I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands

And wrote my will across the sky in stars

To earn you Freedom, the seven-pillared worthy house,

That your eyes might be shining for me

When we came.

~TE Lawrence, The Seven Pillars Of Wisdom

I’ve always been confused by the claim that masking starts in early childhood. As a child, I did not have the self-awareness for masking to even occur to me. I was a weird kid, and my mother, by her own account, thought of getting me assessed for Asperger’s more than once, but just never got around to it. Recently, while we were on vacation together, she commented that she had thought my two older siblings were a bit spergy until I came along, and then she thought, “Oh, never mind, that’s what it looks like.” Despite knowing I was different from the other kids, my parents did too good of a job assuring me that it was okay to be weird and that there was nothing wrong with me. It never occurred to me that I should be doing anything other than what I felt was right at any given time.

I always knew that I was different from my peers, but I wasn’t cognisant of just how different I was until around the age of ten. I’ve found this is a common pattern for many people my age who were diagnosed with Asperger’s. Social relationships in elementary school are quite simple. I had a social life because my mom’s best friend had a son my exact age, and that was about all it took to build and maintain a friendship. Unfortunately, that friend moved far away, and I soon discovered, like a young, autistic Joe Exotic, that I would never socially recover from this. Puberty hit right after my one friend skipped town, and suddenly social dynamics became exponentially more complicated. I went from being able to tread water hard enough to keep from drowning to sinking to the bottom of the pool like a brick. I didn’t realize the shift was occurring at first. I was like one of those lobotomized frogs that doesn’t jump out of the water as the temperature rises incrementally, until one day I finally realized that I was being boiled alive in the social dynamics of a sixth-grade classroom.

I first realized how much these dynamics had changed in a week when a group of my classmates asked me if I was “actually retarded” every time I tried to join them at recess. I told them that I wasn’t sure—which unfortunately didn’t help me in that situation—but even the addled musings of my eleven-year-old brain were cogent enough to see that something was not right. What exactly was not right, I could not tell you, but my working theory at the time was that, in the same way that some people were unable to understand basic concepts in math, I was unable to understand basic concepts about people. I often asked my mother what was wrong with me and why I didn’t fit in with most people in my class. I did this so often that I eventually dubbed the response she would give me as “the people person speech.” The speech was about how some people, like my siblings, were people persons, but some people, like her and me, weren’t. She would explain that God made us all different for a reason and that it was okay to be how we were. With the helpful prompting of some of my classmates, I realized this might have been her way of telling me that I was kind of stupid, and so I concluded that I probably had an unspecified type of learning disability. I knew it was not a generalized learning disability: I was always consistently ahead of my peers in math, and many of my teachers joked about me being a tiny professor, which, in retrospect, should have been a hint.

I felt ashamed of the hitherto unspecified learning disability that I decided I had, and I became determined to figure out how to either hide it or compensate for it. I didn’t know what to do and was too embarrassed to ask anyone about it, so I would spend most of my recesses and school bus trips unsuccessfully cooking up ineffective solutions to “my people problem.” This lasted until the serendipitous day when the government of Canada, by way of public broadcast radio, beamed into my head what I assumed was the key to my future success. My mother, a woman with a PhD in virology trapped in rural Saskatchewan and starved for intellectual stimulation, used to faithfully listen to Quarks and Quirks, a science communication program on CBC radio. On this fateful day the episode featured anthropologists describing their ethnographic research into Amazonian tribes: their field work, data collection methods, and conclusions about the tribes and their social dynamics. As I listened, I realized that what these scientists were doing was basically just learning about people skills and social dynamics in a foreign culture, and from what I gathered, it was fairly straightforward. Their descriptions mostly involved watching people and then writing things they noticed in a notebook. My classmates and their social rituals seemed about as alien to me as any Amazonian tribe, so I figured that these techniques would have a broader application to my classmates in rural Saskatchewan.

I asked my mom if I had understood the methodology of the ethnographers correctly. She confirmed that it was more or less what I thought, but noted that there were a lot of additional complexities. I asked her if I could do it, and she assured me that I could. I then realized she had misunderstood my question because she began to explain that I would make an excellent anthropologist one day and listed many qualities of mine that she thought would lend themselves well to field work. I suspect she just was happy that I seemed interested in something other than the role of airborne troops in the Normandy campaigns. She explained anthropological field work, the adventures I could have, and how I could study to become one. But unfortunately, for my mother and for everyone around me, the next few years would continue to be Normandy airborne campaign themed. What I had really been asking was if I could watch my classmates and write down my observations in a book, and regardless of her intentions, my mother’s response was enough encouragement for me to go ahead with these endeavours.

Like every normal eleven-year-old, I began to collect and document information about my classmates. To my great surprise, this exercise was far less useful than I had been led to believe by the good scientists on the radio, and I abandoned it after a few unsuccessful months. Eleven-year-old Jon was not a particularly good scientist and did not realize that his data collection methodology was affecting his sampling and contaminating his data. As it turns out, lurking around your classmates as you surreptitiously write things in a book is not the gold standard of anthropological data collection, or of fitting into your sixth-grade class. Several years after this ill-fated endeavor I found and re-read one of my notebooks, which I remember because I absolutely killed myself laughing over a line I knew I had written with complete and utter sincerity. It was something like, “Two people threw rocks at me this recess and did not specify their reason, other than instructing me to not be a loser.” A note on the next page said, “This keeps happening when I sit down to write in my notebook.” Another note, which painfully echoes the desperate cries of the pre-teen sperg, said, “It is like everyone is talking in a secret code that I didn’t get.” Unfortunately, because I was eleven, it did not occur to me to just learn this code, but alas, hindsight is 20/20.

My brief data-collecting exercise gave me undeniable proof that I was socially struggling in ways that most of my peers were not. By my records, two of my other classmates also seemed to be struggling in ways that no one else was, but I seemed to be struggling the worst. I later confirmed this was the case through interviews with my two older siblings. They very helpfully agreed with my observations and assured me that my data collection had been accurate, and that I was right to draw the conclusion that I was a loser with no friends. I explained my struggles and observations to my mother, and she reassured me that all of this was a normal part of growing up and that everyone went through this. Relieved by learning that this was nothing to be worried about and that I would grow out of it, I went to ask my older brother about how he had managed to navigate this situation. He informed me quite frankly that my mother was lying to me to make me feel better and that no one other than me, in all of human history, had ever had my specific problems.

Realizing that I could not rely on my family for help, because my mother would lie to me and my brother would creatively insult me, I knew I was going to have to figure this out for myself. Unfortunately, like most pre-teens, my brain was not particularly well developed, and while I was smart for an eleven-year-old, that is like being the fastest turtle in the 100m sprint. It wouldn’t be until halfway through the year and several months of ineffective strategizing that I started to stumble on the beginnings of an effective solution. Much to the chagrin of my wonderful math teacher, Mr Lee, I had managed to get two full months ahead of my class by working ahead in my textbooks while hiding in the library over lunch and recess. In order to prevent me from becoming a nuisance and distracting everyone else in the class, he gave me a developmentally appropriate book about game theory to read quietly in the back of the room. It was a fascinating read, and I was completely bewitched by the idea that you could use math to make decisions because, while I made many bad decisions, I had a natural predilection for crunching numbers. I became particularly enamoured with a scenario in the book about the decision theory involved in predicting the positions of a Japanese carrier fleet in the Pacific. Sadly, carrier positions in the Leyte gulf did not lead to my breakthrough in understanding people. Instead, it came from a discussion about how to win a game of rock-paper-scissors against a child prodigy.

