Making the connections

I had a project in primary school and I can’t remember what the brief was. If I remember rightly I had a partner. I was massively into the Beatles so I had a vague idea around a Lennon McCartney duo, not that I’d figured out how that would work. So it turned out to be another one of those episodes where I felt rather inadequate among a class that seemed to have had a pretty good grasp of what they’d been asked to do. I didn’t have a clue.

I got plenty of remarks about being a dreamer in my school reports so maybe that was my problem; I just wasn’t present when instructions were given out. However I feel there was something else at work: I just wasn’t on the same wavelength. There is more to listening than imbibing words, everything needs translating and converting to understanding otherwise it’s just noise. You wouldn’t know you’d been barking up the wrong tree if the right tree wasn’t pointed out and just about everyone has done that, except some of us remember those mishaps too vividly and some of us just didn’t get it more often than others didn’t.

It wasn’t until I was in my forties that I began to understand what autism was. I thought it was fundamentally about being averse to social interaction until I learned that someone with autism needs to be touched and included as much as anyone else. Its really about social conventions, consent and the person’s connection with their environment.

Have you ever had someone give you coffee when you thought it was tea – or the other way round? It tastes awful. Have you ever jumped out of your skin for no apparent reason when someone touches you? This is because you are in different spaces and your mind is having to adjust rapidly to make the right connection. Someone with autism is having to make these adjustments continually because their brain doesn’t have the bridges many of us take for granted – most of the time.

It’s like teaching higher maths to someone who doesn’t understand algebra. You might as well be speaking Arabic to someone whose only language is English. Conventions are extremely complicated so it’s hardly surprising that someone who doesn’t have an understanding of them, hard wired, should find physical interaction strange and fearful.

I’m not suggesting that I’m in any way autistic or that we are all on the spectrum – even off the scale, it’s that autistic traits and behaviours are common to us all even if the root cause is different. We all occupy a unique space, our brains are wired differently and what can seem obvious to one person can be incomprehensible to another.

While personality disorder is it’s own thing we all have our own personality disorders that we might not be able to fix even if we can create coping mechanisms. The problem a person with autism has is your problem because it’s up to you to understand where they’re coming from. Do you remember as a kid, an adult telling you they couldn’t understand why you behaved the way you did? How many times did you amend your behaviour in order to please adults, assuming you were wrong even though your behaviour was perfectly reasonable given the conditions?

On the other hand you persisted in unreasonable behaviour because you didn’t understand – or even perceive – the triggers. Children learn through repetition, through singular successes and multiple failures. Success should really be measured in how well you failed rather than how little you succeeded. My life has been defined by my dislike of symmetry. I’m averse to conclusions and resolutions. I love sustained and open chords. I don’t want you to tell me the answer, I want you to explain how you got there and the conflicts you couldn’t resolve. As a child I used to wander off but for no particular reason. I don’t believe I was looking for something, I was simply wanting to be in my own space where conflicts didn’t need a resolution.

The term ‘autistic’ is useful because it describes a condition that has nothing to do with personality but sometimes appears as though it does. The condition lends itself to isolation and, in some respects, independance. If you contrasted someone with Downs Syndrome to another with autism you might conclude that the former was an extrovert while the latter was an introvert but that would simply be a truism that reflected their condition. While I respect Myers-Briggs as a useful tool I feel it falls into that same trap. If you take the test you will fall into one of their prescribed types but its a kind of reverse engineering rather than a critical analysis.

By all metrics I know of, I would be classed as an introvert but that only acts a lens, it doesn’t really help me figure out how best to find and optimise my place in society and the universe. What does help me is understanding what it means to be autistic, a woman, a person of colour, someone with a physical handicap… Discovering that sweaty feet smell cheesy because its the same bacteria producing the smell, helped me see other connections. The isolation I feel and self impose has similar root causes even if the circumstances are different. So as well as the negative aspect of isolation I can see positivity in why someone with autism would self isolate. Its a form of protection that’s exaggerated when almost all of your interaction with your environment is strange but it gives you space to parse the information. And if its your MO it can give you a unique perspective that can be an invaluable contribution to society.

My own inadequacies, eccentricities, trials and tribulations, failures and missed opportunities have made me what I am. As I become more and more comfortable in my own skin I can call upon gifts I’ve accumulated and was born with. I can distinguish between traits that cause me to act in certain ways and habits that I really need to hack. We need to come to terms with lives that follow the same path but never converge. Becoming whole isn’t about resolving differences but about making positive connections and, as in a train track, the connections are not made along the line of travel but perpendicular to it.