As a young girl, Beth was rather odd. She never talked very much and seemed to stare off into space a lot. One could never figure out whether one was getting through to her or not. She was a pretty little girl with long light brown hair and huge amber eyes. It was the eyes that really stood out. They had a piercing hypnotic gaze.
She did not particularly care if she were dirty or clean. She appeared to have no attachments to any toys. She did not seem very drawn to play with other kids. Facial expressions rarely crossed her face, and when they did, they were most inappropriate. For example, she'd laugh when she fell and cut herself. She'd cry when her mother tried to hug her.
Her parents were very worried about her. They tried to make overtures to her, but she didn't seem to respond. She did not care whether she was eating spinach (which most kids hate) or sweets (which most kids beg for). She ate food listlessly as though she were eating tasteless sawdust.
They took her to doctors who were concerned that she was retarded, or "developmentally disabled", the politically correct term. However, they did tests on her which confirmed that she actually had quite a bit of latent intelligence, especially in spatial ability or with numbers. The doctors were utterly baffled and didn't know what to call her. All they knew was there was something distinctly wrong with her. One doctor raised the issue that perhaps she's "autistic". "There's no cure for it," he sadly explained. Beth's parents took her away in a huff, since this implied they were not very good parents, and this did not agree with them.
One thing that stood out about Beth is she liked to stare at things. She would hold a global crystal from the living room and gaze intently at it for hours. She just held it in her lap sitting cross-legged like a contented Buddha hypnotized by the light patterns that formed in it. She had a sly Mona Lisa-like smile on her face.
Or she would stare at the curtains. She especially liked it when the curtains rose and fell with subtle currents. She was as happy as a kid on a merry-go-round watching the curtains.
She liked to sit in the back yard lying down looking up at a tree. She would fixate her gaze on a single leaf. She might watch that same leaf for a whole season from the time it grew outwards in spring till the time it turns color and falls in autumn. She'd then sit and watch it decay into the ground with the approach of winter.
She was also fascinated by certain sounds. She would perk up her ears upon hearing the call of a single bird. She never got tired of listening to that one bird, like hearing the sound of a favorite song over and over. However, she'd scream and start throwing things around whenever she heard jets flying overhead. The sound of garbage trucks tended to freak her out, too.
She'd pick up a piece of wrapping paper and crinkle it over and over, enchanted by the crackle and pop of it. It would drive her mother crazy when she was busy with more important things in life than the sound of wrapping paper. If her mother demanded that she stop and try to take the paper away, Beth would suddenly scream and rant and rave like a little demoness. Seeing the futility of attempting to discipline her, her mother would finally allow her to get her way.
Or she would spin a bottle around and around. That was very interesting to observe all the twists and turns, the way it would gradually slow down to a stop. Then she would give it another spin. And so on all day long.
She had a thing about puzzles, one of her more relatively normal occupations. She wasn't especially interested in the finished product however. She was just amazed at how all the little pieces fit together. She had no interest in the picture it was supposed to make and never referred to that at all. She was only interested in achieving some kind of ultimate symmetry with all the little pieces. She enjoyed making order out of the chaos. Paradoxically, she was able to put a puzzle together quicker than the average kid. Then once completed, she'd throw all the pieces apart and start the whole process over again.
She was really into order. She'd go around the house and put everything in just the right place. She apparently had her own internal rules for where the "proper place" was supposed to be. If anyone moved a single thing out of order, she would throw her crazy temper tantrum which was so unprecedented, no one would dare move anything. She was becoming the Little Empress of the house.
At a very early age, she liked numbers because numbers were so orderly. She liked the way one number came after another. She'd walk around counting things like a little accountant. For example, one week, she counted everything that was in the house: how many plates there were, how many spoons, how many rolls of toilet paper (and how many sheets on each roll), how many chairs, beds, mattresses, toothbrushes, and so on. She did not give a damn about the praise her parents gave her for this ability. She just did it because it was absorbing.
At first in school, she had a hard time learning to read. The reason was she'd get caught up in the shape of the letters. She liked "o" because it was so round. She liked the zig-zag pattern of "z", so she really liked to read the word "zebra" even though she didn't have the foggiest idea what it meant. She would study each letter intently and contemplate it, experiencing a kind of samadhi in the experience.