The rock-paper-scissors scenario is a classic game theory problem that is taught in a lot of introductory courses. The premise is that you are playing against an opponent who, through a series of logical deductions and inferences, could reliably guess which move you would make. No matter what mind games you tried to play against him, no matter how brilliant your strategy, plays, and counterplays were, he would always correctly guess the move you would play using his advanced rock-paper-scissors acumen. The question in the book was about how you, without these powers, could even your odds in a competition against the prodigy. The solution, which would go on to form the basis of my future social plans, was not to outsmart your opponent, whom you could not outsmart, but instead to completely forgo strategy. The book suggested that you simply roll a die that he could not see: on 1-2 you choose rock, on 3-4 you choose paper, and on 5-6 you choose scissors. This strategy would not get you the win every time, but it would completely remove the massive advantage that he had on you, changing the situation from a strategic game where you would always lose to a random draw in which you had just as much of a chance to win as he did.

To the now twelve-year-old Jon, this was a monumental discovery. I learned that in some instances the best strategy was not to outsmart your opponent but to completely ditch your own faculties and intuitions and, by doing so, even the odds that had been stacked against you. It was immediately clear to me that I was in a much more complicated version of this game with all of my classmates. They were able to flawlessly predict my next moves, and I was unable to predict them in return. This meant that, in every game we played, I would end up decisively losing. I correctly deduced that if I wanted to even the odds, I needed to come up with a strategy that did not involve trying to play a game that I could not win with my own faculties. Since rolling a die to decide what to say or how to act seemed to be a terrible idea in this context, I began thinking outside of the box. My solution, I quickly realised, had been with me this entire time. My brother was two years older than me, socially skilled, well liked, and, most importantly, did not share what I would later learn was a neurodevelopmental disorder called Asperger’s Syndrome. The key to my social success would be to not rely on my own social intuitions, to stop attempting to play the game, and instead to do whatever my brother did. I had spent my whole life with him; I knew what he did, I knew how he behaved, how he spoke, and what he said; and I could often correctly guess the kind of thing that he would say or do in most situations. I formalised this insight into a plan which I dubbed Operation Be Normal.

This plan had some critical flaws which I could not see at the time. Chief amongst them was that I had autism. My perceptions of my brother’s actions, my perceptions of my peers, and my peers’ perceptions of me were all filtered through a twelve-year-old’s Asperger’s-riddled brain that was fundamentally unable to recognise many of the subtleties of social dynamics and communication. One of the cruellest ironies about having autism and trying to correct your own social issues is that autism often hinders your attempts to diagnose your own problems. It’s like trying to figure out how to colour match a painting while not realizing that you are colour blind and wearing colour tinted glasses. This turned out to be a reoccurring flaw, akin to the Belgium-sized gap in the Maginot line, that would haunt all my pre-diagnosis adaptation plans and strategies.

The other major flaw in my plan was that most cool and socially well-adjusted fourteen-year-olds don’t appreciate their spergy little brother attempting to wear them as a skinsuit. My brother found my new behaviour deeply annoying, and it became a reoccurring point of friction in our relationship throughout the coming years. I can’t really blame him. The way I looked up to my brother was weirdly intense. I was deeply envious of his social ability, friends, and social acceptance, and I wanted nothing more than to literally be him. While this plan was not meant to be malicious or annoying, it turned out to have that effect. I suppose I should have predicted that seeing your dorky little brother do his best to recreate an uncanny-valley version of you would be a pretty weird experience to which he would not take kindly, but alas, I did not.

As the saying goes, no good plan survives first contact with the enemy and this plan was no exception. I could not effectively emulate all of my brother’s behaviours, and emulating him did not work in every situation. Keeping track of what I was supposed to do was exhausting. In order to figure out what I was supposed to say to someone, I had to listen to them, replay what they had just said in my head, ask myself how my brother would respond, figure that out, and then finally respond. But most importantly, I needed to somehow do all of those steps quickly. It also turned out that I could not predict what kinds of imitation would work or not, and I realised that, in order to figure it out, I was going to have to need a lengthy, gruelling battery of trial-and-error tests. Since I had no better ideas or alternative options, I buckled in and got to work.

I began by copying everything that he did. At one point I started ordering all of the same food and drinks as him on the chance that his diet might hold secrets that I could not otherwise discern. The secrets I actually learned were that I did not like most of the food that my brother did, and that he found it very annoying that I was even copying his restaurant orders. Most of my testing involved paying close attention to how my peers responded to my new behaviours and to whether they led to better or worse outcomes, which it turned out I could not reliably determine. It also involved replaying conversations after they happened to figure out what I said and what my brother, in similar conditions, would have said. I spent a lot of time inventing hypothetical scenarios, or replaying ones I commonly found myself in, and running through the types of things that I might need to say. In front of a mirror, I would then practice saying those things out loud over and over, trying to get my delivery, body language, and presentation as close to my brother’s as I could.

I may not have been reliable, but I was persistent, and I started to build up a library of behaviours, responses, and probabilistic branching decision trees to help me quickly figure out the move in a given scenario which was most likely to succeed. I then painstakingly refined this model. Oftentimes I learnt the wrong lessons for the right reasons and then had to retroactively readjust and modify the algorithms that I had built. Then I would learn the right lessons for the wrong reasons, build more ideas off of those bad principles, and then have to conduct a retrospective analysis of everything I had learned to figure out what went wrong. I had to learn the hard way that successful behaviours were not universally applicable and that different contexts could completely reverse rules, principles, and expected behaviours. Eventually I was able to derive general patterns, make inferences, and deduce what worked, why it worked, and how I could use that information to make predictions in the future. I was still an awkward nerd, but through brute force and sheer will, I started to form the foundations of a passable socialisation strategy that I was still years away from perfecting.

My brother, in his wisdom, once made a passing remark that people would like me more if I was funny. I realised that this was probably a noteworthy insight and began trying to figure out how to be funny. I didn’t know how to do this, so I began obsessively observing the people around me, taking extensive notes, and then analysing them to look for patterns, which were really the only tools at my disposal. Operation Be Normal, up until this point, had given me the general sense that there were complex social rules that were more or less legible and interpretable to the people around me but inscrutable for me. I had figured out the rough shape of some of these rules through my labours, and I intuited that humour and jokes worked on roughly the same principles. I began watching when people laughed and then performed an exercise where I would ask myself, “Why was that funny?” and try to reconstruct a list of reasons. I would go home, repeatedly practice my delivery, and would try to figure out the rules that were behind it so that I could deliver my rehearsed jokes at the right time. I would then field test my routines and I failed spectacularly almost every time. I then tried to suss out more of these comedic rules by watching and rewatching lots of TV comedies, radio comedy shows, and videos of comedians, acting like a WWII code breaker at Bletchley Park trying to break the enigma. I managed to get the hang of it quite quickly because, unlike other social interactions, the failures and successes could be easily discerned by just seeing if someone laughed.

