The incident with the tire swing was an early clue.
In the middle of a summer thunderstorm, Jennifer O’Toole — then a whipsmart 4-year-old with flame-red hair — couldn’t stand seeing her backyard swing twist and spin so violently in the wind. Tears streaming down her face, she begged her father until he gave in, braved the storm and took it down.
“It had to feel like the most ridiculous indulgence,” O’Toole, now 42, writes. “But I wasn’t throwing a fit for the fun of it.”
O’Toole has Asperger’s — a condition on the autism spectrum — but she wasn’t diagnosed until many years later, at 35. For her, the information was a tremendous relief. Finally, she was able to explain certain lifelong challenges and behaviors: her trouble with gauging social cues, for instance. There were also sensory issues — clothing tags grazing her skin made her nuts — as well as her obsession with various historical facts and figures, such as writer Laura Ingalls Wilder.
For O’Toole, Asperger’s was the missing piece in a puzzle that had vexed her for as long as she could remember. Her diagnosis was — as she writes in her new book “Autism in Heels: The Untold Story of a Female Life on the Spectrum,” out Sept. 25 — “the greatest gift no one expects to want.”
For instance, it helped her understand why she saw letters and numbers as having clear-cut character traits.
“I announced to my mother at a very young age that letters and numbers had colors, and genders, and personalities,” O’Toole tells The Post.
Her mother, understandably, balked. “I was adept enough to know, ‘OK, that apparently is weird, don’t talk about that anymore,’” says O’Toole. (She has synesthesia, which makes sense to her now: It’s a cognitive anomaly that causes blending between the five senses, and can go hand-in-hand with autism.)
Other times, O’Toole wasn’t quite so good at concealing her differences.
“I felt better around adults than I did around other kids,” the Caldwell, NJ, native remembers, admitting that while growing up she was prone to various social blunders, such as monopolizing conversations and bragging about her accomplishments. Because she was incapable of “reading the room,” she endured years of painful bullying.
Later, as a college student, O’Toole trained herself to blend in. She studied movies and books for tips. But the scars from her being bullied remained.
At Brown University, O’Toole fell in love with a seemingly perfect guy who turned out to be physically and verbally abusive. She says her challenges with interpersonal relationships, along with low self-esteem, made her tolerate him.
Then, at 25, she was hospitalized for severe anorexia.
In the hospital, a doctor pronounced her bipolar, which turned out to be wrong. But it started her down a path of mental-health treatment and, eventually, self-acceptance. It wasn’t until her kids — now ages 15, 12 and 9 — were identified as having Asperger’s that she herself received the correct diagnosis.
With the help of continued psychotherapy and a deeper understanding of her condition, the Charlotte, NC, resident is now a bestselling author of six books and an autism advocate — turning her biggest obstacle into a thriving career.
“All of us have things about ourselves that we worry about,” O’Toole says. “But if we can take those things and transform them, from a place of victimhood to a place of being a creator, that’s where there’s infinite possibility.”
