Thinking differently

There are many voices in the autism community talking about how we have a hard time being understood by non-autistics. Mine is among them. But it recently really began to dawn on me just what the differences in our ways of thinking entail. And as I ponder this, it seems to me that I’ve had difficulties understanding non-aspies in the same way that they misunderstand me.

Unlike many aspies, I’m pretty decent at socializing. It tires me horribly, but I can get into “social mode” and make it through a social function, coming off to everyone there as “normal,” maybe even delightful. (I’m pushing it, I know. :p) But this is a persona based on imitating what I’ve observed as appropriate and entertaining behavior in others. It’s a mask made of my own genius.

On a much more fundamental level, the processes that take place in my mind as I take in information are very different from those in others. I don’t feel the way others do about things. I’m not patriotic, I’m not a sports fan, I’m very nonreligious, I’m not a feminist or an ally, I’m not outraged by the injustices that people bring up every day on Facebook, and there are many other things that seem to define a normal way of thinking that are totally alien to me. It’s as if I was born on another planet, and I’ve always felt that way. My sisters could tell you about the years of my childhood when I fantasized that I’d been born on Mars. Even back then, I picked up on the fact that there was something different about me.

And even though there are also differences in the way even individual aspies think, feel, and process information, I think we all know what it feels like to be different. In my opinion, the best way to begin fostering understanding between us and non-autistics is to work to understand them. It might make an interesting academic study.

Yay for life

I tend to find things to write about mostly when something is bothering me, so I thought I’d post something happy while nothing is bothering me. I don’t really have anything specific planned to write. I just wanted to wiggle my fingers on the keyboard for a bit and see what words come out.

Since I got my lens back from Canon and switched to Linux Mint on my main computer, I’ve felt very satisfied as far as my aspie obsessions are concerned. I take a lot of pictures, I get to use a variety of operating systems among my various devices (desktop with Linux, tablet with Windows 10, and Kindle Fire running Kindle’s version of Android), I’m not sick or injured, I’m in a wonderful relationship, and I just discovered that I have powers like Superman.

You would think that this would be the part where I confess that I’m just kidding, but no. I’m Superman. Deal with it. :p

Guest post on gender politics, behavior and perception, by Pól Rua.

The following post is an invited contribution by Pól Rua, comic book expert and internet personality from Brisbane, Australia.  This was originally a Facebook post by Pól on his own personal page, but it struck me as so concise and eloquent that I felt it needed a wider audience and would be instructive to many of my fellow Autistics who struggle with Theory of Mind (ToM) and other issues.  It certainly resonated with me, and I hope it will prove illuminating to our readers.  It took me many years to reach many of Pól’s conclusions on my own, which I’ve also been sharing in limited personal ways with other Aspies in recent months.  The post below was written in the context of #gamergate and other hot button headlines of the present moment in late 2014, but I feel it has wider applicability and is worth sharing in full below.  With Pól’s permission, I have reposted it here.  Without further ado, I present to you Mr. Pól Rua’s essay.

English: One of the symbols of German Women’s movement (from the 1970s) Deutsch: Ein Logo der deutschen Frauenbewegung (aus den 70er Jahren) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

–redjohn1971

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By Pól Rua.

Two things I just wanna say on the topic of gender politics* that I’ve been butting up against a fair bit lately.

1. Everyone saw that video on street harassment and I heard from a bunch of people. “Hey, some of those guys were probably just being friendly. Why is it automatically harassment?”
This is one of those areas where Feminism can seem hostile to men, but it’s chiefly a failure of communication.

The idea you need to get your head around is that Your Intentions Don’t Matter.

It’s like racism. If you call someone on racist behaviour, they’ll often come back with, “But I’m not a racist. Anyone who knows me can tell you that.”
In the end, it doesn’t matter. Your intentions could be good, bad or indifferent. Nobody knows. Nobody can read your mind.
What matters is your behaviour. What you say, and what you do.

The problem is that some people, when called on their behaviour, will get aggrieved. Nobody wants to be the bad guy, and sometimes, if someone calls you on offensive behaviour, it can seem like they’re passing judgment on you.
As a result, we get pissed off. Nobody wants to be accused of being something they feel they’re not. Especially when they didn’t mean anything by what they said or did.

Calm down. Take a deep breath. Now, consider what you did from the other person’s point of view for a second. They don’t know you. They can’t read your mind. They don’t know what your motivations or intentions are. All they can go on is what you said, and what you did, and how it looked from their perspective.

