00:00:00
Speaker 1: Committed is a production of I Heart Radio. I'm autistic, and what that means for me is that sometimes I don't pick up on social cues or hidden meanings. It's hard for me to read between the lines and understand that there's a bigger context. Sometimes I tend to have a lot of black and white thinking, so it's an all or nothing situation for me, and it's hard for me to navigate gray areas, which is where most of life happens. Is in the gray areas. I'd like to talk that we because we're nearer diverse family, and we spend time embracing our quirks and uniquenesses. We're a little bit more aware than an average parent who's just going through and expecting things to be normal, because that's the way the world. We want to perceive it as normal. So we have this benefit of being vigilant and looking at the works. That's also a detriment because sometimes it's just a weird day and you don't need to read into the tea leaves or the fortune cookie. I wasn't diagnosed until I was thirty one, so that was just a couple of years ago, and we had already been together for what six or seven or eight years already at that point, and really, you know, I had mentioned that I was suspected that I might be autistic back in college, but I never really went further than just suspecting. We were pretty committed to this whole thing pretty early on, before we even considered that I might be autistic. We had this phrase we are better together that I think you said within the first year of us of just being together. Larry and Sarah Nannery didn't know that it was autistic when they first met and fell in love. They knew their brains worked differently, and sometimes that could be frustrating, but very often it was also pretty interesting. They had their miscommunications, but they found ways to figure them out. And then, after about seven years of marriage, Sarah got a formal diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder. I especially wanted to make sure that if I did pursue the diagnosis that it wouldn't change the way that Larry thought of me, or treated me, or interacted with me, and it was never a concern. First and foremost labels are always a wonderful way to begin a conversation, to to start a subject, but they can't define what's going on. But for Sarah and me, we were very invested in us and then each other's successes. So no, it wasn't a real concerned but it is a real fear that that is natural, and it was good that Sarah went through that process to feel comfortable. I found Larry and Sarah through their book What to Say Next. In it, they break down how they communicate as a neurodiverse couple, how they support each other. This is a love story about learning how your partner's brain works, about how every single person's brain is different and unique, and there are lessons in here for all of us. We were pretty committed to this whole thing pretty early on, before we even considered that I might be autistic. We had this phrase we are better together that I think you said within the first year of us just being together. I'm Joe Piazza, and this is committed. Yeah. Larry and Sarah's love story started at a Starbucks in Penn Station, the Big train station in New York City. Yep, go for it, Sarah. It's it's kind of a fun story. This was, like I guess it was. It was a giant snowstorm in February of two thousand eleven and I was in New York. I was in grad school at the time in Vermont, but I had come to New York City for a two week course on nonprofit management, and I was trying to get the train back to where I was staying up in the Bronx at the time. And of course, because it was something like twenty inches of snow in like an hour, every train was was stopped and nobody was going anywhere, and so Penn Station was packed, and I was like, all right, I'll just go and get a coffee, and along with everybody else in Penn Station, the line was g enormous. Larry happened to be in front of me in line. Larry loves talking to strangers. Sarah does not, but she stuck at the train station and she figured she might as well talk to this dude to try to pass the time. Well, you were very cute there with your very old school phone and being completely overwhelmed him. Can I just not exist here? Can someone just give me my coffee and I can run away? Which worked out just like you would fuck because we only stayed there three hours. Very good with the running away part. Yeah, it was kind of stressful because we weren't expecting to be stuck in Penn station for that long. But then I found Larry, which he can talk to anybody. I don't really I don't talk to people. Having found someone who really who did that, it was great. Not only to Sarah not like talking to strangers, but she doesn't like small talk. A lot of us don't like small talk, but for Sarah it's particularly taxing and sometimes it's even confusing for her brain. It just takes more of an effort to process the small talk than it would for other people. Did it somehow work with Larry? And why do you think that it worked? Well? I think it worked because we skipped a lot of the small talk and we really started talking about common interests. And you know, he's asking me what I'm studying, and which is I could talk for hours about about what I'm studying, whatever I'm studying at the moment, and we started talking about his work and how there was some overlap. I was studying a lot of multicultural communication at the time, which was something that he was very interested in. So we I think what worked for me is that we skipped, we skipped to the deeper stuff, which is where I always am better, unlike the tropes, Like today is a very beautiful sunny day outside, and talking about the weather now is quite benign and useless. But when it is a snowstorm and trash is piled up and subway systems aren't working, that's a rich data conversation. So talking about the weather while we're stuck in Starbucks with everybody else that there was some meat in that conversation right off about Sarah went back to Vermont where she was going to grad school, but the two of them kept in touch. Larry went to visit her the wouterer by cooking dinner for Sarah does not cook dinner, by the way, you'll learn that later in the interview. And they saw each other a couple more times, and then that was that. Because Sarah's experiences in dating are just a little different than a lot of people. And I don't know necessarily if it's because I'm autistic, but I think it definitely helps. I'm very much like an all or nothing person, So if I'm in a relationship like that, in my mind, that's it, Like that's the relationship, and okay, if it doesn't work, fine, But I'm not really planning on it not working. But I'm kind of there. I didn't really I don't think we really did date. Did you want to go back to a small town in Michigan or I was able to offer you a chance to move to New York City and have opportunities freshly graduated master's degree and what do you which way do you want to go? And so I kind of had a nice enticing offer there for you to to take to move into New York and since you didn't have a job or anything, you had to move in with me. So that kind of stunted any of the preliminary datings, and it just became let's try this, sellt let's see how this works. Yeah, I don't know if i'd say stunted, I would say