Writing Fiction

I had a friend at university who told me I was better at writing theory than writing the creative stuff. I knew I was a good critic, and good at analysing things. I thought I could be equally good at writing creatively, of course I didn’t know I was autistic at the time. I wonder now if I could ever be a good creative writer. Maybe I just needed to find a style that suited me.

I think the key to writing good fiction, to writing anything, is to really love what you’re writing about. With me, I was always trying to write something I thought would impress my teacher, or at the very least she would like. But that’s how I behaved in all areas of my life, I’ve spent my life trying to fit in. The idea of sitting down and writing a story I really wanted to write is a bit strange. I think you need to drop any pretences and intellectualism and think, what would I write if I wasn’t concerned with what others thought about me and I could just write what I wanted.

Unfortunately, at the moment, I’ve lost my passion for fiction. I don’t feel I have time for it, what with the amount of reading and writing I do around autism and self-development I feel I would be putting the brakes on my commitment to my growth, i.e. finding out about autism and how best I can function in this world, which at the moment is my most urgent task. But I’m like that; I tend to throw myself into something whole heartedly and everything else is banished to the side lines. I think it’s an autistic trait.

My mind is constantly making hypotheses and theories about the world and myself. This is how I spend much of my time thinking, even before I was diagnosed I had this same obsession to find out everything I could about my behaviour and other people; it was almost a necessity. I will not deny I am pretty much socially inept, but if I hadn’t had this ability to analysis people’s behaviour and to theorise about the world and how it works, I don’t think I’d have achieved nearly as much as I have.

I suppose if you are a natural writer of fiction you would spend your time dreaming of plots and story lines and characters. I day dream a lot, and even though other people appear in my day dreams, they are either mute, or saying things I want them to - because I don’t know what they would think or say in the situation I’m imagining. Maybe this is a skill I can practice through writing. I wonder if there have ever been any autistic authors of creative fiction. I did used to write a lot of poetry, but this was mostly just about myself and how I felt. Maybe that’s why poetry came easier to me.

The only thing I did well in fiction that other people enjoyed was the descriptions I gave. I always tried to make my descriptions as accurate and clear as possible and I think I achieved this. People on my creative writing course always said how real my descriptions felt. I think this is because when I’m reading I find it very difficult to visualise the scene the author is describing, so I always put a lot of effort into my descriptions. To make an effective description of a scene you need to come up with unique metaphors. Metaphors make people go ‘Ahhh!’ that’s what it’s like. You take their experience of everyday life and use it in a description of an experience they haven’t had, this makes it real to them.

But a scene needs characters in it that interact with each other. I think I was okay at describing characters. They never felt very real to me though, unless I was basing them on someone I actually knew, I found it difficult to create characters from scratch. I don’t know what other people thought of my characters. But even if I had an endless stream of real characters to chose from I couldn’t predict how my characters would react to each other. At the time I didn’t even realise it was something I should be trying to do.

My plots therefore where guided by events, and people where usually victims of events rather than controllers of events. My plots weren’t people driven. I think this is why I was such a fan of Thomas Hardy. People describe his characters as victims of fate, there is always a sense of something larger outside of the character’s power that directs their life. Also I was a fan of Virginia Woolf, I love her descriptions of people and places, she takes a microscope to the world and can spend a whole novel just writing about one day. She is more focused on individual psychology than how the characters interact. When I first started writing I tried to copy her style, I wanted to write a novel like Mrs Dalloway. It was years ago now, when I was first at university.

I can’t remember when I stopped writing fiction or why. I used to dream when I was younger that I would be a published novelist, but now I’ve lost my enthusiasm and motivation, I guess because I tried for so long without getting anywhere. With what I know about autism, and the things I should be doing with characters I probably stand a better chance now of writing something that works. Maybe I will, when I’ve got my life on an even keel and I’m more relaxed and feel that I have the time. It would be nice to see if I could do it now with what I’ve learnt.

Thinking in Words and Pictures

Thoughts are ideas that our brain has to find words or pictures for. I don’t think my brain likes either medium particularly. But as I am so poor at visualisation, words are my only recourse. Occasionally (not often) my brain just gives up, especially if it is a complicated idea. I get the sensation of the thought in my mind, and I recognise ideas or feelings in it and then I try to work out what it was about. But thoughts are so fast, if you don’t get them straight away you lose the original sense it was trying to convey.

