This is the best description of what it feels like to have AS I have read to date.
http://home.att.net/~ascaris1/abnormal.html
NT=neuroypical -- person not on the autism spectrum
How Abnormal Am I?
Every now and then,. I start to think that I am really quite close to normal; that I am only a half-step away from the NTs that usually seem so strange to me. While I can clearly remember evidence of my own weirdness in the past, sometimes I begin to doubt that it really was that different. It's only natural, I suppose; my own way of thinking and of relating to the world, and to others, is normal to me. I have always been as I am now; I know no other way.
Of course, being the analytical being that I am, I have tried to determine why sometimes I think this way. I have noticed that these bouts of thinking that I am normal always follow periods of time where I have kept myself secluded. I am by nature reclusive, and I sometimes spend a week or more in my apartment, without any reason to leave. Absent the basis for comparison with normal people, it seems that I begin to lose sight of the differences. I begin to forget that the pacing (which I do for several hours daily... I think best when I am pacing), the flapping and rocking, the noises I make, the hours spent staring at the patterns in a brick wall, even the tendency to seclude myself for days at a time, are not what most people do. It seems really odd to me that these things are not normal, because they sure feel normal to me.
Other times, though, my difference is less obscure. One of these incidents was fairly recent... my brother's wedding, which was a week ago today as I write this. Any environment where there is a strong social component makes the differences show, and the relative formality exacerbates that effect. In the pre-wedding dinner party, which was held in a horribly noisy bistro, I was left with my fingers in my ears, trying not to overload. I got some Kleenex and stuffed it into my ears, which helped a bit. There were strange people all around me, and that had my nerves on edge. The motion of the waiters and other staff members, which would normally be tolerable, became in itself a stressor. Not long into the event, I began to lose focus, and sat there staring at the table in front of me. When the other attendees tried to engage me in friendly banter, it jolted me back into the world in which I have to interact with others. I have written before about the sheet of glass that seems to exist between myself and the rest of the world, as if the other people were nothing more than images on a television. When I am comfortable, the glass wall seems thinner, sometimes almost imperceptible. When I am overloaded or otherwise stressed, though, the gulf between my inner world and the real world enlarges. That effect was in full force that night. Though I could clearly see the people and the world around me, it somehow seemed obscure or dark... not visually, but in a way that I cannot explain.
The wedding on the next day was not too awful. It was a relatively casual affair, which was certainly helpful for me. I find it intolerable to wear clothes other than those I wear on a day-to-day basis. I cannot tolerate shirts with buttons, ties, or jackets, and in the few cases when I have been coerced into such awful garments, I have spent the whole time obsessing on the clothes. I feel something similar to self-consciousness from wearing clothes outside of my normal ones, even when I am alone. I get the sensation that the clothes are like a vise, crushing me with their very presence. In middle school and high school, I wore jeans and T-shirts every day, the latter of which had gone out of style years prior. I knew that the shirts were contributing to the perception of me as a "nerd," and did nothing to help the abuse I recieved at the hands of my classmates. Still, I would not change. The stress of the change in clothes was too much to overcome. I'm still that way today.
After the wedding, we all drove en masse, procession-style, to the restaurant where we would be meeting (in lieu of a real reception). Unfortunately, the other drivers did not cooperate as fully as I would have liked. Some people that were not part of the wedding party got in between cars in the caravan, and toward the end of the trip, several of the members of the group got out of line. This was instant overload for me... I was in a state between panic and rage. This was not how it was supposed to be going. I was a mess by the time we got to the restaurant... enraged, and in a state of meltdown. I ended up kicking the hell out of my car's left rear tire.
It took me quite a while to begin to adapt to being in the restaurant. This time, I had my immediate family members surround me, so that I did not have to be close to any strangers again. This restaurant was much more dignified, with a much quieter ambience. Still, the pressure of being in the group served to keep the fight-or-flight response from abating fully.
For the next few days, I spent most of my time sleeping. It took quite a bit of time to recover fully from such traumatic events, as it always does. The informal dinner parties seemed to have been fun for everyone else, but they were a nightmare for me. I knew they would be, and I had no intention of attending either of them initially. The day of the wedding coincided with that of the local autistic adult group meeting, and I had planned to go to that rather than the wedding. I was not particularly concerned with the expectation that everyone else had that I would go to my brother's wedding; I did not want to go, and I had every intention of skipping the event, until my mother successfully pressured me into going. She initially tried to use guilt to achieve that effect; she enumerated the various nice things my brother had done for me. That had no effect on me; when people do nice things for me, I feel absolutely no compulsion to do nice things for them that I would not otherwise do. If I do something nice for someone, it is because I want to do so, not because of a sense of obligation. Similarly, arguments that I should do something because "it is what you do" or because "it is the right thing" do nothing to convince me. They may be what NTs do, but I am not NT. Social obligation is not something I have ever felt, nor is it something that I can really understand. I sometimes go with the flow for one reason or another, but it is a mystery to me as to why I should do something just because others expect it.
