Tag Archives: communication

Chronologically Out of Step

December 12, 2014 musingsofanaspie 91 Comments

When our daughter Jess was little, her dad and I used to take her to see a lot of animated movies. Jess and I really enjoyed them, but The Scientist often dozed off twenty minutes into the film. He slept through Toy Story and Shrek and Monsters Inc. before we all decided that a better plan was to split up when we went to the movies. That way he was free to see the latest action movie while Jess and I watched the newest offering from Pixar or Disney.

The Incredibles, Cars, innumerable sequels in the Monsters, Toy Story and Shrek series. Nightmare Before Christmas. Brave. WALL-E. Coraline. Up. Paranorman . . . Actually, I saw quite a few of those by myself. Jess is all grown up now and The Scientist still isn’t a big fan of kid’s movies. To be fair he stayed awake for the entire Lego Movie and thoroughly enjoyed Big Hero 6, but he wouldn’t have gone to see either if I hadn’t suggested it.

I imagine quite a few adults would consider my interest in animated movies that are mostly marketed to children to be childish. It certainly hasn’t escaped my notice that most of the other adults in the theater are there to chaperone children.

I’m not sure what it is about animated movies that I enjoy so much. Maybe it’s a sense of nostalgia, dating back to the time when I was a young parent and the excitement that we shared as a family going to a new movie. Maybe it’s the sly humor that the writers build in for the adults in the audience alongside the simple feel-good themes that most of the movies have. I’ve even seen it suggested that many of us gravitate toward animation because the exaggerated facial expressions are easy to decipher.

Maybe I just really like animated movies.

Whatever the underlying reason, it’s hard to escape the sense that my enjoyment of the movies is somewhat age inappropriate. I don’t know a lot of other middle-aged women who were as excited as I was about the Lego movie. I do know better than to blurt out “How about that Lego movie?” when talking with most other women my age.

Fortunately not all of my tastes in media run toward children’s programming. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if Netflix created a recommendation category for me titled “Dramas with Large Ensemble Casts and Lots of Cursing.” That gives me sufficient fodder for dinner party conversation when the subject turns to movies and TV.

Age Appropriate

The concept of “age appropriate” has been one that’s always haunted me. In elementary school, from about fourth grade, I began to get the sense that most of my peers seemed to somehow older than me. As if they knew something I didn’t.

By the time I got to middle school, that vague sense of being “behind” widened into a very obvious maturity gap. Many of the other girls in my class were developing an interest in dating and fashion and other things that marked a critical right of passage, and in which I had little intrinsic interest. In high school, most of my peers spent the school week looking forward to a weekend of drinking, partying, dating, football games and dances. Again I felt left out, having barely caught up with the concept of dating.

My interests ran more toward listening to music, reading, riding my bike, and shooting baskets in the driveway. At least the ones that I would publicly admit to. I also had a huge fascination with the TV show M*A*S*H and still liked to pull out my collections of baseball cards, stamps, and coins. Occasionally I pulled out my model train set or my Matchbox cars and Barbies were still in my closet. My bed was home to as many stuffed animals as it could hold and I still had a well-worn baseball mitt that I’d gotten in fourth grade.

Instinctively, I knew that there were things that it was “okay” for a teenaged girl to be interested in and interests that were best kept to myself. Sometimes the appropriateness of an interest hinged on gender stereotypes, but just as often it was related to age, either in the sense of something being “too childish” (or sometimes “too adult”) for the age that I currently was.

I spent a lot of years assuming that I would simply catch up with my peers, that I would develop an interest in partying and chasing boys at football games and gossiping on the phone for hours after school each night. When I graduated, without that ever having materialized, I somehow went right on assuming that I would catch up with the adults that I saw around me who invariably seemed much more adult to me than I seemed to myself.

I’m sure this is a typical reaction of many young people as they make the transition into adulthood in their early twenties, however I was still thinking this in my late thirties and early forties. After being diagnosed with Aspergers, I finally realized that there would be no magical catching up with my peers. I was simply different and that was okay.

