Spectrum of Superheroes

10-15 Minute Read

Do you have a superpower? Something you can do that the average person cannot? When asked, most people say they’d like to fly, or have the power of invisibility.

Would you like to hear the tale of MY superhero power and its accompanying dark shadow? Of course you do.

ONCE UPON A TIME IN ASPIELAND

Once, for online security, I was asked to send a photo of my bank card ‘with all digits visible and the second and third four obscured.’

Engrossed by this fancy new security method (why fours?! Does everyone get the same digit?) I proceeded to find all the INDIVIDUAL fours in my card number, blacked out the second and third ones and sent it back.

I also consider myself intelligent. Discuss.

HELLO. I’M YIANNI. I HAVE ADHD AND I’M AUTISTIC.

I hate the phrase ‘I’m autistic.’ From Rain Man (great movie, but he was later rediagnosed) to all the vaxx/autism bullshit, there’s too many preconceptions, too much baggage. I prefer to say I’m on the spectrum. That sounds fucking cool. Like I’ve got pixelated 8-bit sunnies that let me shoot rainbows out of my eyes.

My favourite term of all, neurodiverse is the least descriptive one. I like it because for all the trouble it’s caused me, I wouldn’t trade my weird aspie brain for anyone’s. I think emphasising that neurodiversity means difference not deficit is the best path towards acceptance.

ACCEPTANCE.

Acceptance is important. The minute I got my diagnosis I went from feeling alone to being part of a community. When you discover that very smart people spend their careers researching people like you and why you’re a bit different; it’s kind of amazing.

Bracing at déjà vu after vu reading book after website after blog describing different versions of my life, I went from feeling like a bit of an alien species to just a particular type of human. I can’t tell you the difference that makes.

So now, I inform people that I’m ND. It’s not grandiose. I don’t ‘come out’. I wait, take it chill and, at an appropriate time, I just slip it in. Now I want you all to know that even though there isn’t a cheap sexual joke after ‘slip it in’, that I spotted the opportunity, could have written a very good one, but I made an active choice not to because it would have set an inaccurate tone. I’ve explained that as thoroughly as I have because I want you to know that even though I’m on the spectrum and shoot rainbows out of my butt, fundamentally, I’m just like you.

WE’RE THE SAME, YOU AND I.

That’s both a joke and a truth. In some ways, I’m very unlike you. I watch endless videos and listen to podcasts on cosmology and physics, I’ve watched every Simpsons episode¹ over a hundred times and while I listen to birds in our yard my mind maps the note sequences of their calls onto segments of songs that I know².

But in a deeper sense, we’re alike. I love my family, went a bit wobbly during lockdown, fear dying alone and once the bird songs enter my head I can’t get them out. I’m a human being. A diagnosis doesn’t change anything fundamental about a person. Neurodiversity is just a helpful line drawing exercise.

So I just mention it whenever it’s appropriate. Maybe I’m telling the story of how a world-famous comedian was a dick to me in a car ride home from Essex. I’ll mention that maybe I misread the situation and overreacted because I’m a bit aspie. Then I just continue with the story, and if anyone wants to ask me about it, that’s fine. That’s a natural, low-pressure way of doing it and I think people appreciate that.

THIS ONE TIME, AT BAND CAMP…

I also started doing it that way because once I just came out and told someone I was on the spectrum, and the first thing they said was “Ha. Do you know what 267 times 516 is?” Un. Believable.

What else was unbelievable was the look on his face when I shot back “one hundred and fifty-six thousand, four hundred and five.” Now before you grab your calculators, no it’s not and no I can’t. But his face. Come on. That’s gold.

Some people genuinely believe if you’re neurodiverse you’ve got some sort of superpower. And that’s because they’re keen, insightful people. We do have superpowers. I just don’t have that particular one.

LYING FOR FUN AND PROFIT.

Alright, fine! I’ll tell you! My superpower is the ability to make complex things simple.

