Sharing Conversation

I went out with a small group of friends recently. There were four of us. We hadn’t seen each other for a while so we had plenty of news to share. I did quite a lot talking. It went quite well really. I was more relaxed than I normally am, now they know I’m autistic they are more forgiving of my little idiosyncrasies and I’m not so anxious about keeping up my normal act.

I hadn’t seen one girl for nearly four years so I had a lot to share and I became conscious I was doing a lot fo the talking. The thing is, it’s thin line for an autistic person; saying too much or saying too little. I think for NT people it’s a very wide line, saying a few lines three or four times maybe okay in some situations, talking for half an hour maybe okay in others. Each situation is unique and there are very few rules which can guide you.

I used to see conversation as a bit like tennis; you say something and the other person returns it to you with a different take on it. The only difference I guess is that you want the other person to be able to hit the ball so you don‘t say anything too obtuse. I knew conversation should be a two way process, so I imagined a process where one person says something, then the other person takes that idea and sees what ideas this gives them. And so the original idea grows and changes until there is some kind of satisfactory conclusion and the subject can change.

I began to realise how inadequate this model was when I took some screenwriting modules at university. My tutor told me my dialogue was very ’back and forth’. I knew then, for the first time, that I was doing something wrong. But I didn’t know what and my NT friends were too polite to point it out (I didn’t know at that point that I was autistic).

The thing I liked about my model was that both people spoke for roughly the same amount of time so you didn’t have that dilemma of deciding how long you should speak for. I never managed to figure out a model that worked for groups. Probably this is why I preferred to deal with people on a one to one basis. I get very anxious in groups.

Despite my best efforts I could never make my model of conversation work in reality, and somehow this didn't make me realise my model was wrong. NT people don’t work to a set of defined rules. So whenever I would start talking about a subject (which I may or may not have introduced), people either disagreed or said something I disagreed with or they would say nothing and I’d end up talking until I stopped myself or someone butted in.

I can see now that the model I had built was actually just a replica of the kind of conversations I have with myself. Whenever I was writing a script or a short story, the conversations I created between characters were really conversations with myself. What I wasn’t doing was imaging two different people, and what their agendas might be, their interests, their personalities. I wasn’t imagining what their emotional reactions might be. I wasn’t, not doing it because I didn’t want to but because I couldn’t.

For an autistic person conversation is either about being a listener or a talker. As the subject changes you change roles. Conversation is usually about communication of information rather than two people interacting emotionally. Because you I'm not very good at the emotional thing I rely very heavily on having a good store of knowledge and funny stories to entertain people with. But this over compensation can get you into trouble.

Talking too much is misinterpreted by my NT friends as a lack of interest in what they think. This isn’t true, because I spend most of my time studying my friends and trying to act like them. I’m talking because I know they want me to talk. If I don't talk they think I'm ignoring them. My lectures are really intended as a gift. It’s the only gift I have to give them. It’s the only way I know how to talk to them. And I want to give them a lot, because I know I can’t bond with them in the way they want me to.

Fine Motor Skills

Difficulty with fine motor tasks is commonly associated with autism. I think it’s another one of those things that isn’t caused by autism itself, but something that tends to appear along side it. When I first started working with my autistic boy, I was not able to see just by watching him that he had fine motor difficulties. He couldn’t tie show laces and he preferred to eat with his fingers, but then he was only four. If someone’s arm is bandaged making movement difficult, you can see it and make allowances. But like other aspects of autism, fine motor problems are something felt on the inside and are not obvious to others.

I began to think about fine motor issues when I began taking more notice of how I used my hands. My handwriting is pretty much illegible unless I write in capitals. I could write fairly neatly when I learnt at school, although I could never achieve the nice, evenly spaced, rounded letters my friends did. It was still readable. I have since lost this skill.

It’s a bit like speech in that respect, while I was having the elocution lessons my pronunciation improved drastically. But slowly over the years I’ve lost some of what I learnt. My speech can be broken and garbled especially when I‘m tired or not paying enough attention to it.

The mother of my autistic boy told me he might be orally dyspraxic. Because I find speech difficult, particularly pronouncing consonants, I thought maybe I had this problem. But thinking about it now, I wonder if it isn’t just a fine motor problem. Dyspraxic is when you can’t co-ordinate your movements, my problem is actually producing movement.

Poor handwriting on it’s own doesn’t indicate a fine motor problem, or dyspraxia. I think most of my teachers had very poor handwriting, I know we struggled to read their comments on our work. Strangely though if they wrote on the blackboard their handwriting was always neat. It’s like they had two styles of writing. When I was at school we always thought of messy writing as an indication of cleverness. Because older people and clever people had messy writing.

Now I have a laptop, so I write much less with a pen than I used to. Using a laptop with a shallow keyboard is much easier than writing with a pen as most of the action to hit the keys comes from my knuckles and I don’t have to bend my fingers as much. I’m quite fast on a keyboard.

It’s not just writing though that I have problems with. I’m always a bit self conscious of my hands, I never know where to put them because I don’t know how to hold them. When I‘m walking I don‘t like having them by my sides, you have to take up a posture of some sort. I prefer to put them in my pockets, so I like to have jackets with pockets. If I don’t have any pockets I will probably cross my arms. I like having a bag to hold, even if it’s one I carry over my shoulder, because I’ve at least got a strap to hold onto to. Wearing gloves is nice because it’s less obvious what your doing with your hands. I think part of the problem is the movement in my fingers. They feel a bit numb, it’s similar to the sensation in my lips when I’m struggling with pronunciation (which is why I think this might also be a fine motor thing).

When I’m sitting with someone I tend to find a hand position and to keep it. I’ve copied most of these off my Nan (not consciously). My Nan is very conservative, she sounds a bit posh when you speak to her. The way she holds herself, including her hands is quite stiff and formal. I’ve picked up her mannerisms because they are easy to imitate. The only downside is that this makes me appear stiff and formal too.

I’ve notice since my diagnosis that the problems with my hands have got a bit worse. I think the reason for this can be demonstrated by a simple analogy. Imagine you’ve had a very demanding job, working 40 hours a week without a holiday for more than ten years. It‘s a job you‘re pretty bad at and you never seem to get any better. Then someone tells you there has been an error and this isn’t your job you were meant to be something else, so they are going to change your job to something more suitable. Wouldn’t you feel like I’m never going to that work again! I think that’s how my fingers feel.

I find myself grabbing at things rather than taking the time to think and pick them up properly. It’s like my brain is trying to figure out new ways of doing things that will take less effort. It’s like all my life I’ve existed in this over tired, over stressed, really tense state without knowing why and now I’m learning to relax and not trying to keep up with everyone else.

When I worked with my autistic boy I saw he used to drop things a lot. Sometimes he would throw them. Most of the times this wasn’t in anger. He would pick up a toy, play with it for a bit then drop it and pick up something else. The floor of his session room would quickly become littered with toys and I would be constantly tidying up. One of things we taught him was what ‘tidy up’ meant. And we did go through a period of trying to get him to put stuff away after he had dropped it, although I wasn’t very strict with this. I sympathise with him now, think most of this was down to his fine motor issues and he had much greater difficulties in this area than I do. I’m able to tie shoelaces and hold a pen. No one notices my difficulty, except probably that I’m a bit stiff.

