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

better. I might acquire more friends. It seemed worth a try.
    I made that decision in my mid-twenties. That’s sooner than some, but later than many. In retrospect, I see that my life would have gone a good bit smoother if I’d made some changes in my teens, and if I’d paid a little more attention to those illogical rules of behavior.
    Once I resolved to change, the course was clear. I was now an adult. My grandmother had passed away, so there was no one left to train me. I would have to train myself. As I’d done so many times before, I set off for the bookstore to look for guidance. I thought manners would be simple, but I was wrong.
    The gold standard for manners and etiquette is the Emily Post book
Etiquette
. To my great disgust and amazement, it ran to eight hundred pages! It looked as daunting as the Internal Revenue Code. Still, I bought her book and carried it home.
    Emily seemed to have a rule for every possible social situation—thousands and thousands of them. How to act at dinner, at work, in a bar, or at the theater. How to dress, how to walk, and even what to say and when to be quiet. The complexity was just overwhelming.
Does everyone else in the world already know this stuff?
I wondered. Whetherthey did or not, I quickly realized I needed a simpler system. I remembered what my grandfather used to tell me long ago about watching the older people. Starting with that advice and fortified by snippets of Emily Post, I made my own set of rules. I based my plan on advice from people I trusted, how Emily said I should behave, that moral compass, and a lot of careful observation and contemplation about how I interacted with other people, successfully and otherwise.
    First of all, when in a strange social situation, I watch the others and do as they do
. This applies to wearing a suit, handling silverware, eating food, going through doorways, and many other situations. I do a lot better when I watch, wait, and imitate. My grandfather taught me this.
    When I speak in casual conversation, I try to start a mental clock in my head
. I actually learned this from Marty Nemko, a San Francisco career coach. He told me, “For the first thirty seconds after you start talking, imagine a green light in your head. After thirty seconds the light turns yellow. At sixty seconds, it’s red.” That’s a good piece of advice for most any conversational situation. It takes some mental energy to monitor myself, but it works.
    I used to feel that I should say everything as soon as I got a chance to talk, because my contacts with people were so fleeting. After all, I might never get the chance to talk to them again. Today, I realize that my contacts were fleeting because I went on and on, bored people silly, andran them off. It was a sad day when I finally realized that most people do not care about the 66,000-horsepower MAN B&W diesel engines in the big American President Lines containerships. The world is just filled with important and fascinating facts, yet nypical people just choose to remain indifferent. So I stopped running on at the mouth, or at least I try to.
    I’ve learned to say “please” and “thank you” fairly often
. That’s a simple rule that delivers good results. I don’t always remember to do this, but I know should. There’s nothing false or objectionable about “please” and “thanks.” Even if I don’t like someone, I can thank him for handing me the hammer, and I can say, “Please move over so I can get past you.” Those words just make things smoother. People seldom refuse to step aside when asked, and shoving them out of the way without asking almost always leads to a bad outcome, unless you are at a sporting event where manners are not used.
    Manners mavens often advise us to go beyond “please” and “thanks,” to actually make up nice things about the other person. For example, they suggest things like, “Susan, your dress looks lovely tonight!” I don’t usually follow that advice,