Read Online Be Different: Adventures of a Free-Range Aspergian With Practical Advice for Aspergians, Misfits, Families & Teachers by John Elder Robison - Free Book Online
Authors: John Elder Robison
Tags: Self-Help
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That was why I had to bother, as much trouble as it seemed.
Years later, Cathy is long gone from my life, married to someone else; but the feeling she brought has never left me.
What Are You Afraid Of?
W hen I was little we lived in Philadelphia, where the museum was one of my favorite places. Trains and dinosaurs were two of my special interests, and they had both at the Franklin Institute. They had a huge model train layout and several real steam locomotives. They even allowed kids to go up in the cab and work the levers, just like real train engineers. Another room was full of dinosaurs, or dinosaur skeletons. I really liked to wander through the big dinosaur room, but it was different from the train room. With the dinosaurs, I had to be brave, especially when I looked at the teeth on some of those monsters. One of the skeletons they had on display was a plesiosaur, a gigantic meat-eating aquatic dinosaur. “They were fierce,” the museum guides said, “but they’ve been extinct sixty million years. There’s nothing to be afraid of here.”
I heard his explanation, but I wasn’t fooled. I knew that scientists weren’t always right when they claimed something was extinct. Take the coelacanths; they weresupposed to have been extinct for millions of years, too, but a fisherman caught one off the coast of Africa a few years before I was born. The books I read said that most of the deep ocean was unexplored and unknown—we knew only 10 percent of what lived there. To me, it was obvious that there could be living dinosaurs in the deep sea. There might still be plesiosaurs.
That’s the problem with being what grown-ups call a “bright kid.” You learn stuff, and some of it is scary. And no one understands why you’re frightened.
When my family went to the beach at Atlantic City, in New Jersey, I was brave and went in the ocean anyway, because there were a lot of people there and my parents assured me no one got attacked by dinosaurs. But I stayed in shallow water where plesiosaurs and other aquatic monsters could never get me.
Shallow water also kept me safe from undertows, riptides, killer seaweed, and all the other stuff that lurked at the deep water’s edge.
Even with that knowledge I never had bad dinosaur dreams until I read about the Loch Ness Monster. That story got me really worried. I saw pictures of something big swimming in Loch Ness, which was someplace in Scotland. It looked a lot like the plesiosaur from the museum. And it was alive.
Could one appear here? Or up the road at Lake Wyola?
Sometimes in my dreams a plesiosaur stuck its head in my bedroom window, ready to eat me.
But they live in water
, I told myself.
They can’t be in our backyard
. Could I be sure?
“There are no monsters out there. It’s okay.” My mother would reassure me when I woke up from the bad dream, and eventually I’d fall asleep. But I did worry, and with good reason.
My father was a philosopher, and I tried to tackle the problem the way he did in his classes, by asking myself questions.
People like my mom didn’t believe in monsters, because they’d never seen one. With no evidence, why should an ignorant person believe? Mom wasn’t a scientific thinker like me. She was just a mom, trying to quiet me down. Any kids who had seen a monster got eaten, so they weren’t around to tell the tale. Kids vanished every now and then, and monsters might well be the cause
.
What’s the downside to a belief in monsters?
If they are real and you believe, you are wary and therefore less likely to get eaten. If they aren’t real and you believe, you waste time being afraid of an imaginary threat. On the other hand, if they are real and you don’t believe, you could come to a really bad end. So the risk of not believing monsters are real is huge, whereas the risk of believing when they’re not is minimal.
After long and careful reflection, I concluded that monsters may be real and I was wise to be wary.
My father liked
Years later, Cathy is long gone from my life, married to someone else; but the feeling she brought has never left me.
What Are You Afraid Of?
W hen I was little we lived in Philadelphia, where the museum was one of my favorite places. Trains and dinosaurs were two of my special interests, and they had both at the Franklin Institute. They had a huge model train layout and several real steam locomotives. They even allowed kids to go up in the cab and work the levers, just like real train engineers. Another room was full of dinosaurs, or dinosaur skeletons. I really liked to wander through the big dinosaur room, but it was different from the train room. With the dinosaurs, I had to be brave, especially when I looked at the teeth on some of those monsters. One of the skeletons they had on display was a plesiosaur, a gigantic meat-eating aquatic dinosaur. “They were fierce,” the museum guides said, “but they’ve been extinct sixty million years. There’s nothing to be afraid of here.”
I heard his explanation, but I wasn’t fooled. I knew that scientists weren’t always right when they claimed something was extinct. Take the coelacanths; they weresupposed to have been extinct for millions of years, too, but a fisherman caught one off the coast of Africa a few years before I was born. The books I read said that most of the deep ocean was unexplored and unknown—we knew only 10 percent of what lived there. To me, it was obvious that there could be living dinosaurs in the deep sea. There might still be plesiosaurs.
That’s the problem with being what grown-ups call a “bright kid.” You learn stuff, and some of it is scary. And no one understands why you’re frightened.
When my family went to the beach at Atlantic City, in New Jersey, I was brave and went in the ocean anyway, because there were a lot of people there and my parents assured me no one got attacked by dinosaurs. But I stayed in shallow water where plesiosaurs and other aquatic monsters could never get me.
Shallow water also kept me safe from undertows, riptides, killer seaweed, and all the other stuff that lurked at the deep water’s edge.
Even with that knowledge I never had bad dinosaur dreams until I read about the Loch Ness Monster. That story got me really worried. I saw pictures of something big swimming in Loch Ness, which was someplace in Scotland. It looked a lot like the plesiosaur from the museum. And it was alive.
Could one appear here? Or up the road at Lake Wyola?
Sometimes in my dreams a plesiosaur stuck its head in my bedroom window, ready to eat me.
But they live in water
, I told myself.
They can’t be in our backyard
. Could I be sure?
“There are no monsters out there. It’s okay.” My mother would reassure me when I woke up from the bad dream, and eventually I’d fall asleep. But I did worry, and with good reason.
My father was a philosopher, and I tried to tackle the problem the way he did in his classes, by asking myself questions.
People like my mom didn’t believe in monsters, because they’d never seen one. With no evidence, why should an ignorant person believe? Mom wasn’t a scientific thinker like me. She was just a mom, trying to quiet me down. Any kids who had seen a monster got eaten, so they weren’t around to tell the tale. Kids vanished every now and then, and monsters might well be the cause
.
What’s the downside to a belief in monsters?
If they are real and you believe, you are wary and therefore less likely to get eaten. If they aren’t real and you believe, you waste time being afraid of an imaginary threat. On the other hand, if they are real and you don’t believe, you could come to a really bad end. So the risk of not believing monsters are real is huge, whereas the risk of believing when they’re not is minimal.
After long and careful reflection, I concluded that monsters may be real and I was wise to be wary.
My father liked
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