Learning how to make jokes turned out to be an incredible adaptive camouflaging strategy in a way I would have never initially predicted. At the time, I was mostly just following my brother’s suggestion without knowing the reason it would work, hoping I would figure out why along the way. I expected learning how to be funny to unlock some important social skills and understandings, but instead what I learnt is that people like funny weird people more than they like people who are just weird. A beneficial side effect that I discovered completely by accident was that, if you are constantly doing absurdist bits, people are not able to distinguish between your legitimate social errors and your failed attempts at jokes. There is an entire genre of humour premised on social aloofness and missing the cues that everyone is sending you, and it turns out that most people have a hard time distinguishing between attempting this type of humour and autism. Trying to make a joke that didn’t land was still not great, but it was about a hundred times better than people realising that I was sincerely socially clueless. It was a somewhat frequent occurrence in my middle school years for people to interpret my sincere overtures as jokes, and instead of laughing at me for being weird, they would laugh with me because they wrongly assumed that I was in on the joke that I was apparently making.

My lack of meaningful friendship and acceptance among my peers meant that I often had an enormous amount of spare time. I chose to fill most of this time by reading books about military history, which had been my sole preoccupying interest since the age of four. The books and memoirs that I found most interesting and which I learned the most from were those that discussed infiltration, subterfuge, sabotage, covert operations, and spy craft. I deeply related to the descriptions of finding yourself in an alien culture and needing to learn the ways of the native peoples, earn their trust, and gain acceptance in order to accomplish your mission. Like many a quirked-up white boy, my favourite was T. E. Lawrence’s The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. I liked it so much that it managed to shift my special interest from airborne operations in Normandy to General Allenby’s campaigns against the Ottomans in the First World War.

In his own words, as well as in the many descriptions of Lawrence that I read, I believed that I had found a kindred spirit. He was described as enigmatic; notoriously shy, socially disconnected, and aloof; clumsy, both physically and socially; and obsessed with historical maps and cryptography. He was principled to a fault and ascetic to the point of masochism. He was also intensely vulnerable, filled with self-doubt and questioning, and throughout his whole autobiography he described a persistent sense of social and cultural alienation that I felt in my very bones. It was the first time in my life that I read about another human and thought, “Oh, he’s me.” I related most to the themes of self-abnegation that permeate every single part of his book. He frequently talked about forcing himself to put on the trappings of a foreign people and losing himself in the process, caught between the old version of himself and the put-on version that he was trying to become. It was clear to me that he was a deeply troubled and traumatized man, but if anything, that made him more relatable.

Before reading about Lawrence, I had a pervasive feeling that I was an aberrant life form, like an alien creature that just so happened to have the physical appearance of a human. Then I read about him and realized that wasn’t the case. There was actually a kind of guy like me out there; they probably weren’t very common, but they were still there. I understand if this seems like a ridiculous and self-aggrandizing thought, but to fourteen-year-old me, it was the first time that I did not feel like a weird and defective freak with nothing much to hope for. I realized that there were other men like me who had come before me, who had managed to figure it out, and if I played my cards right, truly put in the effort, and worked hard at it, I could become one of them. I became convinced that I was not doomed to a life of failure and social ostracization, because Lawrence was not, and I began to intentionally shape aspects of my personality to be like him. Where he had befriended the Bedouin tribes to stir up revolt against the Ottomans, I was befriending the members of my volleyball team to win a tournament in rural Saskatchewan. Unfortunately, I didn’t learn from many of his behaviours that could have actually helped me, like wearing the clothing and regalia of the people around you instead of military fatigues. It would still be many years before I kicked that habit and learned to dress normally.

While I related a lot to Lawrence, one of the features that I knew I was missing was his demeanor. Everything I read about him praised his stoicism, self-control, and ability to dominate and control the will. Lawrence, for all of his many flaws, was impressively resilient. Self-denial, self-sacrifice, pushing through pain, and forcing your uncooperative mind and flesh into obedience are repeated throughout the Seven Pillars. I, on the other hand, was incredibly volatile, quick to blow my lid, and easily controlled by intense feelings of compassion, anger, sadness, and grief. I was a very emotionally sensitive child. My mother always thought that I was going to become a vet one day because of how much I cared for the little animals around our farm. I spent long stretches of time nursing baby lambs rejected by their mothers, caring for the barn kittens, and carefully grooming, feeding, and attending to our dogs. The same sensitivity made it very easy for me to be set off by my peers: one of my common nicknames was ‘spaz’ because of my frequent meltdowns. Reading about Lawrence and wanting to emulate him instilled in me a desire to overcome this glaring fault. Unlike most of my efforts to improve my social skills, quite unfortunately, I ended up having tremendous success developing this ability. My propensity to emulate the people around me without understanding them ended up giving me permanent brainworms that I’m still not fully able to work out. Lawrence was famous for his pain tolerance, self-control, and obsession with feats of absurd endurance in the face of pain, and he was not shy about discussing it in great detail. Many of his biographers pin a lot of this behaviour on his service-related trauma, but it is also clear that he had a knack for masochistic self-abasement. Autistic fourteen-year-old Jon did not understand this distinction and decided to follow the example of a deeply troubled man with several layers of PTSD and neuroses.

My attempts to read the weird masochism of Lawrence of Arabia as an instruction manual led to predictable outcomes. I started training myself to develop greater pain tolerance through self-administered exposure therapy. I told myself that I was doing this to train my resilience, but a large part of me felt like I deserved it as penance for my many social failings. I was often told by my peers that I was an idiot, that I was bad, and that I didn’t deserve friends, nice things, or happiness. I internalized a lot of those messages and took them out on myself in a way that I could justify through appeals to self-improvement. I started small, but ended up developing a whole host of ritualized behaviours to manage different amounts and types of self-inflicted pain. I walked barefoot on the gravel road outside my house while practising conversations to ensure that my voice didn’t carry the sound of pain. I would go outside in the dead of winter without adequate clothing to see how long I could last and how easily I could maintain my composure in the extreme cold. I recorded myself speaking while pressing a tack into my thigh until I could do it without making a perceptible sound. I bought a jar of jalapeño peppers that I kept in my locker; I would eat one and then practise going about my day without reacting to my mouth burning1. I intentionally overworked muscle groups to induce stiffness and then force myself to perform those same exercises the next day. I eventually developed enough tolerance to start upping the ante to see just how far this training would let me push myself, and I soon learnt that with enough practice the answer was “too far.” At the time, I was very proud of myself and genuinely thought I was doing something good, as it had had some noticeable and traceable results. Despite how I thought of it at the time, in retrospect I can now see that it was a classic case of adolescent ritualistic self-harm.

While self-harm didn’t help me better understand people or discern any important social rules, it would become a necessary component of all my future masking attempts. It gave me the ability to bear pain and keep myself going when things hurt and all I wanted to do was scream. As it turned out, the ability to keep calm and collected under pressure without showing people your true feelings was far more important than learning the correct sequences of small talk. Once my demeanor changed from a scared chihuahua, baring its teeth and barking at anything nearby, to a teenage boy in rural Saskatchewan doing his best impersonation of a repressed British aristocrat, people started to relax around me. I realized, by way of Lawrence of Arabia LARP, that by showing fear, anxiety, and nervousness, I was accidentally socially escalating every situation that I was in, and by simply being calm, people would instinctively be more charitable, laid-back, and reasonable around me, rather than mirroring my emotions. Training myself not to react to my emotions or to pain allowed me to shrug off most attempts to antagonise me. I learned to simply act bored, when internally I wanted to explode, and then to ask them in a nonchalant manner if they were done yet. This turned out to be incredibly demoralizing to many bullies, so they moved on to easier, more reactive targets.

