Why I have embraced my autism

I know the title of this post may seem awkward but allow me to explain: my regular readers of my blog will know that I love my older sister, we're very close as siblings and she is my rock. I think she's very wise and good with people, but she did this one thing recently that made me do a double take. I know where she's coming from but I wanted to challenge her reaction to something I said about myself. Now I gladly wear the label autistic - it started when my nephew got his diagnosis when he was an infant and then my mother claimed, "no one on our side of the family is autistic!" I rolled my eyes and thought, yeah right. My parents are not just autistic, oh no. They are super autistic, they take Asperger's syndrome to the extreme and in the past I just thought that they were socially awkward or stupid - but now we have a word for it and it makes complete sense. I look back at my past, growing up in an autistic family and realized that yeah, I am autistic too and had Asperger's syndrome. The only difference is that in those days, people like me went undiagnosed and we were just labeled socially awkward or weird. I then found myself in some pretty harsh environments during NS and was in a sink-or-swim situation, that forced me to improve my social skills in order to survive NS. I would describe myself as a well-adjusted adult who is acutely aware of my autism and goes out of my way to compensate for it.

So when I told my sister that I grew up autistic too, her reaction was, "no lah, you were not autistic." My mother joined in and said that I was very good in school, that I always had excellent results, so I couldn't possibly have been autistic since I was smart. I rolled my eyes: did she equate autism with being stupid? Now allow me to analyze their reaction: firstly, for my sister, undoubtedly there's a lot of social stigma still with being associated with being autistic - it is a disability, it comes with a lot of negative traits and if I managed to somehow grow up without having been associated with autism, why bother embracing it now? What good would a diagnosis do me now, even if that was the case? And my mother's reaction is pretty much your typical Singaporean parent: you know, the child can be totally messed up, bullied at school, suicidal, all kinds of mental health issues but as long as your grades don't suffer than things can't be that bad. My mother had no understanding of what mental health issues meant - which is so ironic given that she has a list of mental health problems as long as my arm, so if she can't even recognize what is happening to her, how can begin to understand what it was like for me to grow up autistic? Thus she defaulted to the classic litmus test for Singaporean parents: are you doing well at school? Are your results decent? Good, then you must be alright then: whatever it is, it can't be that bad.

I am sure many of you must have recently watched the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics but how many of you watched the 2018 Winter Paralympics? I was very inspired by the story of the blind skiers at the Paralympics - skiing is one of my favourite sports. I have skied a few times in the last six months: in New Zealand, England, Spain, Finland and Germany. I watch these blind skiers bomb down the slopes a lot faster than I can and I realize - they're doing it all without seeing much at all. Some of them can see very little, others are completely blind. It is hard enough to ski down those black runs with full vision, but to do it without sight? Sometimes, I encounter very foggy conditions which reduces my visibility to nearly zero (that did happen in Spain this year) and that's when I am 'blind skiing' because I can't see a thing in front of me. I am very much dependent on seeing what lies ahead of me because you need to know what you need to do with your legs in order to adapt to the steepness of the pistes and of course, avoid obstacles. No matter how careful I am, I always fall a lot when I am 'blind skiing' in those foggy conditions and that just makes me realize just how incredible those blind skiers are. So, I invite you to watch the Youtube video below of Menna Fitzpatrick skiing at the Paralympics.

Menna is an awesome skier no doubt, but if you realize she is doing it without seeing much at all, then it puts her skiing skills in a whole new perspective. Now, what has blind skiing got to do with my autism, you may wonder? Let's look at what I am doing for a living: sales. This is probably the last thing someone with autism can do - you need to express empathy with your customers, understand their needs, listen carefully to them and develop great relationships with strangers. That's the kind of thing that normal people find challenging already, but for people with autism and especially Asperger's syndrome, that's the hardest thing for them to do. Sales has little to do with product knowledge and far more to do with understanding your customer - you don't make a sale by bombarding the customer with details of the product. Typically, you'd expect people with autism and Asperger's syndrome to become quite reclusive and work in IT, where they can hide behind a computer all day without having to interact with a real human being. But the fact is, the same way blind people can overcome their lack of sight to learn to ski well enough to win medals at the Paralympics, autistic people like me can also overcome our disability to become excellent at jobs like sales. This is why my sister's dismissive attitude of, "no lah, you were not autistic" is almost like someone dismissing Menna's success as, "but she is not completely blind right? She can still see a bit right?" Both Menna and I have struggled hard to overcome our disability to achieve success in our respective fields - the least you can do is at least acknowledge the many tough struggles that we have gone through rather than dismiss it. Give us credit where credit is due - you are not doing us a favour by ignoring our disability.