I did a degree in Visual Culture, one of the subjects we looked at was semiotics and at the work of Ferdinand de Saussure. Saussure said that language (words and other systems of signs) was made up of the signified and the signifier. The signifier was the word or symbol and the signified was the object or idea the signifier referred to. He said the relationship between the two was arbitrary and the result of social consensus. Basically the idea exits in your mind first and then the mind has to find signifiers to communicate that idea.

The strange thing for me is that I can have these thoughts, that don’t have words or symbols and I don’t actually know what they mean. It’s my thought, surely I should know what it means with or without signifiers? It’s a shame, because these thoughts are usually about new ideas or ways of explaining the world and my experience of it. Maybe my conscious mind just doesn’t have the language to express them yet.

Not all autistic people think in the same way. Temple Grandin thinks in pictures, she can visualise complicated designs for farm equipment. I wish I had this ability. Instead I think in words. Not because I’m particularly good at it (I think I‘ve shown my language skills aren‘t very good already). I have to think in words because my visualisation skills are so poor. I find this strange, because I am a visual person. I like drawing and painting and I like watching films.

It means I’ve had to work really hard at getting to grips with language. My reading skills were below average for some of the time I was at primary school. I’d catch up, then fall behind then catch up again. I was doing well in all other areas. I don’t think I had any concept that they were measuring us, or that it was important to keep up with how others were doing. I never thought about how other people were doing. And as it was a lot of hard work for me, I wouldn’t always try very hard. Once you reach a certain level of competency though it ceases to have much impact on your work, so eventually it stopped being a problem.

It’s only now, when I’m trying to express new ideas that I begin to struggle with words again. My problem is that I form sentences mostly by recalling phrases. There are certain sentence structures that I repeat. I’m trying to put these phrases together in a way that conveys what I mean and that is also readable and flows and doesn’t sound like disconnected phrases that I have gathered from different places. Occasionally I get a sentence that I know I’ve created myself, I get a particular pleasure when I’ve achieved this and been able to convey an idea in my own original way.

When you’re talking to someone they don’t usually notice if you repeat words of phrases, but when you put it down in writing it becomes obvious. There is a lot of editing that goes on after I’ve drafted something; the thesaurus is my best friend at these moments. I’ve noticed that I also make jumps between ideas, assuming that the reader will understand how one sentence relates to another. Often in my writing sentences don’t follow very well. Getting the words to flow in a sentence is one thing, getting sentences to flow from one to the other is just as hard. I think my writing must sound very methodical.

One way that I practised my language skills when I was younger was by talking to myself. I can remember the exact moment I began doing this. I was sitting in the back of my parents car. We had been to visit my Nan, and I was talking to myself about what had happened. This monologue when over and over in my head till we reached home. I rephrased parts of it then started again. As I got older I would use this a way of working out how I might feel if an event turned out in a particular way, or how I should respond in certain situations.

All this is very essential stuff, but it did have a negative impact on me, in that my mind was doing overtime for much of my waking hours. And if I hadn’t been born a worrier, it’s probably why I’m one now. I over think everything. I also became very focused on me. Because I can’t imagine other people’s responses these monologues were always about just me and my feelings, of course I didn’t realise this until I was much older. Maybe that’s what causes the stubbornness. I’m inflexible to other people’s opinions because I grew up only ever being aware of my own, I wasn’t even aware that people had different opinions from my own until I was about seventeen. And even thought I’m now aware that other people have their own opinions it very hard to undo this way of thinking. I think all this mental activity while I was a child must have wired my brain in such a way that I now find it difficult to undo.

Reading Emotions

When I watch television, I’m always looking for clues and information about human interaction. I prefer sitcoms to soap operas. Soaps tend to be more about emotional tension and conflict and I don’t like conflict. I avoid it wherever I can. I think this is linked to my anxiety. Dr Amen says people who suffer from anxiety avoid conflict in order to keep their stress levels from rocketing.

Sometimes I can be watching a television programme, and I think I’ve got what’s going on and then I’ll watch the same episode a while later and see things I never noticed before. I suppose everyone gets this, even NT people don’t notice everything the first time. I think it’s the kind of things I don’t notice at first that’s different, like the emotional nuances and relationships between characters, and the fact that I go on not noticing for the first, second, third and fourth time - and beyond.

