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.

Stubbornness

Autistic people have a reputation for being stubborn. I have problems with this word. Firstly it a judgement one person makes on another person. Nobody ever describes themselves as stubborn. Secondly I have difficulty defining what it means exactly. I don’t know what a stubborn person is like, I can’t picture them in my mind and I don’t think I’ve ever described another person as being stubborn.

If I was pushed I would say someone is being stubborn if they refuse to change their mind about something when the evidence is that they are in the wrong. But it still seems like a bizarre idea. I only believe things I think are true, I’m not going to purposefully be obstructive and pretend to believe something I know isn’t true. Maybe being stubborn is simply having different beliefs to other people, and what’s wrong with that? We all have to find the truth for ourselves.

I’ve been told by my family I’m stubborn many times. Most of the occasions though, which they would describe as examples of me being stubborn, are in fact examples of their inability to see where I’m coming from. Being fussy about my food, not wanting to wear particular items of clothing, these were all times when they were misinterpreting my sensory problems. This wasn’t me being obstructive, this was me being misunderstood.

There were other occasions when I just wouldn’t believe my parents were telling me the truth. I believed something else and nobody was going to persuade me to think anything else. My arguments may have sounded very strange to an NT person, but their logic was faultless according to my autistic brain. However, I have come to accept that I live in a world created by NT people, a world that doesn’t abide by set of rules, and there will be times when logic can’t help you!

I remember one instance when I was about six. My Mum and Dad told me I had a middle name that was ‘Ann’. But I didn’t believe them. Up to that point in time I had thought I had two names; Victoria Beeching. So when they tried to tell me my name was Victoria Ann Beeching, I was very dubious. How could I have not known my name for so long? I was convinced that what my family was saying was my middle name, was in fact just the word ’and’. I thought they must have misheard someone who had said my names where Victoria and Beeching.

At the time I was having elocution lessons because of my speech problems; I missed the ends and beginnings off words. Most of my lessons where spent repeating words and being told off for missing the ends off them. If your autistic you learn things by repeating them many times, the downside to this way of learning is that once you’ve got it entrenched it’s very difficult to undo it. So when my parents told me I had a middle name that was ‘Ann’, I thought they’d missed the end off the word ‘And’. I’d spent so many lessons being told off for not saying that word correctly my brain found it difficult to get away from this.

This is best example I can think of my stubbornness, and yet I don’t really think I was being stubborn. I can still remember how I felt at the time, and the logic I applied still seems reasonable for my age and understanding. Stubbornness isn’t just about believing you’re right, it’s about trusting other people to tell you the truth. And in my black and white world, either you trust someone or you don’t. You can’t trust people some of the time, and not at other times. You have to make a choice. An autistic person doesn’t have the ability to tell the difference between a person who is lying and a person who is telling the truth. If my family had been consistent and understanding of me maybe I’d have had an easier time trusting them.