Meeting Folks for the First Time, Fifty Years Later

My wife and I once participated in a 10k run at the last of the five universities I attended to get my BA. It was the first time I visited the campus with her, and I felt nostalgic. 

"There was a giant, wall-sized photograph of the entire United States in that building," I told her, (forgetting that that satellite images of the entire Earth can now be summoned on any phone). 

But as we marched along I realized how different my nostalgia was from the memories of those around me. Hundreds of alumni were converging to participate in the race. Many wore school colors. They were laughing and talking with lifelong college chums or a person they met on campus and later married. They were remembering frat parties, dances, football games, sex in the dormitories, wild times on and off campus. 

Me? My fondest memory was giant, black and white composite photograph of the United States. 

I loved my college years, but they were different. I spent my college years alone. I explored the libraries and bookstores. I went to plays and movies. I visited art museums and galleries. I read. I listened to music. I taught myself guitar. I wrote. I went to class. I worked. I went home--early on to a dorm room, and later to apartments, where I saw no one and received no visitors.

I suppose I shouldn't exaggerate. I made one good friend during my freshman year. And on a year abroad program I got to know the names and faces of a hundred fellow students but at two other schools I attended I never met or talked to a soul for more than a few minutes.

I was undiagnosed autistic. School was easy. The social life was impossible.

In those days I wrote lots of letters to my family and to my high school friend, Greg. In those letters I described the people around me as dummies and snobs. I tried to be funny about it, but my bitterness was palpable. I had no explanation for why I found myself alone in large groups of happy people.

There's no way for me to mend relations with people at four of my five colleges because I never learned their names. But for a decade now I've been attending reunions of the year abroad program that I attended in the mid-1970s.

The year abroad program was different. It was a small group. We flew abroad together. We travelled together. We studied together. We lived together in small rooming houses. A lot of us drank together. I wrote about the experience HERE. In some ways I knew those people like the back of my hand. I knew their names and faces, the way they talked and laughed.

But I didn't actually know them, and they didn't know me. They saw me as inexplicably quiet (except in my own rooming house, where I was inexplicably loud.) I tried for a while to fit in, and to some extent tried to join in, but without much success. For the most part I simply observed.

When I began to attend the reunions, forty years later, I inherited a batch of photographs taken by others. I only appear in a handful, accidentally, and off to the side. Once, looking at them, I teared up. 

It's been interesting to meet the other students forty and fifty years later, now that I have the skills to interact properly. I feel like I've met many of them for the first time. They are interesting people, with interesting lives. (Our year abroad was undoubtedly a factor; most of us have continued to travel and explore throughout our now long lives.)

I wish it had been easier to get to know each other then. 

I'm glad it's possible now. 

A Review by Joe Martin in Post Alley

A review by Joe Martin in the Seattle online newspaper Post Alley (someday the puzzle motif will disappear!) If you've read the book, I'd love for you to leave a comment about it under the review! At any rate, thank you, Joe.

https://www.postalley.org/2025/12/23/a-new-book-autism-and-a-fulfilling-life/

Trop Parler C'est Maladie--(But it was Fun!)

 I want to thank Chaya Mallavaram and Mike Cornell for having me on their wonderful SparkLaunch podcast. (Find it HERE, or look for it on YouTube.) I talk a bit in the podcast about my very autistic way of preparing for my first visit with a therapist--scripting and rehearsing every word I wanted to say. I didn't do that so much for SparkLaunch, but I'm afraid that writing my book, writing several articles, and scripting several speeches about the value of neurodiversity had me overly prepared. (My dad would have called the result "diarrhea of the mouth;" my friend Dando Gabi would have said "Trop parler c'est maladie!") I talked too much, and should have settled in for more of a conversation. But in the end, good stuff was said by all.

Former Child, Still Autistic: Robert F. Kennedy Hasn’t Got a Clue

Talking recently about autistic kids, Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. said, “These are kids who will never pay taxes. They'll never hold a job. They'll never play baseball. They'll never write a poem. They'll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.”

As a former kid and still autistic, let me say that maybe he got the baseball part right, because I was a terrible baseball player. Fly balls put me into a panic, and pitched balls evaded my bat most of the time. 

