I have been battling Asperger’s for as long as I can remember. I can tell you that my inability to read social cues has cost me many career opportunities and caused me tremendous emotional suffering. People who have normal social skills take it for granted that others around them can read social cues, and they tend to persecute and exclude anyone who cannot read social cues. The stigma associated with the inability to read social cues is arguably even greater than the traditional stigmas associated with sexism, racism, and homophobia.
I am not dismissing the harsh realities of sexism, racism, and homophobia. But the fact is that the law protects against employment discrimination based on gender and race as it well should, but basically those of us who were born without the capacity to read social cues have neither legal protection nor social support in an office setting. There is nothing to prevent an employer from firing or not hiring someone with a social skills deficit because most employers in an office setting regard the ability to read social cues as more important than any intellectual skills or abilities. In fact, I would argue that in the office setting, having a very intellect is viewed as a liability rather than an asset if it is combined with a severe social skills deficit. In other words, once employers realize that their intellectually gifted employee has little or no comprehension of social skills, that person’s intellect is used against them in vicious ways.
I was taunted my entire life for not having social skills. When you can’t read social cues, you don’t conform to the expected social norms because you can’t. When I was in middle school, I was viciously taunted by other girls. I will never forget the day in 8th grade when one of the bitchy girls found my underwear in my purse and shared it with the whole class. The sense of humiliation was overwhelming. In addition, when I went to a Christian high school, I was systematically shunned and ignored in a calculated and cruel fashion by the other girls in all my classes. I was a target of a vicious and sophisticated school-wide boycott that was led by a few ring-leaders and carefully obeyed by the vast majority of the girls. I went through months at a time in school without another girl so much as saying hello to me, let alone engaging me in conversation.
The evil girls who found out that I couldn’t read social cues made the boycott of me so painfully obvious that even I could read and interpret it with my very weak social skills. I knew that I was the school wide scapegoat, the school-wide target for all kinds of bullying. The many years of shunning caused me such agony that I don’t think I ever recovered my confidence in my ability to interact socially with girls. I was so severely brutalized by my female peers in high school that in some ways I grew to despise myself for being female. I also grew to hate other women and to fear and avoid social interaction with other women. I grew to view other women as my enemies simply because so many girls were so horrendously cruel to me, and for the most part boys were the only ones who would even speak to me, let alone befriend me.
Obviously with my inability to read social cues, I could not figure out the complicated social dynamics involved in female cliques. These cliques had very complicated and sophisticated roles, rules, and patterns that I could not understand. I never really even bothered trying to break into a female clique because I knew it was a waste of my time, and I also knew my chances of success in this endeavor were less than zero. I also found the behavior of these cliques, which were based on cruel dynamics of exclusion, to be morally revolting.
Anyway, I preferred to stay in the library reading or doing math problems than attempting any social interaction in such a brutally hostile, cold, and vicious environment. I sat alone in the lunch room so often that eventually I ended up taking my lunch with me and walking outside to sit by the lake or in the forest nearby the school. I found a little peace and quiet from the systematic social isolation that I suffered in the presence of nature.
I had planned today to write about being in an office with Asperger’s. But I am glad that I was able to write for the first time about how I was socially punished and brutalized by my female peers in high school for having such a profound social skills deficit. I always knew in my heart that these girls were wrong to treat me in such a vicious fashion, so although I was naturally hurt by such cruel treatment, for the most part I allowed it to slide off my back and not affect me too much.
Now I am going to write about how having Asperger’s destroyed my chances of pursuing an academic career. I discovered to my chagrin that in academia office politics skills were essential, while intellectual ability was optional at best and definitely not required by any means. I told my closest friend in Russian studies about how I had clashed with this powerful professor in my freshman year of college. When my friend told me that the clash was entirely my fault, it only confirmed for me what I had always known: academia is not for me. He said any professor would have gotten angry at being interrupted in class, thus implying that I deserved to have my career destroyed for having committed this social mistake. Then he asked me if I had told my professor that I have Asperger’s, and I replied that I didn’t know I had Asperger’s at that point because I was undiagnosed. This devastating incident happened to me when I was 18, and I was not diagnosed with Asperger’s until I was 25 years old. So this incident happened seven years before I was diagnosed with Aspergers.
I have a classmate from Brown who has the same high intellect as me but who is also fortunate enough to have the social skill set that I was born without. He has made it academically without any hitches. He had a research job for four years after college. Then he earned his PhD in political science in Yale, and now he teaches in a tenure-track position at the Kennedy School of Government. It still pains me to know that I cannot pursue the academic career of my dreams due to having Asperger’s, but I know at least that it is not my fault at this point. I no longer blame myself for not being able to pursue an academic career because it is due to factors that are beyond my control.