So maybe they’re NOT saying, “You’re an arsehole.” Maybe what they’re saying is, “I feel uncomfortable with that, could you please stop it.”
It’s at THIS point that your intentions, and how you act on them become important.

2. Some people can speak with more authority on certain topics than others.
If a professional guitarist is talking, and my musical experience is limited to Guitar Hero (and even then, only while I’m REALLY drunk), I’m prepared to concede that what they’re saying carries more weight than mine on the topic of writing, playing and performing music.
I know it’s tempting to think that everyone’s opinions are like beautiful, glorious snowflakes of wonderment, but the simple fact is that some people know what they’re talking about based on knowledge, learning and experience, and other people are talking out their arse to a greater or lesser extent.

So when a woman (hell, a bunch of women) tells you what her day-to-day life experience is like, what’s so difficult about considering that maybe they know more about what they’re talking about than you do?
I keep hearing, “Okay, I get it, because I have a dick, I’m wrong!”
No, because you’re not a woman, you’re probably not as aware of what a woman experiences from day-to-day as a woman does.
This is no more a value judgment than a guitarist telling Mister Guitar Hero that maybe he doesn’t know what he’s talking about on the topic of shredding a tasty lick on a sweet Les Paul Special.

The thing that both of these miscommunications have in common is that I used to have them ALL THE DAMN TIME. I got angry at feminists for accusing me of shit that I didn’t do, and I got frustrated because it seemed like nothing I could do was right.
And it’s not about that. It’s about the fact that what women experience from a really early age is different to what men experience, and that, when you grow up entirely surrounded by something, it’s easy to not even question it, much less imagine yourself outside of it.
That’s how privilege works. Frequently you can get the impression that some people thing it’s a magic key that opens every door and transports you to a magic kingdom of wishes, but it’s not. It’s like oxygen. You can’t see it, and the only time it becomes really obvious is when you don’t have it.

(* – the other thing that most of them have in common is that they’re not just applicable to gender politics. The first one’s just as easy to apply to racism or religious bigotry, and the second one… well, try reading the letters to the editor in the Courier-Mail for a big helping of that one.)

So yeah, I know this is a long, rambly thing, but I remember being a big schmuck about this sort of shit (and in a LOT of ways, I still am… like REALLY) and it wasn’t because I was trying to be an arsehole (though there’s that point 1 again), but I was certainly acting like one to those around me.

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Pól’s insights above may be tough hear and accept but I think they’re valid.  We Aspies are in the unenviable position of being frequently misunderstood because of our quirky behavior and feel wounded when judged harshly by a hostile Neurotypical-majority world.  We want to protest that our intentions were totally pure and we’ve been misjudged and that we want acceptance & understanding of our divergent neurology and behavior.  But Pól, I believe, though discussing a different social issue, does offer up a reality check for us to consider.  At the risk of sounding like I’m preaching a kind of respectability politics for the ASD community, we Aspies do need to guide each other in best practices.  I’ve had to stress to more than one fellow Aspie that although you may know you’re being completely innocent, even naive in asking certain questions, or discussing certain topics that interest you with robust frankness, you can’t assume, it is unwarranted to assume, that everyone sees a certain situation exactly the same as you, a trap far too many Aspies seem to fall into.  You know you don’t mean anything by X, but there’s no way for your NT interlocutor to KNOW that.  You need to pause and consider that before blurting out X out of the blue.  Neurotypical persons seem to have an better innate sense of appropriateness in social situations, read social cues better, etc.  These don’t come naturally to an ASD person, and we have to exert the cognitive effort to build the little “brain macros” necessary to navigate certain social situations.

Nobody can read your mind; you will, guaranteed, feel a certain frustration when exculpatory matter falls into a seeming epistemological black hole.  Making as few assumptions as possible and talking it out civilly are a way forward, of sorts.

