Chapter 3-- "Finding the Right Roommates and Friends." My name is Ethan. I'm 26, pushing 27. I wasn't the easiest of kids on the planet to raise. In fact, it was after a day of being a total demon child in second grade that my parents looked into getting me tested, and that was when they figured out I had Asperger's syndrome. I was eight.

Middle school was miserable, but fortunately it was around my last year of middle school, starting into high school, when I began figuring out how social skills worked. I enjoyed high school, for the most part, as, by that time, I kind of grasped how to have friends, how to have a social life, and how to be normal.

Probably the biggest thing to learn was the balance between being nice to everybody and not overdoing it. I've met others who take the "be nice to everyone advice" and run wild with it. You don't want to go to an extreme and you don't want to come across as being too hard or creepy. I'm not really sure exactly what I did to find that balance, but I was being nice to everybody without laying it on too thick.

If you're kind of quirky but you're nice to everybody, people are OK with that. I considered myself to have a lot of friends in high school. I didn't have any close friends particularly, but I had lots of people who knew who I was and would cheerfully say hi to me when we passed each other.

Schoolwork in general was probably the biggest struggle for me, either knowing that I had stuff due and what the homework assignment was or doing it in a timely manner. It drove my parents bonkers because you could look at the grades online as well as see the scores for individual assignments. This one A; this one A; this one F because you didn't turn it in. Another F because you forgot to turn it in. A, F, A, F, A, F. The stuff that I actually did I did well on, but the struggle was remembering to actually do the work.

"College." I went to college about two hours south of where I grew up. It was far enough away that I lived on campus but close enough that I could come home and visit on the weekends if I wanted to, which I did semi-frequently. My first semester down there, I had five roommates, and none of us had lived on our own before. It was a train wreck.

It wasn't just on me, either. Each person in that dorm had some exasperating trait about them that drove the others nuts. Mine was that I was a stickler for the rules. They had on-campus curfews, and I would actually want to be asleep after curfew. But some of my roommates who liked to have people over and party didn't.

The person that I shared an actual bedroom with would frequently have his girlfriend over to spend the night, and that drove me nuts. I got to the point where I couldn't sleep, so I ratted on him. A different roommate just turned into a video game addict and would play video games 10 hours a day, sleep a ton, and never go to class.

Roommate number three was a debate person. You could not start a conversation with him without him trying to argue about something. I can't remember the other two, but putting six people who've never lived on their own before in the same room and saying, have fun, in my opinion, is not the most ideal.

I ended up getting the housing people involved because the one roommate who was driving me nuts the most was blatantly violating the rules. The RA came over, but I very quickly discovered that he would rather have the people who lived in his area like him instead of enforcing the rules. So he basically caught them red handed and gave them a stern finger wagging and then sent them on their way.

This happened four different times where he caught them red handed and said, if it happens again, you're going to be in trouble. So I finally went over his head and talked to his boss. I don't know what she did, but she brought the hammer down, and then thankfully it stopped. I was still completely done with it.

So after that, I switched rooms. I was there for maybe three weeks, and I absolutely hated it. From what I could tell, I think it was where they stuck the problem people that they didn't know what to do with. So I complained about that. And then they put me with a third group. That group actually turned out great because it was a nice cross-section of seasoned veterans of living on their own, with a couple of newbies.

We also had a foreign exchange student in there. It was a nice variety, and the maturity level was higher. I think if you're off living alone for the first time and you don't have a lot of experience, finding people who are on the same level as you is important. If you're more mature than they are, then their craziness is going to drive you nuts. However, if they are vastly more mature than you are, then they are going to seem boring to you and you're probably going to drive them nuts.

It's hard because you can't exactly wave a magic wand and all of a sudden you have found your people. But the bottom line is to look for people who are similar to you and won't drive you off a cliff. I would also recommend to people that, if you have a chance, try to be more independent before you move out. Do your own chores. Find your own rhythm and routine. That's going to be massively helpful.

