Kiriana's similar strategy amounts to remembering and rehearsing scripts. When she walks into a clothing shop, for example, she pulls up a mental dialogue box: "No thanks, I'm just looking," is what one should say if a saleswoman offers help. But as Attwood points out, such playacting is not intuitive, and is therefore exhausting.
Looking around Kiriana's apartment—at her collection of colored Easter eggs and logic games, her Edward Gorey books and whimsical drawings—it occurs to me: She's a successful young woman who still inhabits the magical domain of a child. I'd anticipated an awkward encounter based on what I knew about her syndrome. But she was poised and attentive. She smiled and laughed while we spoke, displaying a wry sense of humor. Her eyes wandered to the side as she formulated her thoughts, but the conversation flowed. Though her demeanor was cool, she answered questions enthusiastically and thoroughly. A little too thoroughly at times: I could see how some would find her company exhausting.
Many children immerse themselves in creative projects, but Kiriana, like most kids with Asperger's, was an extreme case. "We didn't see her that much, honestly," Melissa says. "Every now and then I'd pass her in the hall, but she was always working on something." Kiriana never had a lot of friends, but she consistently had at least one close confidante, invariably a sensitive, reliable girl. The boys would provoke her—say, by stealing her pencils. Over time, she began to suspect that any time a boy spoke to her it was to mock her. She became defensively standoffish. "I just wanted them not to talk to me, so I pulled together as much blunt sarcasm as I could and established myself as a weird, unfriendly girl."
To any animal that crossed her path, however, Kiriana was the warmest creature imaginable. On rainy days, she would gingerly pick up earthworms from the sidewalk and move them to the grass. She once rescued a stray kitten that her neighbor's Rottweilers were hungrily circling and took her home.
At the age of 9, Kiriana, ever the scientist, asked her mother, "Does everyone see, hear, smell, taste, and feel exactly the same thing when they perceive the same object?" Around that same time, she developed a feverish curiosity about the medical experimentation the Nazis conducted during the Holocaust. "All my obsessions related to something profoundly catastrophic," she says. "I have a really hard time feeling emotionally aroused. Brutal, violent, scary things were interesting to me because that was the best way to feel something."
In a similar effort to manufacture emotions, Kiriana found it exciting to jog through her high school's murky backwoods at midnight in the snow wearing a T-shirt, shorts, and sockless sneakers. And her repeated readings of Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho soon surpassed those of The Wonderful World of Prehistoric Animals. "I was partly drawn to serial killers because of my interest in patterns, logical induction, and puzzle solving," she remembers. "These twisted individuals took puzzles to a whole new level of interest." Captivated by the process of piecing together an event based on its physical trace, she fell asleep each night trying to come up with the "perfect crime," one that could not be reconstructed.
Incessant puzzling wasn't necessarily an academic boon: Practicing for the math portion of the SAT, Kiriana says, "I would ponder the logic instead of just using shortcut strategies." Though her scores were good, she didn't get into Princeton, her first-choice school. She happily went to Vassar instead.
During her first year there, she found herself part of a group of friends—a first. But stressed out by greater academic challenges and increasingly aware that she could not process lectures as well as her classmates, she sought help from a doctor, and then another. When a psychiatrist finally pulled the pieces together and diagnosed her with Asperger's, the label alone resolved a lifelong identity crisis. The diagnosis was the only one that reconciled, as she puts it, her special talent for being smart and stupid at the same time. "In this very small world of Asperger's," she says, "that's normal."
After graduation, driven partly by a desire to understand her own "neuro-atypical" mind, Kiriana set out for New York University to begin a Ph.D. program in neuroscience, where she now conducts emotion research on rats. Lacking the internal maps on which most of us depend, she often got lost in her lab, a stark maze of hallways lined with nondescript white doors. Toward the end of the school year, when no one was in sight, she stuck pieces of colored tape on the doors, visual cues to help her find her way.
Listening comprehension is still a source of strife for Kiriana. "When I watch a movie, I have to turn the volume way up to understand dialogue, but way down whenever there is background noise or music," she says. "When I go to hear a lecture on a subject, it's like I'm listening to a foreign language." But Kiriana makes efforts to work around her deficiencies. After a few mishaps, she explained to one scientist she works for that she just can't remember spoken instructions. "Now that he's aware of that, I can just run and get a pen and write it down." She tries to remind herself that as neuroscientists, her colleagues are particularly likely to understand that her brain is wired differently. Besides, she says, "It's a profession where everyone is a bit odd."
Tags:
asperger,
autism spectrum,
brain,
cardboard pieces,
gender gap,
girls girls,
hallmarks,
Kiriana Cowansage,
long brown hair,
maleness,
many realms,
minidress,
neuroscience,
neuroscience program,
piece puzzle,
processing systems,
sensory,
shana,
straight hours,
studio apartment,
syndromes,
trouble reading,
unfamiliar settings