accelerated. We in February and in Mark and May I moved in with you. I love that. I love it when you you just you're like, I'm just going for this. I'm fully I'm fully in this. And so at the time, did you know that your brain was different? You didn't figure this out until much later, Right, I had always known that I was a little bit different than everyone else. I had suspected in college that I might be autistic, but I had never really pursued it, and so I knew that I was a little quirky or that I was just I thought about things differently than most people did. But yeah, at the time, I was not aware of the of being autistic. No, but you did know that you had traits that you had, that you were shy, and the first few years you did explore what books are out there, what inform s's out there for various challenges that you had without having the diagnosis and really the full understanding of who you are. Yeah, and Larry, when did you realize that Sarah's brain might work differently than yours or a lot of people that you knew two weeks of starting to date, I would like to have a conversation with Sarah and she would like to have an email response to me, which is very disjointed. So very early on, I appreciated that Sarah was special, that she was awesome, but that to unlock her was going to be a different experience than I had in my past, and I don't I don't think I made a conscious decision, but subconsciously I enjoyed the engagements, the thoughtfulness that she had, even though it was quite challenging at times, it left me wanting to pursue her even more. In their book What to Say Next, Sarah writes that their communication was challenging in the early days. As we've already mentioned, Larry's a talker, and Sarah's brain just needs some time to process. She needs time, and she needs to maybe write things down a little bit to think about them further. My husband Nick is very similar. I have the kind of brain that makes a decision right away and wants to talk about it, and Nick, much like Sarah, needs to sit down, think about it, write an email about it, a race the email about it, And so by the time that Sarah processed something and she was ready to talk it out, Larry might have already completely forgotten about it. It often felt like they were on two totally different wavelengths. If it came down to something that was a little more emotionally charged, it takes me longer to process emotions. They feel bigger and scarier to me, and I don't really know how to recognize them right away, so it takes me time to process and go through and say, you know, really realize what it is that I'm feeling, why I'm feeling that way, what Larry might have been feeling. What we should say, what we shouldn't say. So oftentimes, especially in the beginning, we would have an emotionally charged interaction and I would say I wouldn't be able to say anything really in the moment, and Larry has learned to just give me some space, and so I then would come back with the long email. This is all of my perspective of what just happened, which is both helpful in some ways because it gets my thoughts out in a way that is the way that I need to communicate, but it also is not helpful in that it was very one sided. Larry's just reading the email. He's not able to respond in real time to what it is that I'm saying. So we ended up working out a system where I still can do that. I still can get the words out at a later point after I've processed what it is that I really do want to say, but we park it in email as a kind of a journal, and you know, I'll put that in the subject line like journal, so that Larry knows that it's just my brain dump and that he's not I'm not expecting him to respond right away or to write me a big long email back, and that we can then talk about it together later when we're calmer, which at times I still would like to immediately reply to. And I have to the subject and go, okay, this is just in fairness, how Sarah needed to break it out, and then I have to marshal myself to say, let's just take a moment more and then I can respond to what the salient that I wish that she could do a t L drs in the in those journals to pull out that thought. But I think it's because it's a journal, you still don't always pull out that salient thought. It's just here's all your information. I think that's useful for any couple, neurotypical or not to try to figure out and learn how the other person's brain processes things, how they need to take in information, and then how they need to give you information, because we all do it differently, but we all assume that everyone does it the way we do it right. We all are very unique, complicated folk, and we evolve the way we have. So when you're able to find your partner, your relationships, your coworkers, anywhere where you can establish some of that rapport and just trust that there's good intentions on the other side and be patient in figuring out how that person is going to best communicate and interact. I think that's a good thing for all of us humans, regardless of how we define ourselves with In the year, the two of them both knew that this was it, they were going to be together. Larry proposed at a resort in the Poconos, and they got married at a small park in Brooklyn. Now, even though Larry and Sarah had both suspected that she didn't have a narrow typical brain, Sarah didn't get diagnosed as autistic until she was thirty one years old, well after the two of them were married. More on that, after a quick break. I wasn't diagnosed until I was thirty one, So that was just a couple of years ago. And we had already been together for what six or seven or eight years already at that point. And really I had mentioned that I was suspected that I might be autistic back in college, but I never really went further than just suspecting. It wasn't until I graduated graduate school. I'm married Larry I moved up in my career, and then we had our first child, and all of it all together just became too much for me to be able to handle without some form of extra support besides what Larry was already doing, which was hugely supportive. They talked about it for more than a year. What should they do, who should they see? Should Sarah even pursue a diagnosis at all? And she was nervous about that. I especially wanted to make sure that if I did pursue the diagnosis, that it wouldn't change the way that Larry thought of me, or treated me, or interacted with me. And I was afraid that it would. And I shouldn't have been afraid, because it didn't change anything. I'm still the same me, and we're still the same we that we had been for seven or eight years. It's just that the the diagnosis, or just knowing the autism was a part of what I was going through, gave us more grace, I think, just more insight into how our brains worked differently, how we were having miscommunications, how our intentions were really pure. You would consider how some people consider yourself to be forgetful, but that's just your executive functioning. So it added labels that added language and knowledge to our day to day interactions that are just amazing and very helpful. Yeah, So like that forgetful piece is to dig into that for a second. If someone was near a typical forget something, you assume it's because it wasn't important enough, or they didn't put enough