You see, my sister and my mother's refusal to even admit that I am autistic is based mostly on my academic success and the fact that I have built a successful career today. The fact is disabled people all around the world are overcoming their disabilities and achieving success everyday despite the fact that the odds are stacked against them - however, the fact that they can achieve success doesn't mean that they weren't disabled (or that disabled) in the first place. You should have seen me in my childhood - I was so autistic that I am even ashamed to connect with some of my old classmates through Facebook because I just cringe at the thought of them remembering how utterly awful my social skills were back in those days. Put yourselves in my shoes for a moment - I was brought up by severely autistic parents with zero social skills and I went to the best secondary school in Singapore in those days but it had a really endemic culture of bullying. But of course, being Singaporean, all the parents and teachers turned a blind eye to the bullying as long as the boys in the school were still churning out straight As. Yeah. That's how utterly messed up my childhood was. My parents didn't realized just how damaged I was from the culture of bullying in the school - I turned into a nasty bully myself in the "bully or get bullied" culture. I look back in horror at not just the person I was, but at how everyone just accepted that was normal then. I suppose being autistic, it took far less social skills to bully someone than to form meaningful friendships.

My parents cared about my grades and little else.

My mother just didn't get it: she said, "but Vincent (not his real name obviously) was your best friend, you had friends then right?" I had a strange relationship with Vincent - he was a vulnerable kid from a troubled home. His father spent many months away abroad, his mother worked long hours, he was quiet and shy, a bit of a loner: we had the kind of friendship whereby I told him what we were going to do and his only response was to go along with my plans or he would face my wrath. How he put up with my nasty behaviour was beyond me, but I supposed I had picked a guy who was even more vulnerable than myself to dominate like that. You see, when you have a friendship like that, you just get what you want without the need for all those social skills like empathy, kindness, patience or compassion. Hell no, you just bully the other party if you don't get what you want - that's exactly how my parents treated me at home as a child and so that's the kind of dysfunctional relationship I replicated with Vincent. Eventually, even Vincent grew tired of me and we drifted apart as we got into secondary 3 when we ended up in different classes. and I think I was really only able to hit the reset button when I had a fresh start at VJC where there wasn't a culture of bullying there. I wonder if RJC would have had that same horrible culture of bullying, given that most of the RI guys ended up there. Leave a comment if you know.

When I was a student, there was always another assignment to be done, another essay to be written, another exam to think about. We were just so focused on our studies but you suddenly get thrown off that academic hamster wheel in NS and suddenly, the challenges you face are completely non-academic and mostly to do with adapting to a new environment. You'll be amazed how easy it was for students to ignore so many issues to do with their social skills and environment as long as they are completely focused on their studies. However, in the army, I witnessed a shocking number of incidences of extreme bullying leading to numerous suicides. I did my BMT in Pulau Tekong and there were just so many stories of poorly adjusted soldiers who killed themselves. Every camp I went to after BMT, there were even more stories of suicides and these are not the kind of things that people talk about outside the SAF - it is all too easy to ignore these stories or dismiss them as 'just an isolated incident'. That was when it became pretty clear to me: there was a stark choice. I had to either learn to adapt and develop those vital social skills to get along with everyone I had to work with, or I will become one of those soldiers who had committed suicide. In school as a student, you could always run to a teacher for help if things ever got too bad; but as a soldier, you're an adult and you are pretty much expected to solve a lot of your own problems especially when it came to issues like making friends and getting along with your colleagues.

Do Singaporeans talk about the suicides that happen in NS?