Very recently I was on a trip to a nearby coastal island city (Galveston) that was hosting an Anime convention.  I was standing in line at MacDonalds after a long day at the convention.  I was still wearing my Star Trek TOS Science officer regalia, and with my friend who is also in our adult Asperger’s support group.  There were two black men in front of us, one in his thirties, the other in his twenties.  The older man turned to me and began speaking to me, leading with the question “Are you from the Island?”.  I’ve lived in Galveston before, where I worked briefly as a librarian for a local branch of a major state university located there.  I knew from that experience that “BOI” (“Born on the Island”) is a local “thing”, which some native Galvestonians take great pride in.  But considering that much of Galveston’s economy is based on tourism, and considering the admittedly weird clothes I had on, the man’s question struck me as strange.  It took me a split second to parse his accent and also the (to me) unusual/strange nature of the question…not wanting to ignore him, I blurted out a “No!” probably a little too nervously/loudly.  Plus also I recognized that I myself was feeling a bit defensive in full nerd gear, wary of being belittled or mocked.  The man was disappointed by my seemingly frightened response, which he interpreted me as being white, uptight, and probably racist.  He muttered something about “Relax, we’re just black dudes, we’re not gonna kill nobody”.  He shook his head in disgust, gave his companion a knowing look, and when they received their food order, they decided to get it “to go”, and left.  I was, in fact, not fearful of them based on their race.  I didn’t find them particularly intimidating or “scary”.  I was simply baffled by the odd lead question as I was not expecting it, and because, as an ASD person, it may take me a bit longer to process something someone has said, but at the same time feeling ancy because I took too long it looks like I’m just ignoring him, I made the gaffe of blurting out a nervous “No!”; But I’m not angry this gentleman probably wrote me off as another jumpy white racist with an irrational fear of black people, because for all he could observe, that’s exactly what I looked like.  And given the context of 2014, with #Ferguson still seared on the national consciousness, and with the Zimmerman acquittal still fresh on everyone’s minds, I totally get where the man was coming from.  The fact that he was wrong about my actual inner thoughts is largely irrelevant.  The fact that I view the killing of Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin as horrific, racist miscarriages of justice myself, also irrelevant in the given context.  I can’t perform a Vulcan Mind Meld on the spot to show the man “No, I don’t have a paranoid fear of black people and indeed feel myself in solidarity with black Americans and disgusted by the lingering racism of my country”.  It’s simply a tragic miscommunication.  If I were younger and less reflective, I might’ve gotten pissed off at the insinuation that I have a paranoid fear of black people, but because I can take a wider view, and consider his point of view as well, I have no chip on my shoulder from the incident, merely a sense of profound sadness at our failure to communicate.  If he had asked me about why I was dressed that way, or if he had asked about the convention, say, I would’ve been happy to tell him.  But because I was not expecting the question he did ask, I was caught flat-footed and blurted out my response in a manner indistinguishable from someone who might harbor a paranoid fear of black people.

It simply is the way it is, and the best I can do is simply learn from the experience and endeavor to do better, and try to make as few assumptions as possible.

–redjohn1971

Goodbye, cat

Aspies often have a connection to animals, and my favorite has always been cats.  My family has gone through 3 cats.  The first was Kitty, an orange and white bruiser of a cat that liked to chase dogs around the neighborhood and attack us from the bushes.  He was awesome.  We moved away and left him with a neighbor.  Next there was Katy, who we had from the time she was a kitten for about 3 or 4 years.  She ended up running away.  Then we got a cat we generally referred to as “kitty” or “the cat” but never formally named.  We had her for about 16 years.  My mom took her to the vet about two weeks ago to be put to sleep because she was in pain all the time from arthritis and she was pooping all over the house.

I took the loss of this cat harder than I’ve taken the deaths of any of the humans in my family who have so far died, which consists of all my grandparents (my mom’s mom was the last to go just a few days ago) and a cousin (a tragic shooting in Detroit).  We aspies tend to get close to animals because I think we understand each other on a level that we don’t with other people.  Maybe we’re more like them than we are like other people.  Maybe we’re magical animal-communicating wizards.  Who knows?  What matters is that we feel a connection, and when a pet dies, it’s as difficult for us or more as when a person dies.  I’m not depressed any more about the passing of my cat, but I still get sad when I think about the last moments I spent with her, knowing it was the last time I would ever see her.  She was under a bed in the guest room, probably in a lot of pain and wanting to be left alone.  I felt like we were friends, and I’ll miss her.

Meow.

You know what really drains my tokens?

I don’t know who came up with token theory, but it’s a brilliant analogy for how we find many environments and situations draining and why they cause meltdowns.  Every aspie (and possibly every non-aspie, but we don’t care about them right now) has a certain number of tokens at maximum.  When we do things we’re uncomfortable with, we spend tokens to deal with it.  When we run out of tokens, we can no longer cope, and we have a meltdown or have to get away from the situation any way we can.  It can mean closing our eyes, shutting our ears, singing loudly to ourselves, or all of those things and more.  Spending time doing things we are comfortable with (or obsessed with) allows us to regain tokens.  We can even get to a point where we have hit our capacity and desire to do something draining for a little while.

