Not A Blog™

When I started writing Stranger back in May of 2006, I didn’t have an ending in mind. I just assumed it would be a perpetual thing—me illustrating the odd situations and conversations that I find myself in almost daily. At the time, I said these are the things that make me feel like an alien—something that was not at all intended to be a joke. Growing up I seriously entertained thoughts (and came up with complex rationalizations and stories) that I was actually from another planet. If not that, I must have been adopted. People in general simply didn’t make sense.

In October, Dave mentioned this article in the New Yorker, written by a man, Tim Page, with Aspgerer’s Syndrome. Although I wasn’t very familiar with AS, I had heard of it before: it had something to do with autism which, as everyone knows, is what retarded people have. Clearly I am not retarded.

The article floored me. With only two or three exceptions, I saw extremely compelling parallels between Page’s description of his childhood and mine. It went far beyond mere coincidence. AS (as well as autism, I would come to learn) isn’t simply a fancy term for retarded people at all. It’s a non-verbal learning disorder characterized by difficulty in recognizing and responding to body language and facial expressions, as well as a plethora of other behaviors, of which I generally have all but one or two in any given list. (Link to Wikipedia) Through much practice and memorizing of deduced societal rules, I’ve learned to keep it subtle. According to others I seem to be good at blending in. I consider this a complement, since that has been my ongoing goal since about middle school.

Despite my efforts to come across as a normal person in everyday life, this did nothing to actually make me feel like a regular person, hence the alien avatar. Having no other point of reference to how other people feel in day-to-day interactions, I assumed for a number of years that everyone was faking it, and it’s just this thing you had to do. Later, I decided that, were that the case, everyone would just act normal, and I wouldn’t have to pretend. So I couldn’t put my finger on it, but I seemed to be doing a lot more work than everyone else, and I was utterly baffled at how most people actually enjoyed going to parties every night of the week when they were so much work.

Discovering that I’m introverted helped eliminate some of this confusion, and when I started Stranger, I mostly had that in mind. But even in talking with some of my introverted friends, the consensus was that there was something else about me that, for them, was hard to pin down. Likewise, I just assumed that I was doomed to a life of quirky feeling-out-of-place-ness. Until I read that article, anyway. Before I had finished the second page I was thinking, oh, man, that’s me. No one else would necessarily know it, but I sure did.

This gnawed on my brain for about three weeks before I finally decided that I have to know, if only for my own peace of mind. I was surprised to find a psychologist in my area who is an expert in AS. An evaluation seemed to be fate.

Of course I vacillated between this has to be it to I’m being silly; there’s nothing wrong with me. Certainly I don’t feel broken, just like an alien. Well, I had the eval and did the tests and got the diagnosis. I have Asperger’s Syndrome.

Looking back over the Not A Blog™, I can see the evidence of it. Who else writes about the allowable topics of conversation during a financial transaction? Someone who doesn’t understand it intuitively, natch, and needs to write the stuff down to organize the rules for himself. Who else does a blow-by-blow analysis of a thirty second conversation and concludes that it made no sense? And then, two weeks later, it happens again. And then again, and again, as Stranger illustrates.

So now that I’ve got a label, the comic is put into a context. It seems like the right place to let it go. Of course, I could continue doing the alien gag. It’s not like the weirdness has gone away, it’s just named. (Interesting and awesome side note: I’m evidently not the first Aspie to feel like an alien. There’s an entire AS support website named after this phenomenon: Wrong Planet.) However, there’s another, more pedantic reason I have for ending the comic today.

It’s my least favorite thing to do, period. I’ve used cleaning my house to procrastinate working on the comic. It has become some sort of massive headache/burden and I have absolutely zero desire to pursue it. It takes six or seven hours to put one together, which is a huge amount of time—much more than I spend writing a single article, anyway. I never developed a style that I was happy with, and I kept making compromises that I told myself I wouldn’t make. In sum, it’s just not fun anymore.

I have a huge, newfound respect for webcomic artists. Sure, a lot of them reuse sprites or don’t draw beautifully, but they keep after it consistently. The ones who don’t reuse art and do draw beautifully also only tend to update once a week, or less, but they produce a nice piece of art. Stranger was also updated once a week or less (usually less), but it delivered a product no better than the comics that update daily.

The difficult part is, I’ve had more positive comments said to me about Stranger than anything else I’ve done. (I’ve had more positive comments overall on the Lolcat Bible, but not as many people actually talked to me about it personally. Almost everyone I know in real life who reads the Not A Blog™ has said how much they’ve enjoyed it.) I hate to let you guys down, I really do. But I just no longer have any desire to work on it. I tried the webcomic thing, I’m glad I did, it was a good experiment, but I’ve found it’s just not for me. I was considering ending it a few weeks before the whole AS discovery, anyway. That just happened to provide a convenient and tidy excuse.

So what happens from here? Well I expect to continue the blogging. Three times a week seems to work for me, so I’ll try to stick to that. I hope not to reference the AS too much; I don’t want to make it a focus of the site or anything. It’s good to know, but I’m still the same person, although perhaps not trying as much to hide it, now. I’m even still trying to figure out the demarcation between Asperger’s and introversion, so it’s an ongoing thing, as Know Thyself is wont to be.

-Pulsar, a.k.a Ted

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