ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder) for me is like being in a room full of people whose language I understand, but who’s body movements, facial expressions, and overall actions are as foreign to me as if you were dropped into Ancient Jerusalem and expected to speak Aramaic.
Over the years, I have learned to mask these various deficiencies, and emulate the responses that I have observed others provide in similar situations. This is called masking.
This is why I don’t like to be in crowds, it’s to much stimulus, too many behaviors to emulate. Imagine if 20 people are speaking to you at once all about different topics, with different accents, from different regions, where words have slightly different meanings. This is EVERY day for me.
Part of the reason I began therapy was to learn to how to interact with people in way that was less… exhausting, mentally and physically for me. So far it has not gone well… some people have outright told me to get lost, some have just stopped engaging, and others are fading away like the last raindrops in a storm.
It can also mean we have trouble with boundaries. We don’t see them. We don’t sense them. In a lot of cases, we don’t share them. We tend to be more open about things, because to us, they are just facts, not something that we should be ashamed of, or afraid to broach. Tell us. Tell us clearly. Tell us unambiguously, and without emotion.
We tend to trust by default. We tend to trust completely. Once that’s broken, it’s almost impossible to repair.
When we have conversations people, it’s our words that matter. It’s your words that matter to us. Our own body language, vocal inflection, and tone are not even something we consider, and we, until we learn that it matters, don’t consider yours. Once we do learn that it matters, we will try to assign meaning to it. We will, inevitably, get it wrong. We simply have no in-built frame of reference. It’s as meaningingless to us as the phrase “Nobis nihil significat” is to you, unless you can read Latin. Unfortunately, there is no handy translator for non-divergent to neuro-divergent and back.
When this coupled with the hyper-focus/lack of focus that comes from ADHD, it really makes life around others untenable.
From cruel jokes and manipulations perpetrated against me as a child, because deceit was a foreign concept to me, to being “let go” from jobs because I’m “not a good fit;” this is the life of those who are not like you. Even something as simple as being in a restaurant can be overwhelming, our brains can’t process all of our senses at once, when we close our eyes, we smell things better, when we appear to stop listening and look past, it’s because we’re using more of our brain to “see” in that moment. I watch television with the subtitles on, not only because I have trouble discerning dialogue, but because it’s easier just to block out the noise and read while looking at the pictures.
Those further along the spectrum are essentially locked in to their minds. They are so stimulated, that’s it’s unbearable, they build walls, isolated spaces within themselves in which they can survive. It doesn’t mean that they are non-communicative. It means that they don’t have the bandwidth left to communicate.
When someone tells you they have ASD, remember, it doesn’t mean “Rain Man,” or one of those poor, locked in souls, it means a lot of people, all different, with all types of abilities, and disabilities. The onus to “fit in” shouldn’t only be put on one person, especially when that person is already confused about how the world works, overwhelmed by how much of a cacophony of sights, sounds, smells, touches, and tastes there are… Try to meet that person part way. If your office has a lot of noise, let them wear headphones. Fluorescent lights, they’re like being a club, but just at the edge of our perception…. Let them wear sunglasses, or a hat, or both… If one of us looks at you like we don’t understand the words that you are saying, chances are we probably do, but you’re giving off some clue physically that is incongruent.
What you take for granted is a struggle for people like me. And there are a lot of us. Chances are, you work with, or for, one or more of us.