Lesson 4: Getting Control of Your Autism: Tagging Your Deficits

A basic technique for learning about your autistic brain and dark gift

If you want to make peace with your autism and live the good life with the dark gift, the very first practical step you can take is understanding exactly how your own unique autistic brain is working. One effective technique that can help get you going is tagging your mental deficits.

You want to identify the specific quirks, flaws, or shortcomings in the way your mind processes the world and expresses itself. You want to build up a kind of map or blueprint of your mental deficits that will help you better see and understand how your mind truly operates.

I recognize that it can be difficult to know how to pinpoint quirks in your thinking when it’s not even clear how thinking itself works or is supposed to work, so to get you going let me share my own list of tagged deficits and how I used them to develop a working portrait of my autistic mind. Future articles will provide even more practical guidance, this article is just to get you oriented and establish the technique.

Step One: Tag Your Deficits

I paid careful attention to all the ways I interacted with the world—how I interacted with other people, with Nature, with computers; how I read, how I moved, how I talked, how I looked and listened and tasted things, how I navigated through my environment. I wrote down specific forms of thinking, feeling, and doing that didn’t seem to work right.

My initial list I came up with in my early 30s:

• Trouble remembering people or events with people.

• Trouble remembering trivia facts.

• Dyslexia, an inability to process written language. I had mostly overcome it at that point, however.

• Dyscalculia, an inability to process written math. I have difficulty parsing the meaning of equations, for instance.

• Dysphonia, I couldn’t sing on key.

• Dysarthria, a pronunciation problem. My mouth often feels it’s filled with mulch and I swallow phonemes. And I absolutely cannot pronounce foreign languages or emulate a foreign accent.

• In addition to my dysarthria and dysphonia, I realized I have difficulty controlling the volume of my voice. People often tell me I’m yelling when I (wrongly) feel I am speaking in a normal indoor voice. Not yelling like shouting with emotion, more like I’m trying to be heard over the sound of a vacuum cleaner.

• Constructional apraxia: I couldn’t draw.

• Trouble processing verbal lectures. After a minute or two, I have trouble following the flow of an explanation if I’m forced to sit and not interact.

• Trouble processing song lyrics. Until quite recently, I never listened to song lyrics and could never remember the lyrics even to overplayed pop songs.

• Trouble understanding figurative language, like metaphors and similes.

• Couldn’t do small talk.

• Couldn’t tell jokes (at least, jokes others found funny).

• Didn’t seem to naturally experience certain social emotions, or if I did, I experienced them at times others would consider inappropriate.

• I could handle one-on-one conversations and enjoyed them and sought them out. But as soon as a third person joined the conversation, everything fell apart. Instead of just continuing with the flow of conversation, my brain automatically started performing endless social calculations in real-time, “If I say this, then he will think that she believes this, but if I say that, then she won’t understand that he was talking about me” and I can no longer follow the thread of the discussion. In short, I was terrible in group situations for the specific reason that I was unable to instinctively keep up with multiple speakers due to my brain treating it like many simultaneous one-on-one conversations rather than a single flow of shared dialogue.

• Most of my friendships ended in disaster, though I wasn’t clear on exactly what the mental dynamics were that reliably caused this.

• Tremendous difficulty navigating social institutions with complex implicit rules of behavior, like office workplaces or academia.

• There was the greatest friction in social contexts with non-autistic folks who considered themselves smart and were in professional roles where they got regular feedback that they were smart and educated, such as academia or tech jobs. I found this particularly puzzling at the time.

• I suffered some kind of seasonal mental issue (mental problems in winter, no problems in summer), though I wasn’t yet sure what this was about.

Step Two: Evaluate Each Tagged Deficit

For each mental issue on my list, I asked myself: is it broken or adaptive? Simply put, can my impaired form of thinking still learn, even if very slowly? Or is it totally nonfunctional?

Early on, I determined that my pronunciation, singing, and drawing deficits were all nonfunctional. That meant the underlying deficit was biological and permanent. No matter how much effort I spent trying to improve my pronunciation, singing, or drawing, I could not improve one whit through repetition and focused effort. In fact, I could clearly feel how my conscious will to speak, sing, or draw generated a mental signal that got swallowed up by darkness in my awareness. . . before a new, strange, disconnected signal appeared from out of the darkness to incompetently move my mouth or hand.

