Mocking the Learning Disabled

Several times, I've seen a video on Facebook making fun of a female driver who repeatedly parks with the wrong side of her vehicle facing the gas pump until she finally gets it right. On YouTube, the video is titled "Stupid woman at gas station," and many comments on both YouTube and Facebook derisively echo the YouTube title.

But I don't feel like laughing. To me, the video appears to be a textbook depiction of nonverbal learning disorder, and this is a problem with which I have a frustrating lifetime of firsthand experience. Here is the comment I posted to Facebook and YouTube about it, and I hope some people take it to head and heart:

I don't laugh at videos like this, because I empathize with the driver. Like me, she may well have NLD--nonverbal learning disability--and, consequently, great difficulty seeing in her mind's eye how to get the proper side of her vehicle to face the gas pump. And the frustration she undoubtedly feels over her mistakes coupled with anxiety that people might be watching her struggle and laughing at her might well inhibit her reasoning faculties to the extent that she keeps impulsively repeating her mistakes instead of finding some way or other of collecting herself so that she can figure out how to do what she needs to do. She could be very intelligent in other ways. And even if she's not, I wish we would have more empathy and compassion for people who struggle to do things that we are fortunate not to struggle with.

Autism's Paradox

"You've never been in my body. I wish for one day you could be in my body."

--Autistic girl Carly's typed message to her father

A little boy in my family is autistic. I knew this before his parents, grandparents, and even doctors knew it or, at least, were willing to concede it. Perhaps this is because "it takes one to know one." That is, when I was a little boy myself, my mother thought I was autistic because of the weird ways I would withdraw from the world outside and immerse myself in an inner world of my own. And I think it's fair to say that I haven't completely outgrown this condition even to this late day. I have never been "normal," and, at almost 58 years of age, I think it's more than reasonable to say that I never will be.

Yet, at least I was always able to express myself well, perhaps uncommonly so, with spoken and, later, written language. If I've been endowed with any cognitive gifts whatsoever, however modest they may be, it's the gift of my linguistic ability. At least this is true of my English. I don't speak any other languages and have a devil of a time whenever I try to learn them. My greatest fear, at least for this life, is what would happen to me if I lost this gift to some brain-crippling condition and became cognitively impaired in every way instead of in every way but verbally the way I am now.

But what would it be like if I had never grown enough out of my autistic or autistic-like immersion in myself to be able to express myself to others or manage the other demands of everyday life well enough to be able to live with any independence at all? What would my life be like? How happy could I be locked inside myself, and how would I experience the world?

This remarkable video may provide some inkling of how an autistic person experiences the world in that she is able, with stunning eloquence, to communicate that experience, by typing on a computer, in a way that she could never convey by any other means. To look at her hand-flapping, incessant fidgeting, paroxysmic shouting, and other stereotypically autistic behaviors, you'd think there was nothing beyond the most rudimentary, animalistic consciousness going on between her ears.

But when you read her typed words on a computer monitor, you are overwhelmed with the realization that autistic people can be extremely intelligent and incredibly aware of what's going on around and inside them, and they know full well how strangely they're acting, but they just can't stop themselves. As the girl in the video explains, she does the strange things she does "to drown out all the sensory input that overloads us all at once. We create output to block out input."

Isn't it ironic that autistic people sometimes look as though they're almost unaware of the outside world precisely because, in a sense, they're TOO aware of it?

New Job

Later this morning, I begin training for a new job as telephone operator for a local health care system. My supervisor assures me that the job is "a piece of cake," and for him it probably is. It remains to be seen what it will be for me. I have a book written by, for, and about people with nonverbal learning disorder and Asperger syndrome that says we shouldn't be telephone operators. I hope it's wrong about me and this particular job.

Time will tell.

Thank You, Salon

I was living in Alice's Wonderland -- if Alice was a little kid lost in a suburban shopping mall, petrified by the knowledge that she will never be able to find her way back home. I never outgrew that feeling of constant disorientation. Rather, it never outgrew me.
--Sloane Crosley

There are times when I contemplate canceling my longtime subscription to Salon. It's not that I don't like this online cultural magazine or that I want to eliminate it from my life. It's just that there is so much to read and do these days, with more and more on the horizon, that I wonder if I'll be getting my money's worth by keeping it. Then I stumble onto articles like the one I read today and all doubt is erased. I'm keeping my subscription.

