Untypical, page 2
And imagine! The same could be true for autism. Someone stimming in public – perhaps rocking on a park bench or fiddling with a small toy – could be seen as ‘Ah, probably autistic’, rather than someone to be feared or avoided. Well, one can dream. Better still – and it’s very much what this book is for – we can work to make it happen, in practical and useful ways.
This book represents everything I’ve learned about autism since I was diagnosed: a summary of my experience as an autistic person making sense of the world as a part of a much larger autistic community. I hope that you find it useful.
Disclaimer
I’m only one person and so it’s impossible for me to speak for a whole diverse demographic. I’m not speaking for all autistics, nor do I believe that all autistic people are the same. I am, however, a quick learner and a good listener, and I’ve gathered a lot of information over the years about what it is to be autistic and the commonalities that exist between autistic people, and it’s this that forms the backbone of my book. Please don’t accuse me of being some bossy voice, speaking over all others – this is hardly the only book on autism to have ever been published. It’s my take on things, my experience, my understanding.
* Eric Garcia, ‘The school that uses shock therapy on autistic students’, https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/autism-shock-therapy-trump-biden-b1885595.html, 16 July 2021. Accessed 19 July 2021.
1
The Social Web
Small talk rules
‘Hey, Pete, how was your weekend?’
Even though I know it’s going to happen, I still grimace with shock every time. Is there any way I can make a break for it and run away without being accused of being too weird? I mean, the stairs are just there, and I reckon I could be down them, out of the door and halfway up the school driveway before the alarm is raised. I’m out of shape, and holding a vast mug of coffee and a stack of exam papers, but given the severity of the situation I think I could still manage it.
But of course, I know the rules well enough to understand that such a move would be labelled ‘extreme’ and, in all likelihood, ‘alarming’ by the people I work with, as it’s Monday morning at 7.45 a.m. and I’ve a class to teach in forty-five minutes. Perhaps it’s time to acknowledge that escaping into the woods as a response to a typical, innocently asked Monday-morning question is not a viable option. Instead, I will have to respond.
But not honestly, of course. Goodness me, the social faux pas were I to respond honestly! No, it’s very important, for reasons that I still don’t truly understand (I’m thirty-nine), to respond with a vaguely positive remark despite the fact I just had a truly awful weekend; likewise, it’s vital not to be too positive, as I would then risk appearing a show-off. This morning, so early, so uncaffeinated, I must figure out an appropriate reply and handle any subsequent enquiries. The consequences for getting this wrong have, in the past, been unpleasant; as a result, my anxiety (heart racing, blood pressure building) is depressingly familiar. But it’s Monday morning, this person has asked me, and I must try to respond without messing up completely.
I’ve learned over the course of my life that the correct way to respond to this question is with a simple, meaningless ‘Fine, thanks’, before continuing with my day. This is ‘small talk’ – talk without communicative purpose, but brimming with social purpose. And it’s extremely valuable, at least to the neurotypical majority of people who seem to make all the rules. The purpose of this ‘phatic communication’, as linguists like to label it, is to lubricate social relationships in tiny increments whenever the situation arises, to give the illusion of meaningful talk while gradually and quietly increasing the connection between the two people.
For an autistic person like myself, it’s an absolute nightmare.
There was a time when brand new video games came with a thick instruction booklet that gave you all the information you’d need to get started. I would pore over them before switching the game on, ensuring that I knew exactly what I had to do. It’s my understanding that non-autistic people were given – in some subconscious way – something similar to these full, useful pamphlets filled with rules and guidance and tips and tricks for the game called Social Interaction the moment they were born. Meanwhile, my autistic peers and I received nothing, leaving us to try to piece together the ‘rules’ without any kind of assistance, forever feeling slightly locked out of the full experience of ‘life’.
It’s true that autistic people often report feeling like they grew up without access to whatever social rule book it is that non-autistic folk appear to have automatic access to, and it will be a metaphor that I will bring up regularly, by necessity. As we watch our neurotypical peers, we realise that all of this stuff comes naturally, automatically, to them, while we autistic people seem to be stuck on manual, struggling to keep up. Small talk seems as easy for them as clapping, but for the autistic population it’s a barrier that thwarts us several times a day. Why is this?
Autistic people of an age where small talk has long become commonplace – usually in employment – will have experienced years of both misunderstanding other people and being misunderstood in turn. It’s a common feature of autism and can be quite disabling. Being understood can be compared to an aeroplane’s autopilot. For many non-autistic people, conversations are relatively easy. Thanks to the instinctive understanding of the rule book, they go smoothly and serenely from point to point, like an airliner calmly progressing to its destination, safe in the hands of automation. Exactly the same interaction for most autistic people is more akin to piloting an aircraft with no autopilot, and very little training, through a major city (one filled with skyscrapers) in the fog. Every movement of the controls veers you wildly in varying, unpredictable directions and you feel – and I can’t stress this strongly enough – as if you’re always moments from disaster.