It wasn't until a few years later that she finally got it that all those letters added up to units called "words" that stood for something real. The letters were just like pieces of a puzzle that added up to a larger unit. This was amazing to her! The letters "c" "a" and "t" added up to the sound "cat" that stood for that warm furry thing that lived in their house and ate that slimy stinky food. She was an extremely good speller because she could not stand to see those letter pieces out of place. Here was a new order!
One word after another she got. She was learning language faster this way than she learned to talk. Indeed, she found that she preferred to read and write than she did to talk. In only one year, she went from a vocabulary of a couple of words to thousands.
She discovered an even vaster unit called a "book" that was composed of thousands of words and hundreds of thousands of letters (she would even count them!). The book gave her information about the world that no human was able to give her. However, she had a hard time understanding story books because she did not quite grasp what feelings were. And plots baffled her to no end. She began to regard humans as though they were alien creatures to herself.
Before she knew it, she was reading stacks upon stacks of books. The teachers praised her and gave her good grades for this, but she could care less about this. The students teased her and called her an "egghead". She just looked at them peculiarly trying to fathom what instincts led them to do that. She knew that eggs were the round things birds and reptiles laid or that there were "eggcells" in mammals and humans, but why would they connect the word "egg" with head, the things containing brains that are connected to necks?
She especially liked science since it was so orderly. There were things called "laws" such as the "Law of Gravitation" or the "Law of Attraction of Positive and Negative". This fit her intuitions that there was some sort of innate order in the universe. She was especially interested in evolution and began to speculate that perhaps she was some kind of mutant. This is pretty unusual for a kid who is only ten years old. Most kids were out playing ball games with each other, but here she was, making hypotheses about the nature of the universe.
Unfortunately, because she was not interested in communicating verbally, there wasn't really any way she would be able to apply any of this to real life. As a matter of fact, she didn't have the slightest interest in applying it. She didn't even know what that means.
When she became a teen, when the sex hormones hit her and made her restless, she became somewhat shaken out of her childhood self-centered utopia. She felt odd that she couldn't make it with peer groups and was a loner all the time. She tried to make overtures to them, but she came on so out of place that they laughed at her: "Go away, Egghead, go back to your books!" She was hurt that she didn't fit in. She was confused about what was wrong with her. She would shut herself up and have gloomy thoughts about suicide.
She started hanging out with a group of kids who also didn't fit in for one reason or another. They were not the most reputable kids in the area. A lot of them were gang members and a lot of them got drunk a lot and did drugs. She tried doing some of these things, but found it all made her sick and made her even more out of sorts. On drugs, for example, when the other kids were at least able to function somewhat, she was way out of it and couldn't function at all. Her mind just went completely to pieces and everybody had to babysit her, which irritated them. "Oh boy, Egghead's freaking out again," they'd sigh wearily. Or she'd start talking about how everything is connected to everything else and is all composed of the same Basic Energy. Her peers, who only wanted to party and have fun, were not very interested in such revelations. She decided she better not do that stuff anymore. She tried hanging out when they'd go around tearing things up but somehow that didn't seem right to her. It seemed pretty stupid.
Of course, Beth became initiated into the world of sex. She did it with both guys and some girls. Beth would just lay there and gaze into a guy's eyes while he was pumping in and out of her. She was not particularly connected with the sensations below; she would be fascinated with the jewel of the eyes, observing the permutations they went through (which would convince the guy she was really turned on to him). Or she would fixate on a girl's ear-ring the duration of the act. She never had a climax; somehow she just wasn't connected to that part of her body. She got some satisfaction from the act, but it was just something her body wanted. She felt utterly detached from it.
She didn't understand the other part of sex: the whole business of relationships. Relationships were like emotions and plots to her: unfathomable. She didn't understand why a guy got mad if she went off with someone else. So what? Or when a girl told her she loved her, she would ask her pointblank what she meant. Then she had no idea why she went off in a huff. She soon had a reputation as a cheap whore, but she wondered what that meant. She looked it up in a dictionary and read a book about prostitutes but this did not elucidate anything for her.
After awhile, she had her fill of this silly business. If this was what people did to get along, she didn't want to have anything more to do with it. Beth, having tossed out the wild weeds of her adolescence, went back to her leaf-gazing and books.
She discovered some books about Eastern mysticism, such as the Upanishads. It somehow rang a bell with her. She realized that intensive meditative concentration was what she was doing all her life. She began to wonder if maybe she was one of these people in a past life and that's why she was having such a difficult time in this culture. She tried practicing formal yogi and meditative practices, but she soon tossed such things out the window. She figured her own way was best for her. She watched a single mote of dust floating through the air shining brightly in the light. She achieved her own satori just doing that.