emphasis on it, or they weren't thinking about it enough. Whereas if I forget something, it's it's not because it wasn't important, it's because it literally is not in my brain. I dropped it somewhere along the way, and it's not something that I can control. And Sarah mentioned that she was nervous that you would maybe think about her differently once she was diagnosed or if there were these labels. Was was that ever really a concern or was that something that was in her head? It was never a concern. First and foremost labels are always a wonderful way to begin a conversation, to to start a subject, but they can't define what's going on. You actually have to go into the details and the weeds. It is fair that the label autism, and especially now that other labels like Asperger's is retired, the the amount of people who are diagnosed is significant, The amount of different types of traits that are present is significant. The worries about is it hereditary and what what that means, that's all real. But for Sarah and me, we were very invested in us and then each other's successes, So no, it wasn't a real concern, but it is a real fear that that is natural, and it was good that Sarah went through that process to feel comfortable. And what were some of those miscommunications or misunderstandings that you guys had early on before you had more of a language for this. There's a good example in there of one time we were driving. I was driving. We had Cyrus, our son, who was what two and a half or maybe three at the time, in the back seat. We were looking we were in a new city. I think we were in Pittsburgh for some reason, so I was already highly stressed. Picture this, Larry's in the back seat trying to calm down a toddler. We've all been there, Larry. Sarah was in the front seat driving the car, stressed out about find a cafe in a weird city where they're supposed to meet a friend at who she can't get ahold of She's looking at a map. She's trying to figure out where to park. So I'm trying to like do I have my keys? Do I have my wallet? I'm in a new place, and Larry's like, get out of the car. And I was like what what? Why? I thought there was something, you know, terrible going on, and He's like, just get out, and so I got out of the car. And then I'm like, okay, now what Now I'm in like instruction following mode. I don't know what's going on. I don't know if I should be looking for danger somewhere. And he opens his Story's like over here, you know he needs help. Obviously he needs help with Cyrus because Cyrus just having an issue in the backseat. Routines in process are paramount in Sarah's brain. As she writes in her book, her brain doesn't give her the luxury of automatic information absorption. It doesn't switch gears very quickly. So Sarah was very wrapped up in the process of trying to get them from here to there, and she couldn't see that Larry needed her in the backseat. So that's like an example of a miscommunication that can happen where to Larry, it's like obvious that he needs help, and and to me it was not. Yeah, I like sharing that, Sarah. How often do you cook for us? Sarah? I don't. I don't cook the variables that go into cooking. How long things take? Are you following a recipe is already a significant amount of effort? Throw in that you just went through a work day, or you have kids, or for you you have both. Early on, we we just wouldn't eat properly and we would end up having to do take out food. I went from somebody who didn't cook other than barbecuing to a I don't know, maybe a two star chef. I enjoy it now A two stores are now give you borning that? I mean, you were amazing. So there's a lot of those introspective adjustments that we've made throughout our life so that we we do things better together than trying to dole out of the test to each other, because that that just doesn't work. There are so many different wavelengths on the A S D spectrum, Sarah, what is the best way to describe how your brain works? How how do you describe this? If you were just going to tell me in one paragraph, what is your brain like. I'm glad that you said wavelengths because there's so many different there's a lot of different terms out there when it comes to autism that I don't like and that a lot of people don't like in terms of functioning labels and things like that, because we're all autistic on the spectrum and we're all affected in different ways. And so for me, the way if if you were going to ask me and I was to describe it, I would I would just say I'm autistic. And what that means for me is that sometimes I don't pick up on social cues or hidden meanings. It's hard for me to read between the lines and understand that there's a bigger context. Sometimes I tend to have a lot of black and white thinking, so it's an all or nothing situation for me, and it's hard for me to navigate gray areas, which is where most of life happens. Is in the gray areas. I like to have structure. I like to know what the rules are. I know, I like to follow the rules. I don't like when other people don't follow the rules, which is something that my son can relate to very well, I do find comfort in routine only because it helps me to not forget things, because it's so easy for things to slip out of my brain. The way I describe it is that I'm I'm kind of holding my whole life in my hands as if they were It's a pile of sand, and the grains of sand are just falling through the cracks all the time. So when I have a routine, when I know, when I have a habit or something that I've established a workflow, I like to call them sometimes it helps me to manage that pile of sand and get the results that I'm looking for. I want to add that one thing but you identified fairly early on, and that we constantly talk through, is you take your analogy of the grains of sand for you and your brain. Each grain is the exact same value, and having no gas in the car for you is the same as did you put enough butter on your bread? Whereas same value one one is going to get you to pick up your child from school on time and the other is going to produce an extra three seconds of pleasure as you're eating your lunch. Right, the they can't be the same value, and yet that my brain makes them the same value. One of the things I loved about Larry and Sarah's book is the opening bit. In it, Sarah is reaching out to Larry to ask how she should solve a particular communication issue at work. This is a regular occurrence in their lives, and in fact, Larry's frequent text and instant messaging tutorials throughout the work day have helped Sarah rise through the ranks of one of the world's largest nonprofits. Talk to me a little bit about that, Like, so, how does Larry help you to function better professionally? This is a large part of the book because so much of the way that I was able to navigate the work world, because remember I met Larry as I was graduating graduate school. So I had had a few jobs, but I had never really had a career yet, and so Larry was there from the beginning of my career, when I was an unpaid intern, all the way up through. So some of what he was helping me learn was were things that any intern out of college would find helpful, But a lot of the stuff was things that I particularly was not picking up on or not understanding. One good example is how in certain