Survival of the Fittest...

''Autistic children are often tormented and rejected by their class-mates simply because they are different and stand out from the crowd. Thus, in the playground or on the way to school one can often see an autistic child at the centre of a jeering horde of little urchins. The child himself may be hitting out in blind fury or crying helplessly. In either case he is defenceless.'' (Hans Asperger, 1944).

On Sunday afternoon, before I had to shoot off, I had a brief chat with a friend over a cup of tea about ''building confidence'' and being able to defend oneself against abuse. This is an interesting subject and explores some of the most (to me) incomprehensible aspects of the human mind - how one person is singled out as an ''easy target'' by some innate ''instinct,'' and another is left alone in the same way. I have spoken to my mother, wise with the wisdom of the world according to her fashion, about this, and she says that we each of us exhibit certain signals, manifested by our body language, posture, other subtle nuances and gestures etc. By these signals, we make personal judgements about whether this person is a weakling, that person is not to be messed with. If you are extrovert, sit and stand upright, sporty, popular etc, you are naturally going to be ''respected'' by your peers in the playground (so far as school children understand ''respect'' that is); if you are shy, weak, slouch, sit with your arms folded you are naturally going to be the easy target. This attitude of mind seems to manifest a, what I shall call, ''survival of the fittest'' mentality; and my devoting a blog post to this subject at all betokens that on the one hand I consider it to be inherently flawed, and on the other that I recognise that it is, all the same and in spite of all endeavours to remedy it, not going to change - until the Lord comes and the meek come into their own.

As a child, I never had the ''innate confidence'' about which I have just spoken. Moreover, as a child with Asperger Syndrome, I was manifestly different from my peers in many ways. I was more intelligent than most of them (and therefore simply attracted the scorn of the ignorant and the markedly stupid); I was shy and introvert, preferring the quietude of my own thoughts and the genius of the written word to the company of others (although I did have a small group of friends); I also made a point of not following the latest fashions or fads, which to me were just silly transient things. When I was in Primary School, I had cultivated a sense of detachment from people, so by the time I got into Secondary School, I was not really ''used'' to people much, so my dealings with them, which were often more frequent than I had time or interest for, were often halting and uncomfortable. Sometimes, mid-sentence, I would just get bored and walk away. This was my way of saying ''I am tired,'' or ''I find your gestures bewildering or objectionable,'' or ''I am bored with you and it won't be good until you're out of my presence.'' In Primary School, certainly before I was taken in by the headmaster about my behaviour towards the other children, I would probably have told them to go away, or shut up; but apparently this was inappropriate. Nobody thought to tell me that actions, sometimes moreso than words, could be just as inappropriate. These are just a few examples though.

It's all very well and good to talk about one's body language and other subtle nuances of manner, it's quite another to explore why they affect people the way they do. In this area of human psychology, seeing things through the lenses of a very peculiar perception, I am confessedly left altogether bewildered. For one of the characteristics of Asperger Syndrome is the impaired ability to read body language, social cues etc, which are said to make up as much as 93% of human communication - for someone with severe Classic Autism, they might as well be blind and deaf. I expect (being no expert or authority of course - just someone who lives with Asperger Syndrome day after day, if that counts for anything) that for this reason, as well as having impaired Theory of Mind abilities (which are, of course, related), people with Asperger Syndrome cannot fully understand how to act around people. And this is not something you can read about in some hypothetical manual of human behaviour, or learn by some other means like a language or the rudiments of some interesting subject. And what happens? In practice, this means that children and adults with Asperger Syndrome come across as very halting, uncomfortable individuals - trying to constantly work out what to say, and when, what to do, and how to do it. For me, as someone on the ''milder'' end of the Spectrum (interestingly, I was not when I was younger, but my mother rejected psychological help and other financial grants when I was very little and was just very strict with me, trying to ''correct'' my behaviour all the time), I developed a not-very-effective remedy to this. For years, I observed the interactions of other people and memorised them by rote, in the hope that when the occasion arose, I could apply them to new situations - like an actor revising a script and then acting it out, as it were (in fact, on the occasions when my relatives caught me ''talking to myself'' I was in fact revising the best way to say something). But this simply does not always work. I expect neuro-typical people just instinctively know what a raised eyebrow means, or how to read and understand an ambiguous facial expression, or (and this often thwarts me) what people are saying when they mouth things.

I hated school, at both Primary and Secondary levels. I had nothing but contempt and scorn for most of the teachers, most of the pupils, all of the work, the school grounds and the timetable. I spoke to an 11 year old boy about this recently, and he seemed surprised, since I ''know so much.'' Trying to get him to understand that one can be naturally intelligent and still despise a system that stunted my intellectual growth was futile. Although a doctor had speculated as far back as 1993 that I had Asperger Syndrome, I received no diagnosis until last year, and so to my teachers at school (except, perhaps, one or two astute ones - although no one ever said anything) I expect that I must have been just that slightly odd, clearly bright but lazy, awkward and bitterly angry boy. Alas, though, I am aware that this post is already quite long, so if what is intended as the central topic of this post is to be reached within a manageable space, a lot of context and elaboration must be left unsaid (although I have devoted most of it already to the establishment of context). Questions and Answers in the Comment box please.

All the popular children at school seemed to be good at PE (which to me just said it all really; they had no capacity for real learning). On the rare occasions that I turned up for PE, I was often subjected to teasing by teachers and pupils alike on account of my lack of physical strength and force (what use are attempts at improving social skills if in cases such as this one is consistently, maliciously and deliberately rejected by people?); I would almost certainly be picked last to form a team for some pointless exercise (this was not always the case - there were people more weak and pathetic than I - but these sad cases didn't even have brilliant minds to compensate for this so they were doubly worse off - I did pity them though) etc, etc, you probably know the situation already. Usually my response to teasing was to walk back to school and sit in the Library; if one teacher (the one who especially hated me, and knew how to wind me up) called me ''stupid'' (to me, a significant personal insult, since I valued intellectual ability above all things, and certainly as one of my strengths) I would go into a fit of rage and be sent to the ''behavioural management centre,'' where I would listen to a well-meaning but clearly unimaginative woman with no personality drone on about adherence to the rules etc. Rules...school rules ought to have been logical. Clearly most of them were not, and so I disobeyed them. I adhered to rules about the uniform and other such things, being quiet in-between lessons, going straight to them etc, but other rules such as having to attend PE lessons were not logical and were therefore fit to be ignored.

Anyway, as is my wont, I have been distracted and I am bored with writing this now (as you probably are with reading it). The point of this post is this: why did school children and PE teachers value physical powess and popularity over intelligence? Why did school children scorn someone who was intelligent, label him ''geek'' or ''nerd'' or ''weirdo,'' and prefer someone manifestly ignorant but good at PE? To me, such children were stupid, unoriginal and unimaginative, slaves to fashion etc. It still goes on; I am still rejected by people in all walks of life, and the hurtful thing is that some of these people are people for whom I have deep personal affection, desiring only their ''rehabilitation'' (by which I mean, conformity to my own world view).

This post has been appallingly written and hardly merits posting (I am never quite satisfied with posts of this sort, they are always not-quite-finished, fall short of making a point etc). So the cogent question is: which will fair better on the Day of Judgement, the popular boy or the weaker intelligent boy eaten up with bitterness?