By Whose Milestones?

The really interesting aspect of this to me, is that while autism is commonly referred to as a developmental delay, no one ever explicitly told me that I was “delayed.” Many years spent comparing myself to my typical peers and seeing the obvious differences had somehow caused me to assume that I was just a few steps behind them.

It’s not surprising to me that many parents look at their autistic children and make the same assumption, often with the encouragement of doctors, teachers, and other professionals in their children’s lives. And in the same way that I passed many years simply assuming that I would catch up, I think many parents spend years operating under the assumption that the goal of their children’s education should be to “catch them up” to their typical peers rather than to equip them in ways that are practical and useful for the child.

Ariane Zurcher recently wrote a blog post about how focusing on the belief that her daughter Emma was developmentally delayed caused her to pursue therapies that in the end she felt were not helpful to Emma. Here’s a quote from that post (emphasis is mine):

“for us it meant constantly comparing our daughter to her non autistic peers (using their development, and not hers, as the ideal). It meant pursuing all kinds of therapies that never questioned the push for spoken language. It meant not considering AAC devices, because she “had language.” It meant encouraging my daughter to “use your words.” It meant asking her to focus on things that made it impossible for her to concentrate on what was being taught. It meant looking at her through the lens of deficits, so much so that they became blinders shutting out everything else.”

Ariane’s words hint at the danger that lurks in the idea that autistic kids need more than anything to catch up to their nonautistic peers. The emphasis, when working from that assumption, is on getting the child to do things in a way that may not be the best possible way–or even possible at all–for them.

A straightforward and common example is speech. Here are some standard developmental milestones for speech and language:

by 3 months: makes eye contact
by 6 months: imitates sounds and facial expressions
by 12 months: says 1 or 2 words
by 21 months: uses at least 50 words, names objects
by 24 months: begins to use 2 word phrases, uses simple pronouns
by 36 months: asks simple questions

If an autistic child isn’t making eye contact, smiling when smiled at, or saying a couple of words by 18 months, it’s very natural for their parents to look at the other toddlers who are doing all of these things and assume that their child needs professional intervention to help them catch up with their peers.

However, autistic language development varies greatly from the developmental norms. Some autistic people speak early, some at a typical age, others at a later-than-average age and some not at all. Some of us use speech for simple interactions and text or other means for more complex interactions, while others use AAC for all communication. Some of us never reach typical milestones and other leap over milestones at an atypical age.

We are each literally our own developmental milestone chart and to compare an autistic person’s language development to their peers–autistic or not–is both unfair and counterproductive.

The typical developmental milestones are useful as a diagnostic aid, but beyond that they are simply a distraction. Rather than focusing on meeting a set of speech milestones, the emphasis should be on finding communication methods that work reliably for the individual autistic person.

The Fallacy of Mental Age

Another potential pitfall of the developmental delay paradigm is that it leads to the assumption of “mental age” in those individuals who don’t meet developmental milestones on the expected schedule.

If a child is mostly nonspeaking until the age of 5, echolalic for several years after that, and begins to use short phrases at 12, some people will make the assumption that the child not only has the language abilities “of a 2-year-old” but also the thought processes and cognitive abilities of a 2-year-old. As many parents of children who began speaking at a later age can tell you, that’s far from true.

A person who is echolalic at 7-years-old, speaks in short phrases at 12 and uses some sentences at 22 isn’t simply delayed. They have a completely different communication ability than their peers. It’s entirely possible that they’ve been capable of typing in full sentences for a decade or more before they used any sentences verbally. Perhaps not, but unless they’re given the chance to learn to use a variety of communication tools other than speech, no one will know for sure.

Chronologically Out of Step

The inspiration for this post was in part a Facebook discussion that Ariane initiated prior to the post I linked to above and in part some comments on the Intersection of Gender and Autism posts here.

