He says he attributes it to his autism, but maybe that isn't the cause at all. I'm not autistic, but I recognized what he was writing about. I have difficulty showing genuine emotions. My wife joking calls me Captain Holt (a reference to the stoic leader of the Brooklyn 99). Encounters with strangers are a draining experience involving a constant inner dialogue that sounds like am-dram director: "Emote more! Bigger smile! Deliver with eye contact! Now bring it down a notch. Act concerned by this revelation."
Consider social anxiety. Many autistic people suffer from it. One cause might be that they were bullied in childhood. But they were bullied because they were autistic.
You could argue that the cause is being bullied as a child, but you can also argue that the cause is autism. I'd say both are true, but as long as the solution is the same it doesn't really matter.
Unfortunately it's a bit more complicated than that in reality. Many high-functioning autistic people are often initially misdiagnosed with bipolar, borderline, ocd, add, narcissism, schizoid, etc, for example, because their symptoms appear the same. But the underlying causes, or internal mechanism can be quite different, and the same goes for solutions. On top of that, it's quite common for autistic people to have both autism and, say, ADD.
Personally I feel that we often spend too much time thinking about causes, perhaps because of the history of psychology. Causes are only relevant insofar that they require different solutions, and spending too much time dwelling on a cause can often itself become a problem.
Here is my understanding, after some extensive conversations with people in the same situation as the author.
In English one refers to a male as "him" and a female as "her". However, some people identify as "non-binary", which means that in their own internal self they so not feel that they are entirely male, or entirely female. As a result, they find it not quite right to be referred to as "him", but also not quite right to be referred to as "her".
So they prefer to be referred to in the gender-neutral "them".
If you are "traditionally aligned", if your personal self-identity matches the body your ghost[0] inhabits, this can be totally mystifying. Personally, I've come to accept that people are weird, and if someone says they want to be referred to as "they" and "them" then why not?
[0] "You are a ghost driving a meat covered skeleton made from stardust[1] riding a rock floating through space."
[1] Or nuclear waste - take your pick.
Edit: To the people downvoting this, it was intended to be a factual answer to a direct and reasonable question. I have no idea why you think this comment is inappropriate and deserves a downvote.
I have no personal experience of it, but I know people who have. As a result I've read a bit about it. It seems that people in these circumstances can be content with who they are, but the external pressures from society can be overwhelmingly unbearable.
I don't know how common it is, but you can look up the terms "non-binary" and "transgender" and find out more.
Again, personally, I think we should just let people get on with being who they are. Respect them for who they are and the work they do, and just stay the hell out of their personal lives. No business of mine.
In the spaces I frequent, it's becoming more common to introduce onesself by also introducing your preferred gender pronoun. "Hey, I'm Danielle, they/them." "Hi, I'm Mike, he/him." "Hi, I'm Sarah, she/her."
I like doing this because it's one small, simple way of welcoming those who might not otherwise feel accepted.
I haven't met anyone that has said that they consider themselves "non-binary", "transsexual", "transgender", or any of the other subtly different labels that they could use, but part of the current zeitgeist, especially within socially liberal-leaning circles, is to spread awareness of how diverse human sexuality is.
I don't think that there are really solid numbers for how different people identify themselves. The information would have to be self-reported, and since there would still be some social stigma attached in many places, I doubt that a survey would end up being very accurate.
I feel like we would've said that about gay people thirty years ago if we'd had the Internet we do today.
'
I live with one person who uses "they/them" and have lived with three others, one of whom identified as transgendered (as opposed to "gender queer). At the high school I worked at, we typically had a transgendered population of 1%-5%, but no one who used they/them--just one who used he/him/his and several that used she/her/hers. I think I've known more transgendered people than I've known CMU, Harvard, Stanford, and MIT grads combined, despite working in a tech startup and being the son of two CMU grads.
Yes, it's rare, but not as rare as graduating from Harvard, and it's definitely not just an Internet phenomenon. There are just a lot of areas where they don't feel welcome. They're real people in real life and they tend to congregate in places where they'll be treated as such. Right now that includes sections of the Internet, but also quite a few real life enclaves.