It’s not just my hands that are a problem, my feet too can trip me up. I was always being told as a child not to drag my feet. Of course, now I’m an adult I can drag my feet as much as I like! Don’t think though this is something I do out of laziness. My Mum told me once I had talipes when I was born. It wasn’t very severe and as the only way they can fix it is to break the bones in your legs and put you in plaster my Mum decided not to have anything done. She told me when we saw a child on a bus who was in plaster like this. I think she thought I would pleased that she told the doctors not to do anything She had an old fashioned view of doctors, that you shouldn’t go unless you were dying. Actually I was gutted, okay so I can walk okay and I don’t fall over, but I might not have this strange walk I have.

I mention this here because I was wondering if motor skills might be responsible for me having two left feet. It’s very difficult to determine the reason for things when there are so many possible causes. When it comes to walking you have to have good spatial awareness, good balance and be able to co-ordinate and move the muscles in your body in the way you want. I think it’s a possibility.

Personal Relationships

I had been thinking that I was getting good at working out what was going on in social situations. That I had mastered what I needed to, or got as good at it as I thought I would or needed to. Then I had a recent experience that made me realise I hadn’t at all. All I had learnt (and the results are still inconsistent), was to recognise some of the games people play and to analysis peoples behaviour using theories I have gained by reading books on popular psychology.

I think this is because I’ve been focused on social situations as the main area were the autistic person’s lack of people skills becomes most obvious, assuming this is were they are most important. I haven’t really looked at the impact of autism on my close personal relationships.

In personal relationships I only manage by keeping people at a distance. So I have friends, but I don’t see them very often. There isn’t very much emotional investment. I think this is the big difference between social and personal relations. Personal relationships involve a greater emotional investment.

Emotions are difficult for me. It all started to go wrong when I reached puberty. Before then, I was just thought of as an odd, but bright child. Then puberty came along and I became an odd, but bright, unhappy teenager. Puberty is a difficult time, not just emotionally, but because we are maturing socially. Making friends is no longer as simple as running up to someone in the playground and asking them to play tag with you. Being autistic puts you at a disadvantage to your NT peers.

So puberty is difficult for two reasons. You are dealing with lots of new emotions and having to navigate an increasingly complicated social world. Being autistic and undiagnosed there was no way I was ever going to cope even reasonably well. This was a very difficult and dark time for me. I’m still amazed I held it together without doing something silly.

I have matured emotionally, to some extent since then, but in stressful situations I often feel as did when I was a teenager. I used to think this was my fault, that it was something I was doing that had meant I hadn’t grown up like other people. This was reinforced by my families treatment of me, e.g. not being given responsibilities, not being included in decision making, not being kept informed of events. (Although this did change for a brief period after my mother died).

The problem was also the lack of initiation on my part, which is autism related. So I am caught in a situation with no exits. I won’t be treated as I want unless I stop being autistic, which without a brain transplant isn’t going to happen.

I think the reason I’ve been focused on social situations rather than personal relationships is that the personal side of things often feels just to painful to be worth risking. This was an unconscious decision, but when I look at how I have led my life this is definitely what I have been doing.

I have also to some extent excluded emotions from my study of social situations and also from my own behaviour in social situations. The reason for this being that I don’t handle emotions very well, I often don’t know how I’m feeling and I’m also confused about how much emotion is appropriate.

I recently went to see a lawyer who wrote a letter of complain to my healthcare trust because my mental health team had refused to see me. When I read the letter she’d written there were several references to the emotional impact the situation was having on me. I thought this was a bit odd at the time. But I trust this woman was doing a good job and that this is how people do and should behave. I see now that this is something I need to bring back into my interactions with people. I think I have been focused more on the other person and understanding them than looking at myself and working on how I behave. Probably because this is harder to do.

Social Boundaries

I feel about social situations the same way I fell about physical spaces. In space, I have to trust that I am occupying it and these objects are solid and I’m not about to fall over or walk into someone. Most of the time I don’t look relaxed, this is because I’m not, if I look stiff it’s because I am holding myself ready in case that’s not the floor and this chair isn’t where I think it is. It’s to do with spatial-visual perception which is often affected in autism.

In a social situation, if I don’t know what is acceptable behaviour and what isn’t, I can’t construct any boundaries in my mind. I think autistic people have far stricter ideas about what is and what isn’t acceptable behaviour. Such as our position on honesty. We want and need these boundaries as they are essential to us understanding each other, we can’t read all the hidden meanings NT people pass between themselves.

Autistic boundaries are constantly being broken by NT people. It’s no wonder we feel anxious around NT people. NT people often speak of autistic people breaking their boundaries, obvious things include stripping off, or inappropriate sexual behaviour. But for high functioning autistics the problem is usually the other way round. Autistic people have a very strict code of ethics that most NT people would view as puritanical, and these codes are constantly being broken, much to the pain and distress of the autistic person.

In any social situation boundaries are being created and taken down and rebuilt. If a controversial subject comes up, the potential for disagreements and broken boundaries intensifies. I can’t position myself in relation to others because I don’t know what position other people will have. This is hard for me, because I have been blessed with lots of non-mainstream ideas. As a child I often offended my parents with my views on women, race and sexuality. This puts me in a more precarious position than if my views were more in line with the rest of society. For an autistic person though, pretending to have the same values as someone else to fit in would be very difficult, it would mean breaking that code of ethics.

Sometimes I think these difficulties also stem from my past experiences. If the people around you have been supportive in the past then you won’t worry what people’s reactions are going to be in the future. If however, your past experience was negative this is how you will expect future interactions to be. If you’re autistic your view of events may be skewed anyway, but it doesn’t change how the situation felt for you. An NT person will have the skills to assess a new situation using their social skills, an autistic person doesn’t.

When NT people go into a social situation, they are protected to some extent by the social barrier that they can create to manipulate how people see them or even to deceive people as to their intentions. Autistic people don’t have this, they operate on a policy of honesty because they can’t do all the complicated things NT people do when they communicate. Autistic people are like windows, you can see straight through them. Whether you are aware of it or not, going into a social situation without a disguise or the ability to disguise your feelings is a very stressful experience.

When I feel insecure in space I sometimes like to think how nice it would be to be held, the way a parent holds a baby who can’t sit upright or hold it’s head up. I would feel safe with someone holding me so that I could feel where I was. I wish there was a similar way of being held in social situations. It seems impossible, unless the NT people present could be persuaded to drop their social costumes. Then everyone would know where they stood, we would know where the boundaries were and people would have to stick to those positions and not keep changing their minds because of self-interest.

You know how you feel when you are doing something for the first time; a new job, starting university, or joining a group. That’s how I feel for most of the time. I rarely feel at ease, even in places I go to a lot. It’s as if people are new to me no matter how often I meet them. I guess because no matter how long I know them, I’m still never sure of how they will behave.

Getting to Know You

Normally when two people meet they will make some very quick judgements about the other person. These judgements will be based on how nice the other person is (i.e. how good they are with the social chit chat thing), how well they look after their appearance, how attractive they are… generally how well they present themselves and how good their social skills are.

However, good social skills aren’t always an indication of an honest and trustworthy character. In many cases I have observed the opposite to be true. Conmen have very good social skills, or they couldn’t do what they do.

I sometimes make judgements on people’s appearance, i.e. whether I like it or not, but I don’t make judgements on a person’s character this way. Having poor social skills myself who am I to judge someone who doesn’t mix well? For a while I couldn’t understand why NT people valued these skills so highly. Then I realised, most of the time this isn’t a conscious action on their part. Greater social skills means a greater ability to charm people, and this is what NT people are responding too.

