Why I'd Prefer to Be Mildly Autistic

I had an interesting realization tonight.

But before I get into that, there's a confession I have to make. And please don't take this too personally, but what I want to get off my chest is...that you bore me. And most of the time, just to be fair, I pretty much bore myself. 1st world societies, with their people suffering from increasingly diminishing attention spans, either encouraged by or resulting in internet and television obsession, drug/alcohol abuse, video games, sexual degradation, and pop literature, in addition to the many other casual spoils of modern life, are making for a very dull climate. Maybe 'complacent' is the righter word.

It seems the more a civilization advances, with America as the prime example, the more its inhabitants devolve into cultural zombies. Our daily effort becomes the process of trying to stifle our innate desire to do something (our original nature which wants for us to live dangerously and make an adventure of the daily life) with all the momentary gratifications we can manage or afford to stuff into our day. Most amenities in modern life, in fact, are designed to be nothing more than a quick fix. And since we prohibit many types of drugs, I must ask: Are we oblivious to the fact that most of what we consume on a daily basis could more or less be considered just as harmful, dulling, and addictive than what we tell the kiddies not to smoke or inject through needles? For it all serves the same underlying purpose: numbing restlessness which would be better satisfied through meaningful activity.

We're suffering a shortage of interesting people. Each generation the count reduces, which takes me back to that realization. The other day I encountered in Psychology Today an article about a young woman, Kiriana Cowansage, who was diagnosed at the age of 19 with Asperger's Syndrome, a condition on the "high functioning end of the autism spectrum." The subject of the article is a graduate student in NYU's neuroscience program, an undoubtedly intelligent girl, and yet she frequently gets lost in her own West Village neighborhood. Other quirks of Kiriana's: 1) When she was two years old her mother remembers her saying things like, "The bee fell out of my mind. What's a mind?" 2) She once spent 10 hours straight working on a puzzle of the astrological heavens. 3) She can hardly interact comfortably with most people but possesses a natural closeness to animals. 4) Her tendency is to develop an extreme infatuation for her interests as well as a consuming focus toward whatever is her task at hand, preferring to be immersed in productivity rather than to socialize or hang about.

One of Kiriana's current projects at NYU is translating a textbook on neurodevelopment into metaphorical scenes, combining her scientific proneness with her talent as an artist. "To me, art is a part of science, of observation—it's finding the details that define an object." Kiriana's drawings are described as whimsical and detailed, perhaps influenced by the Edward Gorey books found strewn about her apartment.

After reading the article I found myself overcome with fascination for this person. I even noticed in me a strange yearning to be diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome myself and to befriend other people with similar conditions. How lovely, I thought, it would be to be diagnosed as abnormal and belong to a scene that could care less about the I-Phone or latest episode of Prison Break. I won't deny that I'm incredibly naive to what it truly means to suffer from any form of autism or neurological disorder. I'm sure the people who actually struggle with these conditions would do anything just to be normal. Nonetheless, I have to naively wonder if perhaps, in some respects, they were saved by their disorders from living your average ho hum kind of life.

But then I suppose the same question could be asked to the victims of a tsunami disaster, residents of a civilly unrested region, or those who struggle to simply eat in poverty stricken third world countries. Would they trade in their "interesting" lives for a one-way ticket to safe and comfortable normal land? Please inform me if you're savvy, because I honestly don't even know if that's a dumb question.