Skip to main content

Diver Analogy

I am a diver.  I go into the water as deep as I have the courage to go.  There are fish all around me.  They breathe through gills, but I need a breathing apparatus.  They swim unaided, but I need swinfins.  I'm nothing like a fish.  I'm from another world.  Underwater, I have to rely on special equipment to see, move, and stay alive.

But I don't trust my special equipment.  I feel like something important might be missing from my underwater diving toolkit.  I'm convinced that my accessories are unreliable.  I'm already disadvantaged because I'm the wrong kind of animal.  I'm an intruder.

But I can't return to land.  There's no boat anywhere.  There's no land either.  I'm not a misplaced man but a diminished fish.  The truth is blood in the water.

This is a very rough picture of what it's like for me living with an ASD.  It's not just socializing.  It's all of my life whenever it intersects with anyone else.  The reality is much more nuanced, but I still don't know how to express it well.  I'm trying to get better at expressing it.  But just imagine feeling like an amnesiac alien every moment of your life.  Maybe that's better than my diver analogy.

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