On the other hand, an NT person may make a conscious negative judgement against someone who lacks social skills and they probably wouldn’t want to be seen around with that person in case other people made the same judgement against them. People enjoy being popular and being popular requires good social skills. Neither of these response is a reliable way to assess someone’s character.

When I meet someone I am generally quite nosey and I ask a lot of questions. This doesn’t normally go against me, people usually like talking about themselves, unless they have something to hide. Also it is a genuine interest, I love popular psychology books and programmes, I observe people all the time. It started out as something I had to do in order to fit in, now it’s become a bit of a hobby.

I’m quite good at it now. I can usually tell after some basic background information what type of person they are. Through working out their psychological profile I am better able to read between the lines of what they are saying. This is a different reading between the lines than what NT people do. When NT people read between the lines they are picking up on messages that have been imbedded purposefully. I am very poor at this, I don’t normally get it till I’ve gone home and had a chance to go over the conversation. When I read between the lines I am searching for what that person doesn’t want me to know. This makes me a better judge of character if not a very good conversationalist.

It seems strange to me that NT people aren’t interested in each other in this way. They are quite happy taking each other at face value. But then the NT world exists as a set of unspoken rules and NT people accept secrecy as one of these rules. Secrecy is almost essential if social etiquette is to be followed. A lot of social interaction is about disguising rather than revealing. Secrecy is a way of life, something they don’t even question.

I used to be very enthusiastic when I met people. What would their likes and dislikes be? What personality traits would they have? How would we get on? I was always hopefully this new person was going to redeem all others and turn out to be a friend. And when I did meet the person, I was like a puppy, bounding all over them. Over the years I’ve toned this down a lot. I’ve got burnt so many times! My naivety left me open to a lot of cruel tricks. Also, what I didn’t realise was that in the NT world, kindness is often taken as a weakness. If I’d met people wearing a tough, mean looking exterior I wouldn’t have encountered half the trouble I did. (But then, I also wouldn’t have grown very much as a person).

This is because people think they can harm you without any fear of a reprisal. They may think to themselves, this girl likes me, she wants to be my friend, she’s naïve and doesn’t know when I’m making fun of her, this is a good opportunity to show everyone how clever I am. Or a man might think, this girl likes me, I already have a girlfriend but I’m enjoying the attention I think I’ll lead her on. Those are just two examples of situations I have found myself in. Hopefully if you have ever tried thee tricks on someone I will have aroused your conscience.

Hints and Innuendos

What I find frustrating about NT people is that they never want to tell you things directly, it’s always through hints and innuendos. I think they do this mostly to save your feelings if they’re saying something unpleasant, or because they’re a bit shy about talking of their feelings, or sometimes I think they’re just showing off their superior skills in this area.

I tell people about my autism and how they need to be direct and talk in a straightforward manner with me, but I think they forget. Their minds are zapping ahead and they don’t remember to pause for me. But it causes so many complications. There have been so many arguments in my family because people think I’ve said or agreed to things I haven’t.

This tends to happen mostly between me and my younger sister. Not all NT people use the hints and innuendos technique equally. My sister does it a lot though, which can create havoc for me. She will say something which contains an unsaid meaning which she thinks should clear; I don’t get it, but because I don’t disagree, she assumes an agreement has been reached and all the while I am ignorant.

Taking the direct and straightforward approach with an autistic person can mean having to changing old, sometimes negative behaviour patterns, and this can be very challenging. People don’t always have the other persons wishes in mind when they decide what they want and if that person is autistic the temptations to exploit their social naivety can be great. Being around an autistic person is a lesson in behaving well. If you behave well, the autistic person behaves well; you both understand each other clearly and there is no game playing.

Now that I am wise to the games people play (it’s taken me up to this point in my life to get there) I am constantly on the look out for them. I have been naïve and innocent so people have used these tricks on me many times. But now I have caught on! And I do my best to stop them. . Before I had a tendency to go along with what others wanted because it was easier than trying to figure out what was going on in the first place. But I am not as malleable and compliant as I used to be. My growing awareness has lead to some conflict, I think my family sometimes prefer me the way I was before.

There was this one time when I was planning to go away with my family. I was going to get a lift back with my sister. I absolutely had to back for work Monday afternoon. I checked with my sister when we would be coming back and she said Sunday, though it might end up being Monday. What she really meant was Monday afternoon, but she didn’t tell me this because she knew I would try and get a lift with someone else and for her own reason this was not what she wanted.

As the weekend was approaching I was getting more and more edgy. I couldn‘t get a straight answer out of my sister and I smelt a rat. Eventually, after some pestering she conceded that they were planning to come back Monday afternoon, I then told her I couldn‘t go. She was very cross saying I could easily miss work. I was cross because I felt someone had tried to pull the wool over my eyes. I think you have to be autistic before you realise how much that sensation can hurt.

Unconscious and Conscious Thinking

Before I began learning about autism I didn’t know anything about the many functions the brain performs. Like most people I had some hazy idea that the mind was contained within the brain, but I had no idea how the structure of the brain controlled the way I thought. The mind I thought was controlled by me, isn’t in fact. I think a lot of people have trouble accepting this fact.

I read about the conscious and unconscious when I became interested in psychoanalysis as a teenager. I wanted to figure out how my mind worked so I could fix whatever it was that was wrong with me. I also began reading lots of self-help books and spiritual literature. It took me a long time to realise what my problem was; that I had an autistic spectrum disorder.

Although I’d read a lot about the conscious and the unconscious I never felt I had fully grasped what these terms referred to. I couldn’t picture them as real things. They didn’t seem real to me. They seemed very vague, nebulous terms to me.

The whole time I’ve been reading about autism and how the autistic brain works I’ve been looking for a definition of these terms and now I think I’ve got there. This may be obvious stuff to some, but for me it was a eureka moment, because I could finally attach these terms to parts of my brain.

My unconscious mind, I believe, contains my memory (naturally) and my feelings. I‘m still a little unsure of pairing my feelings with the unconscious, as I only have my experience as an autistic person to go on. I used to think that emotions began in the conscious mind, but my personal experience contradicts this.

If my emotions arose within the conscious mind I would be aware of them the moment they happen. But I’m not. The physical sensations of an emotion are obvious; blushing, increased heart rate, tears, etc… all of which tells me I’m having an emotional experience.

Subtle emotions though are more difficult to pick up on. Maybe it’s different for NT people. If I am having trouble telling when I have an emotion this is because it is still in my unconscious. It seems to me that the unconscious is determining which emotions are released and which aren’t which would suggest that this is where they are first felt.

The conscious mind though, is my awareness. It is a logical thinker and the knowledge it acquires is passed onto the unconscious to be stored. Our conscious mind must be able to contain a number of thoughts at the same time to be able to think. This is our working memory. It’s like a very think slice of memory, just enough to allow the thinking process to occur.

You could say the main role of the unconscious is to store, and the main role of the conscious is to think. These would be neat definitions, but not strictly true. The unconscious is also a thinker. When we can’t figure something out using our conscious mind we often wait for our unconscious to come up with something.

Lastly I would just like to say something else I noticed about memory. Our memory contains both events that have happened to us and knowledge we acquire. We acquire our memory of events without any conscious effort, but knowledge requires more effort before it becomes part of our memory. I think there are two different mechanisms at work here.