The article is titled Lost in Space and is about one woman's constant struggle with what she calls "spatial disability" and others call nonverbal learning disorder or some such thing. Whatever it's called, she seems to have a pretty severe case of it, and so do I. I've made references to this in the past, but I've tried to turn this blog into less of a pity party than into something more upbeat.

Yet, I want to point out, to anyone who's interested, that the disorder in question is more prevalent than many might realize and that it can have a profound impact on people's lives. I know it has impacted mine to an almost devastating degree. Fortunately, I'm getting some help with it. But if I had gotten that help decades ago instead of now, I might have accomplished far more and suffered far less than I have. I hope and pray that every child afflicted with some variant of this disorder or with any other learning difficulty receives the help he needs as soon as possible so that he might live as productive and happy a life as possible instead of floundering in failure, frustration, and a crippling sense of inadequacy.

After reading the article, I posted the following letter to Salon:

I'm extremely grateful for Sloane Crosley's article and for all of the accompanying letters from readers who share some type or degree of this disability or know someone who does. For while I wouldn't wish nonverbal learning disability on anyone, it's comforting to know that I'm not alone with this problem. And believe me, it HAS been a problem in my life. So much so, in fact, that I have been profoundly crippled by it.

As a child, I quickly realized that I couldn't find my way around, follow or give directions or instructions, assemble models or fix my bicycle, learn to play chess or numerous other games, or do countless other things that came easily to my peers. In junior high, shop class was torture. In high school, I gave up a promising future in basketball, the sport my life had revolved around and that had provided me with just about my only sense of capability and competence, because I couldn't learn the drills or plays and endure the unending frustration and humiliation of team practices. All through school, I took aptitude tests with resulting graphical profiles of towering verbal peaks next to gaping nonverbal or visual-spatial valleys. I came to unshakably believe that I was stupid in every way that mattered, so I hid from the world and shied away from taking on challenges, became a proverbially "perpetual student" in college because I believed that I lacked the ability to turn any major into worldly success, and, afterwards, wrapped myself in an adolescent cocoon of homebound television, books, the Internet, and aimlessness rather than apply for jobs or engage in other activities I was certain I couldn't do or socialize and face the dreaded, "What do you do?" question.

And since I've been married, I've eschewed fatherhood because I don't want to be a hapless provider and teacher for a child, I fear traveling to new places and getting lost and overwhelmed by their unfamiliar complexity even though my wife is bored to tears staying home so much, I can't repair anything around our house or offer any suggestions or assistance for home improvement projects, and I hate our trips to Home Depot because I feel utterly and completely out of my element and distressingly unmanly there. At 54 years of age, I have accomplished virtually nothing worthwhile, am a dismally inept husband, and am seeking entry-level work in what seems to be that impossibly rare field that requires virtually no nonverbal ability or the need to learn an even moderately complicated set of procedures.

I marvel at how others here, some with what sound like even larger cognitive deficits than mine, have managed to accomplish so much more than I have. For my part, I have tried to explain my situation to those who need, or I need, to know about it. And I'm receiving help from the state Department of Rehabilitation and from a clinical psychologist specializing in neuropsychology who has diagnosed me as having mutually reinforcing nonverbal learning disorder and ADD. I would like to think I'm making progress, and I feel more hopeful than I have in the longest time that I can still do something with my life. But it has been and continues to be very difficult. I'm a poster boy for how psychologically as well as intellectually disabling this condition can be and how vitally important it is to get help as soon as possible for children plagued by it before it does to them what it has done to me.

And then I followed one of Salon's links to this blog entry by a wonderful writer named Laurie Edwards that eloquently describes her lifelong struggle with this problem. Here is a quote from that entry:

Similar to the author’s experience, I got tested for the disability when the humongous gap between my verbal and non-verbal reasoning standardized test scores was too big to ignore any longer. I could read before I was three, I read on an eighth-grade level when I was five, and used my photographic memory to learn all the answers on every card in Trivial Pursuit so I could beat my older brothers that same year.

Yet when the educational psychologist asked a 14-year-old me to put together a basic 7-piece puzzle of the human face in three minutes, I could not do it.

I know what a face looks like. I know seven pieces—a mouth, a nose, two eyes, etc—is not a hard puzzle. So why, in 180 painstaking seconds, couldn’t I put even two pieces together? Or match up a tree to its shadow, or any of the other basic spatial things most people can do?

Thank you Salon, Sloane Crosley, and Laurie Edwards for helping me to realize that I am not as freakishly defective as I used to believe and that one can still make a decent life for oneself despite this disability.