Recently I was diagnosed with a strange little neurological developmental disorder called Asperger's Syndrome (and, no, I don't watch Boston Legal although I hear perhaps I should; we'll see when time is made for THAT; it took me three months to put this together). Here is the diagnosis letter from the professional who evaluated me (clicky biggy):
In one sentence, Asperger's is a condition that is related to autism, learning disabilities, obsessive-compulsiveness, Tourette's, ADHD, schizophrenia, epilepsy, etc etc without managing to be quite any more of any one of those than any of the others. The particular outwardly-apparent symptoms are loudness of voice, lack of eye contact, lack of social engagement, a seeming disregard for the feelings of others, monotonic voice and an affinity for mathematics / engineerings as well as music and other arts. The inward symptoms are social anxiety / panic / aversion, sensory hypersensitivity, inability to understand subtleties of social interactions, inability to "see the forest for the trees" in any given situation, cognitive fixation with an object, word or idea, etc etc all of which most of the time is appreciated by innocent bystanders as narcissistic self-centeredness. Read more about it here; some symptoms are more prevalent in some people than others so I tend to focus on those that preoccupy me (cue laugh track).
As a bonus I also have a rather intense case of ADHD, which jives with the statistical co-morbidity of A.S., i.e. that if you experience one of the above-listed conditions you (or a relative, as these things are genetic) are also likely be diagnosable with one or more of the others.
Please note that the vast majority of diagnoses for this and related conditions these days are done of people under the age of ten. Even highly educated and trained professionals until recently didn't have the awareness of this and so often children were either dismissed as "retarded" (which we are in some specific areas, strictly speaking, but not in most and certainly not in a purely cognitive sense) or else were just chided for not trying hard enough to be normal or otherwise address whatever the "problem" was.
It feels like a watered-down version of coming out as gay at age 17 (1991) -- while at the time the prospect of coming out might have perversely suggested sordid, unwelcome and unfathomable images into the minds of friends and family, now the only response to the question "Well, what do you *do* as an Asperger person?" is "I try not to get hit / fired / dumped." Not exactly fuel for conversation one way or another.
So, in honor of this and my now having to re-evaluate 33 years of painful, boring, significant, mortifying, unexplainable, happy, transcendent experiences in terms of them having been certainly colored (if not outright caused) by a weird brain, I have put together a small piece of performance art in the form of a scientific study. It is a MS Word document which you may download by clicking on the image below:
portrait of the artist as a scientist