While I got along well with the last group of roommates I mentioned towards the end of my college experience, I ended up paying a little more to have my own private room instead of sharing with somebody else. For me, and the way that I am wired, that ended up being a really good investment, as I had a safe zone that I didn't have to share with anybody.

In terms of the actual coursework for the classes, I threw everything at the wall trying to find out what stuck. I had an echo pen that worked out OK for me, but it didn't help as much as I hoped it would. What I resorted to was, after class was done and everyone was packing up and hanging out, I would go and poke the teacher.

Just to confirm, the parameters of the homework assignment are yada, yada, yada. Is that right? Most of the professors in college were totally cool with that and either confirmed or corrected the information that I needed to know. Others had actual handouts with all the instructions on them. I only had a couple of teachers who got bothered by me asking them questions. And when they were, there was always something else going on with the class entirely, so I would usually end up dropping it anyway.

In general, I found that, in college, teachers are more understanding and supportive of quirky students than in high school. One of the biggest tips I learned for college is to write stuff down. There are no parents or teachers hovering over you and reminding you about assignments. You might tell yourself that you'll remember it, but, from my experience, 30 seconds later, I would forget and then be frustrated when I had nothing to turn in the next week because I forgot that it existed. The dullest pencil can remember better than the sharpest mind. I learned that the hard way.

"The Grown-Up Experience." Overall, I was down there for five semesters doing medium-to-low class workloads each time. Now I'm two credits out from an associate's, and throughout all that time, I think I only failed one class, and it was in my first semester down there. I would say I was successful even if I don't have a degree because I did well and I'm still so close.

I actually ended up getting married, and that kind of derailed the whole college thing but not in a bad way. The current plan is that I've got a decent paying job right now, so I want to dig out of student loans and then go accrue a little bit more and finish it off. So I absolutely plan to go back and finish. Even if it's not what I'm doing right this second, I want to at least finish the associate's degree if nothing else. I did it up to this point, so it would just be stupid to throw all that work I have done away.

In my adult life, I've held several jobs. I've worked fast food at a pizza place, and then I worked at a furniture store that's fairly well known around here as a cashier/customer service grunt. The longer I was there for, the more apparent it became that it was kind of a dead-end thing. They wouldn't give anybody a raise and they wouldn't promote anybody.

Now I'm doing call center stuff. Given my quick learning and ability to manage emotions well, I've done extremely well at that. They only let their top people work at home, and I've done that for a year now. The pay is almost double what I was getting before. So as far as working goes, I'm doing fine.

If you had told me when I was in college that I would be working from home, I would have told you that you were nuts because I didn't have the discipline for it. But I've been doing just fine. I had expected after getting married to be just drained all the time because your time spent alone drops significantly, but I haven't had near the drain on my system that I would have expected from just having another person around me.

I guess part of that's because when you're comfortable around somebody, they don't drain your system in a way strangers would. I stay on top of the finances. I'm a math nerd, and luckily finances come easily to me. Probably my biggest struggle is motivation to do the more mundane things, like cleaning, laundry, dishes, et cetera. Usually with that, it'll reach a point where I'll just be sick of looking at the pile and will eventually go do it, but it's much more out of annoyance than it is out of deliberately trying to stay on top of things.

"Advice for Others." If there are parents reading this or other people like me reading this, the message I hope I can give to them is one of the same hills I have been willing to die on for years-- being on the spectrum is not inherently a problem. Likewise, if you're a parent reading this and you're concerned about your wild child from hell and where they're going to be in 15 years, look at my story.

Everyone has different strengths and weaknesses. We just tend to have a lot of the same similar weaknesses. If you can identify what the weaknesses are, you can use your strengths to patch them up. So in my case, being off the wall and emotional for a lot of my childhood, I was able to acknowledge that, focus on that, and work on that. Instead of despairing over my struggles, I focused on honing the skills that I was good at and repairing the ones I was not. If I can do it, anyone can.