On Being Slightly Autistic

I have, like, a cute level of autism

I don’t think that most people who meet me peg me as autistic, or even spectrum-y. This is a result of acquired skill. I have learned to override my basic social instincts. If I obeyed them, I would speak in a loud monotone with weird patterns of eye contact about whatever I’m obsessed with.

To avoid this, before a social occasion, I will remember: there is more to life than the abstract. Create a space for the feelings of those you’re with. Try to bring some of the energy from your head down into the space around you. These are guidelines that I have to bring online intentionally. 

Also, there is a lot of small-scale patching/debugging/updating. Whenever a socially graceful person executes an effective little micro-behavior that I’ve never seen before, I assimilate it as fully as I can.

This has all worked fairly well. I’ve been told that I make people feel comfortable, and that I seem emotionally intelligent. I also have a successful coaching practice, which is fairly good evidence that I’ve refined my 1:1 communication to an acceptable level.

However, I still think people notice that I’m just slightly off somehow, like I’m a little ‘intense’ or “abstracted” or something. But it’s within the normal scope of human variation. Being a little odd is fine, even charming.

However, every single person I’ve dated for more than a month has said, at some point, “um, so you’re a little autistic, right?” 

They start noticing things that come up repeatedly, especially as I relax around them and become more unguarded. Like: in the middle of conversation I’ll randomly start gazing intensely into the middle distance while I work through some interior puzzle, and only notice this when I’m forcefully interrupted. Or: my facial responses are a little atypical, unless I’m monitoring them. Or: I’ll suddenly decide that I need to live my life based on some new rule I’ve assimilated, like a way to eat, or dress, or conduct myself, and I will not stop thinking about this, ever. Or: certain noises and textures will physically bother me so much I need to run away from them.

That last one gets a little silly sometimes. I was afraid of popsicles for a few years, because of this. And I’ve had to leave restaurants because someone in the back is folding cardboard, probably in the process of unboxing produce, and the idea of wearing certain kinds of wool makes me really uncomfortable.

These are superficial elements, though. The real fundamental thing is that I can’t hear the social music. It’s taken me 33 years to figure this out because it’s hard to identify an absence. But, hey, did you know that groups of humans have moods that are contagious? Like, a room has a heavy feeling or an abundance of joy and excitement? I didn’t know that this was a real felt thing, a primary element of the atmosphere, as real as temperature. I always assumed that people were faking it—or not faking it exactly, but going along with collective patterns of engagement as a matter of ceremony.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like I’m blind to emotionality around me. I can notice what people around me are feeling, and empathize with it intellectually. But there is not a lot of general transference of mood. This makes weddings, funerals, sacred events, concerts, and any other group occasion really weird to me. Everyone is in a contextual headspace, I have learned. I cannot enter that headspace. I am not influenced much. Thus, I am alienated. It’s like everyone else is on drugs, and I’ve shoved the same drugs up my nose, but I am not getting high. Drinking is nice to have during these moments because it’s a temporary hobby. I can distract myself by trying to be in the top twenty most intoxicated people in the room—the fun zone—without entering the top five—the danger zone.

It’s not like I don’t have emotions. It’s just that I float on my own emotional ice chunk, most of the time. My patterns of feeling are different, and they’re largely in response to inner movements, not other moods around me. My three most felt emotions are ‘this music rocks and it makes me happy,’ ‘this idea is stimulating,’ and ‘I am somewhat annoyed that the world is like this.’ I’d say that I’m ‘neutral/amused’ most of the time.

Talking to autistic people who are, crudely speaking, more autistic, is in some ways relaxing. I can very easily enter the mode of just relating information about topics, and not minding too much about body language or subtext. But, at this point, that’s not quite a natural setting either. It’s kind of like I have a native language that I don’t generally speak, in favor of my second language, the language of normal people. Neither is ‘mine’ exactly. Both are, in a way, costumes, at this point.

I don’t know if this is why I fundamentally feel isolated from most of humanity, like there’s this indefinable membrane between me and others. Maybe ‘autistic’ just serves as a nice catch-all word that I can throw at both my very real idiosyncrasies and, also, the general strangeness of being a conscious being with access to precisely one consciousness. I don’t know whether I feel more separateness than other people. There is no way to measure the degree to which other people think, ‘how do I work this, how do other people pilot this machine.’

What I do know is that this observation rarely causes me pain, anymore. It’s just kind of a, ‘huh, I guess I’m a different subspecies, that’s fine,’ thing. I’m totally happy with the compromises I make to fit in—I strongly prefer to make other people comfortable, so a little behavior modification is worth it. Also, in many ways, not hearing the social music is adaptive. I feel like I can cut through some kinds of societal bullshit more easily, and I don’t feel super governed by what other people expect my life should look like. For me, social norms are felt as optional. Mostly I go along with them, but sometimes I just skip them, and there’s very little inner friction when I do. 

But I do wonder how it feels to be among, rather than beside, and occasionally mourn that I’ll never have the chance to be fully immersed.