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.)

My So-Called Disorder: Accommodations are not a Charitable Gift to Autistic People

 Thank you to The Seattle Times for publishing my op-ed, called My So-Called Disorder Made Me A Better Attorney. You can read it HERE.

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: Autism, Exploding Trucks, and the Big-Daddy of Rock and Roll

     It's a big deal, at the age of 65, to learn that you're autistic--a big enough deal that you might write a book about it. I found out, almost by accident, during my first visit to a young psychologist. Ten minutes into the visit she asked if I liked to read. Yes, I told her. Non-fiction? Anything, everything.

    "Well, I have a book I'd like to lend you."

    The book was Divergent Mind: Thriving in a World that wasn't Designed for You, by Jenara Nerenberg. I took it home and began my journey.  Here's an excerpt from the book about that first visit.

                    6.    My Second Attempt at Therapy

     Once again I have chosen almost at random—or maybe this time magic has intervened. I have made several efforts to find a therapist, but with so many people distraught about Covid no one is taking new patients. I will eventually learn that this particular person had an opening because she had taken time off to be with her daughter and is rebuilding her practice. 

    I spend the days before our first session preparing: walking, talking to myself, relearning, revising, and rehearsing my life story. I figure I will do what I did last time—until I show up, and my plan falls apart.

    It’s my first visit. Icy roads add to my nervousness. She has sent an email telling me to “take a seat in the waiting room” when I arrive. I can do that. The waiting room is broken into two adjacent areas with a handful of chairs in each part, and I take a seat by the front doors.  

    At the appointed hour my new therapist walks into the other part of the room, pauses for part of a second to look at the empty chair in front of her, then turns and walks over to me. We are both wearing masks.

    “Peter?” she asks.  

    “Yes,” I say, and begin to stand up. She’s a lot younger than I am, probably half my age.

    “You weren’t where I expected you to be!” She points to the empty chair. “I thought you would be over there.”

    I am never brilliant with small talk but now I’m flummoxed. I am the only person in the waiting area and 15 feet from “over there.”

    I follow as she walks silently to her office and points me to a small couch. Now my own expectations go unfulfilled. I’ve prepared myself for a certain amount of chit chat, maybe about the icy weather, maybe the earlier snow, or maybe a meaningless question about whether I had trouble finding the place, but there is none. We have evidently used up our stores of small talk on my seating choice.  

    Although I don’t know it yet, this awkwardness on both sides bodes well. It is a sign that I have come to the right place, that I am with the right person.

    I fall onto the very center of the little couch and lean towards an armrest that is too far away.  I wind up at a forty-five-degree angle. I am making the first impression of a crazy person, which, given her profession, is perhaps not surprising.  After all, I am here to talk about my crazy life—but it’s not the first impression I planned.

    I pull myself up to a more dignified vertical and we begin. I have come with the firm intent to repeat the well-rehearsed story of my life to this new person, as I did with the last. She even knows this plan, because in my initial email I foolishly shared the “candy store” comment of the previous therapist. I promised good stories. But my plan sputters immediately into chaos. I jabber out bits and pieces. I breathe oddly. I talk about my current clingy depression. I talk about my painfully alone college years. I try to say something about the crazily alcoholic but loving home I grew up in. My voice warbles. I blame my ragged breath and speech on the mask I am wearing. She smiles and says, “It’s okay. It happens. Just talk.”  

    And within minutes, she begins ushering me gently towards an entirely new understanding of who I am—a unified theory of me that explains almost everything.

    She doesn’t tell me during our first session, but she has seen something, and I know this because at one point she talks aloud to herself, laughing a bit and shaking her head, saying, “It’s not even a firm diagnosis yet!”

    I’m listening and wondering, “What? What’s not a firm diagnosis?” 

    Ten or fifteen minutes into our first session she says, “Do you like to read?”

    “I do.”

    “Do you like nonfiction?”

    “Anything. Everything.”

    “Oh good!” she says. “I’m thinking of a book you might like. It focuses on women, but you’ll be able to see past that.”

    This is exactly what I have been hoping for—a book that will help me understand who I am and why I am that way. Because I have known most of my life that I am different.

    And then she asks the big question.

    “Do you know the term ‘neurodiversity?’”

    I do not—so she reaches back to a word I had used to describe my relationship with Rebecca. “We like each other and love each other and support each other despite our quirks,” I told her.  

    She smiled. She smiles again now.

    “It means ‘quirky.’ Neurodivergent people are people whose brains are wired differently from most people. Not badly, just differently. We see the world differently from most people.”

    We? Have I heard this properly? At any rate, I like it. I’ve known all my life I am wired differently, that I see things differently, that I’ve lived differently, and even lawyered differently. I’m proud of it. I can’t wait to learn how and why.

    As I’m getting ready to go she loans me a copy of the book—a volume so new and fresh it makes me nervous. I hurt the books I read. I spindle, fold, and mutilate. I cart them on long walks to read in bits and pieces from any dry bench. They wind up with arched spines and ragged pages spotted with drops of coffee and wine. But I take the book home, protecting it from the winter elements, and immediately sit down in my customary spot (I have two) to gingerly open it and read.  

    I am immediately and stunningly disappointed. She hasn’t understood me at all.

(Peter O'Neil is the author of My So-Called Disorder: Autism, Exploding Trucks, and the Big Daddy of Rock and Roll, available on bookshop.org, barnseandnoble.com, amazon.com, or on order from your local bookstore.)