My so-called ‘disorder’ made me a better attorney

Last year, at the age of 65, I learned something new about myself: that I’m autistic.

It wasn’t the first time I considered the possibility. Seven or eight years earlier I was streaming the television show “Parenthood” when a new character was introduced — an awkward but accomplished middle-aged man played by Ray Romano. The show didn’t tell us he was autistic — he had not yet been diagnosed — but I recognized something in Romano’s performance. Almost as soon as his character appeared, I paused the show, opened my laptop, and looked up what it means to be autistic.

Everything I read online that day in 2015 was so negative and dour that I ruled out autism as being part of my own spectrum. My quick and dirty research told me autistic people have no sense of humor, no understanding of sarcasm and no empathy. All I found were deficits, deficits and more deficits. Forget it. Not me. I shut my computer and carried on.

Flash forward to early 2022, when I met for the first time with a young psychologist. I had barely begun to speak when she told me she was going to send me home with a book — the start of a journey to an entirely new understanding of my life, good parts and bad.

During the next several months I read everything I could find about what it means to be autistic. Happily, what I found online was very different from what I found seven or eight years prior. Instead of a page full of deficits, I stumbled into a list of autistic strengths.

I am an attorney. I never went to law school. I became an attorney the old-fashioned way, studying on my own with the help of a mentor. I did some of my best legal work before I even thought about becoming a lawyer. I was the go-to guy for facts, and as a paralegal, I quickly became one of the most knowledgeable people in the world about one particularly dangerous pickup.

As I studied what it means to be autistic I began to realize that my persistence, my eye for detail and for patterns, my ability to focus, my visual style of thought, my creativity, my ability to form intense interest in the products that injure my clients and my ability to work alone are common with my so-called disorder.

Unfortunately, I have read again and again that the majority of people like me — even college educated, highly intelligent and capable autistic people — are unemployed or underemployed. It’s a statistic that probably begins with the job interview and then gets worse as autistic people find themselves in jobs shaped by cookie-cutter descriptions and conditions that are difficult for many or most autistic people because of sensory or other issues.

I have been lucky. I had a big, dysfunctional but loving family, and therefore plenty of playmates. I went to a small high school where I was accepted and liked. After some difficult years in college, I spent three years in West Africa where I was perceived as no different from the next foreigner and learned a whole new set of social rules. Then I found a boss who didn’t know I was autistic but knew me, and who kept streamlining my position to exploit my strengths and eliminate distractions. I thrived, and helped make him and our clients a lot of money.

Nowadays they’d call that accommodations. I call it sensible and economically sound.

Accommodations are not a charitable gift to autistic people. It’s smart to learn every employee’s strengths and customize every position for the employee. One person thrives at the office, another at home. One loves bopping from one task to another. Her co-worker thrives on uninterrupted focus. By accommodating all workers, we can get any job done better.

Every form of diversity makes us stronger, smarter and more powerful as a people and as organizations. Every form of diversity means we see with new and different eyes and new points of view.

A whole lot of inventors, artists, writers, musicians, engineers, mathematicians, and captains of industry are and have always been autistic. It’s a terrible waste that 70- 80% of us are unemployed or underemployed. Let’s change that statistic so that everyone can thrive.