When we remember past events, these are usually things our unconscious has chosen to remember, when we are learning new knowledge these are things that our conscious mind has chosen to remember. Knowledge I think can be divided into facts and wisdom/lessons. Facts, if they don’t get used can be forgotten, or rather the link between the fact and our conscious mind gets lost. This happens to me a lot. Wisdom though, permanently alters our personality, and stays with us forever.

Word Retrieval

I have poor word retrieval. My sister (the one who maybe dyslexic) has the same problem. What happens when you can’t retrieve the word you want is that you either say nothing, or instead a different word is substituted. The substitute word, though associated with the word you wanted, it is not a synonym but instead is associated in some weird Freudian way, because that’s how the unconscious works. So the substitute word is in most cases inappropriate and leads you to say some strange things, which might not be rude but are still funny to your listeners and embarrassing to you.

Personally I prefer saying nothing to saying something daft. Most times I can tell the word I want isn’t coming and there is another word that I can use if I want. It’s a bit like playing Deal or no Deal. Shall I choose this word or not. It might make sense and end this awkward pause, or it might not. Sometimes you might be half way through a sentence in which case you it is better to just start the sentence again and choose slightly different words. So you would pause, then say ’What I mean is….’ and try saying it in a different way.

Sometimes you might be near the end of the sentence. If I’m near the end of my sentence and I think people have got my meaning then I will leave the sentence unfinished. Sometimes I do this even if I don’t think I’m going to get the words wrong, it saves me the mental effort of looking for them. This sounds really lazy, but the mental effort required for me to talk and look for words at the same time is harder than you know. I think this is why I come across as a serious person, because I’m concentrating so hard on what I’m saying all the time. I can understand why some autistic people don’t speak even though they can. The rewards simply don’t outweigh the work involved, for them that is, and as they can’t see your point of view, you feelings don’t get factored in.

Sometimes, if you have very bad luck, a substitute word will stick. My sister says she often calls the kitchen the bathroom. It really embarrasses her. I told her this sounded logical to me. Both rooms have a sink, they are the only two rooms in the house where you meet water. For some reason they seem to be the coldest rooms in the house and the only ones without carpet; the only ones to be tiled rather than wallpapered or painted. There are lots of similarities.

Recently I was writing a story and I put down the word wave instead of flag. I actually had in mind a small flag to go on the bonnet of a government car and for some reason I put down wave instead of flag. I can see there are associations between the words; flags move in a similar way to waves when it’s windy and waving is also what you do with a flag.

Before we can think of a word the conscious mind must first have an idea it wants to express. Then it makes a request to the unconscious mind for the word that represents that idea. For instance you might be looking for the word ‘kitchen‘ or ‘flag’. Before you can say the word you must first think of the idea. I don’t know how the unconscious finds the correct word, there must be links then between ideas and the words we use for them. Maybe in autism these links are weaker. Hence the need for repetition when I am learning new words. These links can come and go, or maybe they become blocked, because sometimes I can think of a word and other times I can’t.

I find things drop out of my memory quickly if I don’t use them. After doing my French and German GCSEs, I’d say I lost most of what I’d learnt after a year. The same is true for numbers as well, I have forgotten my pin number numerous times because I didn’t use my card for a week. We have so many passwords for everything these days; bank accounts, email accounts, website accounts, etc… the only way I can cope is to use the same password for everything. Before then I was having to create a new password every time I wanted too buy something off Amazon.

Poor word retrieval I think explains some of the language difficulties I had when I was younger. Reading was hard for me. On the other hand I was good at maths, or rather I had a good memory for numbers. I could remember my times table up to twelve before anyone else in my class. Numbers are easier to remember because they have no associations. They mean one thing and one thing only and there aren’t so many to learn. Once you understand decimalisation, and you can count to ten you’re there. A word though is much more complex. Words can be nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, conjunctives and other things besides. Plus your memory isn’t just linking one idea to one symbol when you learn a new word, it must be creating a whole host of connections with other associated words. However, if I don’t continue using words or numbers (like the answers to my multiple times tables), both can drop out of my memory.

Sequencing of Thoughts

You know, it’s strange how very disorganised an NT persons thought processes can be, or that’s how they used to appear to me. Now I know I just think differently. At university a number of people commented on my very clear and easy to read style of writing and the logical way I put forward my arguments. My essays always followed a very structured logical argument.

This though, is the only way I can write. I’d love to be able to write with a more carefree or loose style. I’d love to be able to write like Virginia Woolf, the way she wanders about between events that sometimes don’t even appear to be related and yet are.

When I was a film studies student we had to read lots of theoretical essays. Even though they were writing non-fiction, the style of these writers was very vague. They would jump around their subject and I found myself going back to certain passages to check what I’d just read. Sometimes I felt I was having to build the argument myself, other times I doubted there was one. Theses writers were explaining complicated ideas in a very complicated way. In what other subject would you find that? Even my NT peers would struggled to understand sometimes.

My dependency on logical and structured thought has its disadvantages in everyday life as well. One thing the psychologist recommended is that I go and see the Disability Employment Officer at the job centre. I had just found a job when I went to her. She gave me information on the things I needed to do before I started. This included making a claim for some new clothes to go to work in, getting a bus pass and finding which bus I needed to get. Also we talked about claiming disability allowance. The only problem was all this information was given to me quite randomly as we talked about the job I was starting.

I became very confused trying to put everything she was telling me into some kind of order so I could remember it. I asked her to repeat parts of what she told me, but it didn’t make any more sense. The speed at which people talk doesn’t help either. I tried a different tack and said it would help if this was written down for me. I told them how forgetful I was.

But I don’t think they realised just how confused I was, because they (she had a colleague observing) would begin repeating what they had already said. I think it was probably the third time I asked them to write it down, that her colleague put down some bullet points for me. There wasn’t much detail, but it was something. He wrote down disability allowance and then said ‘you remember where the link was for that?’. I wasn’t sure so he jogged my memory, but I knew I would probably forget these details once I had left.

NT people just think differently to autistic people. When they are explaining something to you, it could some instructions or they might be telling a story, they don‘t always follow a linear sequence. It is like they have a sequence in their mind and they can jump into it at any point and know where they are. The person listening is expected to be able to construct this sequence in their head also. Having a poor working memory I think affects my ability to hold a sequence of multiple events in my mind.

I find listening to people hard work in any case, it requires a lot of concentration. Trying to put what they’re telling me into some kind of logical order that I can remember makes it all so much harder. In a situation such as the one above I would normally just pretend I understood then go away and try and work it out for myself.

Since I’ve been diagnosed I’m trying to act more myself instead trying to act normal, which has meant I’ve started asking more questions and asking people to repeat what they’ve said. I was asking more questions at the meeting with the Disability Officer, but I didn’t come away feeling confident I had remembered everything. What I should have done, was take a pad and a pen and make notes myself. I could then have pieced everything together into a logical order later.

Repetition and Memory

My memory skills vary for different kinds of information. Facts, like dates and names, are difficult for me to recall and consequently my general knowledge is very poor. I love quizzes but I always do badly at them, or rather the results don’t really reflect my intelligence. People think if you are good at quizzes you must be clever, what it means is you have a good memory for facts.