Another very important part of figuring out how to mask was joining the air cadets, which put me in totally new peer groups where I was freed from years of social debt. When I showed up to cadet summer camp, none of my course mates knew any of my awkward history, and I could make friends, try different techniques, and further refine my processes with a clean social slate. Cadets acted like a control group that allowed me to determine if a technique was failing because of my past social baggage or because it was genuinely off-putting. Cadets also taught me a lot of valuable skills like public speaking which gave me the tools for analyzing tone, voice, and body language. I learned about how to decode non-verbal messages other people were sending and how to adjust my own non-verbal communication to modify the way my messages were being conveyed. I also learned how to be more clear, concise, and articulate. While these skills did not translate directly into all of the complexities of reciprocal communication and social dynamics more generally, it certainly helped with some of them.

The social leaps I was able to make over the next few years of persistent effort were noticeable. I made real friends through cadets. Occasionally I was invited to hang out with people when everyone else bailed on them. I was invited to a birthday party for the first time in several years, and there were people who were not embarrassed to occasionally be seen spending time with me in public. It was exhausting to attain and then maintain my improved social position, but importantly, all that effort kind of worked. I was never anyone’s first choice of friend, but I consoled myself with the fact that, unlike in years prior, I was still a choice. However painstaking and arduous it had been to reach this point, as far as I was concerned, it was the best I could do with the limitations that I had.

When I was sixteen, I got another shot at a social blank slate. My rural high school cut its calculus program and didn’t offer computer programming classes, so I transferred to a larger school one town over. While I transferred for the classes, a new school had the pleasant side effect of allowing me to get a new social start unmarred by my last ten years of persistent spergery. A few people in the new school knew me already from brief interactions in sports, but thankfully I was a pretty decent athlete, and so most pre-formed impressions of me were that I kept to myself and read books about the military. After the transfer, the bullying I had experienced stopped completely, but still I had no idea how to make friends. For my first year at the new school, I kept to myself and developed a technique for eating my entire lunch alone without anyone seeing me before hiding in the library and pretending to do my homework. I played a lot of sports and joined many clubs, but despite being dedicated and proficient, I didn’t know how to make the leap from a teammate people didn’t hate to a friend.

The boys on my team mostly left me to my own devices, and instead of hanging out with them, I spent the downtime at tournaments between games teaching myself computer hardware design, reading about military history, and listening to music on my iPod as I fantasized about securing my team the win and earning the friendship of my teammates. After we won one of our home tournaments, one of the guys announced that we were all going to have an afterparty at his house. I was excited to finally get the invite to one of these events that I had always been left out of, and I asked one of the guys where the party was. He looked at me, seeming kind of confused, and asked, “Oh, you’re going? Were you invited?” I then realised that this universal invite did not include me, and told him, “I’m just dropping some of the other guys off because I have a car.” He looked satisfied and said, “Oh yeah, that makes sense.” That night I went home, buried my face in the pillow, and repeatedly banged my head against the wall while screaming, “WHY CAN’T YOU BE NORMAL?” at myself, until I realized I had woken up my mother.

During my first winter semester in my new school, I had a history class with a boy named Gary who very clearly had Asperger’s. On one of our long drives home after volleyball practice, I told my mom about him and joked in passing that he reminded me of how I used to be when I was younger. I was taken aback when, instead of my mother laughing at the suggestion that I might have had Asperger’s as a child, she just nodded and said, “Yes, you probably were.” Later that night, when we were in the kitchen, she casually dropped, “You know, when you were younger, your father and I thought that you had Asperger’s.” Followed by, “We were planning on getting you assessed for it, but then all of a sudden you stopped being like that when you were around twelve. We were very concerned, but then you managed to figure it out.” My mother didn’t think anything of this conversation: years later, when I asked her if she remembered it, she just shrugged and said, “No, not really.”

For me, this one-off remark from my mother felt like I got a radio transmission while behind enemy lines, saying, “You have been compromised, abort, abort.” It felt like that especially because she seemed to pinpoint the exact moment that I started Operation Be Normal. I tried to keep cool for the next twenty minutes, and then as soon as I was able, I absconded to the basement to Google Asperger’s Syndrome. I read the Wikipedia article and felt a pit in my stomach. As I had suspected in seventh grade, there was indeed something wrong with me. Not only was there something wrong with me, it also had a specific name. I looked at the references and found “The Complete Guide to Asperger’s Syndrome” by Tony Attwood, which I pirated and then printed off in the school library the next day. I expected to find that I had a very mild case because I was fairly normal compared to Gary. As I read through the book, though, I realized that I was actually a lot closer to a typical case, and Gary was just on the more severe end of the spectrum. Reading the book felt like someone had run a surveillance and collection program on me and somehow read my innermost thoughts. With each chapter, I slowly came to see that most of my challenges, behaviours, and quirks were not unique to me but were shared across this strange population. I realized that most of the traits that I had been trying to suppress were traits of Asperger’s and that there was a coherent explanation for why it was so hard to suppress them and do what seemed trivial for my peers. I also started reading personal memoirs of other people with Asperger’s and discovered that most of these autobiographies, especially ones from women, included their own versions of Operation Be Normal.

I was not satisfied with self-diagnosis, so one day, I cornered our school district special education director. I had played soccer, volleyball, and basketball with his son for at least seven years, so we knew each other quite well. We had spent a lot of time talking and interacting over the years. He had mentioned on more than one occasion that he thought I might be interested in his work with kids with Asperger’s, which I now realize was probably his way of dropping a hint, or seven. It had only just then occurred to me that he might have seen Asperger’s in me and had been trying to subtly bring it up. I asked him if I could speak to him in private, and he obliged, and when I asked him if he thought I could have a mild case of Asperger’s, he chuckled and casually said, “Yeah, you probably do.” I was not very satisfied with that response, and I asked if I could be evaluated for it. He told me that I didn’t need an evaluation because the purpose of an evaluation was to allocate special ed resources, which I didn’t need. I told him that I didn’t want resources, I just wanted to know if this was real or if it was all in my head. I gave him a speech about how I just wanted to know if this was the reason that I lived in a perpetual state of social isolation and confusion since sixth grade. He told me that the next week he could meet and talk with me. I asked him not to tell my mom, and he informed me that she likely already knew, so it wouldn’t be much of an issue.