I was struck by how many of us had a sense that we were somehow lagging behind our peers when we were younger or how we still had interests that might be considered age inappropriate by people given to making such judgments. In each of these comments, there was a hint (or more) of embarrassment around these interests.

That got me thinking about all of the ways that I’ve felt chronologically out of step over the years and, more importantly, why. As always, the what of it is fairly easy to quantify, but the why is trickier.

Sometimes the sense that I was lagging behind was tied to not wanting to give up a special interest or to returning to a “childish” special interest for comfort. My love of animated movies and the giant stuffed dog that resides on my couch are a couple of innocuous present-day examples.

Other times, particularly around adolescence, I think missing out on big chunks of social cues and being mostly oblivious to certain types of peer pressure contributed to my sense that I was socially and emotionally younger than my peers. I suspect most kids didn’t necessarily want to start dating in middle school, but they knew that socially it was important to show that they did. It made them seem mature or cool or whatever it was that meant fitting in. Which, incidentally, was exactly the thing I could never seem to intuit and obviously still can’t quite pin down.

Most likely, there were girls who made fun of me in middle school and high school for being so out of step with what was expected but I was mostly too clueless to notice if anyone was whispering about me behind my back. And really, when you have people who will outright tell you that you’re a dork to your face, there isn’t much point in searching for more bad news.

These things, combined with the ever-present sense that I was different from most other kids left, me always feeling the need to catch up but never quite knowing how to do that.

Which brings me to an interesting point that Anna raised in the comments: there is a difference between throwing out the concept of a delay and throwing out all hope of a person learning new skills. She specifically mentioned that as a child, she was left to her own devices a lot and not really pushed to learn organizational or social skills or to further her interests in new ways. She pointed out the value of a “golden middle way” in respecting differences while helping children develop the sort of executive function skills and understanding of the social world that will smooth the road for them a bit as adults.

When Frogs Fly

Finally, it’s important for parents and others who work with autistic kids to understand the difference between, for example, understanding the social world and having neurotypical social skills. The former is achievable to some degree for many of us on the spectrum; the latter not so much.

For example, my social skills are not and never will be those of a typical adult. I don’t have the social skills of a 14-year-old or a 20-year-old or a 30-year-old. It’s not as if I’m simply behind some imaginary developmental curve. My ability to read facial expressions and body language has been “stuck” at the basic level for decades. And I’m fine with that. I have coping mechanisms to make up for some of what I lack and the rest I’ve learned to live with. In the past, I’ve tried to learn how to read more subtle nonverbal communication and finally concluded that it’s not going to happen.

In fact, as I was talking about some preliminary ideas for this post with The Scientist, I told him that teaching me to make consistently natural-looking eye contact would be like teaching a frog to fly. No matter how many times you take the frog up on the roof and toss it off, it’s never going to sprout wings. And it doesn’t need to.

———

A/N: While looking for photos to illustrated this post, I saw the gingerbread people photos and thought “ooh, cute!” and decided to use whimsical gingerbread people family portraits to illustrated my Very Serious Post because it felt delightfully age inappropriate.

Communication, Mental Health, Strategies

Mindfulness in Miniature

November 4, 2014 musingsofanaspie 31 Comments

This is my first attempt at writing a post using voice recognition software. For the past week I’ve been “training” Dragon Naturally Speaking. Or maybe Dragon has been training me.

You would think that voice-recognition software would be as simple as speaking (although that statement in itself may be an oxymoron for many of us). But the software is sophisticated enough that there’s a fairly steep learning curve–both in learning the commands and in learning to “write” by speaking. So far, I’ve primarily been using it for work tasks, which are straightforward and often scripted in nature.

Curiously, I’m finding that voice-recognition software makes the writing process both faster and slower. Faster, because my typing and in particular my ability to spell is hampering my writing considerably. Slower, because before dictating each sentence I have to pause and compose the words in my mind in a way that is very different from typing.