situations in the workplace, it's much much better to have an in person conversation with someone about something rather than send an email. And this made no sense to me, because of course everything is better an email, because that's how I communicate, and I thought that that was how everyone else liked to communicate, because you get all of your words out and it's all there, and it's clear, and it's black and white. Sarah didn't realize that in emails she was missing a lot of nonverbal clues and tone of voice inflections, the kind of things that people are often seeking in an in person interaction. So he helped me learn the difference be between a two paragraph clarification email that's asking what did you mean this? Or did you mean this? Or would you rather have this? Oh my gosh, who wants to read that email? Instead of going to someone's office or cubicle or wherever and and having a five minute clarification conversation with them, which they're going to appreciate so much more than having to deal with your email. Right, it's little things like this that Larry was really helpful. Yeah, Sara, you would have been the best research student or research assistant or coordinator for wherever your career would have taken you had you not been sending me those instant messages, because you would have never built that rapport with the people and shown that you do want to go further. And maybe you just struggle a little bit with communication. So it worked out today. Sarah and Larry are the parents of two children, one of them has all so been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, and Sarah often feels like she has a unique window into their son, Cyrus's brain. The important thing that she always tries to keep in mind and remind Larry about is that it takes their brains longer to process information. She believes her greatest strength in parenting Cyrus is her lived experience of how he operates differently from other people, and her ability to help him by using the tools that she's already learned along the way to help herself. But more on that after a quick break, Talk to me a little bit about parenting. What if are there any challenges to parenting when one of you is neurotypical and one of you isn't And how do you guys resolve those? Oh? Yeah, I mean I think there are there are challenges parenting in general, it's very challenging to be a parent, whatever kind of parent you are. It's also very ranging to parent a child who is autistic. On the strength side, I can often see I have a little bit of a window into our child's mind when it comes to his autism and how it might affect him sometimes. That being said, he is very different than I am, and then I was when I was that age. But there are times when I can kind of almost like read his mind a little bit or understand he's coming from a little bit better than Larry might be able to. But then there's times when he has a cough and I forget to give him his medicine because I just I don't have it in my brain. As part of my routine that I do with him every night, I do the bedtime routine because routine is my thing, and I'm on time every night and I have it all worked out. But if there's a new thing that has to be inserted into the routine, I'm going to forget it. And that's an issue. Yeah, I'd like to that. We because we're near diverse family, and we spend time embracing our quirks and uniquenesses we're a little bit more aware than an average parent who's just going through and expecting things to be normal, because that's the way the world. We want to perceive it as normal. So we have this benefit of being vigilant and looking at the quirks. That's also a detriment because sometimes it's just a weird day and then you don't need to read into the tea leaves or the fortune cookie. We can get outsmarted by ourselves and thinking what's going on, But at a core level, we pay attention and we listen, and I think that all parents that are able to do that are find success and children are amazing, not just ours, All children are amazing. Do you think the fact that you guys had to work now, I don't want to say harder, but differently because of how your brains work differently. Do you think it's improved your marriage because you were forced to confront things very early on that a lot of people might not have have had to. That's a really great question. I don't know that I've ever been asked that question. I have to think about that one. I'll say that absolutely yes. When we were just dating, you have the typical questions, do you want to have kids, what is your religion? Do you like warmer cold climates? But you don't get much past that. And with us because there is no small talk, because there is this needing for competent conversation around something. We don't struggle with hiding things or being that embarrassed about what we want to talk about. And that's something that we now embrace and try to cultivate. And I really don't think it if we were if we were different folks, I don't think we could have written the book the way we did. And and Ben is open and sharing at the same time, though I mean we were we were pretty committed to this whole thing pretty early on, before we even considered that I might be autistic. We had this phrase we are better together, that I think you said within the first year of us just being together, not even I don't think we were married yet when we started saying that phrase, and that really that was something that helped me, especially through some of the stickier moments, that we are better together. It's a great microcosm now that we know that we are neurodiverse, that phrase we are better together, it's a great microcosm for just I think the world we need different types of people working together and different types of brains working together, and we're better for it. Valarry and Sarah wrote their book What to Say Next because they couldn't find another book out there like it anywhere in the world, and they wanted to see that book out there. So you can see our bookshelves. I have books on highly sensitive people, I have books on being shy, and and none of them I have books like for neurotypical people. None of them were written for me or with my type of brain and mind. And so that's ultimately why we decided to go ahead and write the book that we wrote, because we couldn't find it anywhere, and we were we were very lucky that we have a friend in publishing, and we asked her, We're like, this book, it should be graded. You should go find somebody to write it. And she shot back, Okay, you have the job write the book. This episode of Committed was hosted and reported by Joe Piazza, with a very special thanks to Larry Sarah Fannery. Supervising producers Ramsey Young. The executive producers are Joe Piazza and Tyler Klain. Theme song and music by Tristan McNeil. For comments suggestions are to be part of the show, give us a call at four zero four three. That's four zero four one seven three, or send us an email at Joe at Committed podcast dot com. That's j O at Committed podcast dot com. You can grab a copy of Joe's book How to Be Married on Amazon or wherever books are sold. Committed as a production of iHeart Radio and Producing. Our studio is located in Atlanta, Georgia. For more podcasts from white Heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Speaker 