We met and he informed me that, because he had known me for as long as he had, he didn’t need a whole lot more information. When we finished, he remarked that I was “the most stereotypical case of Asperger’s that he had met.” Then he informed me that there was nothing they could do to help me; I had already blown past any point where the interventions he could provide would help. My grades were excellent, and I wasn’t having disruptive behavioural issues. He explained that as far as school resourcing was concerned, I was not a priority. Most importantly, he told me that putting this diagnosis on my file and getting further referrals would likely be counted against me if I applied to the Royal Military College. This was an outcome that I did not want to risk, so I asked him not to put anything in writing. He agreed that the best thing I could do was to go forward knowing that I had Asperger’s and use this information as a tool to better understand myself and come up with more effective adaptation strategies. The meeting was encouraging; he told me that I was an intelligent and determined young man and that, if I applied myself to anything in the same way I had applied myself up to this point, I would go very far in life.

I was satisfied with this result, and I didn’t want anything to prevent me from joining the army, so I didn’t press further. I told my mother about this conversation and my previous months of research into Asperger’s, and instead of being surprised, she said, rather disinterestedly, “Well, yes, that does make a lot of sense.” I finally asked her why she didn’t say anything about Asperger’s before, or at least tell me that it might be a possibility, and she shrugged and told me that I was just like my father, and he was fine. When I went to explain this exciting news to my teachers, I was expecting them to be shocked to learn that I, of all people, could have Asperger’s, but they were far more confused to learn that I wasn’t already aware of it. My physics teacher was especially confused, because earlier in the year he had given me some articles to read about successful scientists with Asperger’s, and he was now realizing that I didn’t know I had it. He asked me why I thought he gave them to me, and I said, “I just thought you wanted to share them with someone.”

While it was not surprising to anyone else, learning that I had Asperger’s led to by far the biggest improvement I ever made to my overall methodology and approach in Operation Be Normal. I had previously been stumbling onto successful solutions through what was essentially guesswork. Instead of trial and error, I now had textbooks describing exactly what my issues were and heaps of clinical data about people just like me, the problems they had, and theories as to why they had them. Thankfully, they also frequently detailed effective interventions which I could self-administer. Before I knew what Asperger’s was, I couldn’t properly diagnose the issues, and while I would occasionally stumble upon something that worked, getting to that point required huge amounts of data collection followed by a period of trial and error. Instead of trying to guess at a colour match while being colour blind and wearing tinted glasses, I could read the labels on the paints I was working with and use those to make better guesses. Learning I had Asperger’s also significantly cut down on a lot of the self-loathing and self-hatred to which I consistently subjected myself. I didn’t need to repeatedly smack my head and scream, “Why can’t you just be normal?” anymore, because it turned out that there was an answer to the question. I had Asperger’s.

The summer after I was diagnosed with Asperger’s, I went to cadet camp as a staff member. I managed to hit it off well with the other staff members and, for the first time in my life, successfully socially integrated with a group of my peers. I also met another cadet staff member with Asperger’s, named Emit. Initially I thought we were going to get along great, but I soon learned that was not going to be the case. Unlike me, Emit did not end up socially integrating with the rest of us and would often bitterly complain about it. I tried very desperately to include him and went out of my way to ensure I invited him to everything we were doing. I knew what it was like being the sperg on the outside and felt it was my duty to make sure he didn’t feel that way. He somehow always managed to find a way to alienate himself from everyone else by making jokes in poor taste, being socially aggressive when the situation called for calm, blowing his lid when things didn’t go his way, and insisting on everyone doing things his way and following his rules instead of living with imperfect social compromises. My biggest complaint about Emit was that he was acting as if the world must conform to his specific ideas of how it should work in theory, with little regard for how it actually worked in practice. He had decided, unilaterally, that many social norms were bad, unjust, wrong, or stupid and refused to participate in them even if it led to both him and the people around him suffering. I would often try to explain what he could be doing better, but he refused to listen and insisted that his way was the right way and that everyone else was an idiot. When I tried to point out that his behavior was alienating people, his response was to explain that it wasn’t alienating, that they were in the wrong for feeling that way, and that he could show them the right way if only they would listen.

I recognized myself in nearly everything Emit did: he was about two or three years behind me in terms of my social development. He was making all of the social mistakes that I had learned to avoid through a painful process of trial and error, and like me, he refused to take correction or feedback from his peers because he insisted that nothing he did was wrong. For the first time in my life, I also got to see how my peers and classmates had probably seen me, because when he would leave the room, people would immediately start talking about him and the latest bizarre thing that he did. I felt the need to defend him and to try to explain why he was doing the things that he was doing, but no one really cared about my explanations and were often confused by my insistence on defending him. Eventually one of the guys explained to me that, even if he had a perfectly good reason to do what he was doing, it was still antisocial and annoying, and no amount of explanation would make that less of the case.

I started to feel a gut-wrenching sense of anxiety hearing the other staff talk about Emit. Every one of the behaviors they complained about was something with which I was intimately familiar. I knew why he was acting this way, and I was seeing for the first time how these actions were being interpreted when the pretense of civility was dropped and people gave their honest opinions. In those few weeks of cadet camp, I had finally achieved a semblance of the social acceptance I had been craving my whole life, and I realized that my ability to keep it was teetering on a knife’s edge. I started to have panic attacks, worried that I would lose my friends, and then realized that my erratic behavior during these moments of panic was pushing people away. I was in the middle of a self-reinforcing anxiety loop where eventually my worries about losing my friends would make themselves a reality. I started going for long walks at night during camp so that I could be alone with myself, to reflect on and process the events of the day, play through them again in my head, and ask myself what I could have done better. I began to feel despair at the absurdity of the situation that I had found myself in. I had fought my entire life to get small fractions of social acceptance, and now that I finally had it, I was self-sabotaging out of anxiety, which was going to lead to me losing what I had gained. I tried to give myself pep talks, but nothing seemed to work. I became afraid that others would see that I really was just like Emit, and like they turned on him, they would turn on me. I remember one night, while walking, I earnestly prayed for discernment. That coming weekend, while off duty in the staff room, I would get what I asked for while watching Carentan, the third episode of the Band of Brothers miniseries.

I had probably watched this episode a hundred times before, and at one point could have recited all the dialogue from memory. The episode follows one soldier, Private Blithe, through Easy Company’s fight to take and hold the French village of Carentan. Blithe is shown to be wracked with anxiety, to the point of developing hysterical blindness. While Blithe’s fear was of being killed by the Germans, and mine was of teenagers being mean to me, I related to him in a way that I previously had not. In one pivotal scene he talks to Lt. Speirs and admits that when he landed on D-Day, he hid in a ditch and fell asleep because he was scared. Speirs, instead of comforting him, leans down, narrows his eyes, and delivers a speech about the hopelessness, futility, and absurdity of war. Near the end of his interaction with Blithe, he asks him, “Do you know why you hid in that ditch? You hid in the ditch because you think there is still hope. But Blithe, the only hope you have is to accept the fact that you are already dead, and the sooner you can accept that, the sooner you will be able to function as a soldier is supposed to function. Without mercy, without compassion, without remorse. All war depends on it.”