There’s always been something about typing that has felt like a direct connection between my brain and the words. Now, something is short-circuiting that connection. I’ve reached a tipping point where the effort to put the words into speech in order to create text is less than the effort required to type those same words. And this new process–both the relative ease and the slowness of it–has me thinking a lot about things like mindfulness and intentionality. Continue reading Mindfulness in Miniature →

Communication

_________ing an Uncooperative Body

June 9, 2014 musingsofanaspie 104 Comments

I don’t know how to title this. I don’t know what verb to put in that gaping blank space. I don’t even know if body is the right word.

Maybe brain is more correct, though my brain keeps reassuring me that it knows exactly what it’s doing. It points fingers at my uncooperative mouth and unruly hands, blaming the execution when I’m quite sure something must be going wrong further up the line, in the commands or perhaps the translation from thought to action.

And yet . . .

It’s clearly physical, too. Physiological? I watch my hand go astray as it writes letters that I’ve know how to form–that I’ve been writing without conscious thought–for forty years. Even as my brain is putting on the brakes and mentally shouting at my fingers that an “S” doesn’t look like that, my hand carries merrily on, barely finishing an extra loop or a backward curve before I bite my lip and, with a level of concentration more commonly seen in first graders, trace over the letter until it looks right.

Less obviously physical, but just as confounding, when the word in my head doesn’t match what my fingers type or my mouth blurts out, it feels like an accident of the body. A localized failure to follow orders.

And yet . . .

The brain directs the body, is part of the body. So let’s say body. It’s all a little less scary that way anyhow.

That still leaves the verb. The action. What is this dance that I’m doing with my uncooperative body these days?

All I know for certain is that I need an -ing form, denoting an event in progress.

Taming an Uncooperative Body?

I wish. Taming implies making something easier to control. What’s happening has its own timing and progression. The best I can do is to try to keep up with the changes as they make themselves known, one by one, steadily more strange.

Wiling an Uncooperative Body?

I should know by now the outcome of “just try harder” in these situations, but I still fall for it. Occasionally sheer will works. I’m pretty good at forcing myself through unpleasant tasks when necessary. But with writing? Having a conversation? Mostly I end up cranky, with an achey head and a strong desire for a nap.

Ignoring an Uncooperative Body?

Ignoring worked for a while. When the oddities and slip-ups and errors were an occasional thing, I could pretend they didn’t bother me, that I was being a silly perfectionist. They were annoying, yes, but still easy enough to ignore. We’re past that point now, and have been for a while.

Accommodating an Uncooperative Body?

I tried–and continue to try, though with less enthusiasm–to find accommodations that work. I’ll talk instead of writing, I assured myself. I’ll use text-to-speech to check for errors. I’ll switch to handwriting, slow down my typing, outline, make notes, scaffold, revise as much as it takes. Give up Facebook groups and commenting and reading a zillion blogs and articles, reduce my communication load and stop volunteering for projects. I’ll have silence day and learn sign language and only write on “good” days and settle for a word that’s close enough when I can’t find the one I really want.

Each one worked for a while, until it didn’t anymore. A series of Maginot lines and my brain invaded Belgium every time.

Fighting an Uncooperative Body?

At times, I do, out of stubbornness, a refusal to give in, pride. I’m angry a lot these days. At what, I don’t know. Myself? Why? It makes no sense to be angry at myself for something I’m not purposely doing. Maybe at life, circumstances, the way irony is only truly ironic when it’s happening to someone else.

Maybe I’m more frustrated than angry. Maybe the exact descriptor of the emotion is irrelevant. Instead, if I say that the headbanging urge arises too easily and too often, does that convey what I’m feeling? If you’re autistic, I suspect it does. I guess that’s where the fighting comes in. Because I have to still that urge, patiently walk myself back from it, seek another outlet for that feeling. That takes energy, effort, sometimes just plain blunt force. I’m thankful for a lifetime of practice.

Mourning an Uncooperative Body?