I like watching the Golden Girls. I have the first three episodes on DVD. I watch them over and over. The initial sparkle has gone but I still get enjoyment from watching them. The other day I watched the first episode from series one. I hadn’t seen it for about a month probably. When I watched it this time, I suddenly saw it, totally differently to how I’d seen it before. The actresses looked to be behaving differently with each other, I guess because they didn’t know each other as well. There were less pauses in the script, less non verbal interaction. It looked very different to the episodes that came after. And I wondered why I didn’t notice this before.

There is one scene from a later episode, that is another example of this. Blanche and Dorothy are playing cards, Dorothy’s mother (Sophia) is standing by Blanche giving her hints about which card she should put down. I know this because Dorothy objects to it. But if it had been a real situation I’m not sure if I would have noticed because it never clicked how Sophia was telling Blanche. I’ve seen the scene many times over two of three years, but it wasn’t till recently that I worked out how Sophia and Blanche were communicating with each other. Blanche would touch a card with her finger and look up at Sophia, who would either shake her head or nod. It sounds simple now I’ve got it, I wonder now why it didn’t click before.

Watching these programmes over and over probably wouldn’t be very interesting for most people, but I think I learn a lot from it. I saw a video on You Tube a while ago, of Temple Grandin giving a talk about autism. She showed the audience some research done on how autistic people watch films, and this explained for me why I miss so much information.

She showed a slide from the film Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. First she asked the audience to look at the slide for a few moments, then she superimposed two lines on it. One line showed where an autistic person’s eye would go to in the image, the other represented an NT person’s eye. It was very revealing. There were three figures in the image, Elizabeth Taylor was standing facing the camera, and then there were two men, one with his back to the camera and the other standing side on. The autistic line showed that the autistic person looked first at Elizabeth Taylor’s mouth, wandered a little around that area and the moved in the direction of the man she was facing. I was really surprised, this was nearly exactly what I had done, I think my eye did wander around her face for a bit longer, and I think I glanced up at the third figure. But this was nothing in comparison to the NT individual whose eyes had been dashing between all three figures at what must have been breakneck speeds.

Well, I thought to myself, no wonder I don’t notice all these exchanges that go on between people. I’m not looking hard enough. Perhaps that’s the wrong way of putting it. I do look, very hard, but I’ve been looking in the wrong way. I’ve always thought if I looked hard enough at someone’s face I will eventually find what I need to know about what they’re thinking or feeling. This is wrong of course, I need to be looking at where their eyes go and the other people around them. I’m not sure I can do this though. If I start moving my eyes around like that NT person in the study Temple Grandin showed us, my sight would go all blurry and I‘d lose my balance. It might be easier watching television than real life, your eyes only have to move around a smaller area, the television screen.

I think I look at people’s mouths because it helps me to know what they’re saying as I sometimes have auditory problems, especially if there are other people talking at the same time. This problem with moving my eyes about though, I’m sure has a special name. I read about it once. Autistic people often move their heads rather than their eyes to look at an object. Children do this at first, but then they learn to move their eyes about instead. Eye movements are important for making facial expressions. This could be another reason why I sometimes look expressionless.

The Necessity of Stubbornness

A little stubbornness I think can be good for someone. I’ve been trying to imagine what it would be like to be totally without this trait, and I think it would create a lot of difficulties for me. The ability to stick to your guns, and stand up for what you believe in is essential, not for individual survival, sometimes it goes against our survival, but for our personal progress and the spiritual evolution of humanity.

Without any stubbornness, we would be susceptible to the whim of every person we meet. Indeed, I have meet people who are like this. They don’t seem to have an opinion that is their own, they agree with most everything their friends or partner says. Fitting in and pleasing people is their main aim, this they do for self preservation because they think they have to in order to keep other people on their side. I think this kind of person must have a less stable sense of self.

I like to think of stubbornness as an instinct, one of self-preservation. The stubborn individual and the individual without a low stubborn drive have different ideas about that self. The individual who has no stubbornness in their nature thinks of their self as embodied in the external world. They have to work hard to please people to ensure both their physical survival and that they get what they want to recreate the image they have of themselves in the external world. In the process they lose their inner sense of self because they are dependent on other people’s opinions. It becomes a vicious circle. They confuse the lose of this self with something other people can give them and so they continue their attempts to flatter and please the people around them, and neglect to act according to their own inner voice, thus causing more damage to their internal self.