Again, by my understanding, the pronoun "it" carries the baggage of non-person-ness. "It" is used for things, not people. I'm happy to be corrected on this by people with personal experience.
The author of the article believes that their gender cannot be categorised as either male or female (hence a "non-binary" gender), so they prefer for others to refer to them using "they" and its inflected forms, rather than "he" or "she".
The singular "they" is already commonly used when the gender of a person is not known, so its extension into non-binary genders is quite sensible, in my opinion. Some others who regard themselves as a non-binary gender prefer invented pronouns such as "xe" or "ze", but I think expecting others to remember and use these is rather unrealistic, whereas "they" has the advantage of already having mainstream use in similar contexts.
Some people have a mental illness that makes them feel like their biological gender isn't the correct one. For some, they "feel like" the opposite gender. Others feel somewhere in between and extrapolate that to mean that there is a spectrum of genders, hence "non-binary".
Would this really be considered a mental illness? You can experience gender in many ways whilst remaining in good mental health. Gender identity is not always mapped directly to biological sex. It is much, much more than something you "feel like".
I am very far from Autistic but I think the whole idea of authentic feeling is rather fragile. I may generate appropriate responses very smoothly but I have no idea if they're authentic until much later. Mostly not. Mostly just what I know people need to see and hear.
I imagine an Autistic mind-adventurer who got inside my head would be very disappointed.
> I have no idea if they're authentic until much later.
Your emotional response about something can change over time as you process it. Thus your initial response can be authentic even if it isn't how you feel five minutes later.
This post is slightly surlrising to me, although I don't doubt that many people feel like they need to behave that way to be accepted / loved. However, an authentic only response exposes your true feelings and opinions about something, and I feel like most of the time, you should be able to generate a decently socially respectful and well attuned response without misrepresenting yourself, even if it takes a slight bit of effort or risk feeling rejected
I agree, expressing non-authentic feelings is so common we even have figurative expressions to describe it, e.g. to "put on a brave face" or "grin and bear it".
On the other hand, it seems that autistics have the unpleasant pressure of doing this in almost every social interaction.
> NTs seem expert at knowing which of their emotional reactions are appropriate, so they can effortlessly express the appropriate emotions and suppress the inappropriate ones.
Emotional reactions and empathy are not consciously regulated on a basic level (at least not for me). Conscious masking of emotions still produces micro-expressions, for example.
By the way, emulating an emotional response is not uncommon for "regular" people, too, e.g. when attending a funeral where you don't care about the deceased or attending a wedding where you hate the bride or groom. I'd say it's an important skill for social survival.
(I guess it could be argued that empathy is kind-of a low-level emulation of emotional responses... at least in some situations?)
> By the way, emulating an emotional response is not uncommon for "regular" people, too.
I think that was the author's point. Everyone, autistic or not, finds themselves in situations where they need to fake emotions. The difference is that "regular people" can detect if the fakery is not working, know instinctually what the "right" response is, and can usually switch gears fast enough to satisfy the other person and save the interaction. The author seemed to be saying that not only do they need to operate off a "playbook" (which is normal for everyone), but that if the playbook goes wrong, they both can't detect it and don't have a backup plan.
> I'd say it's an important skill for social survival.
I mean, practically the defining characteristic of autism is the extreme difficulty, if not impossibility, of getting these skills. We get them for free "in hardware", but they're trying to do as best they can without them. Reminders like this are kind of redundant and unhelpful.
it's dumb, but in these situations I always think of the gpu vs software rendering in 3d graphics.. how much having dedicated hardware can do a crazy difference.. makes me wonder how much things would be different if we had dedicated brain hardware for other things
It's not dumb at all IMO, this is actually my preferred metaphor for explaining autism, at least to people who are technically-minded. When your brain has "dedicated hardware" for some function, it's easy to miss just how difficult the underlying problem space actually is. Being social animals, we evolved a lot of autopilot functionality for processing social interactions, and if this isn't working, you have to do it "in software", and that's incredibly tricky.