1: Committed is a production of I Heart Radio. I'm autistic, and what that means for me is that sometimes I don't pick up on social cues or hidden meanings. It's hard for me to read between the lines and understand that there's a bigger context. Sometimes I tend to have a lot of black and white thinking, so it's an all or nothing situation for me, and it's hard for me to navigate gray areas, which is where most of life happens. Is in the gray areas. I'd like to talk that we because we're nearer diverse family, and we spend time embracing our quirks and uniquenesses. We're a little bit more aware than an average parent who's just going through and expecting things to be normal, because that's the way the world. We want to perceive it as normal. So we have this benefit of being vigilant and looking at the works. That's also a detriment because sometimes it's just a weird day and you don't need to read into the tea leaves or the fortune cookie. I wasn't diagnosed until I was thirty one, so that was just a couple of years ago, and we had already been together for what six or seven or eight years already at that point, and really, you know, I had mentioned that I was suspected that I might be autistic back in college, but I never really went further than just suspecting. We were pretty committed to this whole thing pretty early on, before we even considered that I might be autistic. We had this phrase we are better together that I think you said within the first year of us of just being together. Larry and Sarah Nannery didn't know that it was autistic when they first met and fell in love. They knew their brains worked differently, and sometimes that could be frustrating, but very often it was also pretty interesting. They had their miscommunications, but they found ways to figure them out. And then, after about seven years of marriage, Sarah got a formal diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder. I especially wanted to make sure that if I did pursue the diagnosis that it wouldn't change the way that Larry thought of me, or treated me, or interacted with me, and it was never a concern. First and foremost labels are always a wonderful way to begin a conversation, to to start a subject, but they can't define what's going on. But for Sarah and me, we were very invested in us and then each other's successes. So no, it wasn't a real concerned but it is a real fear that that is natural, and it was good that Sarah went through that process to feel comfortable. I found Larry and Sarah through their book What to Say Next. In it, they break down how they communicate as a neurodiverse couple, how they support each other. This is a love story about learning how your partner's brain works, about how every single person's brain is different and unique, and there are lessons in here for all of us. We were pretty committed to this whole thing pretty early on, before we even considered that I might be autistic. We had this phrase we are better together that I think you said within the first year of us just being together. I'm Joe Piazza, and this is committed. Yeah. Larry and Sarah's love story started at a Starbucks in Penn Station, the Big train station in New York City. Yep, go for it, Sarah. It's it's kind of a fun story. This was, like I guess it was. It was a giant snowstorm in February of two thousand eleven and I was in New York. I was in grad school at the time in Vermont, but I had come to New York City for a two week course on nonprofit management, and I was trying to get the train back to where I was staying up in the Bronx at the time. And of course, because it was something like twenty inches of snow in like an hour, every train was was stopped and nobody was going anywhere, and so Penn Station was packed, and I was like, all right, I'll just go and get a coffee, and along with everybody else in Penn Station, the line was g enormous. Larry happened to be in front of me in line. Larry loves talking to strangers. Sarah does not, but she stuck at the train station and she figured she might as well talk to this dude to try to pass the time. Well, you were very cute there with your very old school phone and being completely overwhelmed him. Can I just not exist here? Can someone just give me my coffee and I can run away? Which worked out just like you would fuck because we only stayed there three hours. Very good with the running away part. Yeah, it was kind of stressful because we weren't expecting to be stuck in Penn station for that long. But then I found Larry, which he can talk to anybody. I don't really I don't talk to people. Having found someone who really who did that, it was great. Not only to Sarah not like talking to strangers, but she doesn't like small talk. A lot of us don't like small talk, but for Sarah it's particularly taxing and sometimes it's even confusing for her brain. It just takes more of an effort to process the small talk than it would for other people. Did it somehow work with Larry? And why do you think that it worked? Well? I think it worked because we skipped a lot of the small talk and we really started talking about common interests. And you know, he's asking me what I'm studying, and which is I could talk for hours about about what I'm studying, whatever I'm studying at the moment, and we started talking about his work and how there was some overlap. I was studying a lot of multicultural communication at the time, which was something that he was very interested in. So we I think what worked for me is that we skipped, we skipped to the deeper stuff, which is where I always am better, unlike the tropes, Like today is a very beautiful sunny day outside, and talking about the weather now is quite benign and useless. But when it is a snowstorm and trash is piled up and subway systems aren't working, that's a rich data conversation. So talking about the weather while we're stuck in Starbucks with everybody else that there was some meat in that conversation right off about Sarah went back to Vermont where she was going to grad school, but the two of them kept in touch. Larry went to visit her the wouterer by cooking dinner for Sarah does not cook dinner, by the way, you'll learn that later in the interview. And they saw each other a couple more times, and then that was that. Because Sarah's experiences in dating are just a little different than a lot of people. And I don't know necessarily if it's because I'm autistic, but I think it definitely helps. I'm very much like an all or nothing person, So if I'm in a relationship like that, in my mind, that's it, Like that's the relationship, and okay, if it doesn't work, fine, But I'm not really planning on it not working. But I'm kind of there. I didn't really I don't think we really did date. Did you want to go back to a small town in Michigan or I was able to offer you a chance to move to New York City and have opportunities freshly graduated master's degree and what do you which way do you want to go? And so I kind of had a nice enticing offer there for you to to take to move into New York and since you didn't have a job or anything, you had to move in with me. So that kind of stunted any of the preliminary datings, and it just became let's try this, sellt let's see how this works. Yeah, I don't know if i'd say stunted, I would say accelerated. We