It's not that I don't desire social contact. I'm positively dying for it! I can be enthusiastically social. Trouble is, I can also be inexplicably dense, a bull in the chinashop of polite conversation.
Here, I don't have to wait my turn. The turns are meted out by the forum. Here, I don't have to worry about how nasal my voice gets, or whether I talk in a monotone. The message flies free of so many trappings, and the keyboard becomes the grand equalizer of social cues.
But dang if it doesn't get depressing to just sit in front of a computer, often talking with people who bitterly disagree with me. If I've published here less lately, it's because I've been working on something else.
KosAbility is a community diary series posted at 5 PM ET every Sunday and 5PM ET on Wednesday. It's a gathering place for people living with disabilities, our families and friends, and interested others. Volunteer diarists offer specific knowledge and insight on a topic they know intimately. We invite you to comment on what you've read and/or ask general questions about disabilities, share your own knowledge, tell bad jokes, post photos, or rage about the unfairness of their situation. Our only rule is to be kind; trolls will be spayed or neutered.
Our diarist this week is: Stephen Daugherty
Kosabilities, of course, is about disabilities, but sometimes I prefer to call Aspergers Syndrome a "condition". I don't do this out of political correctness, because damn it, there really are some disabling aspects to this disorder. I do it because with those disabling aspects come the enabling ones, and in many cases the abilities feature parts of the disability in more benign settings.
One example, I would say, is my focus. Like many folks with Autistic disorders, my focus is incredibly intense, and I can get absorbed in what I'm doing at the moment.
Absorbed, all too often, at the expense of what I might be supposed to be doing! Important things get forgotten, precious time gets wasted... that is, if what I'm focused on is inappropriate. If not, it's a gift. If that focus is getting something useful done, my intense attention is almost a super-ability. If not, then it's a focus that disables me from carrying out things as normal, as intended. Our abilities and disabilities can be two sides of the same coin, different aspects to the same neurological characteristic. In understanding the sometimes astounding feats and test performance of folks with Aspergers Syndrome, this is helpful to understand, especially when you ask that crucial question: How could people so smart do such stupid things, like they sometimes do? Why don't these people understand what they did wrong in these social situations, if they're so smart? Why the mental blocks, why the tendency to flake out, get carried away, off task, or be absent minded?
Well, I think from my position, it helps to point out that whatever I'm doing whatever I'm focusing on, it's crowding out just about everything else, operating at dead center in my motivational universe. If you remember Curly's statement about what the meaning of life was- that is, "one thing, and that's what you have to figure out.", that's the focus of somebody like me, carried out to absurd extremes. People are regularly shocked at my inability to prioritize. One would think that a person like me would figure out that one thing was as important as another, but that's sort of an intellectual distinction, compared with the compelling rush of purpose that the task at hand might bring about. I HAVE to finish the comment, refute each one of the points. I've GOT to find the crucial bit of data that proves my argument. Everything else just fades away. That's not to say that I wouldn't feel sorry about it, or horrified about it, or stressed out when I snap out of it, but that's when I'm out of my own little world!
Asynchrony is a useful word to describe a big part of the disability. People with normal brains, or neurotypicals as some folks on the spectrum call them, have parts of their brain that help them synchronize themselves with others, to moderate their behavior in conversation, in ordinary social interaction, in all the social circles they need to follow. It's also what helps moderate their behavior. People care about what other people think, to put it simply, and they behave accordingly much of the time.
By synchrony, I mean a shared set of conventions, codes of ettiquette, and other aspects of communication that allow people to understand one another, and be similar enough in their assumptions to make it easy for people to understand each other's messages. These moves the brain does are subtle, done in real time.
And to a certain extent, I'm not doing them, at least not subconsciously. I'm using more computational overhead to interact socially than you probably would. In fact, if I were to describe to you the efforts and the complex internal checks I have to use, you'd probably think I was overthinking things.
But you would be thinking wrong, through no fault of your own. You base your assumptions on what's normal for you.
I've got my own definition of normal, or at least my own perspective on what normal is. You've shaped your definition based on how your brain works, how social interactions go for you, how you've evolved in response to the rest of the world. I can't gratify you by doing the same thing you've done. I'd probably still get it wrong, at best come up with a crappy imitation.
