Skip to main content

Positives and Negatives

There are a lot of negatives that come with having an autism spectrum disorder.  I wanted to write about some of the positives, but I could only think of one that I experience.  I process emotions quickly and, most of the time, with little trouble.  I don't get overwhelmed by emotion often, and I'm not impulsive.  I have a very academic approach to dealing with my emotions.  I am pragmatic, but not because I choose to be.  That's the only way my brain works.

Thinking about what's good and bad about being a high-functioning autistic person is not as simple a matter as one might expect.  Every case is different.  Also, almost nobody, I suspect, has complete self knowledge all the time.  I'm not very good at evaluating myself.  Not only do I have low self-esteem, but I'm always looking at myself from the wrong angle.  I don't trust my ability to evaluate others, either.  I don't know what's normal.  That's a complicated issue.  If I'm outside of normal, can I describe and assess what it's like inside?  Few who are inside know they're having an experience that I'm not having.  So it's complicated.

The ways in which my neurodevelopmental condition affects me are manifold and subtle.  I don't even know all of them.  Many of them cause me frustration.  Luckily, said frustration passes like a zephyr; it's the frustration's recurrence, rather than its momentary persistence, that vexes me.  But there are good things about being me. I know there are.  I need to work on seeing through the cognitive and -yes - emotional obstructions that keep me from knowing them.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Man Is Not Great: The Evolution of Anthropocentrism

Why do humans care whether their species is special? Why are they so invested in their specialness that they're uncomfortable with the idea that they aren't? Why is it a bitter pill to swallow that humans aren't uniquely important in the universe, that they aren't the intended end of evolution, and that their wondrous and diverse subjective experiences emerge from the same physical processes observable in "lower" animals? I think that the maladaptive human tendency to insist upon their specialness in the universe is an extension of an adaptive tendency to self-advocate in their tribes. Consider fear. The predisposition to turn around when you feel like something might be behind you is likely to save you when there really is something there. Most of the time, when you can't help but turn around on the dark basement steps, there's no threat. From an evolutionary perspective, it’s better to turn unnecessarily than to do nothing in a moment of danger. That...
Post a Comment
Read more

Threat and Opportunity

Humans see everything as either a threat or an opportunity. These are the only classifications they have. A threat could be a corporal threat, like a violent person, or it could be a threat to their attention, like a boring person or a waste of time.   You're not in control of whether something looks like a threat or an opportunity. You can certainly apply control to turn one into the other, but your first impressions of anything are unconscious. I'm a waste of time. There's nothing to be gained from socializing with me because I'm profoundly socially impaired. I have no status and no way to earn status, so I'm a threat to attention. People who choose to pay attention to me find the endeavor prohibitively expensive of their energy. Attending to me is necessarily a struggle against the Darwinian impulse to conserve energy.  We can call this a rejection response.   I've said that humans naturally have a psychological allergy to me, but that's not a good...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Human Protocol

Humanity is a spectrum. Some people move through human society without ever belonging in it. I'm such a person. Every thought, every emotion, every sensation, everything your internal organs do, your balance, your muscle tone, your proprioception, every experience you have, from the big ones to the little ones, corresponds to something that happens in your brain: a neural event. Most neural events are beyond our direct control. Every neural event has a trigger. Someone says your name and you turn. You like a song, so you turn it up. What triggers neural events is determined by things like your genes, your upbringing, your culture, and your values. Many neural events are reserved for human-to-human interactions. If you encountered a mosquito that spoke English, you'd recategorize it, and you might change the way you went about trying to keep it from biting you. It would qualify for a kind of consideration that we don't usually offer mosquitoes. It would be more than just an ...
Post a Comment
Read more