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.