It is times like those that I become most aware of how different I am. If I could become NT for a day or two, and see the world through the filter of a normal brain, I might never begin to think I was normal-ish again. I think there are probably a lot of things that appear different to people with autistic brains, but there really is no way to compare them to the experience of normality when one has not had that experience. I have never had the experience of feeling like one of a group, or of fitting in. No matter what the group, I have never really felt like I was one of them. I always feel like a zebra among horses. Even if I do my best NT emulation ever, to the point that no one in the group (besides me) knows that I am different, I still feel like I do not belong. The NT emulation is an act; my own innate behavioral set is a lot different than the NT behaviors I have been taught. Relating to, and interacting with, other humans is not innate to me, necessary as it is. It feels like I am acting whenever I am interacting with people. It's really difficult to describe the sensation. It feels like I am "faking" being a member of a group, even if I really AM a part of that group. Even when I am with other autistics, like when I am at one of my autistic adult support meetings, I do not feel truly like I am one of the group. There is this sense that I am the only one that is really alive... even though the others talk and move and interact, they all still seem, on a rudimentary level, like objects. I know I am not an object, so I do not feel any real connection with them. Cognitively, I know they are all organisms as I am, but it does not "feel" that way.
To a neurotypical, it may sound positively horrible to read that I have never (and probably never will) felt as if I fit in with any group. Fortunately, I do not feel the need to fit in, belong, or be one of a group... so it is not bad that I do not feel like I do not fit in. I do not want to fit in. I don't even have a concept of what that would really be like, and I really don't care (except out of curiosity) to find out what it is like. I do not miss those abilities I never had. I feel no remorse for not being normal, or for being me. Normal people often carry with them the assumption that all people that are abnormal should want to be normal. I definitely do not want to be normal; though my neurology has definitely made my life harder and often less pleasant than it would be if I were normal, I would not trade it for anything. In fact, since I discovered why I am as I am, I have, in effect, given myself permission to be more autistic. I have sometimes thought that I would like to reclaim some of my autistic traits that have been trained out of me.
When I was young, I tended to walk with a pronounced forward lean, shuffling, with most of the weight on the front of my feet. I did not swing my arms; more often than not, I would put my hands at chest level as I walked. This was the most comfortable and natural for me. If I was not wearing shoes, I would walk on tip-toe. I remember my mother teaching me how to walk normally. It took a while, but I learned to walk more normally. I have ever since, although I never stopped walking on tip-toes entirely.
I never thought much about the way I used to walk until I found that this odd gait is quite common among my kind. Since I have embraced my autistic-ness, I have lamented the loss of the gait that was normal for me. That autistic walk was a part of me... it was real, genuine. I do not like that I was trained to walk differently, just because my walk was abnormal. I have told a number of people that I would like to get that gait back, as a way of re-affirming that part of me. My mother, NT that she is, cannot understand why I would want to become more abnormal. I give her a lot of credit for not trying to fundamentally change who I was in my childhood, but still she seems to think that the parts of me that have been normalized are good... like the abnormalities were problems that have now been corrected. Other people on the spectrum, though, generally understand why I would want to reclaim that part of me, even if they do not themselves wish to undo any of the normalization that has been done to them.
I have tried walking as I used to, and I can't help but wonder if that is not fake. While the way that I walked as a child was once normal, now it is not, and I cannot help but feel like I am playing a role when I make a special effort to be autistic like that. There is a difference between not curtailing my innate behaviors and trying to recreate those that have long since been buried under years of NT shellac. One is just me having permission to be me; the other is trying to mold myself into something else, and that is not something that I would normally do. I am just me... I have nothing to prove to anyone. One thing I have found, though, is that walking with my elbows bent, hands at the sternum, feels much more natural and comfortable than the hands-at-sides way that I have been doing for more than twenty years. I also noticed that I do tend to walk on tip-toes a lot now. I am not sure if I do it more than years ago, or if I am just paying more attention.
Even with all of this, I still wonder sometimes if I really am different than others. I can look at all I have written here and realize that it is described in the books as abnormal, but to me, it is sometimes hard to comprehend the scope of that abnormality. While there are a lot of resources that aim to educate normal people about how autistics think (this web site included), there really are no resources at all that serve to explain to autistics how normal people think. I had to figure out what normality is by reading the texts about autism and working backwards, and by careful observation of normal people. Obviously, the data in the texts about normality is rather sparse; they universally assume a knowledge of normality, and concentrate only on describing the abnormal. I know that I am abnormal because the books describe my traits as such, but have only a fuzzy view of what it really is like to be normal. Thus, while I know I am abnormal, I tend to think that the abnormality is rather slight, given my frame of reference, and the paucity of data about normality.
As I mentioned, I tend to suspect that I am not all that abnormal when I have been reclused at home, in perfect solitude, for some time. Perhaps when I am not able to constantly refresh my memory as to the weirdness of NTs by observing them, I revert to that fuzzy view, of knowing I am different, but not HOW different, or different from what, gained through reading the texts. One of these days, one of us is going to have to study NTs in the way that we autistics have been studied, and write about those enigmatic NTs. I wonder if any NTs would consent to be research subjects in the way that so many of us have.
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