Whilst it is hard enough to become an expert skier but that same task becomes even harder when you are blind - likewise, yes it is already hard enough for any young man to adapt to life in the military or carve out a career in sales, but those same challenges become so much harder for those of us who are autistic. All I am asking for is for people to recognize the hurdles and barriers I have had to overcome to get to where I am today, rather than just assume that I couldn't possibly have been autistic when I know only too well that I am indeed autistic. The message I am sending is a simple one: autistic people can overcome their poor social skills (with a lot of difficulty of course) - it is not an easy problem to fix but it can be done. Imagine if a skier like Menna Fitzpatrick was embarrassed or ashamed by her blindness and tried to pass herself off as a skier with poor eyesight rather than a blind skier - then she would never ever inspire other blind people to go out there and do things that they are told, "oh you can't do that if you can't see". I'm sure many blind people would want to ask Menna, "how did you do that, how did you overcome your difficulties and challenges to become an expert skier despite being blind?" Those questions would lead to some answers that would be extremely helpful to other blind people - likewise, in my case, surely other autistic people would be wondering how I dealt with my acute lack of social skills to end up doing a job that is almost completely dependent on that kind of social skills.

Here's the thing that frustrates me about the way autistic kids are treated - in my family, I am so frustrated by the fact that most of the adults (apart from my brother-in-law) are quite condescending to my autistic nephew, especially my parents. It varies from my sister being reluctant to take him out of his comfort zone to  my parents treating him as if he is a complete retard, like he is completely incapable of the most basic functions when I realize, please - my nephew is autistic, he isn't stupid. He has issues with social skills but he is not an idiot at all, so stop treating him like one! Perhaps it may be tough love from me to think that it is necessary to drag the boy out of his comfort zone to force him to do things will really challenge him, perhaps I am too cruel to think that this is the only way to force him to develop better social skills but that was what happened to me in NS. If I wasn't forced into such a harsh environment, where I was faced with a sink-or-swim scenario when it came to my social skills, would I have realized that I had to do something drastic to get along with the people around me? He's already 14 years old today, he's going to be 15 next year and NS is just around the corner - if we won't start forcing him to develop that aspect of his social skills now, then when? The clock is ticking but my family keep saying, oh no he needs to focus on his studies for now and I vehemently disagree. Whatever he does in school isn't half as important as developing these vital social skills that will help him survive in NS and the working world and I can't remember any of the useless crap I learnt in secondary school anyway - oh it was all a complete was of time.

Most of what students learn in school is useless anyway.

This is what worries me about my nephew: you see, there's a very Singaporean mentality that as long as you follow the rules and do as you're told, you can't be held responsible if bad things happen to you. There is such a strict respect for law and order and ironically, the place where it least applies is during NS. It isn't hard for my nephew to follow the rules - he's an extremely well behaved child in any case, however, simply following the rules has little to do with having the right social skills to get along with people around you. It is not like there are no rules to follow when it comes to getting along with people or making new friends - it is just that those rules are more complex, more subtle and tend to vary wildly depending on the context. Now the trick to figure this out is actually pretty simple: you need to see things from the other person's point of view in order to learn how to figure out how you need to get along with them. Whilst everyone is subject to the same rules in say, a school or the army, each new person you encounter presents a completely unique set of circumstances and conditions you have to get to know in order to get along with them. Now this may seem pretty obvious to most people, but when I observe my parents and my nephew, I am shocked at how they do not understand this really simply principle at all - it's almost like no one has ever bothered telling them about it so it is a foreign concept to them. Having said that, mind you, nobody has ever explicitly explained this to me growing up - we were somehow just supposed to figure all this out on our own with little or no guidance. But why is this somehow just ignored in our culture?