I know. You wanted me to have the savant one. I’m sorry. That’s not to say that I’m not good with numbers, I am. My superpower is actually what makes me good.

When you think about it, even my incorrect answer was pretty impressive. Even if you don’t know what 267 times 516 is, there is still a skill in coming up with a plausible number that’s in the ballpark, and doing it quickly.

267 x 516

First, I needed to quickly know it would be a six-digit number. How? I streamlined the problem and traded accuracy for speed. I ignored the tens and the ones and just looked at the hundreds (so 200 and 500)

200 x 500

Then I multiplied 200 and 500 in my head. That’s hard to do and get the right number of zeroes, but I have a technique. I picture the numbers like this in my head.

2  00 x 5  00

I multiply the two and the five to get ten and then add the four zeroes onto the end.

100000. One hundred thousand. It’ll be more than that of course, but at this point in the ruse it’s enough to know that it’s near 100,000 not 1,000 or one million.

MAKE IT CONVINCING.

It was also a skill to come up with a number that didn’t sound made up. It’s surprisingly hard to style out a convincing six-digit number off the cuff. You might not believe numbers can be unconvincing, but anyone giving out a phone number beginning 555 knows they can be.

From before, we need a credible six-digit number in the 100,000 range. He’s given me two three-digit numbers. That makes six in total right, can we use that somehow Barack? Yes we can.

Surely the best way to make my fake answer SOUND real was to cloak it in the clothing of the questioner’s number.

267 starts with a two. And ours needs to start with a one. So why don’t we recite 267 and 516 back to him but subtract one from each digit as we go? So 156,405.

Which is why I could look upwards and leftwards, pause, buy some time to do everything I just listed here with a few strategic “Ums”, which, lest anyone think the maths was complicated, consisted of.

·       Two times five.

·       Adding zeroes.

·       Subtracting one.

That’s not a superpower. That’s Grade 4 maths.

But knowing TO do it because your meta-knowledge on what each digit in a number represents and how multiplication works lets you break a complicated problem down into a simple one thus quickly conjuring a plausible number for the purposes of lying? THAT’S the Superpower.

SOUND GOOD?

Now this might sound fun, it might sound exhausting (it’s both), but it’s worth taking pause before yelling “Mummy Mummy, I want superpowers, why aren’t I on the spectrum? Why didn’t I get the illuminati vaccine?”

Although it’s unquestionably fun to be able to bamboozle the short of thinking, bear in mind this isn’t a hobby, this is genuinely how my brain works and comprises the toolkit I have to try to understand myself, the world and others in it and eventually to find happiness and meaning in my life. 

HEROISM AND VILLAINY

Superpower also a burden

Remember those 3D pin art things that were popular for a couple of years in the 90s? They had hundreds of long blunt pins that slid in and out. You know, these.

Let’s say when it’s completely flat, it represents the average person. If you put it over me, certain pins rise above the average. In this case, the ones that say ‘Love’. Don’t take the word ‘Love’ too literally, it’s just a photo I found online. Love is a superpower of course, but we all have the capacity for it, so it cancels out. These protruded pins represent my superpower, how I manage to make complex things simple.

The universe however is a place of balance (quantum physics pods) where you never get something for nothing. So I must pay the piper for my superpower.

Yes, I have pins that tower over everyone else’s. But nature demands a quid pro quo. So when she bestowed her gifts upon me and pushed up my pins, she left a big empty space underneath.

Empty Space

So what IS the price of my ability to make complex things simple? Why it’s my ability to make simple things complex.

“How was I meant to know they meant to black out the second and third GROUPS of four digits?!”

Our superpowers arise because we think differently to normal people. But so do our struggles. Because they’re the same thing. One is the empty space under the other.

IT ONLY WORKS WHEN ITS OPEN.

I saw a bumper sticker once. “A mind is like a parachute; it works much better when it’s open.” I love it.

When you pull the ripcord on a parachute, what actually stops you falling? Why it’s a big empty space, bounded by the parachute and (hopefully) attached to you.