Even though I had heard those lines many times before, they hit differently this time. It was like a switch flipped in my brain, or like something broke—I’m still not sure which. I sat there for a while, zoned out, staring at the wall, unable to concentrate on the show, thinking about that scene. I pretended to get a text and excused myself, telling the boys that I had forgotten a promise to meet up with someone else. I hit one of the many hiking trails where I knew no one would find me and did a lot of soul-searching. I rapidly cycled through a lot of feelings, but eventually I realised that I was like Blithe, and the only way I was ever going to make it was if I took Speirs’ advice, gave up hope, accepted that I was already dead, and leaned into the absurdity of the situation. Inside of me there was a scared autistic child, worried that once again he would be excluded. That child wanted nothing more than to finally be understood and known by others. He yearned for acceptance, to be seen for who he was, and naively hoped that one day he would find it. I had had this idea that understanding, friendship, and social acceptance were locked behind a series of rituals, and the reason that I had not been successful was because I couldn’t get the rituals right, but if I finally mastered the correct sequences, postures, and phrases, I would get what I so desperately desired. But I realised that this was a fantasy. No matter how hard I tried, people would eventually figure out that I was different—that I was not of them—and I would once again become an outsider. This pattern had been repeating ever since I began masking. I had only ever managed to gain acceptance on a small scale, over short timespans; eventually the mask would slip and everything that I worked so hard to achieve would become undone.

The only way I was going to survive, I figured, was if I accepted my situation for what it was. Inside of me, that lonely and sad child was on life support, clinging to the hope that he would one day be seen for who he was and loved on his own terms, and if I wanted to move forward, I needed to pull the plug and stop dragging his dead weight behind me. I thought back to Lawrence and The Seven Pillars, and how much I related to his descriptions of putting on the mask and then finding himself an alien both at home and at war. Lawrence’s way out was a brutal process of denial, austerity, and hollowing out of the man that he was to become the man that necessity demanded. I knew I had to follow in kind. This was not a fun, nor particularly happy, realization. I had read The Seven Pillars twice by this point, and knew that Lawrence’s path did not end on happy terms and that what awaited me would be an austere and strenuous life, but I felt that I had no other choice. As far as I could tell, I could either be unhappy, languishing in anxiety, social isolation, and sadness, or I could be unhappy and force my heart and nerve and sinew to serve their term long after they were done. Either way, unhappiness, adversity, and unredemptive suffering seemed inevitable.

To convince myself to actually go through with it, I told myself that this path was part of a higher calling, and this process took on a quasi-religious tone. I was raised conservative evangelical, so I was familiar with the language of self-sacrifice, denial, and martyrdom. I found myself especially enamoured with the letters of Paul and the themes of self-control, self-emptying, dying to the self, and turning yourself away from who you were and into a vessel for God’s will. In the ninth chapter of his letter to the Corinthians, Paul explains how he became all things to all people, so as to win them for the gospel, and emphasizes the necessity of self-discipline and the inevitability of suffering. In the Gospel of Matthew Christ commands men to deny themselves, pick up their cross and follow him. I read these chapters over and over. I would repeat Galatians 2:20 to myself: “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” I read The Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian and martyr who returned to Nazi Germany to resist the regime, knowing he would die, and would repeat phrases like, “When Christ calls a man, he bids him, ‘Come and Die.’” Finally, I would repeat over and over the exhortation of the martyrs from Revelation 12: “they did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death.” It was all very grim, and I managed to skillfully ignore any passages about hope, joy, peace, or contentment, and set my sights firmly on the aspect of Christian spirituality centred on denial, suffering, and expecting death. I told myself through gritted teeth that this world was a thorn that would press into my side until the day I die, and that my task on this earth was to suffer through it until I could go to heaven.

One of the autism forums on which I was spending a huge amount of time was called ‘Wrong Planet’. It was named after a feeling many of us have had: that we were aliens whose ship had crash-landed on the wrong planet, and we had found ourselves surrounded by an alien species that looked shockingly similar to us. I thought about the metaphor and I decided to lean into it. I was, whether I liked it or not, an alien whose spaceship had crashed on the wrong planet, and the reason I would never feel kinship with the humans was because I wasn’t one. These were not my people, and I was not their brother. I was spending all my time trying to convince everyone else that I was not an alien and that I was really one of them, and I was failing, but this was never going to happen. There was no rescue coming from my home planet, there was no way to rebuild my ship and escape, and I was just going to have to make do with my current lot because there was no other choice. The child inside of me that longed for my own world and my own people needed to die so that I could get on with living whatever kind of life I could in this world that I did not belong to. I asked myself what I would do if I literally crash-landed on a remote island with no hope of rescue, and thought about how pathetic it would be for you to spend your days wasting away and crying about how the people on the island treated you like a foreigner.

At this point there was only a week left of camp, so I spent a lot of the next week alone and mourned for the life I would never have. When I got home that summer, I continued processing this new, grim reality. I decided to allow myself two months, but after a few weeks, I figured I had felt all that I needed to feel; enough was enough, and I put the grief behind me. I emerged from that summer having pulled the plug on my inner child and buried him near the crash site, finally having done the grim work that I had been avoiding for years. I stopped telling myself various ego-soothing protective lies, like that the reason people didn’t like me was because they were jealous that I was smart, and accepted that their reasons for disliking my off-putting behaviours were actually quite straightforward.

During my time at cadet camp, one of the other boys was really into a new blog called “The Art of Manliness” which would become quite popular on the internet. I didn’t have much time to read it at cadet camp, but in the three weeks between the end of cadet camp and returning to school, I read through the entire archive. The blog was a godsend for me as an autistic conservative evangelical teen in the throes of gender dysphoria2. It was a combination of self-help, encouragement, and etiquette guides designed for young men who were struggling to understand and conform to a past masculine ideal. A lot of autistic girls have a story about figuring out social skills by reading etiquette guides, and in a way, this blog was my version of those guides. It had coherent and digestible explanations of so many of the social problems that I couldn’t understand, and I cannot understate just how many gaps in my social knowledge base their guides managed to fill. Reading them again as a thirty-something year old man, I realize that there was nothing revolutionary about the information, but for an autistic teen it was a veritable gold mine of opinions.

The Art of Manliness put me on a menswear arc which has stayed with me to this day. Its detailed guides on men’s grooming, dress, and deportment opened up a whole new world of information to me about how I dressed, how I should be dressing, and the social signals that I was unwittingly sending to the world through my appearance. I stopped buzzing my hair and got a proper haircut from a barber. I started being very diligent about shaving, showering, and keeping my clothes clean and well presented. I swapped my unkempt t-shirts and hoodies for button downs, and jeans for slacks. The website also had a lot of self-help advice which I took with all the earnestness, sincerity, and conviction of a teenage autistic boy desperate to figure out how to be a man. Thankfully, because I was autistic and completely immune to feelings of cringe, I truly set my sights on becoming the type of guy who could fully embody the spirit of the advice.

The Art of Manliness re-introduced me to several poets that my grandfather had read to me as a child, and this time I took a liking to them. I became fixated on two poems in particular, “If” by Rudyard Kipling and “Invictus” by William Henley. Both poems were about being beaten, bloodied, and bruised but never yielding, and they started to take on new meaning to me in my post-crash-landing life. I would repeat to myself, “My head is bloody, but unbowed,” and “I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul” from “Invictus,” and from “If,” “If you can fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds’ worth of distance run, yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it, and—which is more—you’ll be a man, my son!” Another piece of writing that the blog introduced me to was Teddy Roosevelt’s arena speech, which, like “If” and “Invictus,” I committed to memory and silently repeated to myself whenever my conviction started to waiver.