The accepted rules of conversation were a mystery to me, at least at first, and progress towards gradually acquiring them was slow and frustrating. There’s a lot of unspoken content in a typical conversation, and I’m not only referring to body language and facial expression. An awful lot of communication is entirely implicit, needing to be inferred accurately in order to understand whatever point the other person is making, and it’s this content that can cause autistic people the biggest problems. I think it’s fair to claim, although I say this as someone with a degree in English Literature so I may be biased, that autistic people are OK with implied meaning in theory, and understand the concept; it’s the speed and complexity of natural speech that causes problems as we tend to need more time to process whether implication is actually taking place, whereas non-autistic people seem to know straight away.
For example, someone I care about could drop into our conversation the fact that they’re cold. I might be aware that the window’s open, there’s six inches of snow on the ground outside and they’re wearing a T-shirt, but it’s extremely unlikely that I’d spot the implication and close the window or offer them a sweater. It simply would not occur to me that their statement was anything more than a simple statement of fact. After all, if they truly wanted me to do something, wouldn’t they ask, rather than just hint in such a vague way? The whole thing is so fraught with uncertainty: even if I had spotted the implication, it’s likely I’d then spend a frantic few moments second-guessing myself in a panic – ‘But what if they don’t mean that and I end up looking presumptuous?’ – by which time they’ve probably given up and closed the window themselves. A large portion of human interaction, at least in the English-speaking world, relies on this infuriatingly meandering and tricky method of communicating information.
Small talk is a version of this, in my opinion. The vague introductory remarks and questions (‘Warm today, isn’t it?’, ‘Monday mornings, eh?’) are not direct and they’re emphatically not looking for factual, literal responses. Instead, I must understand that what’s really required here is a response that’s similarly vague (almost meaningless, in fact) and that I’m then meant to move away from the conversation. As I, and the majority of autistic people generally, tend to miss this implication, you can see where the problem lies. Upon hearing ‘Warm today, isn’t it?’ my natural reaction is to reply with either yes or no, depending on the ambient temperature. This isn’t some infuriating quirk that autistic people have because we’re weird – we’re actually using language as it appears to have been intended. But if I were to reply truthfully with a ‘No, I think it’s quite cold actually,’ I’d immediately be viewed as strange, combative and contrary. All for answering a damned question accurately.
It wouldn’t be so bad if this were an example of a ‘white lie’, where responding with honesty causes understandable misery or disappointment for the other party. I mean, how much does this person care about how warm it is? By their likely reaction to my disagreeing with them, you’d think the temperature of the room was something they’d worked hard to achieve, were very proud of and would fight to preserve, like how a new dress looks. But obviously this is rarely the case and the discomfort is caused not by actual grievance or even emotion – it’s caused entirely by going against what’s customary.
It’s endlessly fascinating to me how important custom is to the majority of people. As an autistic person I can certainly see the value of the familiar and the routine, but I struggle to understand the need for these scripted, stock responses. I understand that small talk is more about the ‘social’ in ‘social communication’ than the ‘communication’, that content is less important than simply connecting and that there’s even a fear of silence at play too; but despite all this, the likely negative reaction were I to break script seems disproportionate. The fact that small talk, this means of quickly bolstering relationships and politeness, is so prone to wreck an autistic person’s day seems like a serious flaw in the entire system, but most autistic people would recognise this unfairness with a shrug, as it’s so commonplace.
If we swing back to the Monday-morning scenario we started with when my colleague asks me how my weekend was while I stand at the photocopier, the expectation is clear. My colleague, with all the goodwill in the world, expects me to respond with something approximating ‘Fine, thanks’. If I do this, the interaction will cease, with him being satisfied by its perceived success while I’m left dissatisfied by the lack of honesty and sincerity I was forced into. Thinking about all the times this kind of interaction has left me feeling stressed and unhappy, it’s the dishonesty that hurts the most. By responding with a ‘Fine, thanks’, I will have lied twice. Once with the ‘fine’ – my weekend was awful and I’m still feeling terrible about it (hence the huge coffee) – and second with the ‘thanks’ – I’ve nothing to be thankful for here: they’ve just forced me to lie about my feelings when I would rather have said nothing at all.
By this point I’d sympathise with you if you’re starting to think I’m overthinking the whole thing. But that’s the problem – overthinking is what autistic people do, to the point I’m surprised it isn’t among the diagnostic criteria. If you take a moment to glance back over the pages of this chapter so far and get a feel for the number of words I’ve dedicated to this single interaction, you’d come close to having a visual metaphor of how active and turbulent the inside of my head is during a tiny moment like this.