What I am good at remembering are concepts and theories. This is very useful to me at the moment. Writing a blog like this where I am analysing my behaviour would be very difficult if I didn’t have a good memory for the theories I’ve read and also a good memory of my different behaviours. In this way I am able to apply theory to my behaviour and find the reasons to explain why I do the things I do.

Having a poor memory for facts and a good memory for ideas seems to be contradictory at first. When I am engaged in daily activities, it is usually details I am good at and generalisation I am poor at. So why when these enter my memory is it the other way round?

Something you should know is that memory is a scare commodity for me. I put as little in it as I can. Basically because I don’t trust my memory, I know it lets me down. Sometimes I think this is because so much of my memory is used up doing tasks that other people use their thinking processes to do. An NT person will know the rules governing social interaction and use this to guide them, whereas I use past experiences and my memory of other events to guide me. NT people learnt the rules of grammar to be able to speak, whereas I memorised phrases as a child.

I don‘t like people giving me information during conversations because I‘m so forgetful, and I never seem to have a pen and paper when I need it. Emails and texts are good because then I always have something to refer back to. If I know there is somewhere I can go to find the information later then I won’t bother even trying to remember. For example, if I know it is a film someone wants to see then I shall go onto the cinema’s website later to find the details, or jog my memory. If it is a reference for an essay, I shall just try to remember which book it was in.

To remember things I need to have them repeated several times, which can become very frustrating for the person you are speaking to you if you keep asking them to repeat stuff. A fact is a very small thought, forgetting a fact is a bit like losing some change down the sofa, you don’t notice it’s gone. A concept or an idea though, now that’s a big thought and big things are more difficult to loose. Big things seem pass into my memory with much greater ease, there is no need to keep repeating them.

I never thought of thoughts as having a size before, but I suppose they must have. I suppose it’s because we don’t tend to think of thoughts as having an actual physical presence. Any mystic or psychic however will tell you that they do. In which case they must also have a mass or a charge, but I think I need to do some research.

Space

Space like time, is another illusion of our universe. Like events in time, objects in space have a beginning and an end. We live in a world of beginnings and endings, and some people even believe that they have an end, that they will cease to exist when they die. However, our concepts of time and space where created to give us a specific experience that we could learn from.

By giving us lifetimes that have a beginning and an end we are able to learn much more quickly than we would otherwise. Our memories of any other lives we’ve had can be veiled and we can start afresh in a new life. We are given as many opportunities to learn as we need.

Science now tells us that time and space can be warped, and that theoretically it is even possible to travel through time. If this is so, how can anything have a beginning and an end, least of all ourselves?

Space is a concept I find difficult to navigate my way through. I can’t see it. I don’t think in terns of three dimensions. When I’m in a crowded space where there are lots of people I panic. I think everyone is going to walk into each other, including me. I’ve talked about this before. The reason I wanted to bring this up again was an experience I had a few days ago in the supermarket.

As I was entering the store, straight away I saw two people coming my direction. One was coming from my right the other from my left. I tried not to panic. Normally I would increase my pace to move out of the way as speedily as possible, but instead I decided to try and imagine where they would end up if they carried on in a straight line. I could see their paths crossing but this would be just after I had passed them, and that’s what happened. Everything was fine.

Crowds are usually a source of much anxiety for me, but I felt a bit calmer going round the shop that day. I couldn’t keep up this mental imaging though. It takes a lot of mental effort. Especially when I’m also struggling to find my way round the shop in an order that means I can get everything on my list without walking round the whole place ten times.

So shopping is really difficult for two reasons, I’m trying to create a sequence in my mind of the things I need to get, whilst avoiding running into people. I could try to work out the order I get things when I make my list, which would take some of the pressure off. Then I could concentrate on not walking into people.

I think pointing should also come under the category of space. I’ve been doing some more thinking on this point, no pun intended. When I saw those two people coming towards me and I projected their paths, I realised this is the same thing people do when they point to things.

However there is another element to pointing that makes it harder. If the object being pointed at is too far away for me to hold both the hand and the object in my vision, I am stumped. This is because I can’t hold the space occupied by the hand in my mind. As soon as I lose sight of that hand I no longer know where it is in space so I can’t project it’s line. I wonder if this is because I am such a poor visual thinker. Not all autistic people are like this, some autistic people think in pictures. I can only think in words. Maybe visual thinkers don’t have the same problems with navigating crowds and pointing?

I have been monitoring my own pointing. At first I wasn’t sure that I did point, but now I can say that I do. I don’t point to indicate the whereabouts of objects, but I do point to give directions to people. If someone asks me the way I might indicate left or right by pointing. (I’m not good at telling left and right, I have to imagine myself doing the brownie salute first). So there are two uses to pointing, one to indicate an objects position, another as a kind of sign language.

Time

I know what it is and I can read a clock. But it’s not something that I am aware of a lot of the time. I am very poor at guessing how long a task will take me and when I am involved in a task, I am not aware of time passing. I often lose track of time in the shower and find I have gone wrinkly before I realise how long I’ve been stood there. I am a great time waster too. I will wonder from room to room picking things up, or just be sitting, messing about on my laptop before I realise it is lunchtime and I haven’t done anything constructive. I don’t like to feel rushed, people have always commented how laid back I am, that’s because I don’t have a clock inside me telling me when to do things.

Why do we separate time into sixes? Sixty seconds to a minute, sixty minutes to an hour and why 24 hours in a day (6 x 4). All our other systems of measurement are decimalised. I have a real difficulty calculating in my head the distance between two points in time. I can work it out if I have a pad and a pencil. But twice this week, today and yesterday I found myself in a tricky situation because I was couldn’t do these calculations with the same lightening speed as other people.

At the clinic yesterday when I went to book an appointment the receptionist told me she had an appointment available at such and such time that afternoon. I wanted to know how much time that meant I would have to wait but I didn’t know what the time was at that moment, so I asked her and she told me. But by then I had forgotten what time she had told me the appointment was. So I asked to repeat this which she did. I was trying to compare the two times in my head. If the time is in round hours that’s fine, but as soon as people start saying twenty to three or ten past two, I’m lost. Luckily she saw I was lost and told me I would have to wait half an hour to see the doctor which I did.

The same thing happened in Boots today when I went to pick up my prescription, only the lady behind the counter wasn’t as nice. She told me the Pharmacist was on her lunch break and would be back at such and such a time and did I want to wait? Only while she was asking me she had taken my prescription off me and was tearing part of it off. I was totally confused., why was she doing this? I had no idea how much time I would have to wait or why she had taken my prescription. She had assumed I was able to work out how long I would have to wait and also assumed that I knew what happens when you take a prescription in. I’ve taken a few in, but there are such large gaps between my visits I have forgotten what happens by the time I go back.

I asked her why she was tearing my prescription, and she asked me again if I wanted to wait. I asked her to repeat the times, which she did. When I said I wasn’t going to wait (I pretended I knew how much time that was) she gave me back the prescription. I stood still for a few moments not sure what to do. In my mind I was thinking she was going to put my prescription on the Pharmacist’s desk so she would have it when she came back from lunch. I assumed this because she was tearing it while she was asking me if I wanted to wait. It took till I had walked out the door (all the while listening to her laughing with her friend about my strange behaviour) that she was just a bossy woman who thought by taking my prescription off me before I had answered her question would mean I would have to wait whether I wanted to or not.