Unfortunately, my social skills deficit continued to plague me as long as I attempted to work in the office world. My experiences in the office setting were nothing short of completely nightmarish, terrifying, and devastating to me. During my senior year of college, I went on 60 interviews with all sorts of companies, and no company would hire me. In fact, I don’t think I even made it to the second round of any company’s interview process. I had no problem getting interviews, but I felt like I was rejected almost from the moment I entered the interview room. It was as though employers would size me up in the interview room and subject me to nearly instant rejection for reasons that I did not understand.
What are employers looking for in an interview? Clearly it is not intellectual skills because anyone can see from my resume that I have a powerful intellect. The purpose of the interview is for the employer to gauge whether the job applicant has adequate social skills to be able to function in an office environment. I never made it to the second round of any interviews because I immediately demonstrated a lack of the most critical skill set in the office setting: the ability to read and interpret social cues. I was scared and hurt and confused inside when I saw all my classmates getting multiple job offers from 3 round interview processes while I could never even make it to the second round of the interviews. I wondered what was wrong with me that was causing so many employers to reject me for reasons that I did not understand. I remember feeling frightened and terrified every time I had to go on an interview and how it was this horrendously awful ordeal where I did not know what was happening to me.
I graduated college without a job and ended up back home in the abusive environment that I had tried so desperately to escape. And so I took a job with a bank in Boston. The good news is that I was very successful in networking so that I earned a research job which only went to one employee out of hundreds of applicants every year.
The bad news is that I lost this job within 45 minutes of accepting it. How on earth did this happen? Well, first of all I had endured a terrible ordeal of finding an apartment and was exhausted from many nights of sleepless and anxiety connected with the fears about moving. I did not get along with the other employees in the office, who expressed their jealousy of me for having more money than me by telling me how much they admired Hitler. These illiterates could barely process a bank transaction, but they knew just how to terrify me as a Jew by expressing their admiration for Hitler. I was stunned and confused by this violent anti-Semitism for which I was totally unprepared, and I don’t think I even told management about it.
But the proximate cause of my firing was a clash with one of the managers. I remember clashing with one of the managers because I was confused about the question of what my hours were. This group did not work according to the 9-5 hours that I was accustomed to, and I got upset and confused when the manager gave me vague answers about what my hours would be.
I remember that I ended up crying on the job over this misunderstanding about what my hours would be, and at that point the bank brought in the Employee Assistant Team to fire me. I had cried at 8:45 a.m., and I was fired by 2:30 p.m. that afternoon. I was so frightened of the director of the EAT because during our employee training, he had presented one day. He also told us that if he were coming to see us, it meant we were in big trouble. I referred to him as Scott Dragon because his mere presence upset and frightened me so severely.
In retrospect, I think a few things were going on here. First of all, I was beginning to feel frightened of the work place because I was rejected by so many employers at so many job interviews. Second of all, I was fleeing a severely emotionally abusive home environment, and so I was desperately hoping to succeed in this job so that I would not be forced to return to this toxic home setting. Paradoxically, my desperate anxiety about keeping this job manifested itself with the very severe emotional disturbance which caused me to lose this job. Third of all, I was struggling to make the double transition from school to work and from home to my own apartment and was not able to successfully make both transitions at once. Fourth, I was thoroughly unprepared to face anti-Semitism in the work place.
But I also think Asperger’s played a role in this job failure. How? Well, one of the characteristics of Asperger’s is that you have a very rigid sense of time and schedules. Your sense of order depends on following a set schedule, at least in part. For this reason, the absence of a coherent schedule, especially in a situation involving multiple transitions, is unsettling. I was frightened by the lack of order represented by a flexible schedule.
I was placed on paid disability leave and told that I would have to go to psychological counseling before I could get my job back. I went to the first counseling session and told the psychologist that I apologized for my mistake and took responsibility for my actions. I also told her that I wanted my job back. Her response was to tell me that I would have to go for many more sessions of counseling before the company would even consider giving me my job back. When I asked her how many sessions of therapy would be required and she failed to give me a clear answer, I realized that the company was inducing me to quit by making it impossible for me to return to work. So I quit my first job and moved home to a feeling of shame and failure and rage and confusion.
I had been expelled from the workplace for reasons that I didn’t understand, and unfortunately my ordeal in the workplace was only beginning. In retrospect, if I had known that the office workplace would be an even more terrifying and brutal setting for me than my horrendously emotionally abusive home environment, I would have killed myself as a teenager and ended my suffering right then and there. The nightmares in the work place were frightening and upsetting to me because I never knew whey they were happening. In addition, the place where I expected to succeed and feel appreciated and wanted was the place where I felt most hated, condemned, and rejected.
At least with my home environment, I knew what was happening and why. So my home environment was horrendously toxic and yet at the same time strangely predictable. But the workplace frazzled me most because it operated according a rule book that I couldn’t read. I went to a counselor when I was 27 years old for the first time on my own, voluntarily and not because someone else was forcing me to be there. I told her that the rules in the football playbook were very clear and understandable and most importantly they were written down in a book that anyone could read. I was baffled, angry and confused by the fact that the social skills realm had no written playbook and therefore I had no way to understand and interpret it.