“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”

I then began to settle into a cold, ruthless, and headstrong pragmatism that stopped asking why, or if its judgements felt right, and instead focused only on what actually worked in any given situation. I stopped caring about what I liked, what I wanted, and what I believed in my heart was good, and forced myself to just accept the trade-offs that were given to me regardless of whether they were fair. I knew I couldn’t ever integrate with people on my own terms, but I could sure as hell try to integrate on their terms and accept the uneasy tension that would follow. My life would be hard, it would be filled with failure, and if I wanted things I would have to fight tooth and nail to get them, and I resolved to do just that. I had no illusions about my abilities; I still had a very long way to go. But I was in the arena, and I was going to emerge victorious or die on the field.

This shift in my mindset was obvious to the people around me. Both of my parents commented that I had emerged from cadet camp a changed man. I myself started to notice the change almost immediately. My anxiety fell off a cliff; I became a lot more bold and assertive, and took risks that I previously would not have dreamed of taking. My locus of control shifted from almost completely external to almost completely internal. This mindset shift gave me a new lease on life and also allowed me to see a much healthier and more realistic approach to masking. I had been burning all of my energy and attention trying to skin-walk my brother, my peers, and the people around me, thinking that, if I tried hard enough, one day I could pass as one of them. But my goal, all this time, should have been to be accepted as a foreigner, which is an entirely different problem set. I realized that I still needed to mask, but the mask I needed to wear was entirely different from the one I was trying to wear. I had been suppressing the wrong set of traits, trying to emulate others that would never fit well on me, and ignoring a lot of others that could really play well to my already existing strengths. Masking, I realized, wasn’t bad in itself. It was an optimization problem, and the reason I had been burning so much energy for so little payoff was because I had chosen the wrong vectors.

When I came back to school that year, I used many of my newfound insights and abilities to befriend a girl from my drafting class whose locker was beside mine. She quickly took to me, and then immediately offered to plan events for me, her friends, and the two other autistic boys in the physics, computer science, math, and robotics clubs. At the time I had no idea that she had ulterior motives, that she was mostly using these hangouts as a pretext to spend one-on-one time with me. Since we eventually got married after two years of mutual pining and missing each other’s signals, all this did manage to work out in the end. My final year of high school ended up going quite smoothly for me, and it felt like, after all of these years, my intentional and consistent effort had finally paid off. I was not popular—I was still, by everyone’s account, an odd person—but I was consistently and predictably odd, in a way that was legible to the people around me. My wife described me at the time as intimidating, cold, standoffish, assertive, and arrogant, but in a charming Mr. Darcy way, which was an incredible improvement over how people had described me a few years prior.

As I had planned to do from the age of five, I applied for and was accepted into the Royal Military College of Canada to study computer engineering. I quickly found out that the army is simultaneously the most and least autism-friendly environment possible. It is a highly social environment where you need to constantly perform social rituals correctly. Training is more or less designed to be sensory hell with no place to escape. It is filled with completely nonsensical rules and regulations whose only purposes seem to be, one, stopping the dumbest people on earth from accidentally killing themselves, or, two, constantly testing your fealty to the organization and its demands. And finally, almost every aspect of the army involves playing stupid games that everyone knows are fake, whose only purpose is to reinforce the desired behaviors and rigid hierarchies needed to fuel the giant machine that is the army. On the other hand, every single rule, regulation, desired behavior, hierarchy, social dynamic, and expectation is laid out in explicit detail. You are expected and instructed to copy other people’s behaviours and to mimic each other. “Being an individual” is a grave insult hurled at you by your instructors, rather than something expected of you. Military culture is so distinctive and different from civilian culture that, when you join, everyone, regardless of their specific neuroses, is on roughly the same footing in terms of cultural incompatibility. The entire apparatus of the military, from basic training to active operations, is designed to reinforce and reify the values, attitudes, dispositions, and behaviors that you are expected to have through overt instruction, demonstration, mentorship, correction via punishment and reward, and the unique, unforgiving aspects of the job itself. If you have autism and you are willing to lean into the army and let it shape you into the person that it needs, it will do just that.

While I didn’t really make any friends in my first year of military college, I was decently well-liked, and certainly not reviled or treated like some of the other guys. My social prospects improved once I reached my second year of college. I managed to get into the top 20% of my squadron in the first semester and so I earned a single room, which allowed me to socially recover in a way that I previously could not. All of the engineering classes split into their specializations starting in the second year, and I found myself in a class with David, a recent veteran of the war in Afghanistan. He was a few years older than me and had applied for RMC while serving in the ranks; I had known him in the first year, but we didn’t have any classes together or much of a reason to talk. I knew that David was an evangelical like me and had a vehicle, so on our first week in class I asked if I could hitch a ride with him to church on Sunday, and the rest was history. We shared an enormous amount in common, had similar dispositions and senses of humor, and were academically matched.

Seeing as he ended up marrying an autistic woman, I think David was the kind of neurotypical person who genuinely enjoys the company of autistics. He ended up acting as a liaison between me and the social world of the military. If I were Lawrence of Arabia, David would be Auda Abu Tayi: the experienced and respected leader of his people who took a liking to an odd-seeming intelligence officer, helped him to integrate with his people, taught him their ways, and facilitated most of his future successes. This is a phenomenon that autism researchers typically call mother henning. The term is typically used to describe when young neurotypical girls take autistic girls under their wing and teach them how to adapt to their environment, but this happened to me when I was nineteen. David provided me with a lot of social top cover. He was not only well liked, but most of us had no prior military experience, and certainly not a combat tour, so his discernment was unimpeachable as far as everyone else was concerned. Despite being an odd person and in my tweedmaxxing era, I was also David’s friend, so while my peers could sense that something was off with me, it couldn’t have been that bad if David didn’t care. David’s help was so transformative for me that it inspired me to start mentoring young autistic men, thinking that if I could do even a quarter of what David did for me I could do some real good in the world.

Mother henning, so to speak, is a widespread feature of military life. One best thing about military hierarchy was the expectation that people above you would mentor you without you having to ask or initiate. Senior military members mentor junior ones as instinctively as beavers build dams when they hear running water. Because David was older and more experienced than me, it naturally followed that he should spend his time teaching me in the ways of the military. And military mentorship doesn’t stop at your job; it covers basically every aspect of your life. He didn’t try to make me be someone else; I was still an eccentric young man who did strange things, wore strange clothes, and spoke in strange ways, and he didn’t try to correct any of that. But he did correct the genuine social faults that would negatively impact my standing. He was always dropping friendly hints to me like, “Hey, you shouldn’t do that,” “You should do this instead,” “You need to think about this differently,” and “Don’t talk to people like that.” The result was that he helped form me into a terrifyingly effective army officer. As far as I was concerned, this man was a war veteran, and I was not, so I should shut up and listen to whatever wisdom he was willing to drop on me. Another great aspect of military culture is that people are expected to lead by example, so while I realized that completely copying David would annoy him like it had annoyed my brother, there was a lot I could get away with mimicking, and I did just that.