Probably too strong and certainly too final a word, but there’s an intense sadness and feeling of loss that walks beside the anger. My ability to express myself in writing has always been one of the things I thought no one could take away from me. I assumed it was a constant.

My skill with words wasn’t just a strength, it was (is? I don’t know anymore) part of my identity. Writing is an integral part of who I am–one of my oldest and dearest special interests, one of the things that defines me. And I’m sad and scared and angry that it’s possibly dying or, at the very least, deserting me for a while.

Where do you escape to when you’re trying to escape the very thing that has always been your most comforting safe space?

Questioning an Uncooperative Body?

Who is this person I’m becoming? There’s an incongruity that’s developing in the gaps of who I am and who I think I am (was? have been?), between the aspects that continue to be strong and the areas that I’m struggling with in ways I have no contingency plan for.

When I’m not writing or talking or listening, I feel as whole and competent and as much myself as ever. I go out to run in the morning and the ideas flow just as they always have and I think “yes, today is the day.” Then I sit down at the computer, stupidly optimistic, eager to write what’s running around in my head and quickly begin to wonder what kind of tricks my brain is playing on me, what made me believe that today–unlike yesterday or the day before–that today would be the day that I could get from thoughts to words so easily.

Disguising an Uncooperative Body?

Increasingly there is the need to disguise my confusion. How often can I ask The Scientist to repeat himself until his frustration surpasses mine? How often can I reasonably tell him that I need silence because listening to speech, trying to link one sentence to another, holding the fragile tenuous meaning of his words in my head until I can respond requires more effort that I can manage in the moment?

How odd does it look to others when my response to the repetition of a question is “sorry, I didn’t realize that was a question” followed by a request to repeat it one more time? How much easier it is to nod and smile and make affirmative noises and hope I’m getting it right.

Of course, The Scientist is on to me and has started repeating himself when his question is met with confused silence or a tentative guess at an answer.

Living In an Uncooperative Body?

My first instinct was “living with” but there is no “with” here. I can no more live with my body than I can be a person with autism. I am my body, uncooperative or otherwise. Increasingly, I find myself gravitating toward activities that don’t require language. I read less, write less, talk less, watch TV less, run more, walk the dog, workout, listen to music, cook, take long bike rides, swim, play games, tend my container gardens, watch The Scientist fish.

Accepting an Uncooperative Body?

I don’t have much choice on this one. The more frequent and pervasive my language problems become, the more I’m being forced to accept that this is the status quo, at least for now, at least until I know otherwise.

There is also the fact that while I’ve lost a fair amount of my communication ability, I’m still able to communicate many things verbally and in writing. My expressive and receptive language has become literal and concrete and often requires more effort than I’d like, but it’s still functional in ways that matter a lot to me. I should be thankful for that. But the sense of loss is still strong at this point and I’m having trouble getting to a “glass half full” way of looking at things.

And so I’ve run out of verbs. I suppose, secretly, I’d hoped that finding the right verb would mean finding a solution, but I can’t write my way to answer on this one.

Not all posts are about answers, though. Some are simply here to say if you found anything in these words that you relate to or you’ve been in this place or you’re in a place like this right now–you’re not alone. And neither am I.

Acceptance, Communication

Behavior is Communication: Are You Listening?

April 30, 2014 musingsofanaspie 107 Comments

Behavior is communication.

This has become a catchphrase in the autism community. And for good reason. It’s certainly true.

A child runs from a store and experts assure the frustrated parent that behavior is communication.

A parent asks for advice about why their recently diagnosed child bursts into tears at bathtime and experienced parents nod in sympathy. “Behavior is communication,” they say.

A child refuses to eat anything but raw carrots and pancakes and the child’s occupational therapist isn’t the least bit surprised. Behavior is communication.

A child flaps at a wind-up toy that’s stopped moving and the experts . . . somberly intone that the child doesn’t know how to communicate . . . that he isn’t aware of the adults around him and is “trapped in his own world”, unable to share his joy with others.

