Awkward Page 4
Sometimes awkward individuals’ unusual perspective can be funny or creative. There is some evidence that awkward people are more likely to see social outcomes as magical instead of predictable. Because they are not immediately drawn to social information, they pick up on the flow of social events midstream. This is why people sometimes describe the awkward as having a childlike wonder, a naive view of cause and effect in social situations that most adults find predictable.
While socially skilled people have an intuitive sense of social situations, awkward people have to be deliberate to understand other people’s intentions and figure out the appropriate social response. During my graduate training, this distinction between intuitive versus deliberate, labored understanding was clearly impressed upon me by one of my counseling clients. The client was a brilliant doctoral student in chemical engineering who was very socially awkward. He told me about his mishandling of an encounter with a romantic interest and I followed up with a naive and poorly framed question: “Why do you think you have these lapses in your attention to social expectations?” He retorted, “Why do you think you have lapses in your attention to advanced organic chemistry?” It was an incisive and fair point.
When I was twelve years old, my milk-pouring accidents dramatically decreased as the result of an observation from one of my aunts. She noticed that I never looked at my glass. While my mother’s gaze and everyone else’s attention were intently focused on the glass, as if trying to telepathically will the glass not to topple over, my spotlighted attention were fixated off center, on the carton of milk I held in my hands.
All I could think about was my narrow goal of getting the milk out of the carton and into the glass as soon as possible. I did not understand the relationship between the carton and the glass because I was so fixated on the carton and the outcome while not considering the process. Just like I could become so narrowly fixated on eating dinner or playing baseball that I lost sight of the fact that dinner is a social time or that the point of playing games as a kid is to enjoy the company of others.
We will see from behavioral genetic and brain-imaging research that awkward individuals’ narrow aperture of attention is dispositional, powered by neurological hardware that is as heritable as one’s body weight or running speed. The trade-off for awkward people is this: their spotlighted attention makes it harder for them to see social expectations that most people easily recognize, but awkward people also get to see whatever falls into their spotlight with brilliant detail. It’s easy for awkward people to become fully absorbed in their spotlighted area of interest and to feel deeply gratified by seeing things in these areas with unique clarity. There is a tremendous upside that can come from a spotlighted view of the world.
The trick for awkward people is learning how to adjust their aperture and shift their focus to areas of life that fall outside the natural set point for their spotlighted attention. Solving the mystery of how to be socially effective and find the belonging they need takes deliberate effort and a willingness to shift their spotlighted focus to social considerations. The good news is that people can experience significant improvements socially when they turn their obsessive focus on dissecting the components of social interaction and then integrating those components into a methodically constructed understanding of and approach to social life, even if that means that they have to move their spotlight to methodically master three social expectations at a time.
In the chapters to come, the stories of social awkwardness are sometimes amusing, at other times heartbreaking, but ultimately they are uplifting tales and insights about how to embrace your quirks and harness your remarkable potential.
2
IS THERE ANYTHING WRONG WITH BEING AWKWARD?
The summer before seventh grade, I began to formulate a strategy for social success in junior high school. I knew that the complexity of the seventh-grade social scene was going to challenge my social skills and this kicked my mind into a proactive contemplation about how to deal with the forthcoming challenges. Like most kids, I worried about what to wear, who I would sit with at lunch, and what it would be like to go to my first dance. Although these were normal social concerns, the way I thought about preparing for these situations was unusual and my private deliberations resulted in the conclusion that my social success would rely upon my ability to convey a more mature and professional Ty Tashiro.
I am not sure why I believed that the road to junior high social success would be paved with maturity and professionalism. I think there may have been two factors that led to this conclusion. I probably overgeneralized my parents’ forewarnings about the need to make mature decisions about saying no to drugs, alcohol, and other vices, and my favorite television character was Alex P. Keaton from Family Ties, who was a teenage boy who dressed and acted like a forty-year-old stockbroker.
My blanket philosophy that an adultlike approach would be my best bet led to a number of misguided tactical decisions. When the first day of school arrived, I chose an outfit that included a starched baby-blue oxford, a crisp pair of pleated khaki pants, and a pair of extra-large, square silver glasses that looked like the bifocals my grandparents’ friends wore. If I were a sixty-year-old accountant, I would have looked dashing.
Like many awkward kids, I was private, even aloof, and that usually meant I shared little about my thought processes with my parents or anyone else, for that matter. I suspect that when my parents saw my outfit, their minds raced to figure out whether to fight this battle over my stylistic choices. Parents have to be careful about micromanaging their kids, and awkward kids can be particularly stubborn about being micromanaged. There was technically nothing scandalous about my outfit and I was so close to falling in line with the preppy fashion expectations of the early eighties. If I had left my shirt unstarched and untucked I might have been all right, but these small stylistic deviations along with my bifocal-like glasses made things awkward.