So too your mind. A strong but gossamer extrusion, bounded above by your powers below by your struggles, both of which are bound inexorably to you.

Back to the parachute. How does it work? The empty space catches the air whilst the chute provides a resistive structure directing and ordering the chaos outside it just enough to tame it, slow your fall and bring you safely to the ground. If that’s not a superpower then Clark Kent isn’t Superman.

But even though it’s the parachute that’s the hero, it needs the air to drag on. It’s the same in our head. Our mind is our parachute against a chaotic and dangerous outside world. But it doesn’t work without it. We cannot close ourselves off from the world, from difference. A lack of oxygen, a lack of air, is the fastest way to close both a parachute and a mind.

One of the things about being neurodiverse is that often, closing yourself off you isn’t an option. If you don’t want to be isolated your whole life you open your chute and fill it with whatever experiences, whichever learnings you can get your hands on. 

I have had to learn a lot of things from scratch. That ignorance wasn’t a superpower. The misunderstandings, dead ends, the pain I both suffered and caused through this constant trial and error often left me lonely, angry and confused. Don’t cry too much for me. I’m also good looking.

But they also taught me to humble myself, to accept that difference doesn’t mean deficit, that the antidote to ignorance is learning not dogma, and to meet the foreign with curiosity not judgment nor fear.

It’s been quite a journey.

YIANNI STRAPS ON HIS MIND AND GOES SKYDIVING.

At the moment of conception, I strap on a mind and jump.

I don’t describe it this way at the time. For one, I’m only just beginning to become an “I”, so my understanding of the concept is hazy. Secondly, as a zygote, my vocabulary and ability to articulate is deplorable.

This is a great shame, because I won’t link the concept of natal conception to the concept of mind conception for about another forty-four years and I can only think that it must have been a much more obvious link to make at the time.

Eventually, I’m born. Terrified, I pull the ripcord and deploy my mind. It fills up with society’s air: people, relationships, rules and taboos. I breathe it in; once, twice, a hundred thousand times. It burns.

Five years later, I’m a small, absent minded and eccentric child. I stare at the odometer in my parent’s car, fascinated by the way the numbers change, the predictability, and how they relate to the clock and the speedometer. Whenever odometer milestones (hundreds, thousands, etc) are approaching, I inform my family. They are not nearly as interested as I am. I take my parent’s antique clock apart to see how it works. My parents are now very interested, but not in the same way I am.

I’m seven. I realise that to most children at school, fitting in with a group of their classmates is more important than their individual friendship with me. I am not good in groups. A friend who promised to get me a Christmas present instead unfriends (1985 version) me on the last day of school. I cry to my Mum. A lot. I don’t understand what happened. Years later something similar happens to me again. I cry, but less. I add it to my filing system.

I learn that it’s important to make nodding gestures and “Mm Hmm” sounds when people speak even though I have no instinctual desire to do so. It seems that not indicating active engagement every three seconds worries people. I note it, file it away, and begin make the correct noises. This seems to work. Eventually it becomes habit. To this day, every now and then I still forget.

I’m a young adult. My lungs no longer burn as they draw in this alien air. I understand society enough to fit in, at least most of the time. Then a work colleague takes a swing at me because of a misjudged joke. Correlated to but not caused by this incident, I become a comedian.

I lie, to myself, to others. This reliably produces one of two things: pain or delayed pain. I do this not out of malice, but ignorance. I become fascinated with the idea of truth. I learn that there are circumstances in which truth is not welcome. I wonder what situation couldn’t be improved by truth, even if inconvenienced by it. As I age I realise that in many places, truth may never be welcome. I comprehend this, but I’ll never understand it.

I’m forty years into the jump. Breathing deeply, I find to my great pleasure that I can be an authentic, communicative version of myself that doesn’t misread and stop dinner parties. No-one has taken a swing at me for a while.