An adult walks away from an autism researcher who is treating him as less than competent, preferring instead to tend his garden, and . . . cue the tragic music as the researcher looks on gravely and the viewer is made to believe that the autistic adult simply doesn’t know how to have a proper conversation.

What’s going on here?

Why is certain behavior treated as communication and other behavior treated as a failure to communicate, often in the same person?

Somehow a phrase that started out as a positive step toward understanding autistic behavior in the absence of language has become associated primarily with meltdowns, self-injurious stimming, eloping and other obvious signs of distress.

Why is that? Do autistic people only communicate distress through their behavior?

In case the answer to that question isn’t obvious: No, we communicate a whole range of emotions and messages. But much of it seems to get lost in translation.

That toddler flapping at the wind-up toy? It looks to me like he’s saying, “that was fun, do it again!” It’s not his fault that the so-called experts in the room don’t speak autistic as a second language.

Going Beyond the Obvious

Meltdowns. Elopement. Biting. Hitting. Crying. Refusing to eat certain foods. These are not the only autistic behaviors that are communication.

Stimming is communication. It’s not enough to simply assume, “this person is stimming so they must be stressed or anxious.” Sometimes stimming is about anxiety or sensory overload. But it’s about so much more than that, too.

My stims are a language unto themselves. I have a stim for every mood, and while the physical movements may sometimes be similar, the feelings that go with them are distinctly different. My happy flapping is different from my grossed out flapping. My excited bouncing is different from my nervous bouncing. The autistic body is constantly communicating and it’s saying so much more than “I’m in distress.”

“Lack of communication” is communication. Autistic attempts to interact with others are often overlooked because they are atypical.

Did you know that an autistic person may express interest in something by studying it for a long time rather than directly engaging at first? Many of us like to understand how all the parts of an object work or how a person responds in different situations before we feel comfortable interacting. And persistent questioning, monologuing, or echolalia–often dismissed as unidirectional communication–are all signs that an autistic individual is seeking to connect.

Eye contact (or lack thereof) is communication. But it’s not the kind of communication that most people assume. If I’m staring off to the side while you’re talking to me, that’s a sign I’m intensely concentrating on what you’re saying. And if I’m making intentional intermittent eye contact? I’m more focused on “passing” to avoid looking odd than I am on listening to what you’re saying.

And that’s just one simple example of how using a neurotypical “dictionary” to interpret autistic behavior and body language can lead to chronic miscommunication. Understanding that behavior is communication is a good first step. But it’s not enough to look at autistic behavior and guess, based on neurotypical experience, reasoning and cultural norms, what that behavior means or doesn’t mean.

Only through accurate translation of autistic behavior can real communication occur.

For that to happen, autistic individuals–including autistic children–need to be allowed to communicate a broad range of messages in the ways that are natural for them. Forcing a child to make eye contact or to stop flapping is the equivalent of forcing them to speak a foreign language. It’s telling them that if they want to use behavior to communicate more than distress, they’ll have to speak another language because theirs is substandard and the people around them can’t be bothered to learn it.

“Behavior is communication” has to apply to more than just a small subset of behaviors or it’s no better than “quiet hands” masquerading as acceptance.

This post is part of the 2014 Autism Positivity Flash Blog happening today

Communication

Do The Thing!

April 3, 2014 musingsofanaspie 76 Comments

Yesterday morning, The Scientist and I unexpectedly had to Do A Thing that neither of us had ever done before. For some reason–probably because I’m an eternal optimist–I volunteered to go into the town hall to find out how to Do The Thing while The Scientist waited outside with our dog.

Right inside the door there was a Help Desk so I approached the woman seated behind it and said, “There’s an office where I can Do This Thing here, right?” and she said, “Yes but, here let me spend ten minutes explaining five different excuses why you can’t actually Do That Complicated Version Of The Thing here and will have to drive to a nearby town to Do The Thing.”

