Growing up in a tough neighbourhood where there were rough gangs and drug pushers at every corner few children ever made it through elementary school. There were more single-parent families than there were cockroaches in their kitchen.
Just kidding, that’s not my life-story. That is the story you would find in many fiction books about how rough other people’s lifes are. My life is rough but not because of the neighbourhood that I grew up in. I grew up in the suburbs and went to a middle-class public school in a predominantly white area. In a neighbourhood, where most adults were employed and very little happened. You would think in this idealic neighbourhood everything was great. However, if everything was great then there would no story.
In elementary school I was such a weak reader that the teachers predicted that I would never read at grade level but as a result of hard-work and lots of time practicing I was able to prevail and eventually go on to get my masters. It is unusual for people with Aspergers to struggle with reading because the disability is often called the “little professor disease” because of the enormous vocabulary of these children. If a teacher said, however, this child will be alone for much of his life unable to find romantic love to protect him from the cold harsh nights or just the fun nights at parties were everyone seems to be paired up than they would have been right. If the teacher went on further to say “this child will never be extremely popular and may as well carry a parrot on his left shoulder so he would always have companionship”, this teacher would have been considered brilliant when it came to human insights.
As it was I was always picked last for sports teams and when I was allowed to pick the team whichever good players I picked would automatically not try and simply let the other team win. That is how much I was disliked? I mean who honestly throws a recess game of soccer? Who could possibly be that malicious? and yet those people do exist.
This period would set me up for the person who I later would become. As girls set out to first pretend they like me and once they had me feeling confident, shatter this confidence like one shatters a mirror when they see an image that they don’t like. Even the teachers were tough on me, I remember being ostracized in front of the whole class for being too clumsy and people getting hurt around me as a result. The feeling from this lecture after a recess left me feeling ashamed the rest of the day.
My early years also had me trying to be the class clown and achieving some success at it, so even though I never achieved any lasting goodwill towards myself because my social skills were limited as well as people not having much understanding of Aspergers, which I think is still the case today, it began directing me in the direction of trying to do some kind of stand-up comedy.
Why did I never try theatre or any other kind of performing arts when I was younger? My school never had a very good program and it was never the direction my friends went so I had to choose between the limited number of friendships I did have and trying something else that I did not know very much about at that time. Therefore, I only discovered stand-up comedy when I was much much older.
Image from sampler.isr.umich.edu
Mr. asperger 