> The author seemed to be saying that not only do they need to operate off a "playbook" (which is normal for everyone), but that if the playbook goes wrong, they both can't detect it and don't have a backup plan.
I'd add that 'normal' people don't necessarily have a backup plan, but are able to improvise. So if their playbook doesn't have an answer for a particular situation, they can use a similar solution from another page in the book, or cobble something together.
Autistic people, on the other hand, can completely freeze up if the situation in question isn't exactly like the one in their playbook.
This, by the way, doesn't just apply to social situations. The inability to improvise as well as intuit things can also exhibit itself as OCD ('I do it like this because I always do it like this'), ADD ('I need to fix this small, insignificant thing because it's just not right'), eating disorders ('without a system in place, hunger is not felt'), or even narcissism ('I need to talk this thing that I've been obsessing about for weeks and I forget that a conversation is a two-way street').
What I find utterly fascinating is that with most of the above, the internal mechanism for the 'disorder' is often quite different from 'regular' sufferers.
So for example when it comes to 'normal' OCD, as I understand it, the compulsion stems from a strong fear of bad consequences or some kind of reasoning, however unreasonable it might seem. But for many autistic people, there's no sense of things going horribly wrong if they don't feed the compulsion. They just feel that they have to do it because they always do it and there's often no reasoning behind it (to the point of not even being aware of the compulsion).
Then again it's all very murky when we talk about 'internal' stuff, so I might be wrong about this.
I am not autistic but I relate 100% with the author. In fact I have given lots of thought to this same subject.
I have realized that while I usually struggle to find the appropriate emotion to express to people, sometimes I do have authentic emotional experiences, and I wonder if the author does as well. For instance, do you laugh at jokes?
Bringing up the Big Bang Theory as a realistic example
of how to deal with a person with autism and calling your action a "rescue" is petty and hurtful. That show only shows harmful stereotypes of nerds for people to laugh at. What social skills could you possibly hope to magically convey through one two-minute laugh track? The author is fighting a lifelong battle here. Please at least respect their struggle.
The video is a good example of active listening. You don't have to understand what the other person is saying in order to connect with them. It's a very useful skill, removes a lot of stress from interaction.
Oh, that's what you were getting at. I suppose so, but it feels like that scene was played up for laughs because of how fake Anne felt the conversation, which completely went over Sheldon's head.
That sounds a lot like my current state of mind. Only that I'm not on the autistic spectrum. Just did the wrong thing in trying to tough out a major depression on my own which tuned me to feeling vaguely neutral all the time, plus I somehow lost the ability to be empathic almost completely.
I do remember how it's supposed to look though, so hardly anyone notices.
If you're feeling like you're blowing fuses, stop what you're doing and get help before you adapt in the worst possible way.
I can relate to the frustration but this whole article is in poor-me mode.
The author expresses his/her frustration with developing connections - I understand. The most important thing to realize is, no one wants to be around complainers.
Except other complainers, they get together and complain, and theorize about why the world is not the way they want it to be.
Being able to emotionally relate is honestly a false flag - there are plenty of people who are socially oblivious and they're doing just fine.
If the author was a super athlete and couldn't relate to people, he would simply be a 'jerk'. I bet he wouldn't have written that article :)
So really, it's not that you can't relate to people - it's that you haven't found a way to win despite having a bit of a setback and you are spending your energy on complaining.
Here's the solution: go and become really good at something, that other people value, and they'll forgive your social strangeness, in fact, they'll find it exotic and interesting.
Just go be really really good. At social dancing, at sports, at music, at dragon boating, beach volleyball, etc. Something social that takes skill and persistence that regular people don't have.
Autistic people have the gift of not being burdened by the same social programming most people are living in. The ones who take advantage of it live a great life. I mean, look at Elon Musk...
That strikes me as being very ungenerous. The article comes across to me as an honest attempt to explain as clearly as possible the social interactions internals of one particular autistic person - the author - to someone who is not autistic.
I found it an interesting insight.
> Here's the solution: ...
