Winning Friends: What happens when a high-masking girl on the autism spectrum reads Dale Carnegie
I read How to Win Friends and Influence People in the seventh grade for a book report. I found the old book on the bottom shelf at the back corner of the library during a particularly lonely phase, and I was looking for a solution. I was willing to work at this whole “getting people to like you” bit, that wasn’t the problem. It was just that I didn’t know where to begin.
It was one in a whole sequence of efforts to make friends.
The first acknowledgement of the problem was a few years prior. I sneaked into the dining room where my mom was paying bills, confessed to her quite frankly that I couldn’t sleep because I did not have any friends, and asked her what to do. She was practical and encouraged me to talk to girls in my class and learn about them, ask them to be my friend.
Subtlety was not my strong suit. I favored the direct application of this advice. I went right up to one of the more popular girls while she washed her hands in the bathroom. I just said flat out that I would like to be her friend and play with her sometime. She was kind, said yes. Next thing I knew, I was swinging next to them and running around the playground with the girls I had always watched from my quiet reading place. She even invited me every few weeks to ride home with her on the bus instead of walking the quarter mile to my house. There was, if one can imagine, always a little awkwardness about most of these relationships.
By the time Dale Carnegie got a hold of me, it had been a few years since the bathroom mission for friends, and I was still not happy about the state of things, so the concept of a how-to book seemed smart. I also needed to produce a non-fiction book report, so reading this would do double duty.
A quick scour of the filing cabinet reveals this to be one piece of missing schoolwork from my detailed school files, but I remember it. This book contained lots of examples of people smiling appropriately, using names as if they are the most beautiful word in the world, appealing to noble motives to keep customers, get a better deal on a automobile, earn trust.
What did I learn from this book? I learned how to win friends and influence people. Naturally. And also how to point out a mistake of someone else’s without angering them so that they want to give you discounts.
I took copious notes so I could enact these measures in due time. It would look strange if all of a sudden I grinned wildly at my desk neighbors, asked their life histories, repeated their names, and asked if they’d like to work together on a project to change the school. I was up for it, mind you, but I the slower approach seemed like one step of wisdom since my grade school days.
One consequence of reading the book was an encouragement of my preteen ambition, which ended up defining much of my future social life — or lack thereof.
The election for Eighth Grade President was between me and the boy I both crushed on and hated at varying degrees throughout any given day. He won, but really only because he gave a dynamic speech. My campaign was much better and my speech was dynamic, mind you — it rhymed and I memorized all of it. But his. His was the sort of thing that goes down in yearbooks, that was referenced for years to come by me and others.
He began loudly and with each subsequent repetition of the word, he got quieter and deeper:
“Power… Power, power, power. Make no mistake, folks, it is all about power… who’s got it and who doesn’t. And I want you to give it to me.”
At this point, he lifted the mike from its holster, flicked the cord out from its embrace like a rock star, and proceeded to sit on the edge of the stage, mike in hand, gesturing wildly to the audience of wide-eyed adolescents.
Whatever he said after that must have been great, because when he plunked that microphone back in its proper place and flashed that brilliant grin, he was met with an uproarious standing ovation. And this is not my memory over exaggerating. The principal had to actually calm the crowd. There may have been the chance of a riot. It was that rousing. My spunky rhyme looked childish after something like that.
I’m not sure exactly what power he received when he was elected Eighth Grade Class President. I do remember, however, being asked to be a part of a drug awareness group the day after the election. We managed to organize the most impressive red ribbon week campaign in the middle school’s history (I feel sure someone said). The front hall featured a display called The Road of Life that visualized someone’s life altered only by a decision to smoke cigarettes. Our senator requested that it be hung in the rotunda of the state capitol.
We even constructed a life-sized Joe Camel hooked to a respirator and sitting in a wheelchair as a sign of impending doom for anyone starting to smoke. When the senator came for a tour, I made sure and detail for him the real problems I saw with teenage drug use and promiscuity. “You really value knowing what’s going on so you can make a difference,” I surmised aloud, appealing to his noble motives. Another girl in our group got mad at me for this, saying I was tarnishing our reputation with someone important. But, a few days later, he sent me a very encouraging letter written in blue sharpie that I kept in my “Potential References” file under Coverdell, Paul.
As far as I was concerned, that was all just practice for something bigger.
My skills were getting better everyday. I had a casual relationship with at least two people, and usually many more, in every realm of eighth grade society I could identify: the skaters, the athletes, the pretty girls, the smart ones, the trouble makers. This last one I managed by getting in-school suspension for accidentally bringing the photocopies from playing at my dads office. One of them had by younger brothers bare bottom so, officially it was for pornography, but no need to get into particulars.
I was becoming a master of my game. I didn’t share information I came across except to display that I, in fact, had information that I was decidedly not sharing, thus building others’ trust in me. I was trying to learn the humor present in each echelon in order to crack an appropriate joke with the appropriate person at the appropriate time. It was almost a science. I cataloged every interaction, analyzed every glance, and calculated every advance upon new territory. If I wasn’t so busy trying to win friends and influence people, I might actually have friends that I still keep in contact with. But I wasn’t after longevity.
I was after the ninth grade presidency. And boy was that a coup. There were oversize displays, free giveaways, campaign promises complete with action plans, and of course, one memorized speech including an acronym using the letters of the word president. The speech focused mainly, though, on all the positive attributes of my classmates.
I painted a vision of our first year of high school that raised everyone’s hopes. They couldn’t help but put me in office after I convinced them that my interests were the same as theirs and that vote for me was like a vote for themselves. It was beautiful.
Dale Carnegie, I thought as I sat the microphone back in its place, eat your heart out.