I’ve never been able to sing on key, though when younger I brushed off my tin ear as stemming from a lack of practice or effort. But eventually I realized that even though I could hear the correct pronunciation of a word or the correct pitch of a note in my mind’s “ear,” when I tried to get my mouth to make the same sound that I “heard” my mouth refused.

Though no amount of training will enable me to sing on key, I realized I can whistle on key. The contrast is dramatic. First, I focus on a pitch in my mind. If I will that pitch to my lips to whistle, I can feel the mental signal go straight to my mouth and my freewill directly operates my lips and I can whistle a tune perfectly on key. But when I try to will the exact same pitch to the exact same mouth to sing, the signal gets lost and my freewill never reaches my lips. My lips wail a tone that is similar to but inevitably different from the pitch in my mind’s ear.

I greatly enjoy whistling, because it reminds me that even though much of my brain is ravaged, some parts still work great.

When I considered my inability to comprehend classroom lectures, I realized this deficit wasn’t limited to academic settings. I had trouble understanding anybody’s speech. In a moment of epiphany, I realized that I often got irritated at friends, including girlfriends, because it seemed they would jump into a conversation without properly “setting it up,” making it difficult for me to follow the story or argument. In reality, my interlocutors were (uh, usually) talking normally and fine. My autistic brain simply had trouble processing what they were saying.

This was why it was so difficult for me to learn foreign languages. I failed to learn French not because of a lack of effort, but because I have severe difficulty processing spoken dialogue. I can only comprehend spoken English with great effort and difficulty, so comprehending French was a whole new level of challenge. Russian is even more difficult for Americans to learn (different alphabet, different grammar, many different phonemes), but somehow—and believe me, this is one of the weirdest developments in my life—Russian came more naturally to me than any other language. Like I learned it long ago and it had fallen into disuse.

I failed at learning Spanish, I failed at learning French, I succeeded well enough at Russian to eventually live on my own in Moscow under Putin, and then I utterly and completely failed at learning Arabic.

Eventually, I noticed a connection between my constructional apraxia (can’t draw), dysphonia (can’t sing), and dysarthria (can’t pronounce). As mentioned, I can hear a pronunciation or pitch perfectly in my mind’s ear, but when I will a command to my mouth to make the sound, the conscious representation of the sound in my mind’s ear somehow becomes tainted and corroded before it arrives at my mouth. My mouth ends up freelancing and doing its own unpredictable thing. The same thing happens when I try to draw. I can see what I want to draw in my mind’s eye, clearly and sharply, but when I try to make my hand recreate the image in my mind, my hand does its own thing. The representation in my awareness never reaches my hand.

While I was tagging and evaluating my autism deficits, I also became aware of several socially provocative behaviors I regularly performed that I had been totally oblivious to. The iconic example was my socks.

Ever since my senior year of high school until my early 30s, I wore mismatching socks. They might be two different colors, two different patterns, even two different styles (one athletic, one dress). I wasn’t trying to make a statement. I wasn’t trying to draw attention to myself, though of course, that’s exactly what mismatched socks did. Wearing divergent socks simply felt normal and right. It’s hard to describe. I guess the same way non-autistic folks instinctively and unthinkingly feel socks should match, I instinctively and unthinkingly felt they should be different.

Over the years, plenty of people commented on my mismatched socks. I ignored it, or considered such commentary idle chitchat. But while shooting my sci fi feature film, my crew made enough cheerful teasing fuss over my mismatched socks that it finally penetrated my awareness, hey, if I’m going to wear mismatched socks, I’m going to draw attention.

While evaluating my dark gift deficits, I experienced a moment of cringing epiphany: holy cow! everybody thinks socks should match. People do not treat this as individual choice. Socks must match, or you’re weird and flagrant. I had worn mismatched socks to academic conferences, to cinematic meetings, to my tech jobs, to holiday family gatherings. Everybody must have assumed I was trying to be provocative or stand out. I wasn’t. I mostly wanted to be invisible.

Realizing that everyone probably thought I was trying to be the center of attention made me chagrined. It was like pulling down your pants at the doctor’s office and realizing there’s a giant ragged hole in your underwear you didn’t notice when you put it on in the morning.