Throughout my childhood and youth so far, I’ve developed a talent for social interactions.  I use humor to put people at ease and appear to be the life of any party I go to, which is hardly any.  I found, though, that when I would be alone again, I would find myself feeling very emotionally drained, and I didn’t understand why until I looked at it in light being an aspie with a set number of tokens.  Social interaction can be fun, but it drains me very quickly.  The same goes for any situation where I’m uncomfortable.  Hunger, sleepiness, having to go to the bathroom, being confined, and frustration drain me quickly and impair my brain functions.  I get agitated easily and lose my ability to do things like type and not bump into things.  If I don’t have a chance to rest and regain my tokens, I become a very different person who isn’t easy to get along with.

Fortunately, I recover fairly quickly.  A few hours on my computer playing games is generally enough to bring me back from the brink of a meltdown to full tokens again.  I’m lucky enough to know what recharges me.  Not all aspies understand how they tick enough to know what to do when they feel overwhelmed, and even I am not always aware of when my tokens are being drained until they are very very low.  It’s a hard balance to maintain, but it’s a war we aspies fight every day of our lives.

Putting on a show

I’m hilarious. I discovered it early in life, and it has gotten me through many social situations. People like to laugh, and when you make someone laugh, they like you more. Sometimes I feel a lot of pressure to be funny, and when I’m by myself again, I’m left feeling exhausted and sometimes a bit depressed. It seems to be automatic. I can’t turn it off, it’s just my natural reaction when I want the people around me to like me.

This has made working very difficult for me.  I’m always either working with customers or coworkers, and in both situations there is pressure to ensure that the people around me like me.  If I have to work a long day, that’s a lot of energy that goes into being charming and witty.  It leaves me with nothing for my personal life but a desire to escape from reality into video games or books.

I think maybe I don’t give myself enough credit for being smart.  I think I would find that a lot easier to lean on in the long run, and funny is a biproduct of smart anyway.

Just say no to anger

Whoever wrote this letter is obviously an extremely troubled individual.  It would be incredibly easy to get angry and start crying out for her to be punished for it, but decisions made in anger often lead to regret.  What kind of person thinks like this woman?  A miserable one.  She’s being punished already simply by living her life.  She won’t become a better person with the addition of more pain.

Many would say they don’t care about making her a better person.  They want her hurt to make them feel better.  Hurting someone else to feel better is what the writer of this letter did.  She thought that somebody deserved to be put through pain, so she lashed out just like you might be thinking about doing.

But there is a difference, you might say, between them.  The mother of the autistic boy did nothing to deserve punishment.  The letter writer would disagree.  In her judgment, the mother was doing something wrong.  In your judgment, the writer did something wrong.  In both cases, the answer to a crime is another crime.

Hurting other people on purpose is always wrong no matter who you are, no matter who they are, and no matter what they did.  If you went back in time and punched Hitler in the face, you would be doing something bad and probably creating paradoxes for The Doctor to iron out.  Shame on you.  He has enough to do without you messing with the space-time continuum.  Justice means dealing with people in a fair way, not hurting them so you can feel better.

In order to break the cycle of hate, you have to deny yourself the expression of your anger.  Don’t scream, don’t hit a pillow, don’t fantasize about the letter writer getting her comeuppance, and don’t write an angry reply wherever you first saw this posted.  Whatever you want to do, don’t do it.  Take a deep breath or two and consider that aggressive words and actions are the resort of people who are already in pain, and inflicting more pain on them will do nothing but cause them to amp up the aggression.  Imagine how you would feel about someone going through pain who did not behave aggressively toward others.  That is how you should feel about her.  She needs for the pain to stop.  She needs help.  The power to spread pain comes easily to those who call upon it, but the power to heal is much greater and much harder to summon.  If you want to make the world a better place, show compassion for everyone who hurts.  Start with yourself.

The importance of self awareness

For a ridiculously long time, I was turning people away from me without even knowing it. I would say things that would hurt them and then try to justify my actions, thinking that if I just talked hard enough, my words would have the effect that I intended. I’ve behaved insensitively, and I suppose the effects have been so gradual, it’s only now that I’ve begun to reverse my course that I’m seeing the difference. I was pushing everyone away, and I was close to ending up alone and unhappy. I would have deserved it too. I’d have had no one but myself to blame.