Beth, being such a good student, was encouraged to go to college. Of course, she continued to be drawn to sciences, and took a lot of those for her core courses. She had a hard time figuring out what she wanted to major in, there being so much to choose from. She tended to see all the scientific disciplines as connected. She couldn't understand why they put these things in separate compartments.
One semester, she took a course in psychology, and that did it for her. Since she couldn't figure out how humans worked, she hoped pyschology would help her understand these mysteries called "emotions" or "relationships". She studied everything she could on the subject, going far beyond what was actually required of her to make a good grade on the courses.
The problem was she could get it on a rather intellectual level but she still didn't comprehend it on an experiential level. Freud seemed obsessive to her with his emphasis on sexual abuse as being the cause of all human difficulties. Jung seemed way too far out for her with his stuff about Archetypes. Gestalt psychology with its Zen-like emphasis on the present moment didn't seem quite right to her.
Then she hit upon behaviorism. What she liked about behaviorism is one didn't have to worry about this messy stuff called "mind" at all. Behaviorists were quite agnostic about the mind. All they worried about was what the person is actually doing. If you did one thing, a person did one thing. If you did something else, a person did something else. Give them something they like when they do something, then they'll do it more. Give them something they don't like, and they're not likely to do it anymore. It was all so ridiculously simple.
Beth did some experimentations on her own. She noticed, for example, that if she smiled, people smiled back at her. Not only that, but she noticed if she smiled when asking for something, people were more likely to give it to her than if she were frowning. By putting on different masks, adopting different facial expressions or tones of voice, she would get different results. As she experimented with this more, she found she could literally play people like puppets on her behaviorist strings. People became for her like Skinner's rats. She wrote a paper about this and got a "A+". But she knew the teacher's gimmick. The teacher was using positive reinforcement on her so she'd do more of the same.
She began to observe that other people were doing this kind of thing with each other. People were always trying to manipulate one another with the right gestures and expressions. Or more overtly, they'd give each other money. Even the society had its ultimate negative reinforcements: jail, fines, execution (or mental institutions, if one were not behaving or talking properly). Now, she understood why people were treating her funny; they were giving her negative reinforcement for acting peculiarly.
Still, she could not quite figure out what "normal" is supposed to be. She noticed that different people from different cultures have different ideas about what "normal" is. She noticed that people tend to copy one another in behavior, like ducks falling into formation. It must be instinctual. If this is so, why didn't she share this instinct, too? It seems to come so naturally to other people, but for her, it all felt like such a game, like being an actor on a stage all the time. For example, when she would do her experimentations, she was always a bit apprehensive whether people would be nice to her or unexpectedly attack her.
This fear increased to the point where she began to seek out the services of a therapist. For the first time in her life, she felt she needed to talk to someone. She went in and laid all her troubles on him. The therapist looked very worried and told her to get a prescription for some pills, phenothiazines.
She got angry and exploded: "Look, sir, I am not psychotic! I am not some kind of paranoid schizophrenic! So don't give me that medical straightjacket, o.k.! I'm just having a hard time figuring out people and how to relate to them. That's what I'm here for."
The therapist and her spent several sessions. He kept trying to get her to talk about her family. Sometimes she would gaze at an object on the desk and loose the train of thought.
She noticed she could manipulate the therapist in the same way she could manipulate other people. She would simply say what she thought he wanted to hear and that would get him going. Finally, she didn't bother to come back.
Beth began to seriously wonder if she were the only one of her kind in the whole world and all humans were some kind of machines that could be programmed by different kinds of reinforcement.
Beth had a boyfriend who was also a psychology major. Like the therapist, he was also puzzled by her and tried to help her figure herself out. Of course, he was more personally involved with her. He loved her and cared about her, but he couldn't understand her distance from him. It was as if she could care less whether he loved her or left her. Even at the height of the sexual act, she just stared right through him as though she were looking at a crack in the ceiling. He was intrigued and challenged by her. She was a beautiful woman, but had an odd detachment about the relationship. She was like "Mr. Spock" in the old Star Trek series, devoid of human emotions.