In similar fashion I also realized I dismissed blue jeans for no good reason. Before I tagged my deficits, I didn’t own jeans and never wore them. Like mismatched socks, my disregard of denim wasn’t being contrarian. In my senior year of high school, I just decided that jeans didn’t look right or feel right. Jeans were just wrong, the way matching socks were wrong.

So in my early 30s I forced myself to start wearing matching socks and blue jeans and I still wear them today.

Step Three: Develop a Model of Your Dark Gift

Perhaps the most influential revelation arising from tagging my deficits and evaluating whether my deficits were adaptive or broken was the discovery that there were two physically distinct versions of “me.”

One was Real-Time Me.

The other was Real Me.

While evaluating my deficits, I came to understand that my deficits tended to exert their greatest detriment when I engaged with the world in real-time. Here and now, interactively. Worst of all was conversing in real-time, which snarled me in deficits:

• I had trouble with eye contact.

• I had trouble following what the other person was saying.

• I had trouble decrypting what the other person was intending (often by misreading non-verbal cues).

• I had trouble pronouncing words right.

• I had trouble with my speech volume.

• I had trouble saying the specific words I intended to say.

• I easily became introspective when contemplating whatever my interlocutor just said and stopped paying attention to the conversation.

• I was clueless when more than two people were conversing simultaneously.

In short, I was a disaster in real-time. After evaluating my deficits, I finally confronted the reality that I cannot trust myself in real-time. I don’t know what I might say. I don’t know if I’ll pronounce words or say the wrong words, I don’t know if I’m understanding what the other person wants, I don’t know if I’m asking too many questions or not enough questions. Most distressingly, I often can’t tell if the person received the message I was trying to communicate to them.

Real-time interaction was—is—stressful and unpredictable. Talking to someone face to face leads to conflict, embarrassment, and regret, no matter how hard I try to do things right.

There was also Real Me. The identity I consciously thought of as myself. Real Me only dominated when I was alone and didn’t need to interact in real-time. Real Me came out when I was engaged in solitary activities: reading a book, writing a screenplay, playing a video game, surfing the Internet, learning a new subject, walking in the woods, working in the garden, driving long distances. These activities I handled just fine. I could thoughtfully analyze what I needed to do, I could overcome problems, I could plan how to tackle difficult situations. I liked planning immensely: whenever I planned, I was Real Me instead of Real-Time Me.

Even more crucially, Real Me contained all my adaptive mental dynamics. Real Me could learn, develop, and grow, even if slowly. Over time, and with great effort, I was able to improve some of my impaired forms of thinking. Today I’m worlds better at grasping metaphors, implicit meaning, and non-verbal cues. When I turned fifty, I was finally able to process song lyrics. And these days I’m able to enjoy deep, lasting two-way emotional connection with many people.

Real-Time Me, in contrast, consisted of broken dynamics incapable of adapting or improving. I wasn’t ever going to get good at singing, drawing portraits, or navigating cocktail parties. The best I could hope to do was develop heuristics to limit the damage whenever I was forced to be Real-Time Me.

My recognition of the distinction between Real Me and Real-Time Me initiated big changes in my life still unfolding today. I began to reshape my life to reduce the exposure of Real-Time Me and increase the exposure of Real Me. In simple terms, I started looking for ways to avoid interacting with people, especially strangers. Real-Time Me is doomed to stir up problems and conflict, and therefore I take him off the table as often as I can. Real Me, on the other hand, doesn’t appear to have limits.

Plenty of me was broken, but plenty of me worked. After I tagged my deficits, I started focusing on the parts that worked.

In future articles, I’ll provide more guidance on how to tag your own deficits, including deficits that don’t appear on my list. We’re going to learn a lot about the brain to help you focus your efforts on identifying what’s wrong with your brain.

And let me emphasize one last crucial takeaway—your list of tagged deficits is NOT your autism. Your list of tagged deficits is necessary to help you understand your autism and pinpoint autism’s effects on your particular life. Some of the deficits on your list will be directly related to autism. Some will not.

For instance, my inability to process multiple people talking at the same time is a direct consequence of my autism. A direct consequence of the deficit in my Why module.

But my inability to sing, draw, and pronounce words is not from my autism. It’s an independent neural quirk, separate from what’s happening in my busted Why module. In future articles, we’ll see how it’s possible to draw such conclusions, which can help you set up a more fulfilling life.

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