in February and in Mark and May I moved in with you. I love that. I love it when you you just you're like, I'm just going for this. I'm fully I'm fully in this. And so at the time, did you know that your brain was different? You didn't figure this out until much later, Right, I had always known that I was a little bit different than everyone else. I had suspected in college that I might be autistic, but I had never really pursued it, and so I knew that I was a little quirky or that I was just I thought about things differently than most people did. But yeah, at the time, I was not aware of the of being autistic. No, but you did know that you had traits that you had, that you were shy, and the first few years you did explore what books are out there, what inform s's out there for various challenges that you had without having the diagnosis and really the full understanding of who you are. Yeah, and Larry, when did you realize that Sarah's brain might work differently than yours or a lot of people that you knew two weeks of starting to date, I would like to have a conversation with Sarah and she would like to have an email response to me, which is very disjointed. So very early on, I appreciated that Sarah was special, that she was awesome, but that to unlock her was going to be a different experience than I had in my past, and I don't I don't think I made a conscious decision, but subconsciously I enjoyed the engagements, the thoughtfulness that she had, even though it was quite challenging at times, it left me wanting to pursue her even more. In their book What to Say Next, Sarah writes that their communication was challenging in the early days. As we've already mentioned, Larry's a talker, and Sarah's brain just needs some time to process. She needs time, and she needs to maybe write things down a little bit to think about them further. My husband Nick is very similar. I have the kind of brain that makes a decision right away and wants to talk about it, and Nick, much like Sarah, needs to sit down, think about it, write an email about it, a race the email about it, And so by the time that Sarah processed something and she was ready to talk it out, Larry might have already completely forgotten about it. It often felt like they were on two totally different wavelengths. If it came down to something that was a little more emotionally charged, it takes me longer to process emotions. They feel bigger and scarier to me, and I don't really know how to recognize them right away, so it takes me time to process and go through and say, you know, really realize what it is that I'm feeling, why I'm feeling that way, what Larry might have been feeling. What we should say, what we shouldn't say. So oftentimes, especially in the beginning, we would have an emotionally charged interaction and I would say I wouldn't be able to say anything really in the moment, and Larry has learned to just give me some space, and so I then would come back with the long email. This is all of my perspective of what just happened, which is both helpful in some ways because it gets my thoughts out in a way that is the way that I need to communicate, but it also is not helpful in that it was very one sided. Larry's just reading the email. He's not able to respond in real time to what it is that I'm saying. So we ended up working out a system where I still can do that. I still can get the words out at a later point after I've processed what it is that I really do want to say, but we park it in email as a kind of a journal, and you know, I'll put that in the subject line like journal, so that Larry knows that it's just my brain dump and that he's not I'm not expecting him to respond right away or to write me a big long email back, and that we can then talk about it together later when we're calmer, which at times I still would like to immediately reply to. And I have to the subject and go, okay, this is just in fairness, how Sarah needed to break it out, and then I have to marshal myself to say, let's just take a moment more and then I can respond to what the salient that I wish that she could do a t L drs in the in those journals to pull out that thought. But I think it's because it's a journal, you still don't always pull out that salient thought. It's just here's all your information. I think that's useful for any couple, neurotypical or not to try to figure out and learn how the other person's brain processes things, how they need to take in information, and then how they need to give you information, because we all do it differently, but we all assume that everyone does it the way we do it right. We all are very unique, complicated folk, and we evolve the way we have. So when you're able to find your partner, your relationships, your coworkers, anywhere where you can establish some of that rapport and just trust that there's good intentions on the other side and be patient in figuring out how that person is going to best communicate and interact. I think that's a good thing for all of us humans, regardless of how we define ourselves with In the year, the two of them both knew that this was it, they were going to be together. Larry proposed at a resort in the Poconos, and they got married at a small park in Brooklyn. Now, even though Larry and Sarah had both suspected that she didn't have a narrow typical brain, Sarah didn't get diagnosed as autistic until she was thirty one years old, well after the two of them were married. More on that, after a quick break. I wasn't diagnosed until I was thirty one, So that was just a couple of years ago. And we had already been together for what six or seven or eight years already at that point. And really I had mentioned that I was suspected that I might be autistic back in college, but I never really went further than just suspecting. It wasn't until I graduated graduate school. I'm married Larry I moved up in my career, and then we had our first child, and all of it all together just became too much for me to be able to handle without some form of extra support besides what Larry was already doing, which was hugely supportive. They talked about it for more than a year. What should they do, who should they see? Should Sarah even pursue a diagnosis at all? And she was nervous about that. I especially wanted to make sure that if I did pursue the diagnosis, that it wouldn't change the way that Larry thought of me, or treated me, or interacted with me. And I was afraid that it would. And I shouldn't have been afraid, because it didn't change anything. I'm still the same me, and we're still the same we that we had been for seven or eight years. It's just that the the diagnosis, or just knowing the autism was a part of what I was going through, gave us more grace, I think, just more insight into how our brains worked differently, how we were having miscommunications, how our intentions were really pure. You would consider how some people consider yourself to be forgetful, but that's just your executive functioning. So it added labels that added language and knowledge to our day to day interactions that are just amazing and very helpful. Yeah, So like that forgetful piece is to dig into that for a second. If someone was near a typical forget something, you assume it's because it wasn't important enough, or they didn't put enough