The Early Years

Kids just go about being themselves. I was no exception. I was not “different” in my eyes. I was just doing the things that interested me very much. Suddenly I found myself being the talk of the adult world around me. Who is this genius who knows how to pronounce the difference parts of the brain, and also knows what they do? Why does he make up his own addition and subtraction problems just to keep himself amused? What kind of strangeness must be in this guy’s head to dress up as Sherlock Holmes in 90-degree weather? While adults were kept entertained, kids my own age were not. They were very mean and spiteful, calling me a nerd or a retard. Not all of them were like that, though. If you wanted to be my friend, the best way to do that was to play word games with me. Otherwise, I was not social with my peers.

Although in third grade I started to cognize that I was very different, it wasn’t until I was eleven years old and in fifth grade that it really hit me. As we entered adolescence, differences between me and the other kids became very obvious. I wasn’t into all the gossip and rough play. Conversations did not revolve around sports, sex, or building friendships. It was as if my eyes suddenly opened one day. That’s when the inferiority complexes started rolling in – feelings that would plague me well into my adult years.

Just before being diagnosed with PDD-NOS in 2008, I read the book “Unwritten Rules Of Social Relationships” by Dr. Temple Grandin and Sean Barron. While reading Sean’s story, I couldn’t believe how much his early years were almost identical to what I experienced. It was as if I were looking into a mirror. That’s when it really started clicking in my own mind that I may have been autistic all these years. I also thought that it would be nice if I WAS diagnosed with autism because then, for the first time in my life, I could finally put my finger on the reason why I was so different.

To add to all my social ineptness, I was constantly suffering from some sort of health problem. The fact that I was small for my age didn’t help matters. Constantly having ear infections and some reason to visit the medical doctor kept me isolated from other kids much of the time. I spent a lot of time in the care of my grandparents or my Aunt Doris and being examined by some doctor for some reason. At the age of 12, during a routine visit to an endocrinologist, I discovered that I had a leaking heart valve. I myself made the discovery before the doctor mentioned it. I even pointed it out to my parents before the endocrinologist called for the cardiologist. It wasn’t until I was 19 years old that the leak in my aortic valve became bad enough to require open heart surgery to fix. While my own health challenges were an influence in my decision to pursue a career in health care, other interests developed during my childhood that are still present today. While spending time at my Aunt Doris’s place, I would walk up the street to the public library where I would spend the day reading books on anatomy & physiology, astronomy, and paranormal phenomena. While it is obvious from my choice of profession that anatomy & physiology is my forte, these other areas are still topics of great intrigue.

On the first day of fourth grade, in September of 1971, I met a new lifelong friend who would be an integral part of my life in many ways. It was the new priest who just took over as pastor of the parish, Father Steve. I remember that the reason why I was excited to meet him was because he had such a calming and accepting energy about him. As Father Steve recalls, his first great memory of me happened on the day we met, when I recited The Lord’s Prayer in Greek. This was just another feat by which I captivated an adult audience. At this period of time, I was teaching myself how to speak Greek because I had neighbors who were from Greece. From that day on, Father Steve would be the main person I would share everything about myself with. He would be there during all those years I was going through my inferiority complexes. He was there with me in the hospital ICU when I first woke up after my open heart surgery. He would also be the person I’d visit on a regular basis when I needed somebody to talk to during my adult years. I last saw Father Steve one Monday morning in February of 2001, when he made a surprise visit to my apartment in Hazleton, Pennsylvania. Because of his unconditional acceptance of others, I spent a great deal of time talking to him about anything and everything, even well after I stopped practicing Catholicism.

You might wonder what my parents must have thought as I was going through such difficulties. Among the myriad of doctors and health professionals they ever took me to, there was a child psychologist thrown in the mix. Back in those days, though, the only form of autism that existed was classical autism, where communication and logical action are lacking. Even when I saw a psychologist at the age of twenty-two for an evaluation for possible learning disabilities, autism never came into the picture. While my parents were extremely supportive and responsive to my physical needs, they were completely unaware of my emotional and social concerns. To them, I was an amazingly brilliant, precocious wonder. If I wasn’t following the rules of social conduct, I just needed more discipline to knock some “sense” into me. Needless to say, my relationship with my parents in my teen and young adult years were not always so pleasant. They were doing what they though was best, and they gave me what they thought I needed. But it wasn’t what I needed, and all that that discipline to knock more sense into me really did was frustrate me more and more. While I feel that I am very close to my parents to this day, I still do not mention all the things that are on my mind because of their limited understanding of how my mind really works. My mind works like an autistic mind, not as one that needs more sense knocked into it.