The first example was not so awkward as the second example; in fact the second was quite upsetting. The reason example two was upsetting is because the lady (who was supposed to be assisting me) was doing the classic NT thing of not meaning what she was saying. She didn’t really care if I wanted to wait or not because she had already taken my prescription. Being autistic I didn’t catch onto this till after the conversation, by which time she busy making fun of me to her friend.

The problem in these examples is that I was pretending to be normal. I pretended I could work out how much time I had to wait; I think part of me thought I might actually be able to. If, instead of asking the receptionist or the shop assistant to repeat the time, I had just asked how much time I would have to wait I could have saved myself a lot of embarrassment. I’d also have saved myself some brain power and might have figured out the prescription part instead of standing there looking dumb.

Copying/Mimicking

NT people often mimic each others behaviour, it’s a way of bonding with someone. If a person wants to show you that they want to be your friend they may copy a mannerism or part of your accent. It all sounds very bizarre to me, as an autistic person. Actually it took me a long time to even notice this behaviour in other people.

Autistic children have very poor copying skills. I’ve also hear T. Grandin say in a talk that autistic children have to be taught to take turns at something. I think copying and turn taking are both essential skills in social interaction.

Last year I had to go and see the Disability Employment Officer my local job centre, not long after I’d got my diagnosis. I didn’t want to go. I don’t like talking about myself as having a disability, I’m better now than I was then because I recognise the advantages of talking about it. But back then I wasn’t used to talking about autism. It’s still a bit a taboo with my family. I would rather we talked about it openly, but they all seem scared to, as if it’s something shameful.

The reason I’m going to tell you this little anecdote is because it illustrates the confusion and misunderstanding created between an autistic person and an NT person when the autistic person does not understand the codes of behaviour in social interaction.

The Disability officer turned out to be a nice, friendly lady and very sympathetic. Unfortunately she didn’t know anything about autism. I tried to explain, but I didn’t communicated what I wanted to say very well as I was too nervous. I dread people asking me to define autism because there are so many different symptoms. How do you sum it up in few sentences? I wish I’d had a leaflet to give her. There must be one out there, or maybe I could try writing one.

Anyway, when I’m nervous or worried I sometimes display this in my face. (It’s one of my few facial expression, that and smiling!). I do it in the hope that the other person will see my uneasiness and offer me some comfort. But it never seemed to work and the other person would just mirror back to me the same expression. I had no idea what was going on. I wasn’t comforted by this reaction, instead I was thinking, what could I have done to make them worried?

So this is what happened during my interview with this lady. Now I know she didn’t mean to upset me, she was very nice, so she could only have done what she did to be nice. I went over in my mind the things NT people do in conversation. I realised that all she was doing was showing me she was friendly by copying my expression. This was one of those eureka moments. I suddenly realised that all the time I’d been feeling rejected, I was simply misunderstanding the other person.

Now I understand this you might think the next step would be for me to adopt the same social techniques, but this would be very difficult for me to do. I’ve said else where that I am really bad at accents; I have difficulty with pronunciation and adding changes in tone and pitch to my voice. Also autistic people don’t use expressive body language, (if they have a mannerism it is probably a disguised stimming practice). Also my range of facial expressions is quite limited, I would never attempt to copy a facial expression without a mirror, I’d have no idea what I was doing otherwise.

The actions that people mimic when they’re talking to each other are either just impossible for an autistic person to copy or feel so unnatural the autistic person will have a very strong aversion. The whole thing would be done very clumsily, probably at the wrong moments, and the other person would either think you were making fun of them or were just some weirdo. But at least now I have an understanding of theses rules so there is now less chance of misunderstandings.

The Triad of Impairments - Communication

This includes both verbal and non verbal communication. In this piece I wanted to talk about the written word and the difficulties I have with it. I love writing; I have lots of thoughts throughout the day that I want to write down before I go to bed but there isn’t always enough time. I have three different blogs at the moment. One to record my dreams (I sometimes get useful information from them), my autism blog and another blog on my website which is basically a diary.

Although I love writing, I often struggle with the technicalities, mostly spelling and grammar. I haven’t ever analysed the language I use when I speak but I think if I did it would show the same problems to do with grammar. The good thing about writing of course is that you can edit it afterwards. The process of editing my own writing has been a good experience in that it has highlighted for me the different ways that autistic people use language.

I remember picking up a book my Temple Grandin one in WHSmith; it was about birds. I was really excited as I admire her a lot, also I like birds and now I knew she liked birds too. I read a few pages and noticed straight away the similarities with my own writing. There was an overuse of clichés and a repetition of particular words and phrases (I think this related to problems with grammar). Her sentences didn’t flow; they felt disjointed. I was pretty stunned. I had thought my difficulties with language were peculiar to me (I didn’t know much about autism at the time). Now I realised they weren’t.

In my writing there is the same disjointed feeling. My sentences work on their own, but they don’t fit very well together. There is a rhythm lacking in my written work that is similar to the rhythm lacking in my speech. It sounds jagged and jumpy when you read it. I think that’s what I must sound like when I speak.

I remember a poetry teacher picking me up on this once and telling me I should try using more conjunctives in my writing, which I try to do. I have a list of them on a post-it-note stuck to my laptop. My writing goes through a lot of editing before I consider it finished as I want to make it sound as naturalistic as possible and I think I do a good job, for an autistic person that is.

The second major problem I have language is grammar. I have always found grammar difficult. Fortunately or unfortunately, the only grammar I came across at school was in my French and German lessons. I was mystified but I too embarrassed to put my hand up and ask what words like ‘past participle’ meant. My classmates seemed to have worked out the rules for themselves, or maybe they were getting extra tuition at home.

I don’t seem to have this inbuilt understanding that other people have. I learnt to speak and write by memorising phrases. When I was child I didn’t speak till very late. I’d started speaking by the time I got to school but half the time the teachers couldn’t understand me. Their solution was to give me elocution lessons (it was a private girls school). Really though, I should have been seen by a speech therapist.

My Dad told me that the first sentence he heard me say was ‘Put a sock in it.’. He was driving and me and my sister were in the back of the car. She was talking away, and me, who hardly ever spoke came out with this phrase. My Dad said he cracked up, it was so funny. I find it funny when I think about it, but I doubt I saw the humour at the time. The phrase is one my Dad used a lot, I was just copying him. I think this is how I learnt to speak; by memorising phrases, Which is why it took me longer than if I’d understood the rules. I still do this now as an adult. If I’ve been watching a film or something on television and I hear phrases I like I will repeat them to myself and then excitedly wait for an opportunity to impress people with them.

I think both characteristics of autistic writing (it’s disjointedness and the repetition of words and phrases) are related to the way we use memorised phrases (which we do because grammar is difficult for us). If you are using phrases you’ve memorised to write with then you are bound to end up repeating them. You will have your favourite phrases you use often. Cliches are memorable and you will use them more often than most people because it saves you from trying to phrase something yourself. Your writing won’t flow very well either, it may sound a bit like someone has cut up a magazine and glued sentences together from different articles. However, if you are aware of these issues and you have as good ear for literature I think you should still be able to write something pretty decent.

Relationships

I’ve just read Chapter Five of Victoria Bigg’s book ‘Caged in Chaos’. It contains lots of tips to help you improve your social skills. I was really surprised when I got to this chapter. I thought social difficulties were something only autistic people suffered from, but dyspraxic people have these same problems. Also dyspraxic people have the same honest disposition that autistic people have. This made me think the two traits must be linked, then I realised they are actually parts of the same trait. The social function has many filters for adjusting facts to make sure we are acceptable to others. Take away this function and you are left with a very honest person.

