978-1572305441

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Sharon 71
painfully aware of her difference from other children, and confused
about why nobody liked her. At one point she realized that she was trying
so hard for people to like her that she was making a fool of herself.
One time she tried to tell a funny story, but somebody would always interrupt
her. She would start again, and again be interrupted. This went
on for some time—she might try to tell the story ten or eleven times,
not realizing that nobody wanted to hear it. The other girls were just
egging her on. But she only realized this as she lay in bed at night going
over the day’s social fiascoes. Then she would become mortified by the
experience. It was hard for her to start a social interaction and even
harder to alter her behavior once she got going. She would get stuck in
a particular way of responding and could not use the feedback from her
peers to be more socially adept. She could not learn the rules of the social
game, which were becoming more complex with each passing year.
It was clear to me that these social difficulties were indeed longstanding
and were present from an early age. Sharon’s problems were
clearly of a cognitive nature; they did not fluctuate with her mood. She
was not depressed; no mood disorder was clouding her ability to evaluate
accurately social interactions. Admittedly, she was anxious in social
situations, but the difficulties ran deeper than that. It sounded like a
complex cognitive problem, one that was embedded in the spontaneous
matrix of peer interactions. If she thought about it, she knew what to do.
It was at the level of social intuition, at a preconscious level, that Sharon
was having difficulty with making friends. If it were a simple matter of
logic, she would have had no trouble. But her powers of logic were not
available to her on the schoolyard. The to and fro of social intercourse
was too fast for such leisurely contemplation. She did not feel the complex
emotions of guilt, humiliation, and embarrassment in the schoolyard
when the event occurred, when she was teased or rejected. It was
only in bed at night, under the excruciating microscope of her logic,
that she felt these emotions, when she realized with the blinding clarity
of reason that she had been made a fool of in front of the very people
she wanted to impress most.
There were also other stories from her experiences as a child that
were analogous to the experiences of children with ASD and that were
consistent with the third element of the autistic triad, the preference for
repetitive, stereotyped activities with a high sensory or physical component.
Sharon’s earliest and most vivid memories are of objects, fascinating
in their exquisite visual detail: the patterns in a rug and in her
mother’s paisley skirt, the sunlight falling on the linoleum floor of her