I told her that in football you knew that you had 3 chance to advance the ball 10 yards down the field. If you failed to advance the ball by at least 10 yards after three downs, then you have to turn the ball over to the other side. You also have set plays to advance the ball, namely running and passing, and you have set formations to allow you to plan each play in advance. You could have 3 wide receivers and no running backs. You could have 2-3 running backs and no wide receivers. You could have 2 wide receivers and no running backs. And you could also have the quarterback run the ball in what was called a quarterback sneak.
But of course in the social realm, there is no written playbook, and so those of us who depend upon written playbooks to understand our world are lost. Social skills are generally taught to children in the home by their parents. But the schools make zero provisions for children like me who don’t learn social skills at home. There are two major reasons why kids don’t learn social skills at home. Either the parents themselves lack social skills and so they can’t teach something that they themselves don’t know. Or the kids are born with Asperger’s like me and are unable to learn to read social cues. The bottom line is that it is culturally expected for a child to learn social skills and etiquette at home from their parents.
Thus, any child who does not learn social skills in the home setting for whatever reason is at a profound disadvantage. Such a child is unable to function in normal social settings with their peers at school. This child does not learn how to build and maintain friendships and how to get along in groups. This child is socially excluded and stigmatized by their peers who can be cruel to any child who does not fit in perfectly with social norms. Children are often cruel to anyone who is different, regardless of the reason. And I think kids are particularly cruel to children who can’t read social cues. Other kids will pick up on a child’s inability to read social cues and use it against them by teasing them to hurt their feelings.
My college friend warned me that the real world was like high school. Hearing this, I dreaded the thought of entering the workforce. I hoped and prayed that the real world would not be like high school, but to my despair and chagrin I found out that she was right. So the same people who taunted me in high school would then be refusing to hire me and firing me in the work place. What a lovely thought.
I am also very good at finding stock investments. Why? I am very good at numbers, and I can read between the lines of financial statements because I can tell the difference between what the company is saying and what they are implying. I can find discrepancies in the company’s financial statements. And sometimes I can even sense the existence of a discrepancy in a company’s financial statements even if I can’t pinpoint it exactly. You don’t need to read social cues in order to find good investments. You only need to read and interpret financial documents which are driven by the numbers. The information is presented in written form and consists primarily of numbers, and it operates according to a logical set of rules that I can understand. As a math whiz, numbers come very naturally and easily to me, and so anything that involves extensive use, interpretation, and calculation of numbers has a sense of order and predictability that I find very comforting.
I can give at least two examples of my ability to find good investments and avoid bad ones. Before I got a masters in tax, I didn’t have much formal training in reading financial statements. But I took a look at the financial statements of the famous and highly successful investor Warren Buffett: Berkshire Hathaway. I knew that something was smelling fishy about his re-insurance firm General Re. I knew that the numbers didn’t add up and didn’t make sense although I couldn’t pinpoint exactly where the problem was. But a few years later, General Re was indicted by the SEC for various securities violations, and thus my financial and analytical intuition was born out.
My second example was a successful investment. While the economy and the stock market were crashing in 2008 in the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression and my father was becoming so agitated by the drastic drop in the value of his investments that he couldn’t eat or sleep, I kept my calm. So amid the stock market crash of 2008, I found a good investment. I read the financial statements of a number of companies looking for a good product, good management, consistently rising earnings, a solid customer base, and similar factors. I went through a number of companies and found various problems and questions in their financial statements. I decided to stay away from commercial banks and investment banks entirely on the grounds that they are like a black box whose contents you never really know what they are.
So while recovering from a near-fatal car crash caused by the anxiety of being fired from my last job, I spent six weeks pouring over financial statements. I was in a wheelchair and resting much of the time, but I spent my waking time looking for investments. I bought five shares of America Movil when the market went down and they were worth $31 a share. This was a well-known Latin America mobile phone company which was run by the Mexican-Lebanese billionaire Carlos Slim which had a monopoly on the Mexican phone market and substantial shares of the mobile phone markets in Argentina, Colombia, and Peru, among other countries. I looked at the trends by country in terms of revenue per customer and number of customers and found them to be favorable. I also liked the fact that he exited the Venezuelan market before the Chavez regime could shut down his operations.
So without ever putting on a suit for a job interview, without ever entering the torture chamber of an office, I found a great investment. When the market continued to crash even after I bought the stock in October, 2008, I gave myself peace of mind with my investment by putting a floor on it. I arranged to sell it if it fell by more than 20% from my purchase price, thus limiting my potential loss. And I ended up keeping that investment for over two years and selling it for around $50 a share in mid 2011 for a tidy profit of 61% in 2.5 years.
I have always loved doing all kinds of research, and research is even better when there are no office politics involved for me. My most successful job so far was a research fellowship that I held in economic development in graduate school in 2007.
