Be Different: Adventures of a Free-Range Aspergian With Practical Advice for Aspergians, Misfits, Families & Teachers by John Elder Robison Read Free Book Online

fork—like I did when I was little—is both inefficient and impolite. The polite method of holding a fork provides for better control of the tool. It’s a good idea that’s also good manners.
    (The only time making a fist around the fork helps is when you want to stab someone because he’s stealing your food. Now I know stabbing people is really rude, so I hold my fork in the grown-up way all the time, and I rely on discreet snarls to protect my dinner from predators.)
    If only all manners were so logical! Unfortunately, they are not. Aspergians like me are notoriously logical and straightforward, and much of the time, manners are neither. They are not “common sense,” nor are they “acting right.” That’s why manners didn’t come naturally to me.
    Consider, for example, the ingestion of soup from a bowl. When I was small, I used a spoon to eat most of my soup, and then I picked up the bowl, tipped it, and drank the rest. It’s obvious to me that the most efficient way to ingest soup is to tip the bowl and drink it. In fact, unless you have a spoon that’s specifically contoured for the bowl you’re using, that’s the only way to get every last drop. And common sense tells us not to be wasteful.
    Acting right—the moral imperative to treat others as you’d like to be treated—doesn’t say much at all about drinking from the soup bowl. I know it’s not right to throw food or jab the person next to me with a fork. But where’s the harm to anyone in drinking from a bowl that was given to me by the host or hostess? The answer is, there is no harm.
    And yet … my grandmother said it’s rude to do it. For many years, logic prevented me from complying with rules of etiquette like that. I thought they were illogical and foolish, and I refused to go along. Eventually I came to understand that I benefited from compliance with the social rules, even when they seem illogical, wasteful, or nonsensical. Today, I look at my bowl, realize that it’s better to act polite, and pick up a spoon. In our society of plenty, where I seldom go hungry, a person’s positive impression of me is worth more than the small amount of extra soup I’d get by tipping and drinking. I am sure things would be different if I were starving.
    And one more thing: I’m glad my family kept up the fight, trying to train me in manners even if it made no sense at all to me. Without their efforts, I’d never haveacquired what little manners I have, and I’d have entered the adult world socially handicapped as a result.
    That was how I started adult life: with the few manners my family had hammered into me, and whatever innate sense of right and wrong I was born with or was able to evolve. Some people might call that a moral compass, but I wasn’t that sophisticated in my terminology. Whatever I called it, it served me well around close friends and family, and it always worked for the big decisions in life. Unfortunately, a logical, morals-based behavioral strategy breaks down in casual interactions, the sort one has at a party.
    I learned that as soon as I began venturing out socially as an adult. That’s when I encountered strangers who were critical of me and my manners. At first, I reacted with hostility to what I perceived as shallow, superficial posturing.
So what if I don’t hold the door for you? Can’t each of us take responsibility to open our own doors?
It eventually became clear that logical and ethical behavior just wasn’t good enough—I was alienating strangers with my failure to “act like everyone else.”
    I was nice on the inside, but new acquaintances sometimes never stayed around long enough to notice, because they were aggravated or disturbed by my lack of manners.“You’re acting like a hillbilly, boy,” was how my grandfather said it. I never really lived among hillbillies—the closest I came was my grandparents’ place in rural Georgia—but I got the idea. If I changed my behavior, people might like me