I have a twin, we’re not identical. People often describe us as being like chalk and cheese. Whereas I am in the stubborn camp my sister is definitely in the opposite camp. I’m not sure there’s a word for the opposite of stubborn. Irresolute is the best word I can find, but it doesn’t seem to encapsulate everything, fickle might be another word but it has lots of other negative connotations. Although being stubborn also has lots of negative connotations as well, so perhaps it’s a fair deal.

Being stubborn can have it’s advantages. People who are stubborn are often strong and resilient in the face of opposition. They have grit and stamina when things go wrong. A stubborn person doesn’t give up on something dear to them unless they’ve given their absolute all. The advantages to being irresolute/fickle is that you are usually better at dealing with people, your less likely to offend people, and probably most importantly you are more open to ideas from other people and find it easier to accept being wrong. I think the correct about of stubbornness can keep you at a happy medium between these two extremes.

Stubbornness and the Cingulate System

I’ve read about a disorder called ODD (Oppositional Defiant Disorder) in Change Your Brain, Change Your Life by Dr D G Amen. I’ve heard of this disorder before, but I didn’t take it seriously. It sounded so bizarre. How could be obstinate be mental disorder, it’s just someone being awkward surely? After reading about half of the book, and seeing the links Dr Amen makes between behavioural patterns and brain activity, and how these can be changed through medication and cognitive behavioural therapy, I was able to accept this disorder as a serious medical condition.

He links ODD to problems in the cingulate system in the brain. This is a section of the brain that runs longitudinally through the middle of the brain. It connects the right and left hemispheres. Problems in this area relate to cognitive inflexibility which can cause; OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder), addictions such as alcoholism, eating disorders, any behaviour that becomes repetitive and that the individual finds difficult to change.

But you don’t have to have a medical disorder to have problems in this area. Dr Amen describes people with cingulate problems and how it affects their personality and how to deal with them. These are the kinds of people whose response to most questions is usually a ‘no‘, they want things done their way, when they say, otherwise they become very anxious and argumentative. Thee people get stuck on an idea and can’t shift their attention onto anything else until what they want gets done. They are people who hold onto grudges, if a situation isn’t resolved to their satisfaction they are unable to let go.

I felt sad while I was reading this chapter on the cingulate system. Everything Dr Amen said reminded me of my mother, she died of breast cancer recently. These aspects of her personality caused lots of stress at times and disagreements between members of the family. I kept thinking, if only I’d read this book sooner, I could have shown it to her, and the others, and we would all have been a lot more patient and forgiving of each other.

It’s not just my mum who had problems in this area. Some of the descriptions also apply to my Dad, my Nan and myself. My mum used to complain how she would sit down with my dad and discuss things with him, and how afterwards he would go and do something different, usually something totally different to what they’d agreed. This caused lots of arguments at home. My Nan can be a frustrating person to try and have a conversation with. She tends to start her conversations with a scripted discourse and won’t let you speak until she’s said everything she wants to, even if you know the answer to her question, or if you want to point out an error. You have to let her get to the end of what she wants to say, even if this means listening to five minutes of extraneous information. I have seen myself do this on occasions.

I think we must be a stubborn family. I’m now wondering if the stubborn parts of my personality could also be due to over activity in the cingulate system. Besides techniques for altering and dealing with the behavioural aspects, Dr Amen talks about medications that can have a dramatic effect on some individuals. These are drugs that increase the level of serotonin in the brain, like Prozac. St John's wort has also been shown to have similar effects. In addition he says there is an amino acid called 1-tryptophan that the body uses to make serotonin which you can get from health food shops. Inositol (a B vitamin) can also help people who are over focused and have trouble stopping repetitive thoughts. I’m not saying anyone should go out and take these, just that there are ways of regulating cingulate activity. It would be interesting though to see if any of these had an effect on myself of members of my family!

Sensitivity to Hard and Soft Surfaces

(This was written in draft before I knew about the different receptors in the skin, including those for measuring pressure. I think that’s what this section is about, my sensitivity to pressure. This is different from the pressure I apply to myself in order to get that sense of internal awareness. This is how your skin tells a hard surface from a soft surface. In much the same way that I am sensitive to one side of the hot/cold dichotomy, I am also very sensitive to one side of the hard/soft dichotomy.