But I played baseball. Two years of little league, and as few games of schoolyard ball as I could muster. 

He might be right about dating, too. Looking back I realize I dated about as well as I played baseball. I went on my first dates when I was twelve or thirteen, but I didn’t make a habit of it for quite a while. In fact, I never made a habit of it, except with my wife. 

Still, I remain proof that, just as a man with a brain worm can become Secretary of Health and Human Services, an autistic kid and man can date.

Mr. Kennedy might also be right about the “job” business. I’ve had a dozen or so jobs and excelled at most of them, but the truth is, autistic people like me often prefer to start businesses of our own and to be our own boss. 

That’s not “holding a job,” it’s being an entrepreneur—a “lil’Elon” if you will. 

(I won’t!)

I’ve never published poetry, but I’ve written lots of songs and a book. Do those count.

As for the toilet, I must say my biggest fear is reaching a point in life where I have to use a toilet assisted. But I guess if I do, I’ll keep calm and carry on. It happens to the best of us—even us autistic folk.

But where Mr. Kennedy really got it wrong is that business about never paying taxes. He must be mixing up regular autistic people with the autistic billionaires he hangs with today. Being something less than a billionaire myself, I can tell you I’ve paid lots of taxes! DOGE can confirm this. They have the data. 

Maybe they’ll give the money back now that they know I’m autistic and bad at baseball. Let’s call it an administrative error.

As the saying goes, if you’ve met one autistic person you’ve met one autistic person. We’re all different. We each face different challenges in this neurotypical world, and some of us face more than others. I’ve had it good.

But the biggest challenge most autistic people face is the ignorance and prejudice of people like Mr. Kennedy.

April is Autistic Awareness and Acceptance Month. Our Secretary of Health and Human Services hasn’t got a clue.

Peter O’Neil is an autistic attorney, husband, father, grandfather, musician, writer, and the author of My So-Called Disorder: Autism, Exploding Trucks, and the Big Daddy of Rock and Roll.

Retiring While Autistic

Someone on LinkedIn asked how people were doing in their autistic retirements. "Great!" I responded. After all, I had written a book and several articles, spoken several times about neurodiversity, played music in public, read a ton of books, traveled extensively in Italy, twice, and even learned to bumble along in cracked Italian. 

But what about when energy flags, or when I'm too ashamed of our disintegrating democracy to travel abroad? What about when I miss having a kid in the house? What about when I miss the old joy of taking on and exposing a corporate defendant, or the small pleasures of an office chat?

I'm beginning to think a lot about how to continue living a full life as an aging autistic person. If anyone finds this blog, I'd love to hear your thoughts, too.

An Autistic Year Abroad (and a Rebirth Fifty Years Later)

Most of what I have written for the press are articles about the value of neurodiversity in the workplace. (See HERE or HERE or HERE). Neurodiversity is like every form of diversity--it brings new and useful ways of seeing and understanding into our businesses and civic enterprises.

But life as an undiagnosed autistic or neurodivergent person can be bewildering, so recently I wrote about my experience fifty years ago in a year abroad program in Florence, Italy. 

You can find that article HERE. 

I write about how neurodivergent people can find themselves alone in a crowd. Happily, however, we adapt to some degree, even if it takes a long, long time. We gain hard-won skills. We learn to recognize a facial gesture. We learn to talk about nothing. We learn to get by.

My Virtual Book Tour, Stop One

Well, I'm probably too old a dog to learn the trick of YouTubing, but here I go--a YouTube channel in support of my book My So-Called Disorder: Autism, Exploding Trucks, and the Big Daddy of Rock and Roll. YouTube picked the right thumbnail--my lifelong hero, Chuck Berry, leaning against someone's Cadillac in the alley behind the Blueberry Hill nightclub and restaurant in St. Louis. This video is an introduction to my odd(tistic) fascination with Chuck; my late, late life diagnosis as autistic; how my autism helped my legal career; how it hurt my social life, (especially as a young man;) and a bit about why I wrote the book in the first place. BTW: the book it's a good read--fast, funny, and reasonably literate.