emphasis on it, or they weren't thinking about it enough. Whereas if I forget something, it's it's not because it wasn't important, it's because it literally is not in my brain. I dropped it somewhere along the way, and it's not something that I can control. And Sarah mentioned that she was nervous that you would maybe think about her differently once she was diagnosed or if there were these labels. Was was that ever really a concern or was that something that was in her head? It was never a concern. First and foremost labels are always a wonderful way to begin a conversation, to to start a subject, but they can't define what's going on. You actually have to go into the details and the weeds. It is fair that the label autism, and especially now that other labels like Asperger's is retired, the the amount of people who are diagnosed is significant, The amount of different types of traits that are present is significant. The worries about is it hereditary and what what that means, that's all real. But for Sarah and me, we were very invested in us and then each other's successes, So no, it wasn't a real concern, but it is a real fear that that is natural, and it was good that Sarah went through that process to feel comfortable. And what were some of those miscommunications or misunderstandings that you guys had early on before you had more of a language for this. There's a good example in there of one time we were driving. I was driving. We had Cyrus, our son, who was what two and a half or maybe three at the time, in the back seat. We were looking we were in a new city. I think we were in Pittsburgh for some reason, so I was already highly stressed. Picture this, Larry's in the back seat trying to calm down a toddler. We've all been there, Larry. Sarah was in the front seat driving the car, stressed out about find a cafe in a weird city where they're supposed to meet a friend at who she can't get ahold of She's looking at a map. She's trying to figure out where to park. So I'm trying to like do I have my keys? Do I have my wallet? I'm in a new place, and Larry's like, get out of the car. And I was like what what? Why? I thought there was something, you know, terrible going on, and He's like, just get out, and so I got out of the car. And then I'm like, okay, now what Now I'm in like instruction following mode. I don't know what's going on. I don't know if I should be looking for danger somewhere. And he opens his Story's like over here, you know he needs help. Obviously he needs help with Cyrus because Cyrus just having an issue in the backseat. Routines in process are paramount in Sarah's brain. As she writes in her book, her brain doesn't give her the luxury of automatic information absorption. It doesn't switch gears very quickly. So Sarah was very wrapped up in the process of trying to get them from here to there, and she couldn't see that Larry needed her in the backseat. So that's like an example of a miscommunication that can happen where to Larry, it's like obvious that he needs help, and and to me it was not. Yeah, I like sharing that, Sarah. How often do you cook for us? Sarah? I don't. I don't cook the variables that go into cooking. How long things take? Are you following a recipe is already a significant amount of effort? Throw in that you just went through a work day, or you have kids, or for you you have both. Early on, we we just wouldn't eat properly and we would end up having to do take out food. I went from somebody who didn't cook other than barbecuing to a I don't know, maybe a two star chef. I enjoy it now A two stores are now give you borning that? I mean, you were amazing. So there's a lot of those introspective adjustments that we've made throughout our life so that we we do things better together than trying to dole out of the test to each other, because that that just doesn't work. There are so many different wavelengths on the A S D spectrum, Sarah, what is the best way to describe how your brain works? How how do you describe this? If you were just going to tell me in one paragraph, what is your brain like. I'm glad that you said wavelengths because there's so many different there's a lot of different terms out there when it comes to autism that I don't like and that a lot of people don't like in terms of functioning labels and things like that, because we're all autistic on the spectrum and we're all affected in different ways. And so for me, the way if if you were going to ask me and I was to describe it, I would I would just say I'm autistic. And what that means for me is that sometimes I don't pick up on social cues or hidden meanings. It's hard for me to read between the lines and understand that there's a bigger context. Sometimes I tend to have a lot of black and white thinking, so it's an all or nothing situation for me, and it's hard for me to navigate gray areas, which is where most of life happens. Is in the gray areas. I like to have structure. I like to know what the rules are. I know, I like to follow the rules. I don't like when other people don't follow the rules, which is something that my son can relate to very well, I do find comfort in routine only because it helps me to not forget things, because it's so easy for things to slip out of my brain. The way I describe it is that I'm I'm kind of holding my whole life in my hands as if they were It's a pile of sand, and the grains of sand are just falling through the cracks all the time. So when I have a routine, when I know, when I have a habit or something that I've established a workflow, I like to call them sometimes it helps me to manage that pile of sand and get the results that I'm looking for. I want to add that one thing but you identified fairly early on, and that we constantly talk through, is you take your analogy of the grains of sand for you and your brain. Each grain is the exact same value, and having no gas in the car for you is the same as did you put enough butter on your bread? Whereas same value one one is going to get you to pick up your child from school on time and the other is going to produce an extra three seconds of pleasure as you're eating your lunch. Right, the they can't be the same value, and yet that my brain makes them the same value. One of the things I loved about Larry and Sarah's book is the opening bit. In it, Sarah is reaching out to Larry to ask how she should solve a particular communication issue at work. This is a regular occurrence in their lives, and in fact, Larry's frequent text and instant messaging tutorials throughout the work day have helped Sarah rise through the ranks of one of the world's largest nonprofits. Talk to me a little bit about that, Like, so, how does Larry help you to function better professionally? This is a large part of the book because so much of the way that I was able to navigate the work world, because remember I met Larry as I was graduating graduate school. So I had had a few jobs, but I had never really had a career yet, and so Larry was there from the beginning of my career, when I was an unpaid intern, all the way up through. So some of what he was helping me learn was were things that any intern out of college would find helpful, But a lot of the stuff was things that I particularly was not picking up on or not understanding. One good example is how in certain situations