The theory goes that failures of a set of neurons set to do just those kinds of things might be at fault. Let me suggest something here: malfunction can take many shapes. A person could be autistic, and socially awkward because not enough of the feel of a certain cue registers, or it could be because too much of it registers. A poorly nuanced, hyperresponsive social brain can be just as bad as a dulled, unresponsive one.
The inability to maintain synchrony with minimal effort is what's important in looking at the disorder, in dealing with its effects on the social life. Many times, people like me are just trying to fit in, same as everybody else. The response of some is to try and use the typical social bludgeons of mockery and abuse to get the errant lass or lad back in line, but I can tell you from bitter experience that this not only doesn't work, it makes things worse.
The person you're insulting will try to correct you. Or, they'll take the bullying to heart. Or they'll retreat to friendlier environs One way or another, all you'll really do is drive this person out, make everything that was bad worse. And if you stand by and let it happen? Others did in my case, and I can tell you that I won't know of your sympathies unless you step in and act on them.
A person with an Autism Spectrum will always be somewhat isolated, somewhat out of step. If you want to minimize their problems, don't cause them yourself. Look out for them. Reach out to them. Act as their adviser, their guide. I know it may be frustrating, but you're really helping to make that person's life better, and your own as well. I've heard in the past few years about people feeling awful about what was done, but that guilt doesn't erase anything. Those people have my forgiveness, but they should have made better choices in the first place, and let others learn that lesson by hard experience.
My hard experience, I feel, isolated me further. It took me from day to day interaction outside of school, and impoverished that source of up-to-date social information, and the guidance of friends on different matters. It forced me to get used to that kind of deprivation, and I retreated into a world of imagination (in a non-psychotic way, mind you) in order to deal with that pain. Whether it was the movies I watched or the books I read, or my own writing, I was seeking from inside, and from the media the interaction and learning I could not get from other, real people so readily.
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I escaped my hard experience by writing, by creating a world of my own, perhaps to fill in the empty spaces in the real world of my own I was in for so long.
I've had a vivid imagination since I was a kid, a strong ability to manipulate visual information in my head. I daydream with little effort, the images flowing like a movie, often in great detail. When I read a book, I also tend to fall into a state where the events that go on stream in a kind of internal movie.
My visual memory is strong, too. I can usually name a given movie, on walking into a room, within seconds of seeing the actors on screen, or even sometimes just listening to the dialogue. I used to see movies on a regular basis. I can remember much of what was in them, at least visually, with little effort.
Other facts and trivia have a tendency to stick. My mind sort of promiscuously associates things, so if I go to a reference source, like a dictionary, or Wikipedia, or something else, my brain starts pushing me to research more and more. There's a certain joy in learning things, in filling out the world, and it's not necessarily about things of worldshaking importance. I wouldn't say its necessarily about order, rather, I just feel very compelled to fill in the blanks, to take in information from the rest of the world in full bites, rather than the more manageable bits and pieces.
I read the manual, whether it's a car or a computer animation program. I like being thoroughly versed in things. When a doctor put me on Dexedrine in a prescription (I had been on Ritalin in the past), I researched book knowledge not only other psychoactive drugs in general, but their chemical structures as well, copying them down into a book. It's from there that I got strongly demystified about drugs. They kind of lose their glamour when you understand that most of what they do is just do bad imitations of the chemicals you already got in your brain. Forget being high on life, how about experiencing it, and getting the appropriate shading of brain chemicals that billions of years of evolution have bestowed on us?
In my writing, I didn't settle for something simple like just one land. I made up an entire world, complete with maps. The maps that I made even had their own system of cuneiform scripting labelled on them.
I won't bore you with the whole shebang. I'm not trying to plug my writing. What I am going to do is explain why I would think that was necessary, why I wouldn't simply do things the easy way.
Why Cuneiform? In part because it's a parallel world. Why would a parallel world, with a complete history all its own, have English as its language, or the Roman Alphabet, for that matter?
Well, why create the whole world? In part to get it over with. I wanted the sandbox built before I could feel comfortable playing in it.