There are some places that look so uncomfortable I can‘t understand why anybody would sit there. Such as coffee shops, where the floor is hard, the chairs are hard, it‘s noisy and the lighting is artificial. I realise now of course that NT people experience their environment in a different way to autistic people. It‘s seems strange that I‘ve lived so long in the world being uncomfortable in it, never realising that other people where having a different experience.

What I found while revisiting this section was that my likes and dislikes, all these little quirky things I just thought were my personal preferences actually have their basis in my biological make-up.)

I love watching property shows, they’re the only things I watch on television these days. If I did buy my own property I would love to hire an interior designer to turn it into something I that would be truly a home for me. I love soft and fluffy things. I don’t like hard surfaces. I prefer carpets to tiled or laminated floors. This means I have favourite rooms in the house that I spend a lot of time in and rooms I don’t spend much time in. I would have to find a way of turning my least favourite rooms into something I would use.

I don’t like bathrooms. Bathrooms are the worst room in the house for me as not only are they covered with hard surfaces and hard objects they are usually cold as well. These may seem like minor irritations to NT people, but for someone with extreme sensitivity to temperature and surfaces they are enough to make me avoid going there unless I have to. It’s the reason I only shower once every two days, and part of the reason my bathroom hardly ever gets cleaned. It’s not so bad in the summer time, but in winter, the idea of stepping out of that nice warm shower into a cold atmosphere is a daunting prospect.

It’s also part of the reason I don’t like conservatories. Unless they are very well made and insulated they are still colder than the rest of the house. The floors are often tiled rather than carpeted, the walls are often left as open stone or brick work - not very nice if you fall or lean against it. And conservatory furniture is often wicker or metal, nothing very soft or comfortable. They just don’t look very cosy. And there is another reason to do with my fear of space, conservatories just look insubstantial to me. Maybe it’s all the glass, the thinness of the walls and the roof. The construction of the conservatory plus the furniture people put in them, none of it feels very substantial to me. I think this is to do with my inability to visualise space or to be aware of myself in it. When I’m walking down the street I try to stay close to the sides of buildings. When I sit down in a restaurant or a pub or anywhere, I much prefer to be sitting next to a wall. I hate being sat in the middle of the room. Conservatories never look like very permanent structures to me.

The kitchen isn’t as bad as the bathroom or conservatory. They can be warm, especially if you’ve been cooking. And normally I only go in there to work. That is to cook or clean, or do other physical work. I’m not sure it’s somewhere I’d chose to relax though. A carpeted kitchen would be nice, you could put some kind of protection over it around the units, some armchairs around a wood burner could work well.

My two favourite rooms in the house then are the lounge and the bedroom. They have lots of soft furnishings and are cosy places to sit. My favourite place to do anything is lying or sitting on my bed. I can watch DVDs, I can write, I can read, I even eat meals sitting on my bed, because it is the softest place in the house. My dream is to have a bedroom large enough to have a sofa and some armchairs and a coffee table in it.

Décor wise, I don’t really like the minimal modernist look, where everything is white and every surface is rendered smooth, and all the floors are laminated. I’d feel like I was in an art gallery or an open plan office. I don’t like open planned offices, and I don’t like open plan homes. It goes back to this thing to do with space. I like rooms to be big rather than small, but with a whole floor that is open plan? It just doesn’t seem very comfortable; noises travel further, you have less privacy and unless you have lots of furniture it’s a waste of space.

Well, that’s just how the whole hard/soft thing affects how I like to live and the type of home I’d like to live in. Generally in my day to day living, it can be a pain, literally. I am very uncomfortable sitting on a hard chair for any length of time. I always seemed to be wriggling about in my chair at school more than anyone else. They were just so uncomfortable. Thankfully office chairs are soft, so after leaving school this ceased to be a problem. It’s a problem when it comes to socialising, because friends want to go places that just don’t appeal to me and I usually end up toeing the line. My parents used to say this a lot to me, I was often being told I should just toe the line (this expression comes from running and means to keep your toe on the mark at the beginning of a race - I just checked it on the web to see whether it should be ‘toe’ or ‘tow’). Nobody realised though, how often I would toe the line and how exhausted it was making me.