in the workplace, it's much much better to have an in person conversation with someone about something rather than send an email. And this made no sense to me, because of course everything is better an email, because that's how I communicate, and I thought that that was how everyone else liked to communicate, because you get all of your words out and it's all there, and it's clear, and it's black and white. Sarah didn't realize that in emails she was missing a lot of nonverbal clues and tone of voice inflections, the kind of things that people are often seeking in an in person interaction. So he helped me learn the difference be between a two paragraph clarification email that's asking what did you mean this? Or did you mean this? Or would you rather have this? Oh my gosh, who wants to read that email? Instead of going to someone's office or cubicle or wherever and and having a five minute clarification conversation with them, which they're going to appreciate so much more than having to deal with your email. Right, it's little things like this that Larry was really helpful. Yeah, Sara, you would have been the best research student or research assistant or coordinator for wherever your career would have taken you had you not been sending me those instant messages, because you would have never built that rapport with the people and shown that you do want to go further. And maybe you just struggle a little bit with communication. So it worked out today. Sarah and Larry are the parents of two children, one of them has all so been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, and Sarah often feels like she has a unique window into their son, Cyrus's brain. The important thing that she always tries to keep in mind and remind Larry about is that it takes their brains longer to process information. She believes her greatest strength in parenting Cyrus is her lived experience of how he operates differently from other people, and her ability to help him by using the tools that she's already learned along the way to help herself. But more on that after a quick break, Talk to me a little bit about parenting. What if are there any challenges to parenting when one of you is neurotypical and one of you isn't And how do you guys resolve those? Oh? Yeah, I mean I think there are there are challenges parenting in general, it's very challenging to be a parent, whatever kind of parent you are. It's also very ranging to parent a child who is autistic. On the strength side, I can often see I have a little bit of a window into our child's mind when it comes to his autism and how it might affect him sometimes. That being said, he is very different than I am, and then I was when I was that age. But there are times when I can kind of almost like read his mind a little bit or understand he's coming from a little bit better than Larry might be able to. But then there's times when he has a cough and I forget to give him his medicine because I just I don't have it in my brain. As part of my routine that I do with him every night, I do the bedtime routine because routine is my thing, and I'm on time every night and I have it all worked out. But if there's a new thing that has to be inserted into the routine, I'm going to forget it. And that's an issue. Yeah, I'd like to that. We because we're near diverse family, and we spend time embracing our quirks and uniquenesses we're a little bit more aware than an average parent who's just going through and expecting things to be normal, because that's the way the world. We want to perceive it as normal. So we have this benefit of being vigilant and looking at the quirks. That's also a detriment because sometimes it's just a weird day and then you don't need to read into the tea leaves or the fortune cookie. We can get outsmarted by ourselves and thinking what's going on, But at a core level, we pay attention and we listen, and I think that all parents that are able to do that are find success and children are amazing, not just ours, All children are amazing. Do you think the fact that you guys had to work now, I don't want to say harder, but differently because of how your brains work differently. Do you think it's improved your marriage because you were forced to confront things very early on that a lot of people might not have have had to. That's a really great question. I don't know that I've ever been asked that question. I have to think about that one. I'll say that absolutely yes. When we were just dating, you have the typical questions, do you want to have kids, what is your religion? Do you like warmer cold climates? But you don't get much past that. And with us because there is no small talk, because there is this needing for competent conversation around something. We don't struggle with hiding things or being that embarrassed about what we want to talk about. And that's something that we now embrace and try to cultivate. And I really don't think it if we were if we were different folks, I don't think we could have written the book the way we did. And and Ben is open and sharing at the same time, though I mean we were we were pretty committed to this whole thing pretty early on, before we even considered that I might be autistic. We had this phrase we are better together, that I think you said within the first year of us just being together, not even I don't think we were married yet when we started saying that phrase, and that really that was something that helped me, especially through some of the stickier moments, that we are better together. It's a great microcosm now that we know that we are neurodiverse, that phrase we are better together, it's a great microcosm for just I think the world we need different types of people working together and different types of brains working together, and we're better for it. Valarry and Sarah wrote their book What to Say Next because they couldn't find another book out there like it anywhere in the world, and they wanted to see that book out there. So you can see our bookshelves. I have books on highly sensitive people, I have books on being shy, and and none of them I have books like for neurotypical people. None of them were written for me or with my type of brain and mind. And so that's ultimately why we decided to go ahead and write the book that we wrote, because we couldn't find it anywhere, and we were we were very lucky that we have a friend in publishing, and we asked her, We're like, this book, it should be graded. You should go find somebody to write it. And she shot back, Okay, you have the job write the book. This episode of Committed was hosted and reported by Joe Piazza, with a very special thanks to Larry Sarah Fannery. Supervising producers Ramsey Young. The executive producers are Joe Piazza and Tyler Klain. Theme song and music by Tristan McNeil. For comments suggestions are to be part of the show, give us a call at four zero four three. That's four zero four one seven three, or send us an email at Joe at Committed podcast dot com. That's j O at Committed podcast dot com. You can grab a copy of Joe's book How to Be Married on Amazon or wherever books are sold. Committed as a production of iHeart Radio and Producing. Our studio is located in Atlanta, Georgia. For more podcasts from white Heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
