2009-09-01 Piled Higher and Deeper

My diagnosis came as an enormous relief at the same time it presented a significant loss.

Dans les champs de l'observation le hasard ne favorise que les esprits préparés. [In the fields of observation chance favours only the prepared mind].—Louis Pasteur

"I want you to speak with Dr. Seagal in the psychology department." My faculty supervisor looked at me steadily.

I dropped my eyes. "I don't see what the problem is. What do you think this Dr. Seagal can do for me?" I was trying to think of why I had been called in. This “recommendation” made no sense to me.

"Robin, you have been having communication issues with a number of your fellow students and with faculty in this department. I think this could resolve some problems. I think talking it over with Dr. Seagal would be good for you."

Oh, great, I thought to myself. A referral to a shrink. Somebody thought I was mental. Same song, new verse. I wondered who it was this time, and what my chances were of getting around them without losing anything I valued.

I had gone back to school again. I was financially independent and could devote my time to anything I chose. My working experience with materials science had shown me that the future was going to be in yet more advanced materials, at even smaller scales, and would navigate the gray area between the inert and the living. In 2009, I began my doctoral program in synthetic biology.

You might think that odd and wonder how I managed a doctorate in a discipline so different from my bachelor's and master's. The truth was, the program accepted students from the physical science and engineering disciplines because parts of the synbio field were closer to engineering than they were to life sciences. For example, if you examine a virus closely, it resembles a machine more than an organism.

The next three years were exhilarating, exhausting, and highly productive. Not to my surprise, but to almost everyone else's, I did complete the program in the statutory minimum three years, including coursework, research, and dissertation, and despite my half-time teaching load. I came in with a clear goal, and I didn't have a personal life outside the program.

My teaching assistantship covered my tuition plus a minimal living stipend. This meant I could earn my doctorate without incurring debt and that I would leave school with my finances intact. This was an enormous advantage at the time; many of my colleagues graduated with crippling student loans.

Most of my teaching load centered around one of the labs. Because of my technical background, I was appointed student lab manager. I repaired and refurbished the existing equipment, proposed new purchases, and custom-built a few crucial tools.

I also supervised a couple of my colleagues as lab monitors. I could not keep the lab open sufficient hours within my contracted twenty hours per week, so we shared the duty among the three of us. That led to some problems.

I do have communication issues, and the other doctoral candidates took offense at some of my messages. I believe the first issue was when one of them was repeatedly and significantly late in relieving me at the lab monitor's desk. I considered it a duty to keep the lab open for the students. The tardy colleague thought it was perfectly fine to kick everyone out and lock up until she got there.

I put my view of the situation into an email and CC'd the relevant faculty as well as both the lab monitors.

The tardy one took exception to my "tone" in that email. I replied that I had used no tone and was simply describing the situation as clearly and simply as possible. In my defense, I did not say anything about the person, only the events and results. I did rather emphasize the “duty” aspects of the job.

At first, I was defensive and a bit paranoid, not without reason, at the referral to a psychologist. However, my faculty supervisor had given me good advice in the past and I trusted him. He was not wrong in this instance, either.

In addition to a tenured professorship in psychology, Dr. Seagal also had a private practice specializing in autistic children and including a few adult autistics. It took him very little time to make an initial diagnosis, particularly after we jointly disassembled my masking protocols, and he got a good look at me in my natural state.

No wonder I was such a mess at times. I had been spending more than half my mental resources on masking autistic behaviors, using methods I'd learned as a child, with no guidance, no models to follow, and only ridicule and punishment as motivation. So much wasted or inefficient effort.

My diagnosis came as an enormous relief at the same time it presented a significant loss. I suppose I went through something like Kübler-Ross' five stages of grief, although I've since learned I should not have thought of it that way. The grief was for the apparent loss of opportunities. I had hoped, off and on for most of my life, that I would eventually find my place, find meaningful work among peers who respected and valued me, people who would not call me “weird” and exclude me from their opaque and convoluted social games.

Now, I thought, I would never find that place, because it simply didn't exist. I was of course wrong about that. My autistic communities (there are many) are everything I had hoped. I just hadn't known where to find them.

The relief was real. Suddenly I had the means to explain so much that had been confusing and frustrating in my life. My constellation includes vivid, sharp-edged sensory memory, so I could replay and re-experience many formative incidents. The illumination of my diagnosis made clear what had been happening, and in most cases washed away the negative emotions. So many incidents were simply miscommunication or misunderstanding. I could not blame the adults of my childhood, because almost no one at that time understood what it meant to be autistic.

I set up my diagnosis as an additional research project, one that would go on for years. I quickly learned that autism research was a minefield full of cowpats: what didn't actually damage you might still be an unpleasant, stinking mess. Clear patches were rather rare then, although the situation has improved with time. At least aversion therapy is long gone.

I became much more careful about my emails and tried to limit my verbal communication to phatic scripts (Good morning! How are you? Fine, thanks, and you?) and work-focused transactions. Fortunately, my busy schedule provided ready excuses to avoid neurotypical social events, and no one thought that was odd for a doctoral candidate. Most of my social interactions were with students in the lab, where I was so helpful no one said anything negative to or about me.

Several of my students won national-level awards, and each of them publicly acknowledged my assistance. That stopped most of the rest of the complaints.

The only remaining problem was another doctoral student, who had a different set of issues that I believe were related to her mental health. I was never on the need-to-know list, and she never confided in me, although we worked together for the better part of two years. At one point she had signed out a large amount of the portable lab gear, ostensibly to do a major research project over a school break. However, after the break she failed to return the gear. I sent several polite reminder emails, and after a month sent a civil but firm email in which I offered to pick up the gear myself if there was some reason she could not return it.

She went to the department chair with accusations that I was harassing her. The chair sent me a strongly worded email. I queued up all the emails I had sent on the matter, appended an inventory and valuation of the gear in question, and replied it to the chair. Once he saw the evidence (especially the financials), the situation reversed. As the story came out, the doctoral student was emotionally fragile and had had a breakdown over the death of her pet gerbil some three months previously. She dropped out of the program not long after, but the lab did get the equipment back.

I have no idea what I might have done differently. I can't read minds. I really don't think I should be expected to keep up on the health and welfare of everyone else's pets. I can barely keep track of the names and faces of the humans I deal with every day, let alone their mental or emotional states. Particularly if they don't volunteer relevant information.

Amongst all the drama, I managed to write my dissertation. This was a prescriptive guide to applying biological processes to micro- and nanomaterials production, a 600-page tome that became an industry standard for decades. I wasn't giving away all my secrets. The book was a collection of my personal recipes for getting microbes to do useful work, but each technique was an old one I'd long surpassed. I was developing much more efficient and powerful techniques.

My advisor and the faculty researchers I worked with wanted me to stay longer and publish more papers, but I had things to do. The Human Genome Project had opened new vistas, and the implications of genetic engineering enabled by improvements in speed, cost, and detail were intoxicating. I was anticipating far more satisfying innovations than simply chewing over minutiae from my dissertation.

Thanks to my software development and book royalties, I had sufficient financial resources that I could live, frugally, without outside employment. For the next few years, I took on the occasional consulting or teaching job when it interested me, but I spent most of my time pursuing my own research.

My primary goal was a useful general-purpose nanite worker, a nano-disassembler/assembler. I was translating mechanical engineering principles to the nano scale, to create machines that could manipulate individual molecules. If I could do that, I would be able to build (or deconstruct) anything.

I was halfway through my life to date and finally had my hands on the tools that would make everything else possible.