His own specialty was to work with children with special problems. Thinking about what he knew in respect to Beth, he was convinced that she was autistic. Most autistics were somewhat retarded and unable to communicate at all, but Beth was one of the unusual ones that were "high-functioning". With "high-functioning autistics", the difficulties were far more subtle. He noticed that Beth was unusually self-centered, not necessarily egocentric. Beth would not hesitate to offer him something if he asked, but he noticed he always had to ask.
Diplomatically, he brought this subject up to her, but it didn't seem to bother her very much. "I always figured I was some kind of rare breed" she replied. He asked her if she'd mind if he tried to help her with it. "Do you think behaviorist therapy would work?" she asked.
For a year, they went at it, trying out different things. But nothing seemed to significantly change her stance. She might change in a automaton-like way, pretending to be less self-centered, but you could tell there was no real inward change. Finally, the boyfriend had to quit; it was becoming too stressful to him to keep trying. He started wondering if he wanted to get into childhood therapy anymore. If he couldn't change this woman, how was he going to make a career out of it?
Beth was a little sad about it at first, but then she was relieved to have her solitude back. She would spend time in the library reading books, occasionally gazing at a leaf on a tree out the window.
Now there are two ways this story could end, dear reader. I am going to allow you to pick and choose your own, like those "Choose Your Own Adventure" books for kids. Since everyone likes happy endings, and those are what sell books, I'll start with that one:
Beth graduated from college. She went on to get a Ph.D. in psychology, continuing to focus on her beloved behaviorist approach. She made leaps and bounds in the relationship between facial expressions, tone of voice, and words chosen - and what types of behavior that elicits from people around her.
However, when she got out of college, she spent a few years dawdling around, because the real world was a little too overwhelming for her in comparison with academia. The whole business of job-hunting was too odd for her and she had no idea how to apply her prodigious knowledge. Somehow, what got good results from the teachers did not work right with employers.
In her confusion, she wound up in a mental institution as a client, not one of the overseers. The doctors had her pegged as an autistic. She wound up in a halfway house for high-functioning autistics. It was here that she unexpectedly found her niche. She found a bunch of people she was at last comfortable to be with. She then told her about her discoveries in college about how you could manipulate people with the right way of acting. She took them by the hand and taught them what does what. The therapists allowed her to take them out in public to try it out in the real world.
They were so impressed by her results that they gave her a job as a special therapist. Of course, the therapy was only a halfway measure, better than nothing. Although the autistics did improve externally in their social behavior, one could tell something was missing inwardly (a little like the "fake sincere smile" of the salesman, politician, or religious huckster).
However, Beth did well in this career. She wrote a few best-selling books in her field. She traveled around the world giving lectures to colleagues and other autistics inspiring them to go beyond previous limitations in the social domain. She even found an autistic husband who was a savant mathematician professor. Together, they had a sweet autistic child who liked to play tunes on a piano all the time. They lived happily ever after.
Here's the other way it could end. Unfortunately, this is more realistic.
After the absence of her boyfriend to give her support, Beth withdrew further and further within herself. She lost the ability to read and just wound up staring at a single word on a page, not comprehending what it means. She was forced to drop out of school, a tragedy to her professors, since she was such a bright student.
She worked at a number of odd jobs that she was vastly overqualified for - maid, factory worker, waitress, clerk in a motel, seamstress, fruit picker, selling blood, dealing drugs, etc. She was often fired because she'd become fascinated by some little detail and stop and get into it. Her shoddy work history made it harder and harder for her to land her next job in a time when even the best qualified people are out of work.
Eventually, she wound up in a mental institution. She kept staring at her toes or a dot on the wall. They had her pegged as some sort of schizophrenic, so they pumped her full of drugs all the time and even gave her some shock treatments. This, of course, made their prognosis a self-fulfilling prophecy, since the drugs and treatments distorted her mind even more
When they let her out at last, she was a walking robot. They put her on S.S.I. because they didn't know what else to do with her. She just collected her checks and made do with what little she could purchase with her food stamps.
Beth became the local bag lady. You could see her walking around with her plastic bags, collecting different cans and bottles and scraps of trash from garbage cans or off the streets. Occasionally, she'd spin a bottle for awhile and gaze at it in fascination. Cops just ignored her; there was nothing they could do with her.
If you were to watch very carefully, you might see her lips moving as though she were saying a silent prayer over and over: "One... two... three... four... five... etc." Beth is counting all the bottles, cans, and pieces of trash she can find in the city.