If only these moments were rare. Instead, they’re very frequent, and if, as I did for fifteen years, you work in a location with lots of other staff, it can be expected that such dissatisfying, stressful interactions will occur multiple times a day. It stands to reason that any autistic person struggling with small talk will eventually hit some kind of wall, causing us to mess up completely. It’s the times this has happened that keep me awake at night – where rather than swallowing my discomfort and answering according to the script, I instead forgot and went dangerously off-piste or, worse still, actually did run away to the woods to begin a new life as some kind of extremely tall squirrel. The more stressed I am (and as you will come to learn, stress is a huge part of my life), the more likely I am to forget what the rules are and make a fool of myself. One example sticks out in my mind, though – not because it was particularly embarrassing, but because of how unexpectedly well the neurotypical person in the exchange responded to my ‘failure’ to follow the rules.
It was the day before the Christmas holidays, the last day of term, and I was heading out of the building with a bag full of students’ work to mark. The headteacher was standing by the door, so small talk was unavoidable, and I was really not feeling very well. He chatted briefly about this and that, before mentioning how he was worried about the kids who were going back to stressful home lives, who had school as a way of keeping them safe and calm. I was having a very rough time at home with a new baby and lack of sleep, and blurted out without thinking: ‘That’s how I feel. It’s like work is this safer space where I can find some calm even though teaching really stresses me out, whereas home is this exhausting, relentless nightmare.’
Amazingly, I had managed to both overshare and confess that the core part of my job was causing me serious problems. And all at Christmas time, to a headteacher whom I can’t say I was particularly close to or friendly with at this point. To his credit, my boss took this sudden declaration of misery on the chin and empathised by muttering a word or two on how hard it all sounded, before I ran to my car to have a brief but memorable panic attack at the steering wheel before turning the ignition. This exchange hounded me for the entirety of the Christmas holiday that year, only briefly fading in the evenings when I’d had a few glasses of beer, as I couldn’t stop myself dissecting the moment and trying to second-guess how he was likely to respond in the new year. It’s a process I’m very familiar with, whereby I consider every possible likely outcome that I can imagine, and try to figure out how I’ll cope with it should it come to pass, rather like when Doctor Strange visits millions of future timelines searching for the one where the Avengers win the day.
It’s important at this juncture to recognise that this level of obsessive over-analysis of a ‘failed’ communication is by no means unusual or a one-off. It’s the standard, or at least it is for me and vast numbers of autistic people who can share similar tales. In fact, in this example I at least has some good reason to be worried, given the nature of the employee–employer relationship. The sad thing is, I’ve undergone the same kind of extreme ‘over-thinking’ about small talk that went only blandly and meaninglessly wrong, like the time I told a distant colleague whose name I didn’t even know that I’d had a terrible bout of food poisoning over the holiday and indulged in some choice details. Why? Well, she asked me, upon bumping into me on the street, how my holidays had been. She walked away shaken. As did I.
This was never going to lead to anything tangibly bad happening, and I knew that well enough at the time. It was embarrassing, yes; it even approached being funny, in certain lights, but it would never cause any significant problems. Despite this, I was absolutely obsessed with my ‘failure’ for weeks, possibly months (and this was back in 2008 or so, years before my diagnosis), as I was convinced that it would somehow transform into something awful. Of course it never did. I still worry about it from time to time.
As for the headteacher, spring term began and there were no repercussions following my brief moment of oversharing. Things in that job did begin to deteriorate, mostly as a result of being diagnosed as autistic, but I don’t believe that the exchange played much of a part in this. The one thing I did notice, however, was that my boss became an awful lot more approachable after this and was a source of great support for several years. I like to think that he responded to my autistic inability to judge the nature of small talk in the best way – by accepting it at face value and taking it on board, rather than judging me for daring to go off-script. If more people were capable of this, perhaps autistic people would begin to feel more comfortable.
Difficult conversations
Everyone seems to love talking. They all seem to do it so much, so freely, so oblivious to the risks it contains. It must be fantastic to be able to converse with so little care or worry, to go through life seeing conversation as just another minor pleasure. Sadly, talking with other people – in particular non-autistic people – has so many pitfalls and dangers for most autistic people, that they’re scarred by a form of chronic, constant trauma that’s hard for non-autistic people to imagine. The problem lies, as it so often does, in those ironically ‘unwritten’ rules that everybody has to abide by. Rather like the unwritten constitution of the United Kingdom, this leads to extreme ambiguity and reliance on precedent, neither of which are particularly well suited to the average autistic person. We tend to slide from crisis to crisis when talking to people, and behind it all is a brain whirring over the potential problems, analysing every facet.
It’s so unclear how so much of it works. Turn-taking is a good example. All conversations are built on the idea of the back-and-forth, and it seems to be implicitly understood by most people when these moments of shift should occur. But not to me. I’ve no idea when it’s OK for me to take my turn, and so I often find myself sitting very quietly, intently waiting for a pause long enough to represent an unambiguous jumping-off point. By the time I feel the coast is clear for me to interject my opinions on a subject, the conversation has rumbled off into the distance and I’m left nursing an unshared idea.