How do you know? What are your specific qualifications that let you speak with such definite certainty?
Caroline, you're giving me a version of 'that's just like, your opinion man', coupled with 'I don't like your tone'.
I understand the author better than you think. The author has a worldview of 'my life is hard because X', coupled with 'X is something most people can't relate to'.
My point is, everyone goes through 'my life is hard because X' - the solution is to work around it.
I offered a few options that have worked for me and people I know.
In regards to qualifications - people who have them don't go around asking, the qualifications are implicit in the value they bring to the table.
People who explicitly ASK for qualifications, are typically just being passive-aggressive, which's fine - it's just good to be aware of what you're doing.
What implicit value are you bringing here? It's important to question the source when somthing seems like useless stereotyping and metacomplaining, thats a form of complaining about complainers to reenforce current standards and stifle dissent.
>Everyone goes through 'my life is hard because X' - the solution is to work around it.
It's pithy to say, but telling someone to work around memtal illness is just not in the same category of standard woes - the fundamental tools of cognition you're expected to use to come up with, or implement, a workaround (like the one you propose) are also the tools which are malfunctioning. Acting like there is no difference between normal issues and mental illness is simply reductionist.
Now, because another thing you said was so left field, and seems to reveal a critical assumption of your views though, I'd like to take a minute to call it out.
>If the author was a super athlete and couldn't relate to people, he would simply be a 'jerk'. I bet he wouldn't have written that article :)
There's incredible survivorship bias in this assumption, in a way that tells me you're failing to contextualize that it's actually remarkable and important that the article was written by someone you don't know versus by an athlete.
Athletes are first and foremost entertainers, and especially in sports, the channels and forms through which they express their opinions are heavily monitored and limited. This is very visible when someone isn't playing ball with the standard line to toe -
(Aside: The lines you've probably heard from most athletes: I love my coach and team; We're all in this together; I'm grateful to be out here playing today; the other team is made up of great guys and we both played pretty well and had some fun; it's not about the money, it's about the love of the game; I'm an everyman and you could be me someday, kids, making bank! Try your hardest and you'll get there; $SOCIETAL_ISSUE? I don't really think about that, I just want to play $SPORT.
Most of these lines are bullshit we don't actually think represents the athlete's opinions, and everyone involved knows it. We still expect them, though. Why?
In the end, sane athletes are basically compelled to say them, either by their contract or by common sense, to avoid starting a media shitstorm about a rogue athlete.)
So, you'll only ever hear about athlete's views when they're either absolute top-of-the-heap untouchable AND they know they are willing to accept the personal consequences ala Muhammad Ali, or when then they don't care about the consequences and are willing to be despised ala Colin Kaepernick.
All this is to say that an athlete with a brand and surrounded by brands wouldn't post an article about themselves being autistic and struggling to form emotional connections NOT because they're good at something, but because they're being watched like hawks for any slip-ups, their sponsors will abandon them because they want to use them to sell to kids and wannabees who don't want their brands associated with mental illness, and if you admit to being mentally ill as a public figure it is all you will be known for.
This is where this becomes a core assumption: you've assumed a clean split - on one side, the poor-me's who would write this kind of article, and on the other side the successful people who have found a coping workaround and thus wouldn't want to write this article.
That divide doesn't exist, and can be explained by individuals in public roles rationally recognizing and fearing that writing an article like this would have terrible consequences for their public image and their livelihood. You need to, roughly speaking, have nothing more to lose to be willing to write this kind of article.
Your assuming that this is from a 'complainer' who hasn't found a powerful and public dedication, rather than recognizing that those with public dedications are not always "Doing just fine", but are merely forced to hide it, tells me that you're only focusing on messages you see about mental illness, rather than noticing how poignant it is that those specific messages are the ones you see, compared to the ones that seem to be absent.
> Imagine if you had to consciously process every breath. It would seem stilted and robotic. You wouldn’t be able to fully concentrate on anything else. Imagine how exhausting and disabling that would be!
This is a dangerous analogy. The logical consequence is that any reasonable person with this condition would take a "cure" if (well, when) it's available. After all, who in their right mind would want to think to breathe!