I don’t know if this is related, but my skin is a bit strange. If you sat on your hands for five minutes then look at them, your hands would be red and there would be creases in your skin where the fabric from your clothes had made an indent. My skin does this a lot, or maybe it’s just the way I sit or lie. I notice it most on my hands. Because I feel cold most of the time, I do tend to sit in positions where I wrap my arms and legs around myself, so I’m probably putting myself into positions where this is likely to happen, still, I never notice this phenomenon on other people’s hands. Peculiar or what.

Argumentative

Argumentative

Like stubbornness, this isn’t a label I would have applied to myself at the time, but looking back at my youth I did get into a lot of heated debates with people. I used to get very upset when people said something I thought was wrong or inaccurate. I could be very vocal in a debate, I was the sort of person who always had an opinion and I can still be argumentative if it is a subject I care deeply about.

Being argumentative is like stubbornness, it comes from a belief that you are right and other people are wrong. But whereas stubbornness is a refusal to surrender your inner world to someone else’s opinion, being argumentative is turning that stubbornness onto the outer world. You can be silently stubborn, but not silently argumentative. I think stubbornness suits introverted people more, and being argumentative is more likely to affect extrovert people.

These days I’m more likely to let things pass for the sake of a quiet life. But when I was younger I definitely felt I was on a mission to set the world to rights. It was important for me not only to establish the truth for myself, but to establish the truth in the outside world as well. I think I probably came across as very arrogant. Now I recognise that people have to find their own truth. You can be an example to people, but you can’t make them change their ways.

As I became less argumentative with people in real life, I was still in turmoil inside. The arguments I avoided in real life would continue in my head. It just upset me too much that someone was walking around believing something I thought was wrong. Just thinking of the person was enough to set off a long conversation with them in my head detailing why they were wrong, which is a pointless exercise because they can’t hear me. Thankfully I don’t do this as much as I used to.

Part of the reason for these long monologues is that I can’t imagine how the other person would reply. It’s the same when I’m talking to someone in real life, I frequently say things that upset or offend people. I can always work out why afterwards but for some reason I can’t see this before I say what I’m thinking of saying.

Because NT people think differently to autistic people, if I could imagine what they might say it probably wouldn’t satisfy the kind of conversation I wanted to have with them. This would end my imaginary conversation fairly quickly, so it’s a shame I can’t do it.

My Nan was always telling me I had no diplomacy, and my Dad always told me I had no social grace. I was never sure what he meant by this, but I think he probably meant the same thing as my Nan, that I put my foot in it a lot, and offend people. I don’t intend to offend people. If I could avoid it I would. I think my Dad saw social grace as something a person can turn on and off at will, but if you haven’t got it you haven’t got it.

I think what it comes down to is not being able to understand or accept that people think differently and that this is okay. It took me a long time to realise that my family had different values and beliefs to me. It was a big revelation to me, and made sense of a lot of things. Such as why I didn’t get on with them very well. All the time I had been thinking they shared the same ideas as me, and I was saying things that I expected them to agree with and instead they would get upset.

The other day I found a good way to stop thee internal monologues. I imagined I was talking to someone. I wanted to see if I could think of something they might say, and I did manage to think of something. But it was something I disagreed with, this would normally send me off on a long monologue but instead I thought, ‘Oh, well. They’ll probably think something different tomorrow!’. This was a new thought for me. I was pretty surprised by it, but pleased too. It stopped me going ‘off on one‘.

You see, I had been approaching NT people as if they were autistic. So if they said something that was factually wrong I felt I had to show them they were wrong, otherwise they could on believing it till the day they died. But often NT people say things that are just off the cuff remarks without much conviction behind them, even more scary is the fact they sometimes say things they don‘t believe to try and bond with someone, whereas I never say anything on a subject unless I have a strong conviction. I think I come across as a very serious person. One man put it very nicely and said I was very soulful, because everything I said was so sincere.

This trait though has caused me a lot of pain in the past. Family know us better than most, and often I think they would say things they knew would ‘get me going’. Now I see that often they were just winding me up because they knew they could, which isn’t a very kind game to play with someone.

I think NT people find it much easier to change their minds about something than an autistic person, I guess that’s why they think of us as stubborn. But once something is labeled the truth in my mind it is very difficult to remove that label, truth is after all unchanging. Maybe NT people are just more comfortable with things being possibly true and possibly not. An autistic person though has to know which it is. We think beneath all the chaos is a bedrock of truth that can see you through life.