Again, we go back to that compulsion to explore, to understand or realize things in great detail. There's a disadvantage to that, in terms of the time it takes to work such stuff out. There are certainly people who have worked faster than me at what I'm trying to get done. And I'm not going to cheapen their speed by claiming that they're doing worse than I am for that speed. I don't know that, I can't claim that. I probably read and enjoy plenty of stuff from those people.
Perhaps it's a sense of closure that I desire, a sense that the world that I write about extends beyond the margins of the screen or the scope of what's written on the page. I do happen to enjoy the richly detailed worlds of Lucas, Cameron, Jackson, Tolkien, Eddings, and many others like them. I want the worlds to wrap around me, the characters to have deep backstories and great character moments. Even imperfect attempts at it are enjoyable. I give people points for ambition, points for trying to go beyond the conventional.
Like I mentioned before, when I read a page, my imagination practically projects the movie between my ears, in a vivid sort of daydream. I look at some movies, though, and it seems to me that their vision of things falls far short. They just throw in some people with swords, or some special effects creatures (I don't take part in the whole "bad CGI" debate, as I remember even worse optical effects from my childhood.) and then expect people to fall over themselves in excitment.
There was a moment in Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers in Osgiliath, where the One Ring has overtaken Frodo, and he's gone into Kubrick Stare mode. He mounts the stairs to the top of the wall, and this Nazghul rises up on a fell beast in front of the mountain background. Watching that in the theatres, I called it the bookcover moment- that is, the moment where a movie finally felt equal to the imagination of what was promised on all those book covers you see in the stories, the dynamic composition, the complexity of the image.
Somebody in the movie Waking Life talked about "holy moments" (It's the part where the interviewers dissolve into clouds at the end.) talked about those moments of intimate connection. That's something that's valuable to me, something I want to induce in others, if I can. Despite everything, I don't want that world of my own to just be something that's only my own. I want to connect. I want to move people, and be moved by others. Perhaps I require more structure, more outside moderation to fit in the social network, but my difficulties do not stop me from desiring that connection, needing that connection.
My ambitions, professionally, are to finish a novel that I'm writing, and hopefully to make movies. I got a Telecommunication degree from Baylor for just such a purpose. I wanted to be the person who created such moments for others, as well as the person who experienced them himself.
Perhaps what I lack in social nuance, I wish to make up with intensity, like a starving man who wolfs down food, a thirsty man who gulps down water. My attempts to connect are not always graceful, and the appreciation for nuance and ambiguity a learned one, but still, I'm trying to connect. Loneliness and isolation are not feelings that only autistics like myself experience, but the isolation wraps around us much more easily, and we, sorry to say, welcome solitude much more readily. As much as we might want to connect, there is a point at which we yearn for the simplicity and predictability of time alone.
I still remember vividly the times in which a bad social situation turned to a humiliating incident, and it's hard not to feel justified in retreating back to familiar, controllable territory. If movies often have holy moments, then sometimes real life has the moments of sheer hell, unholy moments where things spin sickeningly out of control, and I'm left barely understanding what happened, or what I did to deserve the pain and suffering that follows.
My impulse was to create these worlds so that one day, others could share the same space of understanding as me, that one day others could find cool what I found cool, enjoy the things I enjoyed. The pity of it is that I really had to do this alone, for the most part. Other folks still see little of what I write. In part I'm not social enough to distribute it that well, to have the friends around that I can seek out opinions from. It's unfortunate, but even so, I keep on crafting my stories, mostly unseen.
We can create things, think of things by ourselves, for ourselves. Or we can share it with you, and we can help you learn to see the world through another, stranger set of eyes than your own. We live, we love, we hate, we laugh, we cry, we live our lives as intensely as you do. Reach out to us, help us. Let us open our hearts to the world. Make these excursions to other worlds in our imaginations a pleasant pastime instead of a desperate escape from a real world of pain and suffering.
Help more people avoid the kind of isolation I've faced, and maybe the world will profit for it. Society will not run out of people who think much like each other. It may, though, lack for the different point of view that as person not synchronized so closely to the rest of society might come up with.
Embrace the nerds and the dorks. Embrace the awkward and the stickish in the mud. You will help them make a better peace with society as a whole if you're not one of the people blocking them from the territory.