The social skills Biggs discusses include; eye contact, being able to detect sarcasm, pronunciation, taking language literally, style of speech, body language, facial expressions, humour, small talk, social etiquette. All things autistic people have problems with. She mentions autistic people and says that we also have these problems but that we seem to prefer being loners anyhow. This made me realise that it wasn’t the lack of social skills that made me anti-social, this is just an obstacle I have to get over when I need to be sociable. There must be something else about autistic people that makes us less desirous of having social interaction.

Then I remembered a short story I wrote for a creative writing class that the teacher had written ‘Relationships?’ in big red letters at the top of it. The story I had written was about a family. Although I had drawn realistic characters and created a plot, I hadn’t shown how the characters got on or what they thought of each other, I had failed to show the relationships between them. I wrote this story three years ago, before I was diagnosed with autism. I had written other short stories before this one, but they had either been about a couple, or people falling in love, or where monologues - basically situations where group dynamics where not an issue. I could talk about one relationship between two persons, but if I was writing about a group I was clueless - worse than that I didn’t even realise I was clueless.

Relationships become much more complicated in a group. It’s no longer just a questions of whether two people share the same interests or get on. I shall give you an example. (This is also to show how much I have learnt since I wrote my above short story!). It is a plot outline for a short story with four people - a single mum with one daughter and two sons:

The daughter is an insecure girl and is afraid son no.1 who is doing better at school than she is will become the favourite sibling. She works hard helping her mother around the house in order to win her affection. Son no.2, sees what is happening and thinks he would like to stir things up a bit more. He begins complaining about son no.1 being lazy and never doing his fair share around the house. The daughter realises she has an ally and joins in. Mother catches on and soon son no.1, through no fault of his own, becomes a victim of bullying in his own home. He becomes very unhappy. Over the space of a year the situation escalates to the point where he takes an overdose of paracetamol. Nobody understands why. The family say he was a loner.

This might sound like a simple example to you if you are NT - but three years ago I wouldn’t have been able to write the above outline because I wasn’t asking the right questions, e.g. how I thought they might react to each other. In my short stories I had been presenting the world from an autistic point of view. My characters were honest, they never tried to manipulate each other and they weren’t constantly having an emotional crisis. Relationships like the ones in my imaginary family, are complicated because people were being manipulative and deceitful, and basically dishonest - although not all to the same degree, dishonesty can range from a little white lie to committing a crime.

Relationships for autistic people are difficult. We often forget people aren’t always going to be honest like ourselves, also our lack of social ability means people misunderstand us and we misunderstand them. We don’t see the complicated relationships that are forming in a group which can also lead to us ’putting our foot in it’. Writing about relationships for me then, is more difficult for me than it is for my NT classmates because I’m not writing from my personal experience as they are but from my observations of other people. They are NT people writing about relationships between NT people. I am an AC person trying to write about relationships between NT people.

Now I can work out relationships between people do it in fiction, I need to apply it to real life. Celebrity Big Brother is on at the moment, it has just started, the celebs went in tonight. There are a few big names in there, people even I recognise and one lesbian rapper I don’t, but she seems nice, like a mini Mel C. I watched the show afterwards were Davina speaks to members of the public and gets their take on the housemates. They showed some of the comments on twitter about BB. People were speculating about who was going to get with who, who will have a fight with who, what roles people were going to play in the house.

I realised that none of these questions had occurred to me. I had simply been watching the housemates go in, and trying to decide whether I thought they were nice people or not and whether I would trust them. I wasn’t thinking in terms of relationships.

I think the key to being able to work out these relationships is about being able to see multiple points of view at the same time. Autistic people, as you’re probably tired of hearing me say, only see from one point of view - their own. Maybe this is why I spend so much time alone. You don’t miss what you never had, i.e. if I don’t have a brain with a social function able to see different points of view I can forget that there is social world out there. I’m pretty much the same person around other people as I am when I’m alone. As I don’t think in terms of relationships I don’t go out looking for them. That’s not to say I don’t get lonely, I still have the desire for human contact, maybe not as often as most NT people but still, it’s there. Which I think is pretty amazing considering the stress it causes me and the countless bad experiences I’ve had.

Speech

If you listen to autistic people speaking you will notice they usually speak in a serious, monotonous voice. When I talk I try to inject some variety into the tone of my speech, it doesn’t always work, but I try. There is a similar difference between NT men and NT women. An NT woman’s speech is much more intonated than an NT man’s speech. If I were a man I would feel more comfortable speaking in my serious, monotonous voice; but I’m a woman, and people have expectations of me based on my gender. I think this is why my speech is not so stereotypical of an autistic person (most autistic people are male). I try hard to add colour to my speech, I probably sound a bit strange, but that’s better than sounding boring.

Another thing I do when I speak is pause a lot, at strange moments. I’m not doing this to create emphasis on particular words, or because I’m thinking hard about what I want to say because it’s so important. I do this because I’ve come to a word that I need to think about in order to pronounce. If I’m unsure how a word should sound I will repeat it in my head a couple of times before saying it. This isn’t just with words that have lots of syllables. If I’m tired or under stress simpler words can also cause me trouble. Sometimes it’s comes down to a lack of confidence; I think I‘m going to go wrong when I‘m not, so I pause, bracing myself for the next phrase.

Often while I’m pausing and thinking, there’s a bit of lip smacking or lip chewing going on. This is just a bit of limbering up. I’m reassuring myself my lips are there and working okay. My lips you see are a bit of hazy area; I sometimes forget where they are(and spill my drinks down myself), and they feel very strange, dead almost. I suppose I don’t know where they are because I can’t feel them. I think that’s why I touch my lips a lot and why I chew on them, just to create a sensation.

I think it’s a muscular thing. When I say a difficult word, for example ’pronunciation’, the movement I have to make with my lips feels odd; as if I’m doing it for the first time and the muscles in my lips aren’t used to the movement. It’s feels a bit like when you’ve overworked a muscle, you try to do something else and it doesn’t want to cooperate. It’s a bit like that (minus the shaking and tiredness).

If I’m not concentrating on my speech while I’m talking then my words will come out a bit slurred, and I’ll miss the beginnings or the endings off words. Sometimes I won’t finish a sentence but leave the listener to complete it themselves, to save myself the work of pronouncing the missing words. This sounds like extreme laziness but this is because you haven’t experienced the mental effort required for me to enunciate my words correctly.

I have to concentrate on each word to make the correct noises come out. Of course if I’m concentrating on making my lips move then that’s less time I have to concentrate on what it is I’m trying to say. I would have to have prepared it in advance, which you can’t do if your having a conversation with someone.

I can’t copy accents either. This isn’t a major obstacle in my life but it does mean I’ll never be very good at foreign languages. I’ve always been in awe of anyone who has mastered a foreign language. I did French and German for GCSE, but they were hard work and I knew I’d be rubbish at them if I tried doing either at A ‘level’.