The problem with my nephew's home environment is that hardly anyone cares about the issue of social skills, it just isn't considered important and if a child has poor social skills, that's considered at worst a minor inconvenience. The adults are mostly obsessed with his exam results. To make things a lot worse, he is surrounded by people who are autistic like my parents. My dad's autism is just off the scale - he has a habit of telling jokes that nobody even begins to understand, but he'll laugh at his own jokes oblivious to the fact that his audience are not laughing. To give you an idea about just how he completely doesn't care if the other party is even the least bit interested in what he has to say, let me give you an example. I had just arrived in Singapore from London, I was terribly jet lagged, unwell and was having a nap. When I was fast asleep, my father woke me up and I thought it was something important. He had simply read an article in the newspaper which he found interesting and he wanted to tell me about it. Now where do I even begin? Did he notice that I was extremely tired and sleeping? No. Did he consider that I was unwell and jet lagged? No. Did he care if I might be interested in the story he read? No - for the record, I wasn't at all interested in the story as it wasn't relevant to me. I was just rather annoyed that I got woken up for something stupid like that, but my father is so extremely autistic. Sometimes he does things that only a young child would do and he is totally unable to see that episode from my point of view at all. So if that is the kind of people taking care of my nephew, who is going to teach him about developing social skills then?

It is the blind leading the blind.

To be honest, I paused for a long time before writing this next paragraph because I was trying to identify that crucial moment when suddenly something clicked and I understood how this all worked. You see, not all guys who go through NS emerge with brilliant social skills just because they were subjected to that kind of environment. Some flounder, fail and kill themselves. Indeed, I really struggled in the first few months I was in NS - no rather the difference actually started because I started studying French. Now you may think, what the hell has studying French from a book actually has to do with social skills, especially when I spent a lot of time simply memorizing chunks of vocabulary and complex grammar rules from some textbooks? I remember having a conversation with a friend who is a fluent French speaker and I constructed a really awkward sentence in French which just sounded totally wrong. It was clear that I had formulated the sentence in English then translated into French - my friend said, "no it doesn't work like that, if you want to truly speak French properly you have to think in French completely rather than translate from English." French grammar is quite different from English so the words in a French sentence may appear to be totally in the wrong order to a beginner in French, but makes complete sense to a native speaker. I suppose that thought resonated with me as I thought, okay, I have to put myself in the shoes of a French person and it wasn't anything to do with the French language per se that had this magical power of changing the way I thought. Rather, it was the mindset of approaching a brand new subject as a complete beginner that humbled me into doubting other aspects of my life and what else I could do to improve myself.

But I also have yet another theory about why I finally got my act together when it came to my social skills in the army: people with autism have very poor social skills and it is estimated that they can be a few to several years behind their peers when it comes to developing social skills. So a 10 year old autistic child may have the social skills of say a 4 or 5 year old normal child, so by the time I had turned 19 in the army, I may have finally developed the social skills of a 13 or 14 year old - perhaps I was still some years behind my peers but finally I had just about enough social skills for me to survive the environment in NS. Going on from that, by the time I was in my 20s and 30s, well, the main determinant of how good your social skills are have little to do with age but rather the way you were brought up and how conscious you are of the importance of social skills. That is why there are still plenty of older people with terrible social skills because that is an area of their soft skills that they have never ever addressed.  Now in my case, I went on to study in London and Paris instead of my hometown of Singapore - it meant that I was placed in a position where I had to be very conscious of not coming across as a awkward foreigner and I had to be very observant about the local culture. Not all Singaporeans students studying abroad cope well and adapt to their new environments, but by then, I had already been through enough to understand the importance of looking at issues from someone else's point of view and that enabled me to make friends very easily in both London and Paris. So perhaps there's an element of 船到桥头自然直 here - but that would only be the case if my nephew didn't have NS in approximately 3.5 years and the clock is clicking. We can't wait patiently for the 船 to reach the 桥头 and I just want my nephew to avoid the very worst of what I had to endure in NS.

How do people develop social skills anyway?

So there you go, that's it from me on this issue. The one thing I was most afraid of writing this post was people attacking me for not being autistic enough - there are some people who are so severely autistic that there's just no cure for their condition, no amount of 'figuring it out' can possibly help them with their condition. Or am I simply one of those people who are both autistic and intelligent; and that it is the latter that has helped me overcome the former? But then again, if I don't even begin to start a conversation about this, we're just perpetuating the mindset that autism is somehow a dirty word and that everyone is so afraid of it. That would just lead to autistic people and parents of autistic children thinking that there's so little they can do about the situation when actually, there is much they can do! Am I giving them false hope by underestimating their challengess? What do you think? Do leave a comment below please, many thanks for reading.