Asperger’s Syndrome is not an excuse for behaving badly. I tried to use it as one, but I was wrong, and I am sorry to everyone I’ve hurt. I wasn’t trying to hurt anyone, but I wasn’t trying not to, and the truth is that I was hurting people. I had no consideration for anyone’s feelings but my own. I can’t say I was unaware of what other people were going through. Some of them were directly telling me, and I refused to acknowledge them. It was incredibly childish, and I knew better.

I have no right to expect anyone to forgive me, but people are starting to all on their own. It’s amazing and humbling. I want more than anything else to make myself worthy of the compassion I’m being shown. I’m making more of an effort than ever before to create a climate of peace in my mind because constantly fighting is so tiring, and it’s not strength that made me keep it up for so long. It was weakness. The more tired I got, the harder I fought until I found myself more and more alone. When I took a step back, I saw what I had become and where the path I was on was leading me, and I didn’t want that. I want to be as good as my friends and family. I want to be accepted and liked. I have to adjust not only my behavior but also my way of thinking or else all of my talents will go to waste, and I will never be happy.

Aspies and our parents

I know that John has posted extensively about his complex and turbulent relationship with his parents, so I thought I should go into my own situation.

My parents could hardly be any more different from each other.  I figure they got together through sheer physical attraction.  My mom is very emotional but also closed off.  She reacts very strongly to things, but she keeps a lot to herself.  I think she is the main reason my sisters and I went to church when we were kids.  She’s one of those “spiritual but not religious” people with a mishmash of beliefs that are based on whatever makes her feel like she understands reality, though in actual reality she understands very little, and it’s impossible to have a conversation or debate with her about it.  Back when I was as superstitious as her, if I said something she found interesting, she would say “that’s deep” in a sort of mocking tone that didn’t encourage me to really go on.  Now that I’m more sensible, all of my points are met with “you have too much time to think” or “science is a religion”.  We get along ok most of the time because she likes to pretend that everything is ok when it really isn’t.

My dad is probably an aspie himself, though he hasn’t been tested and never will be.  I get the impression that he thinks things like asperger’s syndrome are just excuses not to do things.  He worked hard to get through school and get a job, so he expects me to do the same, and because I don’t, he’s disappointed.  Fortunately, I don’t care because I can see what walking the well paved path of conformity has done for him.  He keeps himself amused through various engineering, computer, or carpentry projects, but he’s basically not a happy guy.  When my sisters and I were little, he would hit us with his belt when we made him angry.  I remember the way he would snap it when he threatened us with it.  He was a monster, but he has become more of a human being when we became old enough to realize what he was doing was wrong.  It left us all with emotional scars that have yet to be healed completely.  He was one of 10 kids in a very catholic family, so you can imagine what the abuse was like for him.  His parents are both dead now, and he’s almost 62 now, so he’s probably as healed right now as he’ll ever get.  It’s pretty sad, especially because even to this day he thinks child abuse is sometimes justified.  He never touches his grandkids like that though.  He knows that would cause them to be removed from his life.  Despite all this, he and I have a lot in common, and we talk about computers a lot.  I have a lot of good memories of talking to him when I was little.

I don’t feel like either of my parents understand me or want to understand me.  They both just want me to conform and get a job and be miserable like everybody else.  I thought parents were supposed to want their kids to have better lives than they have.  Oh well.  I feel no obligation to work for their approval.  They have a long way to go before they get mine, but until then, relations will remain cordial.

Empathy addendum

I forgot to include this in my last post, but please consider this post an addendum to that one.

In my younger adult years, I used to abuse alcohol as a method for coping with my inherent social awkwardness.  This seems to be a common thread among many adult Aspies my age and older.

In any event, I was arrested for DWI in the 1990s and made to attend a speaking event given by the local chapter of MADD, to listen to a mother tell about her son whom she lost in an automobile accident caused by a drunk driver.  It was a wrenching story, and I teared up myself listening to it.

Looking back, and thinking about the recent lecture I attended at Houston Aspie Info….I think I can put the puzzle pieces together and better understand why.  I think perhaps because the story of this woman’s son’s death was conveyed to me in words, in language, I was better able to process it mentally, logically, and be moved emotionally to tears by the account after the fact.  Which is why I will continue to resent any implication that we autistics are somehow emotionless robots as we are sometimes (mis)characterized.

With us Aspies, yes, you really to have to spell it out for us, explain it in language.  We can’t read your (NT) minds telepathically, our ability to read body language and eyes and facial expression is much more rudimentary and basic.