I learnt these languages by memorising phrases. Grammar is very tricky for me, and similarly are the rules that govern the pitch and tone of language. Grammar at least I can take a stab at, but pitch and tone are much more difficult, there’s no apparent logic. I had a boyfriend who could do a good welsh accent. One day he said ‘I’ve got a letter see, from my mother’; it was a line from a television show. For some reason this stuck in my head. My brain must have been having one of it’s non-autistic moments. But I remembered it and have never forgotten it since. I can’t say anything else in a welsh accent, just this line.

I have a twin sister who is very good at accents and she also had many boyfriends. From about the age of fifteen I don’t think she has ever been single. She went with boyfriends from various parts of the country. She had a boyfriend from Newcastle for a while, and for the time she was going out with him she also had a Newcastle accent. We used to joke that her accent would changed whenever she got a new boyfriend. I’ve noticed as well that her accent changes slightly when she changes jobs. People in groups often create little phrases and nuances to their speech which are peculiar to that group. It’s a way of bonding. My sister has very good social skills. Which is fortunate for her because she does a lot of stuff that upsets people, but she always seems to manage to smooth things over.

Triad of Impairments - Social Ability

Social ability is one of the triad of impairments which affects autistic people. It doesn’t really tell you much though. It’s very vague. When I tell people that being autistic means I’m not good with people, they don’t seem to take me very seriously. They think, So? That’s not such a terrible thing to suffer with. I have a friend who’s very shy. Or they think it’s something that’s fixable. That I can be taught how to get on with people better, if I just came out of my shell and gave it a go. Well, I tried for 34 years to give it a go before I got a diagnosis and figured out why I was never going to be like other people.

Edgar Schneider says in his book ‘Living The Good Life with Autism’ that the emotional deficit is the most significant element of autism. He has Asperger’s Syndrome. I thought about how not understanding emotions relates to social interaction and realised my lack of understanding of my own emotions, probably explains my lack of understanding of others.

If you have had conversations with Autistic people you have probably noticed that they tend to speak a monotonous, serious voice. I say they, because most of the time I’m aware of this and try to speak with a variety of tone. People who know me might disagree with this. I know it sometimes comes out sounding strange, and maybe I sound more serious than I think.

The problem is that the variety of tone in an NT person’s speech is created by emotions. A lot of speech is simply about communicating how we feel. If I’m not feeling anything when I meet a person (note this isn’t any judgement on that person) I might try and fake some with a few pleasantries or more likely I’ll start talking about something serious i.e. something factual that doesn’t involve this emotional chit chat. Perhaps autistic people come across as serious because when we talk to people we tend to talk about factual, serious stuff. Maybe that’s why I watch so much comedy when I’m alone, like comedy is a counter-balance.

The simplest emotion to communicate is I’m happy to see you. Simply talking to someone can communicate that you like that person. Hence not talking to people can be read as meaning you don’t like a person. I have offended many people in my life simply by not talking. It took me a long time to work out what I was doing that was offending people. I would think to myself, I haven’t done anything to harm this person, why are they being horrible?

This lack of social reciprocity has its basis in the lack of shared emotional experiences. Shared emotional experiences enables people to bond. Without these, even faking a few pleasantries can sound insincere. Also I have become more distant as I’ve got older. I don’t try to fit in so much, most of my experience with people has taught me to be wary.

My naivety meant I was easily deceived and mislead. Now I am aware of this, when I do have interaction with people, this is what I am thinking about. There is little room for enjoyment when all your attention is focused on deciphering what people are saying to you and checking it for possible innuendos, hints, insults and deception. I tend to operate a wait and see policy with people these days. People always end up revealing themselves eventually.

Emotions can be painful and uncomfortable. I wonder sometimes if like physical pain, people have different thresholds to emotional pain. My emotions seem super sensitive. Another good reason for avoiding interaction with people. I often shield my eyes in the cinema if I’m watching an emotional scene. Often these are moments I consider awkward, or embarrassing. I can’t bear for the other person (even though I’m aware they are actors) to be made to look foolish. I get a similar feeling when going over a conversation I’ve had and realise someone was making fun of me, it really is painful. I can’t watch soap operas because of the constant emotional tension, there is always a crisis happening, people shouting, fighting, crying.

My emotions are a bit like my other sensory issues. For example my hearing, sometimes I don’t hear anything, other times the smallest noise seems very loud. The same with my emotions, sometimes I can’t bear to recall an awkward situation without feeling very upset, other times I can see a person crying and I don’t feel anything. I remember when my granddad died, I was only young, but while my sisters began crying out loudly, I ran to the other end of the room to get away from all the noise. I don’t remember being upset, even though I liked my Granddad, I remember his lovely smiley face. I think we’d have got on.

I think emotions go through a similar process to other physical sensations. There must be a part of the brain that receives a signal from the nervous system, which I guess must also have something to do with our emotions as well as physical sensations, and then part of our brain decides how big or small the sensation should be. I’m just guessing, but I don’t think it’s as simple as saying, I’ve grazed my knee and I immediately feel the appropriate amount of pain. Your brain is mediating all the time. Which takes me back to my inability to make decisions and prioritise, because I can’t measure how important something is. Or can’t decide how much I like something. In a similar way my brain can’t decide how important an emotion should be and how much pain or pleasure should be attached to it.

Being able to make good decisions is dependent on having good information. If the information my decision maker is receiving is inaccurate, it is going to be difficult to make decisions regardless of how well my decision maker is functioning.

The Triad of Impairments - Imagination

All people with autism share an impairment in the following three areas; language, social interaction and imagination. These are known as the ‘triad of impairments’ which affects all people with autism. This triad of impairments describes what you will observe if you meet someone with autism. They don’t really tell you what is going on inside the autistic person’s head. They don’t tell you why an autistic person struggles with language, or talking to people or why they lack of imagination. By the way, I’m autistic, but I went to art college, I’ve done creative writing courses, film making courses. There’s no problem with my artistic imagination.

I think what they really mean is that autistic people prefer routine and don’t like change. There is little imagination in how I live on a daily basis. I tend to eat the same foods (I don’t like going food shopping, I can never decide what I want.). I tend to wear the same clothes over and over even though I have draws busting with other items (I certainly don’t follow fashion). These are just a few examples.

What they show though is the difficulty I have in making decisions, even about little things. In my head there is no difference between big and little, I will spend as much time deciding what to wear as I will choosing where I want to live. This inability to make decisions means I tend to fall into routines because they don’t require decision making. I read somewhere there is a part of the brain that contains the executive function, this is the part of the brain that makes decision, I think it’s on the right side of the brain, in the frontal lobe. (Interestingly this is where I used to get my migraines.) In autism this part of the brain develops differently.

We can only make decisions through a process of prioritising, (attaching different degrees of importance to each option) and on the basis of whether we like something or not (another problem I have, I find it difficult to choose what to wear or eat because I have difficulty deciding if I like something or not).

So in summary, a lack of imagination comes down to a preference for routine, which comes down to a difficulty in making decisions, which comes down to not being able to decide how important something is and whether we like it or not. These are two separate skills. Sometimes decisions involve both, e.g. do I prefer fried eggs to boiled eggs? This means deciding if I like something and then deciding how much I like it. There are situations where my preference is taken out of the picture, like if I’m at work and I have two jobs of a similar nature to do then I have to decide which is the most important.

I’m having difficulty thinking of a situation when I only having to decide if I like something or not. It’s always do I like this, or do I prefer this. To know if you like something is to know yourself. I think I have the same difficulty knowing if I like something as I do trying to get in touch with my feelings.