Dear John,

You’ve already noticed that you aren’t “normal”, or “neurotypical” as we’d say now.

You usually try to describe that by saying that you’re “crazy” or “mad” – I certainly remember you doing that at least until the age of 28 or so. Both descriptions are untrue; they tend to mean either recklessness or lack of correspondence to reality. Neither is true of you, and neither is a helpful description of you.

The correct word for you is “neurodivergent”, meaning your brain works in a significantly different way from most other people’s. The specific type of neurodivergence that you have is called Autism. It was originally used to describe one specific manifestation, where people aren’t able to talk, but it’s now used of a wider range of conditions. Specifically, you’ve got what in your time was called Asperger’s Syndrome. It’s not called that any more because Asperger was a Nazi and so doesn’t deserve to have stuff named after him.

We’ll get into some more detail about your condition later, but here’s a way to explain it that I think you’ll understand.

In the game of Dungeons and Dragons, the characters have several different attributes – strength, intelligence and so on. And those are often established at the beginning of the game by rolling dice. If you get a statistic by rolling one 20-sided die, then it has an equal chance of being any number. But if you get it by rolling five 6-sided dice and adding the numbers together, then the results will be roughly normally distributed, with much more in the middle than at the edge. In fact, there’s 780x more chance of getting a middle number like 17 or 18 (over 10% each) than getting an edge number like 5 or 30. And I know you’ve just checked that to make sure future you has the maths right!

In reality, people are a bit like that. Most attributes are roughly normally distributed – most people are in the middle and a few are at the edge. But there are far more than the half a dozen attributes you’d typically get in D&D. For example, famous footballers might have superb physical intelligence, but lower-than-average verbal intelligence.

You have an academic intelligence score of 29 or 30. You really are ridiculously good at written exams, and it doesn’t matter much what the exams are in. (Turns out that’s not as useful in the real world as you might think, though.) But your score at some other things, like ability to read other people or to maintain eye contact with someone while thinking about what you’re saying is much lower – you might well be in the bottom 10% of the population. And you’ve actually got a whole cluster of things you are really really good at, and another cluster you are so bad at that you don’t yet realise they are even things people can do.

One of the big differences between you and “classic autism” is that your verbal intelligence is pretty high. Turns out that makes a big difference to how autism presents itself, which is why autism and Asperger’s were classified separately for so long.

It has been wisely said that “if you’ve met one person with autism, you’ve met one person with autism.” It is what is known as a spectrum disorder, meaning that the same base phenomenon manifests itself both to different degrees and in a wide variety of different ways in different people. It might even be a cluster of loosely connected disorders with different causes. Making good generalisations is hard, and doing “proper science” with it is even harder.

What it’s important to say right now though is that God makes all sorts of people different, and wants us to use our different skills and abilities in different ways. If we were all the same, life would be much duller, and there would be all sorts of things that would never actually get done. You are the way you are for a reason, and that’s a good thing.

All the best,

Future John