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I'm Not Finished

There are articles about how Edward Scissorhands can relate to autism spectrum disorder.  This isn't one of them.

I watch casual interactions.  I don't know how people decide what to say when making small talk.  I don't know what to say myself.  And I don't know what people expect.  Trying to conduct a casual conversation is for me like being colorblind and trying to solve a Rubik's cube.  I can only guess.  I err on the side of politeness and that usually works all right.  Somebody told me I should ask people about themselves so I try to do that.  I have a short list of things to say in any given situation.  Like a dialogue tree in a video game.  Is this what it's like for other people?  I don't know.

The video game analogy might not be relatable to everyone but I think it's good.  Video games are limited by their scripts, even those that give the player a lot of freedom.  The play experience happens within clear boundaries and there are only so many ways the player can improvise.  I'm comfortable with this because I'm bad at improvising and I don't want to do it.  Though I enjoy freedom, I want within a free space a limited and focused experience.  This I can cope with.  But real life isn't scripted and there's no plot.  The real world isn't try to do anything.  Moments are blank and we stain them with intent and feeling.  In no framework, I have to improvise, and I become overwhelmed.  I need the focus of a plot.  At least in conversation.

I am analytical.  Analyzing is all I can do.  It's the one trick I know and I apply analysis to every situation.  I expect social interaction to be universally a matter of computation.  When it isn't I'm left staring paralyzed.  And it seems often that it's not, but I don't know.  I make no claims to certainty but it seems to me that people are seldom understandable by pure calculation alone.  They say things they don't exactly mean, they say the opposite of what they mean, or they hide what they mean as a matter of ritual.  Socializing could be straightforward but games and posturing complicate it.  One must know the signs but I can't.  I am analytical, but I have limited avenues of analysis.  And I feel the limits terribly.

But others report that I do fine.  It could be that I don't know what it looks like for me to do fine in a social interaction.  My intelligence is like a prototype artificial intelligence a few iterations distant from being able to pass as fully human.  And I imagine those iterations could be said to represent stages of neurological development.  In three words, the aforementioned homunculus summates this whole piece and my feelings about myself: "I'm not finished."

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