a mentor and ally in the great product liability attorney Paul Whelan, who didn't know I am autistic, but who knew me. I can look back on life and see other "neurotypical" allies and friends, though not too many. You can recognize them by the rainbow of friends who surround them--gay, straight, black, white, whatever. They invite outsiders in.

We should all do the same. We should recognize that our differences are what make us great, and are what should unite us.

It's interesting how comfortable and good it can feel for autistic person to have a conversation with other autistic people. Last week I was a guest on the wonderful podcast Autistic Tidbits and Tangents. I'd spoken briefly with host Kara Dymond, and had seen guest co-host Bruce Petherick on a couple of prior videos, but we were able to settle right in and talk about all manner of subjects, ranging from my introduction to Chuck Berry, the benefits of a late diagnosis, the benefits of an autistic mind in my work as a lawyer and paralegal, to fear of changing jobs or having to transfer to a new location, self-diagnosis through television or film, and a world where autistic people were in the majority (turns out none of us particularly want to live there). We talked a bit about my book, too. I do apologize for a voice that was having some issues that morning! I'd better learn some vocal warm-ups.

Peter O’Neil is the author of My So-Called Disorder: Autism, Exploding Trucks, and the Big Daddy of Rock and Roll.

The Discreet Charm of Being Different

The other day I was the guest on a “podcast” recorded on Zoom with two other autistic people. Both had read my book, and I had seen both on YouTube, but otherwise we were virtual strangers to each other. We immediately fell into 90 minutes of comfortable and deep conversation.

You might have to be autistic yourself to understand how unusual this felt.

At the end of the session we began to discuss what it might be like to live in a world where autistic people made up 80 or 90 percent of the population, the way “neurotypical” people do this world. One of the participants could hardly imagine such a thing. Another agreed that my teenage love life might have been more successful. 

But two days later I realize that there would be no benefit at all—that such a world would represent a huge loss for me.

I often talk (perhaps mostly to myself, on long walks alone,) about my “autistic charms.” It’s clear to me that my autistic persistence, eye for detail, creativity, ability to “connect the dots” and my ability to absorb and navigate a jungle of facts about subjects that interest me, have helped me enormously in my legal career—especially in the early days when I made up for my lack of skills with hard work and autistic persistence. Whole libraries of documents and entire junkyards of rusting car wrecks gave up their secrets to me.

But there is also a charm to being different, especially when you are accepted for who you are and you can therefor accept and love yourself for who you are.

I remember a car trip to Oregon with my mother and two of my sisters when I was 14 years old. I had only discovered Chuck Berry four or five months prior. The day after seeing him I rushed out and bought a double album of his biggest hits and then spent untold hours spinning the disks on repeat.

Anyone who knows me knows I don’t hear song lyrics. I’m drawn to the music instead. At best I learn the words of the title. “Very superstitious.” “That’s the way (uh huh, uh huh) I like it.”

But on this road trip, sitting in the back seat, I suddenly launched into a verbatim rendition of the entire two disk album, from start to finish, including all guitar breaks and every syllable of the lyrics, singing as loudly as possible with the exact phrasing and intonation that Berry used on the records.

What I remember is that no one told me to shut up. They sat, entranced, smiling, for as long as it took me to finish my performance—which must have been at least a full Oregon county.

And I’m certain that’s why I’ve never felt badly about being different and have always loved myself despite my differences. I was loved and accepted as a child.

So in addition to the undeniable charms of autistic people—our love of deep and meaningful conversation being just one of them—there is an undeniable charm to being “different.”

But I guess to appreciate that charm, you have to feel appreciated yourself—something too few autistic people get a chance to feel, especially early on, when so many of us are excluded or bullied, even at times by our families.

My own family was as dysfunctional as a 40 year old Yugo and virtually pickled in alcohol. But we loved and accepted each other, and I feel blessed, grateful, and charmed.

And I’m quite happy--charmed--to be different.

Peter O’Neil is the author of My So-Called Disorder: Autism, Exploding Trucks, and the Big Daddy of Rock and Roll.

My So-Called Disorder: We Know We're Different Long Before We Know We're Autistic

It’s interesting to me how, before I ever knew I was autistic, I knew that something was going on that made me feel different. I told more than one person that, aside from family and a few close friends, I was “the most solitary person you’d ever willingly associate with—and that few willingly do.” I told several people that I had to learn to operate my hard to operate personality. I remember as a teenager and young adult watching all the socially successful teenagers and young adults, (including some really questionable ones), and realizing that that life was never going to be mine. I remember how much I appreciated the Togolese custom of avoiding eye contact during important conversations or when speaking to an important or elderly person. I remember watching various outgoing people meet me for the first time with gusto and then begin to pull back, spotting something odd despite my best attempts at gregarious charm. I remember a hundred times being told to smile, even when I was happy, and actually practicing a toothy smile in front of the mirror without success. I remember thinking there was a bit of magic in my ability make sense of complicated cases or to spot things in documents that others had trouble seeing. I remember when I learned it was more politic not to talk so much about Chuck Berry.

Peter O’Neil is the author of My So-Called Disorder: Autism, Exploding Trucks, and the Big Daddy of Rock and Roll.

Neurodiversity in the Legal Community: Why Autistic and Otherwise Neurodivergent People Bring Value

I thank the Washington State Association for Justice for publishing my article on the value of Neurodiversity in the legal community.  You can read it by clicking HERE. It's a followup to an article I wrote 20 years ago in which I compared my skill working product liability cases to the Seattle artist James Washington, Jr., who carved stone and who once said "If you love a thing, it will give up its secrets to you.

 Washington worked mostly in stone, which he tapped and scraped until he found what he felt was always inside--usually something from nature that was also very spiritual.

I told my readers to return again and again to the documents and evidence of their cases until the case gave up its secrets. I told them to think like artists, intuitively. Now I realize I was teaching them to think like an autistic person.

 Peter O’Neil is the author of My So-Called Disorder: Autism, Exploding Trucks, and the Big Daddy of Rock and Roll.

  

My So-Called Disorder: Pipe Cleaner Man

   

Everything on the cover of my book, My So-Called Disorder, has significance to me and to my story. Take for instance, "pipe cleaner man." He shows up on the front cover, upper right.  He shows up in the book in Chapter 36, where I talk about creatively autistic solutions I've come up with on the job. We represented a man who was crushed under the roll bar of his tractor. An earlier model of the roll bar (like the one in my pictures) would have prevented his death. We were taking the deposition of a scene witness, and I was prepared.

At a deposition of the responding EMT, the company’s attorney asked the firefighter to illustrate how our client was pinned beneath the roll-bar. When the firefighter said he wasn’t a good artist, I pulled out the tractor model. No slouch, the company attorney pulled out a wooden artist’s mannequin with moveable limbs—but the EMT struggled to recreate the scene because the mannequin was way too big for the model tractor. That’s when I revealed “Pipe-Cleaner Man,” a tiny figure I had made from pipe-cleaners and dressed in colored masking tape. I even fattened him up to the size of our client’s deceased husband. The EMT bent him into exact position beneath the tractor roll-bar and we took a photo. Pipe-Cleaner Man still gets a chuckle out of the few of us who remember.

Pipe Cleaner Man, now 25 years older, is not as limber or as colorful as he once was, but he's still a thing of beauty to me. (And his early demise would have been prevented if he had the roll bar shown on the model, designed specifically to prevent crush injuries.)