Over the course of military college, I kept making meaningful, gradual improvements. I made two more lifelong friends, a feat that I would not have believed possible prior to joining the military. I ended up socially thriving at RMC and making an excellent impression on many of my peers. While most of them thought I was weird, by their own reports, they also thought I was smart, reliable, and competent. I was also a signals officer, so being weird was somewhat expected. As all military training is, RMC was often an arduous and miserable experience. Thankfully I was well accustomed to prolonged bouts of misery, and I managed, in large part thanks to David’s help, to navigate college successfully enough that I was selected to be a squadron leader in my fourth year. By the end of my fourth year, Operation Be Normal finally started to pay its dividends, and I had more or less figured out masking and social integration within the military. Once I graduated from military college, I was sent to signals officer training. Having more or less mastered the social role of junior officer from the last four years at RMC, I graduated at the top of my signals officer class. On the recommendation of my professors, I was posted to help jumpstart the military’s cyber warfare capabilities.

Being thrust from military training into the world of the actual military was quite jarring. Being an officer is heavily socially demanding, and while the Signals Corps is a million times more autism-friendly than the rest of the military, it was still clear that the training wheels given to me as an officer cadet and second lieutenant were now off. It quickly became evident to me that in the world of officers, Asperger’s was a huge detriment. One day early on, my first major, whose twelve-year-old son had Asperger’s, confirmed that this was the case. The final necessary piece of Operation Be Normal fell into place for me when he told me, in a plain and straightforward manner, that I was going to be at a massive competitive disadvantage to my peers unless I could find a way to compensate through other avenues. With the piteous recognition of a father trying to get through to his autistic son, he took the rank slip off his uniform and placed it on the table, signalling that he was not speaking as a major would to a lieutenant but as a man to another man. It was evident from the way that he spoke that he wasn’t just doing this for my sake, but for his own, and that while this advice was for me, it was also being prepared for his own son.

The Major told me that the world would not be kind to me, that it was not yet built to understand people like me, that the army was going to fight me at every stage of my career and that, as my major, he could only shield me from so much of it. He told me in no uncertain terms that I was noticeably handicapped in the world of army officers because of my strange social deportment and that, if I wanted to succeed, I was going to have to put in four times the effort of my peers just to stay afloat. I explained that I was already doing that, and he nodded and said, “I know, but it is going to keep being that way.” He then told me about other officers he had known who had Asperger’s, and about the differences between the ones that succeeded and the ones that failed. He reassured me that I had the characteristics of the successful ones and had managed to avoid the pitfalls of the unsuccessful ones. He went on to tell me about one of his friends, who left the army and was now living large working as a contractor for a few different three-letter agencies. He told me the story of a man who, despite never being great at playing the army officer game, earned everyone’s respect during the war in Afghanistan by filling a technical niche that no one else was able to fill. At the end of his speech he left me with some parting words of wisdom to make sure I didn’t miss his point. “It won’t get you to the highest ranks of the military, but honestly, you probably wouldn’t even want those jobs if you could get them. But here is the thing: no one who matters is going to care that you are autistic if you are the reason they get to go home and see their families every night.”

I took what my first major had said to heart, perhaps a little too well, and began dedicating almost all of my spare time to developing technical proficiency in malware analysis, exploitation, post-exploitation, digital forensics, and counter-forensics. I assumed that most of my peers were spending about 10 hours per week on developing their technical skills (which turned out to be a laughably high overestimation), so I figured that if I spent 40 extra hours, I could define a niche for myself at the unit as the officer that is also a technical subject matter expert. This ended up working spectacularly not just for me but for my fellow officers, who now had a peer that could solve problems for them that no one else could. I began offering my services as the advanced, technically proficient officer to everyone at my unit, and they enthusiastically accepted my volunteer work. Just as I had hoped, I became so tasked with loadbearing and mission-critical technical work that most of my administrative duties were shifted onto other officers and NCOs who did not have the same ability to contribute. I also started accruing huge numbers of favors from my fellow officers, who believed that I was doing them all a big favor by taking on their technical work.

I ended up working much longer, more grueling, and more difficult hours than all of my peers, but putting in this work ingratiated me to them to the point that I could pretty much get away with murder. I was still weird, but I was extremely useful to everyone at the unit, so none of them cared. People’s lives were at stake, so no one cared that the Lt stared directly at the floor and dragged his finger along the wall to feel the textures while he walked down the hallways. The overall sentiment from both my troops and my fellow officers was, “He’s a weirdo, but he is our weirdo.” I realized I had finally made it when I was getting coffee in the breakroom and heard some of my NCOs talking in the hallway, saying they didn’t want to leave for an exercise without me and brainstorming how to convince me to join them. The feelings about me were best explained by my CO, who, when we had a new captain come to our unit, informed him that I was an acquired taste, but one that was well worth the time and the effort to acquire.

I had come a very long way from the inception of Operation Be Normal. To a large extent, this operation, while fraught with misadventures in the beginning, turned into a resounding success in ways that I could have never hoped when I first started it. It never actually achieved its intended goal of allowing me to be normal, or at least benignly confused for a normal person. It did, however, allow me to develop the social skills, awareness, and compensation mechanisms to get to the point where my deviation from the norm didn’t matter. I often wish I could go back in time to twelve year-old me and tell him that he had a problem, that it was called Asperger’s, and it was nothing to fear. The challenges I was facing and would face in the future, while not common, were also not unique. There were answers, solutions, interventions, and pathways that he could take that, while they would not solve his problems on a fundamental level, they would make the world a more tolerable place. I would tell him that it was well within the range of possibility to make friends and to gain people’s respect, and that the reason he struggled could be addressed with enough persistence, energy, and effort. I would tell him the effort was worth it, that at times it would be discouraging but it was important, no matter what, to keep moving, keep putting one foot in front of the other, and take the wins of small incremental gains. I would tell him that it was actually possible to beat those social rock-paper-scissors prodigies, and that one day he would become quite adept at the game. I would leave him with the knowledge that I did become an army officer and achieved, by his standards, everything I wanted for my future self.

I wish even more that I could visit myself the summer before twelfth grade when I pulled the plug on the boy inside of me and buried him at the crash site. I wouldn’t try to stop him from going down the path that he had set out for himself. As depressing as it was, it was necessary work, and would end up being crucial for survival. I would tell him, however, that all hope was not lost, and that in time, he’d be alright. I wish I could tell him to be less hard on himself, and that the extreme project of self-abnegation he was about to embark on, did need not be so intense, and that moderation would better suit him in the long run. I would try to get it across to him that while middle school and high school had been rough, the real world is nothing like it, that it is way easier to navigate, and that his plans were heavily overcorrecting for survival in an environment that would only last one more year. I would let him know that the island he crash-landed on wasn’t all that bad in the end. The island isn’t a paradise, but there were worse places to crash, and as far as crash-landings and islands go, he got off pretty lightly. While learning to survive would be an arduous and difficult process, he would eventually stop having to fight for survival and be able to settle into a more comfortable existence. I would tell him that the crippling sense of loneliness and isolation he so desperately wanted to escape would never really leave and he would perpetually be an outsider for the rest of his life. But even as an outsider, he would end up marrying that girl in his drafting class, have children, make lifelong friends, and would gain the acceptance and respect of his peers. The last thing that I would tell him is that, eventually, things turned out out as best as they possibly could, and that for all of its ridiculousness and deluded grandeur, LARPing as Lawrence of Arabia kind of worked.