Anand Prahlad - The Secret Life of a Black Aspie

The Secret Life of a Black Aspie is a highly anticipated book worth waiting for! Prahlad takes the reader through his life journey, moving through generations and differing locations, challenging assumptions of the meanings, experiences, and feelings of blackness, disability, and gender. Prahlads text is a thought-provoking mix of memories, images, and imaginations, with a strong dose of emotion. This is a terrific book!

Michael Gill, Disability Studies Program, Syracuse University

This is a remarkable, important, brilliantly written book. For decades, people of color on the autism spectrum were overlooked by the medical establishment. In telling his own story with candor and grace, Prahlad not only delivers one of the most detailed accounts of being autistic to date, he relates the epic journey of a generation from the years following the end of slavery through the social upheavals of the late 20th Century. The passages of the book describing Prahlads synaesthetic experience of the world are so vivid and intense they will haunt your dreams.

Steve Silberman, author of NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity

Anand Prahlad recounts a life story that has never been told before. He takes the reader on a compelling journey from rural Virginia, to the San Francisco bay areas counter culture to a Midwestern college town. It is also an inward journey charting a consciousness with a compelling combination of dreamy lyricism and unflinching precision. The Secret Life of a Black Aspie fills a gap in the growing cannon of disability memoir, broadening our understanding of race, gender and neurodiversity. It is hard to put down and impossible to forget.

Georgina Kleege, UC Berkeley
Author of Sight Unseen and Blind Rage: Letters to Helen Keller.

Text 2017 University of Alaska Press

Published by
University of Alaska Press
P.O. Box 756240
Fairbanks, AK 99775-6240

Cover design and interior layout by Jen Gunderson, fiveninetydesign.com.

Cover art adapted from Wanderlust Wonderland, Collage on canvas, 2008, by Krista Franklin, www.kristafranklin.com.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Names: Prahlad, Anand, author.
Title: The secret life of a black Aspie : a memoir / Anand Prahlad.
Description: Fairbanks, AK : University of, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016025136 (print) | LCCN 2016038645 (ebook) | ISBN 9781602233218 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781602233225 ()
Subjects: LCSH: Prahlad, Anand, Mental health. | Aspergers syndromePatientsBiography. | Aspergers syndromePatientsFamily relationships. | Husband and wifeBiography.
Classification: LCC RC553.A88 P73 2017 (print) | LCC RC553.A88 (ebook) | DDC 616.85/88320092 [B] dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016025136

Without positive obsession, there is nothing at all.

Octavia Butler, Parable of the Talents

For Ruby, Jeremiah, Lizzy, and Beulah. For my children and my childrens children.

And for my wife, Karen, without whom this book could not have been written.

A special thanks to the University of Missouri Research Board for a fellowship that gave me time to work on the book. Grateful acknowledgment to the journals, Fifth Wednesday, Water~Stone Review, and The Journal of American Folklore, which published earlier versions of Growing up with the Spirits, and Born with the Spirits.

Dont judge a book by its cover.

I first suspected that I might have autism spectrum disorder (ASD) when I read about autism as a university student. I was nineteen. I didnt get an official diagnosis, though, until I was fifty-seven. After decades in denial, I sought a diagnosis because I was finally willing to deal with it, because dealing with it seemed to be the only chance to save my relationship with my partner, Karen, now my wife. We sat in a quiet office as the therapist went over my test results and what they meant. I had high functioning ASD. Her voice was soft and soothing. She got me to the core, like no one ever had, and for a minute I was so happy I started crying. The feeling of being understood was so redeeming. But a second later, I was terrified. I started falling and landed at the bottom of a well. My tears turned the water in the well salty, and so I was thirsty but didnt have anything to drink. I folded inward, like a blossom that closes at night, and couldnt speak, and couldnt scream for help.

My whole life I had thought that I was from another planet, that someday the ship would come for me and take me home. I believed that most other people were insane and that I was one of the rare sane ones. Who else but crazy people would make a world that moved too fast to keep up? What sane people would make a world that left so little room for quiet, for thinking, for kindness, beauty, or grace? In what sane world would there have been slavery?

The feeling that I was from another planet gave life meaning. There was a reason for my suffering. There was a reason why I never really fit in. For why I so seldom had any feelings for many of the things people usually have feelings about. There was a reason why I couldnt remember things. Why everything around me seemed to be a noisy blur, moving too fast to catch hold of. Eyes and ears on my planet were different. They were suited to slower speeds. To lower pitches. I would be here on earth for a while and then I would go home. It would always be today the entire time I lived here, but that would change when I got home. I would remember yesterday then, and I would imagine tomorrow.

As part of my therapy, I started reading about autism. But the diagnosis and the books took away the two main things that helped me to function. They took away the hope that the ship would be coming, and they took away the pride I felt for being one of the few sane ones. Some of the things I read made me feel even more like a creature than I already did. Some of the words were so cold and clinical. The books described creatures that looked human but were something else. They often had limited capacity for empathy. It was questionable whether they were capable of love. They had problems with time perception. They were hypersensitive and prone to meltdowns, usually caused by overstimulation. They were often disassociated from the social world. They needed routine; disruptions could cause severe problems with their functioning. They processed slowly and were sometimes mistaken for mentally defective. I didnt want those things to be true about me, but a lot of them were. And the books didnt talk about our gifts, the special things we can do that others usually cant. They didnt talk about the special light we bring.

Always feeling disconnected is one of the hardest things about my Aspergers. Its like when a white man who has never known a black person puts his arm around a black coworker and says something like, Hey, buddy, you gonna come and hang out with the guys tonight? Were going to knock down a few and watch the game. Hes trying to be friendly. He wants to feel like theyre the same. But theyre not. Most things people say to me feel like that. People talk to me and they assume Im hearing and understanding their words. But usually Im listening to their colors. Im seeing them. Im feeling their temperatures. Im smelling their scents. And whatever I see or smell or touch, I taste. Even if I dont want to. I have what they call sensory integration dysfunction, or synesthesia. My senses are all mixed together. So, when Im talking to people, Im tasting them on my tongue. I learned to tell by my senses what people want, but thats different from knowing what they mean. Sometimes I desperately want to feel connected, but I just dont. Other times, I dont even notice that Im not connected. Im in my own bubble, and other people are in theirs.