I know where my pins are now. I know who I am. It’s knowledge hard-earned in moment after defining moment. The five-year-old crying because his friend left. The twenty-year-old wondering how he moved a workmate to a punch. The thirty-year-old lamenting his thwarted career. In short. My empty spaces underneath. I’m packing experiences in as fast as I can, but there’s always more space to fill.

I get diagnosed with ADHD at age 41. I realise why I was so absent minded. Why I lost things all the time. If you want to know how absent-minded I was, on the last day of Grade 5 camp, my teachers planned to give me an award for going through camp without losing anything. Unfortunately, before they could give it to me, my rugby jumper turned up during lost and found. Don’t worry, they still gave me the jelly bean.

This diagnosis helps me see my mind as a wild stallion: unbridled, powerful and spectacular, but unpredictable and often dangerous. I start taking medication and reading about the condition. Amazingly, I can now direct my mind and focus is something I do rather than something that happens to me. This is a revelation.

I begin studying history, philosophy, music, electronics, how the brain works and what the mind is. I’ve been sporadically interested in these things before, but now I can focus. I learn, analyse, and cross reference. A framework begins to form. I see patterns and structure which I then use to render the complex simple. I wonder what I’ll be like at 60.

GOOD NEWS

Is that a superpower? It doesn’t matter, I like to think of it that way. Seeing my differences as superpowers sure beats thinking there’s something wrong with me.

To end, I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is that you’ve all got superpowers too. Everything I’ve said here: the pins, the space, the benefits of realising where each of them are and filling them with courageous life experience? That’s just as true for you as it is for me.

“No Yianni”, you might protest. “There’s nothing I can do that the average person can’t.” But here’s the big secret. There is no ‘average person’.

You could ask people to rate 5000 statements about every aspect of their lives, take an average and have a highly accurate profile of the average person.

But it’s just an average person. It’s not the average person. Because there is no average person. That’s just what you get when you smush a bunch of real people together.

Neurodiversity draws lines and categorises people. On one side, there’s “the spectrum” I’m on it. But what about on your side? You think it’s not also a spectrum? I listen to physics pods. Trust me, everything’s a spectrum.Being neurotypical doesn’t mean you’re a mere smear in the smush. You’re a real, unique person WITHIN the smush. There wouldn’t be a smush without people like you, and the smush would be less accurate without you and your superpower in it.

You have pins that tower above the norm, spaces filled with your struggles. You have a superpower that’s no less present, or worthwhile for being less obvious, more subtle.

THE BAD NEWS

Too often our powers live dusty, cobweb ridden, hidden away, undervalued by an unappreciative world. That’s the bad news. The good news is that society is just an avatar, a veneer   over reality.

Just like the millions who lived, died, and were killed before we accepted that kings and queens were just ordinary people, I believe today’s society makes a large number of us believe we’re not special just because the thing that’s unique about us is something we can’t or don’t wish to sell.

But something’s value in a market economy and its worth are often divergent things. A quick glance at a hedge fund manager’s and a nurse’s payslip will tell you that. What makes you think that the late stages of an economic system best illustrated by an outsourced assembly line has anything to say about the value of your uniqueness? It’s certainly not something you should integrate into your self-image.

Maybe you don’t think you have a superpower. Maybe you were so busy trying to fit in, that you never even considered it. Maybe you’ve been in your job or a role for so long that you just stopped looking. But that’s just some bullshit you’ve been told. Take some advice from the neurodiverse. Think differently.

Take a deep breath, and with great courage explore and fill your empty spaces with people, curiosity, acceptance and love. Eventually, like a long-hidden piece of 3D Pin Art, your superpower will emerge. And the world will be better for having one less lost soul in it.

Yianni Agisilaou - 6 August 2021

1. Every good one anyway. I have not spent three years watching seasons in the twenties. I am not Jeff Albertson (look it up)

2. Most recently Bert Kaempfert’s ‘A Swingin’ Safari’ if you’re curious.