In her brown Oldsmobile station wagon, my mom drove me to Longs Peak Junior High for my first day of school. As we crept through the circular driveway at school, the discrepancy between my fashion choices for the day and those of my new classmates became clear. My peers wore tattered black jeans that were rolled into a pleated cuff above their ankles, and black T-shirts advertising badass bands who sang about Satan and drinking the blood of bats. They wore gold-framed aviator sunglasses that Tom Cruise wore playing with his boys in Top Gun. As my mother and I pulled up to the entrance of the building and took in the edgy styles, animated discussions, and large scale of this bustling social scene, there was a collective gasp in the station wagon.
As I opened the car door, I suddenly wanted the superpower of invisibility. I tried to minimize my lanky five-nine frame as I stood up and privately asked some important questions for the first time. Who would I talk to? Why were my glasses so large? Why had none of the other students worn starched oxfords? My ruminations were interrupted when I heard my name called by a group of boys I had known in elementary school. Ed Seemers, Will Hartford, and Sam Hassan were polite, studious, salt-of-the-earth boys who were huddled by the flagpole. I was relieved to join their huddle. We were not cool by any stretch of the imagination, but we were all relieved not to appear as lone wolves.
Figure 2.1 My seventh-grade school photo
After a few days, our band of misfits realized that there was no recess-like activity in junior high. No one engaged in tag, king of the mountain, or other games that had been popular in the sixth grade. After discussing this odd turn of events, we reached consensus that junior high culture sucked. People stood around and talked about trends like a new cable channel called MTV or the artistry of Michael Jackson’s Thriller album, which was no way to spend recess-like time. Will Hartford, who was the alpha male of our group by virtue of his lumberjack size, declared that we would play even if everyone else thought they were too cool to play at school. After some deliberation, we decided to go with one of our playtime activities from sixth grade, reenactments o
f wrestling matches from the World Wide Wrestling Federation.
A patch of grass on the south end of the soccer field would make the perfect wrestling ring. The goalie box could be the boundary and the chain-link fence that bordered the south side of the box could be used like the ropes of a boxing ring. Hartford declared that he would play Hulk Hogan, Seemers chose Randy “Macho Man” Savage, and Hassan selected the Iron Sheik. In keeping with the theme of semi-offensive racial stereotypes, I chose to portray Mr. Fuji, the lone Japanese wrestler in the federation.
There was an improv-like quality to the wrestling that Friday, an unspoken understanding that each wrestler’s turn needed to propel the action toward a larger narrative. For example, it was an unspoken expectation that you should let your opponent keep you in a choke hold for about eight seconds, before raking their face with your fingertips, which was usually followed by a body slam. When the improv became a bit stale, one could always rely upon the instant drama created by swinging an opponent into the fence. The fence bounce was great theater because there was something pleasing about the rhythm of swinging an opponent into the middle of the fence, watching him bounce back in double time, and then giving him a punctuated stop as you pretended to clothesline him with your outstretched arm.
At some point during this raucous theater, I paused for a moment to wipe the sweat from my brow and I pushed my silver eyeglasses up my slight nose. Then I had a sharp revelation. None of the other seventh graders was joining us, which I guess was to be expected. In fact, everyone else stood a safe distance from our wrestling debacle, apparently busy making better social decisions. A few of them watched us with a mixture of fascination and horror. As this realization dawned on me, I felt my stomach sink and a panic gripped my chest. I realized that role-playing the WWWF was so sixth grade.
Precisely at this moment of insight, Hulk Hogan placed his tight grip onto Mr. Fuji’s forearm. He began to swing me around like an Olympian getting ready to do the hammer throw. He was building momentum to bounce me off the chain-link fence and then deliver a flying body slam. As Hogan spun Fuji around with increasing speed, the centripetal force concentrated my anticipatory dread about the social ramifications from the hundreds of students who were not behaving like they were still in elementary school. I did not have to suffer this for long. When Hogan released Fuji from his orbit, he made a slight miscalculation while plotting the trajectory, a small error that sent Fuji forehead first into one of the steel fence posts.
When I regained consciousness I saw a blurry image of people gathering around me. I began to feel around the grass for my dislodged glasses, and when I could not locate them, my hands began to move with a frenetic urgency. Then, a large man who looked like an elderly, cardigan-wearing version of the WWWF’s Andre the Giant burst through the circle forming around me. Coach Stenson stutter-stepped to a halt beside me and his arthritic legs creaked as he knelt down. He looked at me for a moment through the bottom of his large, silver bifocals. Then, he picked up my own large silver glasses, and gently set them back on my face.
Coach Stenson was the varsity football coach and a venerated patriarch around school. We had never spoken before my WWWF mishap, but he knew my father and had probably been keeping an eye on me from afar. Coach Stenson barked at the crowd around me, “Nothing to see here!” Once the crowd had dispersed and I managed to sit up, he firmly gripped my shoulder, looked me in the eye, and in a measured tone said, “Son, you have got to slow down. You have got to look around. And you need to figure this thing out before you dig yourself into a hole. Now go to the nurse. You’re probably concussed.”
