Internet searches only turned up more of the same, and I began to realize that I was looking at a dangerous mass hysteria. Their scope was not limited to children but also encompassed autistic adults, who were commonly described as freakish, incapable, barely human, and unsupportable burdens on society. Those sensational articles hadn’t gone away, but instead were showing up more often. By late 2003, the picture had grown clear enough that my internal alarm bells were sounding. The children described in those stories didn’t strike me as all that odd anyway.įar down in my subconscious mind, though, a few dots started to connect. After all, raising quirky children was certainly nothing new in the history of parenting. At first, I paid very little attention to that narrative, dismissing it as a ridiculous pop-psychology fad that couldn’t last long. The stories all followed the same general pattern of describing children who behaved in peculiar ways, thus supposedly causing their parents to lead lives of intolerable misery. I had not seen that term before and did not identify with it.
Sometime toward the end of 2002, I began to notice that there were sensational stories cropping up in the mainstream media about “Asperger syndrome,” a now-outdated term that meant autism without a speech delay. People sometimes told me that my speech sounded a bit odd, which I attributed to living in different parts of the country as a child and getting my regional accents muddled.
I was an early reader, while others in my extended family had been slow to speak, and I simply took it for granted that everyone developed at their own natural pace. I knew that the fact I’d learned to read and talk at about the same time was unusual, but I didn’t understand what relevance it might have in adult life. Although I had seen the word used in reference to me as a child, I thought it simply had to do with early childhood language development. The topic of autism, along with society’s views of it, was not on my radar at that point in time.
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