What happens when those "cured" patients want to go to sleep to revamp the cognitive exhaustion they're used to, they're instead treated to an entire new domain of emotional impressions and memories to process? When they try incessantly to "solve" these emotional impressions and memories, but only end up creating yet more emotional impressions?
What happens when they realize that "null" doesn't actually equal "0"-- that they cannot ever turn off their new sensory perception?
That's a great example. I was speculating after having seen an interview with someone blind from birth who had gained limited sight late in life. But it appears the point applies quite well to this case.
I have often thought that autistic people or socio-path people who have had to learn the appropriate responses to various human emotions would be a good resource for AI research in the area of developing more "human like" interactions. I am not autistic but I think I have elements of that lack of empathy, so I have had to also learn certain rule sets in a similar way: if someone says thing A that is supposed to have reaction B. Intensity of A implies Intensity B depending on situation C and so on. It would be interesting to capture all those rule sets from various subjects.
As I understand it a distinction is made in psychology between affective empathy and cognitive empathy.
Affective empathy is feeling sad when you see someone sad. Cognitive empathy is the ability to "put yourself in another's shoes", so to speak.
Autistic people can come across as lacking empathy because they have difficulty with the latter, but the 'affective' form of empathy is (usually?) quite functional. In fact, there's even some evidence that autistic people have more affective empathy on average, or at least they experience it more intensely.
For many people with Asperger's this is perhaps the shittiest part of their condition. In social interaction they can appear quite narcissistic and lacking in empathy, but internally they feel just the same amount of guilt, sadness, or regret as 'regular' people, if not more.
I have no idea; some people on the autistic spectrum may have issues with it too. I guess my point is that autism seems to be about ability to handle social situations rather than the underlying reasons.
I think the opposite -- the categorization into typical/atypical exists to group wide variety of atypical conditions together because they have very similar challenges to overcome when it comes to societal expectations.
I think that the primary symptom of what is being called autism in this case is the belief that others are better at handling social interaction. The autistic's commitment to this belief is the cultural milieu they develop for themselves.
I hear you, it is more of a glimmer of a thought than something that I have worked out well, and I gladly welcome your explanation as to why I am off-base!
It feels though that the elaborateness of this self-identity is a sign that the person is actually quite typical, but somehow their ability to perform critical analysis has been turned viciously against their own behavior because of a few early formative experiences becoming the archetype of all socialization.
In short then it is the scrutiny they are subjecting themselves to that is the problem.
Their commitment to furthering the development of this self-identity is of course all good, free to choose their lives as they see them. If they are in fact in social pain about the state they discover themselves in I would suggest to them that what they consider to be discovery is instead creation. And creation carries no inherent obligations, and they are much freer than the story they have learned to tell would permit them to admit.
Mild autism (what we're talking about here), in many ways, is (to use a tech analogy) like missing SSL offloading when everyone else has it.
You can still talk SSL, by manually doing it on the CPU, but it bogs down the CPU with crypto and becomes overwhelming if you're trying to do other things at the same time.
You're also not going to be as efficient at SSL, which means you can get overwhelmed by just trying to manage SSL if there's many connections at once.
Recognizing that difference -- that there is a difference in how you're processing those things -- is the first step to doing it better.
Again I believe that it is the concept of not achieving typicality that is the driving force of continuously deepening the autistic's state of alienation, even when typicality itself is an abstract "average" state that no person actually embodies.
edit: Just wanted to add, I'm not saying that autistics are not clearly at the avant-garde edges of personality, I am just suggesting that the source of the difference is created by the autistic's self-understanding.
I understand where you are coming from, but this is a bit like saying "the primary symptom of dyslexia is the belief others are better at reading".
MRI studies have shown fundamental differences in the mental wiring in autistic brains. Lack of social perception/awareness is a widely recognized trait in people with autism spectrum disorders.
how do you know it isn't a result of the belief that I am bad at reading that makes me worse and worse at it, and rewires my brain to reflect this perceived environment?
