An Invisible Struggle

I often leave my therapist's office thinking about all of the things I tried to communicate during our session. I usually feel that I didn't have my thoughts as together as I'd wanted. I don't like improvising clinical therapy. I prefer to express fully developed ideas. I can't always do that, of course. And that is OK.  This is something that I wrote while I was trying to get some thoughts in order after my therapy session today:

I am articulate. This attribute sits in isolation. Some might presume that my being good at talking necessarily means that I'm good at understanding. In my case, this is a bad presumption. I'm reasonably good at expressing myself. This is because I speak very deliberately. When others express themselves to me, I will have trouble understanding if they aren't just as deliberate as I am. I'm only normally competent within a very narrow range of types of communication.  

As a writer, I've had to develop ways of thinking about characters that will give me insight into how they will act. I am good at this because I have a lot of practice, but thinking about fictional characters and thinking about real people are not equivalent endeavors.  When I'm writing, I control everything. Fictional characters can speak more effectively than real people. Their actions are contrived to advance a plot. My characters' actions are really my own actions.  While my practiced ability to imagine realistic characters' motivations has some practical use with actual people, it's much less effective in situations that I don't control.

One reason I have any insight into why people behave or think the ways they do is that I can assess them without emotional involvement. There is much that I can intuit, but there is less that I can grasp on a native level.  This may not be immediately apparent upon meeting me in person.

"Autistic people can't do X" is reductive.  X is a set of behaviors that comprises subsets of smaller behaviors. Imagine that the set of behavior X has the subset of ancillary behaviors 1 through 100.  Some autistic people will be good at ancillary behaviors e.g. 1 through 18 and 70 through 95 but will be bad at all the rest. Others, meanwhile, we'll be good at different groups of those subsets, and the degree to which one might become "good" at any of these behaviors and sub-behaviors will vary as well.

I have no natural ability to socialize.  My first inclination is to ignore people, but that's dangerous. I can't model other minds.  I have to operate on big assumptions.  I assume that gestures, for instance, have meaning.  This can be a bad assumption, but I have to make it.  If I assume that gestures are meaningless, then I might miss something and thus make someone mad or embarrass myself.  Either all nonverbal communication is meaningful, or none of it is; unfortunately, I can't inhabit any middle ground.  I can sometimes tell when someone is gesturing in a way that probably means something, but I might not always know what it means.  If a gesture is subtle, I might miss it altogether. But gestures might not mean anything sometimes, and this is confusing. I make the assumption that people will try to get what they want. This has been a good assumption, so I have continued making it. I make the further assumption that speech and behavior are significant. This has also proven to be a good assumption. Lastly I assume that most people's motivations aren't outrageous or non sequitur from their thoughts. This is usually a good assumption, too.  This is all to say that I have to think in this slow, robotic way in order to communicate.  I presume others don't.

My approach to ethology is necessarily intellectual. If I want to know why someone has done something, cold logic is my only diagnostic tool. And I have to do a lot more thinking than other people. First I have to assume that there are reasons that anyone does anything. If there are, then I can proceed with my attempt to understand. If there aren't, then it doesn't matter. Second, chances are good that the things which motivate me are a lot like the things which motivate other people. I might be wrong about that but so far it doesn't seem that I am. There's no emotional component to any of this thinking. I use myself as a model to try to understand others. This is the only strategy that works. Because this process is so analytical, my understanding of people feels icy and sterile. I have no idea how to act on my insights spontaneously because achieving them necessitates a painstaking science.

A person might see the things that I can do and think that I'm not really hindered at all - or even that I'm not really autistic. If they do, they might decide that I don't need help, even if I ask for it. The truth is that I have only slowly developed ways to make assumptions about people, and those assumptions give me insights that I can't put into practice no matter how good they are. I am never certain about my insights because they emerge from doggedly persistent uncertainty. Sometimes I'm right about people and their motivations, but I never feel that I am. And I am often wrong in ways that neurotypical people are seldom wrong about each other.

When you lose something at home, you know that it's in the house somewhere. You never consider that it might have stopped existing. What if you had to reconsider object permanence every time you thought about where things were in your house? How would that affect the way you interacted with your environment? You would have to do more cognitive work than other people have to do. If you had no concept of object permanence, finding things would probably be more difficult for you than it is for others, even if you were still able to find things.

This illustrates my point. It may seem that I'm as good as anyone else at guessing why people act the way they do, but I have to do far more work than others do to accomplish the same task. Then when I do succeed in understanding someone, the only payoff is that I have to do all the same work again in order to maintain effective interaction. Socializing and interpreting people's nonverbal communication are very big risks that require a lot of energy and yield little reward.