In the nurse’s office, I sat on the green vinyl couch with an ice pack over the contusion on my forehead. While the nurse asked me my name, where I lived, and a few other concussion-protocol questions, my mind furiously searched for the answer to another question: How could I not see that wrestling reenactments were a bad idea?
Strange and Intense
HANS ASPERGER WAS a quiet boy. Peers described him as “remote” and biographers note that he was generally aloof. He was a boy who enjoyed the solitary time spent delving into his nonsocial interests rather than the messy business of social interactions. Although he was a clumsy child, Hans frequently enjoyed long hikes by himself in the Austrian mountains. He possessed precocious linguistic abilities and as a child was obsessed with the writings of Franz Grillparzer, an Austrian poet known for his nihilistic poems about political oppression and death. One of the few instances when Hans shared his unusual interests was when he enthusiastically recited Grillparzer’s morbid poetry to his bewildered grade-school classmates.
Hans Asperger’s unusual social demeanor and unusual obsession with language made it hard for him to make friends as a child and he would continue to have trouble connecting with others throughout adulthood. Although he must have read voraciously as a prolific psychiatric researcher, Asperger spent much of his leisure time reading classic literature and books about the humanities. One of his daughters described him as removed from family life and his obsession with reciting long quotes to his family as “strange and intense.”
In 1944, Asperger published his most notable psychiatric paper, a case study about four boys whose symptoms included low empathy, difficulty maintaining eye contact, and an obsessive, narrow focus on peculiar interests. Asperger coined the term “autistic psychopaths” to describe these boys. Meanwhile, Leon Kanner from Johns Hopkins University had made similar observations he published in a 1943 case study of eleven boys Kanner described as abnormally withdrawn and characterized by unusually repetitive behavioral rituals.
“Autism” is a stark term, derived from the Greek word autos, which means “self.” It’s an image of the self that is disembodied from other people who are engaged in social activity. Asperger and Kanner described autistic psychopaths with the same triad of symptoms: (1) a lack of interest in social activity, (2) a lack of empathy, and (3) a rigid insistence on sameness. In 1980, this triad of symptoms would be the foundation for the American Psychiatric Association’s introduction of a formal autism diagnosis in the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III) and the next edition of the manual (DSM-IV) added Asperger’s syndrome.
Both autism and Asperger’s syndrome were characterized by social skill and communication deficits that included symptoms such as trouble with back-and-forth interactions, problems comprehending nonverbal behavior, and difficulty understanding and forming relationships. Repetitive behaviors included things like inflexible routines, under- or over reactivity to sight, sounds, or touch, and extremely narrow and intense interests.
The advent of autism as a formal diagnosis likely influenced a number of important breakthroughs in how we diagnose and treat autism. A formal autism diagnosis also opens access to school accommodations, social services, and insurance reimbursements for mental health services that are important for autistic individuals dealing with a serious and potentially debilitating condition. But it’s important to be careful about diagnoses.
One way that clinicians exert caution while trying to make a diagnosis is through use of something called the rule of five. Clinicians usually ask patients about what seems to be troubling them. As they describe their symptoms, clinicians are taught to begin generating a list of the five most probable diagnoses based on their symptoms. The imperative to generate an overly inclusive list of possible explanations is a shortcut that helps clinicians avoid selecting the first explanation that pops into their heads. It reminds them to consider both diagnostic and non-diagnosable explanations for symptoms. Some symptoms may indicate a serious condition or just that someone has a few unusual quirks.
It’s hard not to speculate about whether Hans Asperger would have qualified for his namesake diagnosis. I also wonder whether Asperger recognized parts of himself in the four boys from his original case study. Their abnormal social behaviors, difficulty communicating with others, and obsessive interests could have easily been used
to describe Asperger.
Although Asperger had symptoms that point to an Asperger’s syndrome diagnosis, there was also evidence that would argue against an autism diagnosis. Most descriptions of DSM disorders, including autism, require that the symptoms have a significant and adverse impact on patients’ lives. Clients need to experience significant career, interpersonal, or legal troubles as a result of their symptoms to receive a formal diagnosis. Asperger achieved an illustrious academic career, stayed out of jail, married, and formed relationships with some of his colleagues. So it’s questionable whether he would have qualified for the diagnosis that bore his name or if he would be better described as something else.
Is Awkwardness on the Spectrum?
I WAS AWARE from the pamphlets at the pediatrician’s office and my Judy Blume books that junior high is an awkward time for everyone, but I had a sense I was definitely at the high end of the junior high awkwardness continuum. I knew that Coach Stenson was right and I appreciated that he put me straight. If he followed the conventional wisdom at the time, then his primary objective would have been to make sure I left the situation feeling good about myself. The 1980s self-esteem movement, popularized through a wave of self-help books and talk show gurus, spread the belief that raising self-esteem would cause kids to get better grades, stay drug free, or feel less lonely. However, if he and other influential adults had simply placed a psychological Band-Aid over my injured self-esteem, they would have masked a more fundamental problem. Even before my visit to the nurse’s office, I had a sense that I did not need to work on my self-esteem, I needed to develop social skills and learn how to channel my unusual interests.