My stimming behaviors have not always been so disruptive. Most autistic people make strange repetitive motions or have undeniable behavioral mannerisms. This is not the case with me. As a child, I was completely addicted to anything that physically moved me, such as rocking chairs, a rocking horse, swings, etc. Throughout my teen years and well into my adult years, I would listen to music, sitting in a room with all the lights out, wearing out rocking chairs. I mostly listened, and still listen to, Elton John. I would daydream about being a hero with the fire department or being in the military. I would also daydream about being part of Elton John’s band, traveling with the band around the U.S. between concerts on motorcycles that could fly. This world of music, darkness, daydreaming, and rocking was so comforting.

An even more peculiar stimming behavior that I still indulge in is making lists. As a child, I made a list of every kind of car I could think of while drawing a picture of the front of the car next to the name. In high school, a circulating joke between three or four friends turned into my creating the fictitious, and now legendary, “Sugi’s Army”. My “recruitment” efforts netted over three hundred people, and I would always carry with me the list I typed up of all the army’s members and their ranks. Before the days of computer word programs, I became quite a good Scrabble player by reading through the Official Scrabble Player’s Dictionary, making list after list of strange words. While working for Penske Truck Leasing in the late 80s, I made a list of every city and town in every state and cross-referenced the names to every state that has a city or town by that name. I compiled this list be ticking off town names, one by one, in both the Rand McNally Road Atlas and the AAA Road Atlas. But perhaps my most notorious list was the creation of “Pat’s Picture Book” – the entire National Scrabble Association’s Official Tournament Word List typed, word by word, into a WordPerfect document, and many of the obscure words then being linked to websites that describe those words. Over the course of the past eight years that I’ve lived in Minnesota, I’ve created several lists – lists of all school districts, colleges, hotels, funeral homes, attorneys, trucking companies, etc. in the state and beyond, all being establishments which I advertised my services to. Making lists is what keeps my mind occupied when nothing particularly inspirational is in it. Yet, it is the inspiration to reach a particular goal that propels me to take on such an exhaustive project.

So, as I stated, I was just being me, a kid doing his own thing, following his own interests. Then, when adolescence and the teen years came, along came the eye-opening reality that I was very different than my peers. I really REALLY didn’t fit in. Although there were a couple other kids I did do things with, there was no way I could possibly go out independently into the world to make new friends. It’s not that I was shy or afraid. I was not. I was just clueless as to how to go about initiating conversation. Even when I did finally get the gumption to start talking to other kids, my ignorance of the social rules was quite evident. I didn’t even talk like a “guy”. I talked like that nice kid who was treading lightly as he ventured out of an eggshell. Knowing I was so different was indeed painful. Thanks to the adults I could talk to, though, I never reached such a low as to consider self-destruction. There was always that inner spiritual awareness, yet to a small degree during the teen years, that kept me engaged in the world. But at the same time, the strong need to “fit in” eventually gave rise to some very inappropriate ties.

During my senior year of high school, I would go to parties and do things that I would have never considered doing before. My beer chugging habits became the talk of the school. Taking a few “hits” from a marijuana cigarette seemed cool. Although I never became part of the “in” crowd, I was being more socially daring and was therefore talked to more. Once while I was at a training exercise with the Fire & Rescue Explorers Post, we visited a local fire company. I decided that it would make me look more mature if I spent some time hanging out with a loudmouthed fireman and some of his friends. When I became a fireman, I tried to act like what I thought a “guy” should act like. Having a few too many beers at the local bar with some "friends" became a pastime. In the later 80s, the scene moved from bars to a biker bar with adult entertainment where a few firemen I knew frequented. These scenes were NOT regular events at all. They were occasional activities that I felt would improve my manliness. But in the end, all they did was obviate my awkwardness. These “fitting in” digressions lessened significantly when I left Pennsylvania in 1992 and stopped all together when my fortunate spiritual journey began.

Those who have known me since 1998 know the inner adventures I so diligently wrote about during the years since. Meeting an Indian guru in the summer of ‘98 changed the course of history forever. I briefly touched upon my spiritual experiences and revelations in past blog posts. You can get a good picture of where this path has taken me in such writings as “The Healing Power Of Qi: Lessons From Avatar”. There will be more to come like this in the near future.