Because science; believe it or not, scientists aren't that stupid, they've thought of all of that and tested for it to ensure their conclusions are correct. Your two seconds of thought on the subject don't come close to how much thinking has been put into the issue by thousands of people over many decades of effort to understand these things.
All within certain cultural modes, all to confirm certain paths they are already headed down. The collapse of the ability to communicate across cultures doesn't bother you? Doesn't make you question whether or not this approach that we've all been patting ourselves on the back for while so many are lost to its blind spots may actually not be the right solution, no matter how deep our investment in it goes?
The arrogance of assuming that you are correct because what you argue has references that you appreciate is much greater than me trying to develop an idea that permits a new approach to an old problem.
Seems to me you simply fail to grasp the nature of science. You think science doesn't question it's assumptions and biases, you don't understand science. Science is a process for validating the validity of ideas, any ideas from any culture, the process has no cultural bias and no blind spots. You aren't developing an idea that permits a new approach, you're simply assuming simple questions haven't been looked at because you lack any depth of understanding about what's already been studied and don't realize your questions are simplistic and unoriginal. They assume wrongly that scientists are ignorant and didn't think to check something as simple as basic correlation vs causatiion.
I do understand science. What I do not understand is using it to make claims far beyond its abilities and then retreating into its self-certainty when challenged.
D is for disorder. People who say NT are people who challenge the claim that Disorder is appropriate terminology. Instead of an "order/disorder"distinction, they draw a "typical/diverse" distinction.
NT isn't quite neutral -- nothing ever is -- it's an intentional removal of the bias that the center of the bell curve is superior.
I find it strange people are so averse to the idea there's a "normal", particularly if we confine ourselves to talking about, eg, social behavior traits.
Statistically, there is, and most people cluster around being sort of that, even though no one is exactly the "norm".
I think people just get used to making hyperfine distinctions within their cluster and forget how homogeneous the cluster actually is from the outside.
Sort of like you can generally tell apart faces from peoples you grew up around better than ones you didn't. The truth is we do all look alike, just like outsiders see, even if the differences seem prominent to us.
This is here because it applies on some level to us all.
I have a couple autist friends and they are awesome, and I understand that their emotions calibrate differently, but are still there and meaningful. After a while, you learn to calibrate to them, and can connect on another level. But this takes both sides letting down their guard and assuming good intentions. Something rare enough in love, let alone friendship. The time spent is worth it in either case.
Indeed. Autistic people are often extremely loyal, non-judgmental (in particular ways), and lacking in much ego. If you can get past the problems that this 'miscalibration' cause, there are a lot of benefits to having an autistic friend!
I don't blame people who are not up to the challenge, but I do hate it when people aren't even willing to respect the differences and instead choose to cast moral judgment.
Compared to other nations, I find Americans extremely standardized. It must be the repressive schooling combined with the extremely regimented college experience. They have a great need to belong.
The 'how are you doing' you always seem to get from total strangers always baffles me when I visit that country. Whats, worse, it's not a real question, but just a protocol that demands the "I'm fine, thank you" type of answer in all cases. Neither party gets anything out of it, and instead of being some sort of prelude/preamble it's just something on it's own with no use whatsoever.
This had bothered me in the past despite growing up in a culture that demands it. Yet many things in language are far removed from their original intent, and we accept them (i.e. irregular verbs).
Personally I try to use less invasive openers, or at least take a moment to genuinely respond with how I feel at the time.
I want to read this, but it's slightly too wide for my phone screen (the start of words is cut off with no way to scroll) and I can't figure out how to adjust it.
It starts loading where it fits, then jumps to too wide woth no ability to fix by zooming.
Edit: Works on desktop site, so I'm sure it's just the mobile version being "clever". But seriously, annoying.
(Left in case anyone else has the same issue -- requesting desktop site fixed it for me.)
It's not just you, it started happening to me on Tumblr a lot several months ago. Something has gone badly wrong with their mobile layout. I wouldn't be surprised though; I can't imagine Veri-hoo considers Tumblr a priority.