That sounded inconvenient but I was so focused on Doing The Thing that I took the Post-it note with the address of The Other Place To Do The Thing and figured it was an unplanned hour lost from my day, but if that was what it took, fine.

Outside, I explained about the ten minute conversation with the five different excuses to The Scientist who said, “Grumble grumble grumble” and, instead of admiring my informative yellow Post-it note, immediately went inside.

Sensing that confrontation was afoot, I walked the dog around the parking lot, still clutching the Post-it note.

Sometime later–but certainly less time later than the hour it would have taken me to follow The Lady of the Five Excuses’s directions–The Scientist emerged from the town hall and told me that The Thing was done because, in fact, it was possible to Do The Thing there.

Fine. Awesome. Great job.

Not really.

I had mixed feelings about his ability to Do The Thing, especially after I’d just been told by the same person that “no, absolutely, definitely, certainly not possible to Do The Thing here.”

The Scientist was clearly having his own mixed feelings. We decided to grab a coffee and talk over our giant stew of feelings because that’s what married people do and that’s especially what we do.

What Happened?

Sitting in Starbucks, we proceeded to dissect our contrasting experiences. I felt a bit like Watson to The Scientist’s Holmes as he explained how he’d managed to Do The Thing.

He told me that while he’d been waiting outside for me, a town employee walked by and The Scientist said, “Hey, do you know how I can Do The Thing” and the guy said, “Sure, there’s an office in the basement. It’s not my My Thing but there will be someone in The Thing Doing Office who can help you.”

That explained a lot. I’d taken the woman at her word because she’d told me that The Thing Doing Office couldn’t help me when I’d specifically asked. Clearly, she didn’t want to be bothered interfacing between me and The Thing Doing Office when she could just send me away and go back to reading ‘Divergent’ instead.

Which is no surprise. This happens all the time, right?

But here’s what is surprising: the way The Scientist and I viewed what had happened.

To me, having to go to another office to Do The Thing was inconvenient but I was so focused on Doing The Thing that I didn’t think beyond, “This is a little annoying.” I took the information I’d been given at face value because I had no other contradicting information to weigh it against. The social nuances of the situation–especially that the other person’s objectives might be different from mine–didn’t occur to me in the moment.

To The Scientist, the woman was a bully who was taking advantage of my lack of information and trying to make less work for herself by turning us into Someone Else’s Problem. As he recounted his conversation with The Lady of the Five Excuses, I noticed that many of the details he included pertained to the subtext of the conversation.

The things that rarely occur to me on the fly. The things that I can usually pick out later, after much analysis of a situation. The things that I was only starting to realize as we compared our experiences. In other words, the pragmatic (rather than the literal) use of language.

I was so focused on getting my goal accomplished–on using language as a tool to gain factual information–that I didn’t question the motives of the person I was asking to help me.

The Scientist, with the added assurance that he’d gained from his conversation with the town employee, did.

And that, in part, was the difference between our interactions with The Lady of the Five Excuses. When I Do Something New, I usually research it first. If I’d had time to prepare to Do The Thing in advance, I would have gone online to read about Thing Policy and Procedure. I would have Made a Plan, complete with a script. When The Lady of the Five Excuses gave me her song and dance routine, I would have known she wasn’t being straight with me and called her on it, backed up by an encyclopedic knowledge of Thing Policy and Procedure.

The Scientist, on the other hand, isn’t much of a researcher when it comes to minor interactions. For him, the casual chat with the town employee plus his ability to read the social nuances of a situation–It’s 8 AM and The Lady of the Five Excuses doesn’t want to deal with your complicated problem–are enough information for him to go on. When you factor in his in-tact pragmatic language skills, he’s doing a lot more on-the-fly interpretation and adjustment during a typical interaction than I am.

Not Usually This Naive

At least I’d like to think so. But I am literal. I see Help Desk and assume help will be forthcoming. And I’m goal oriented. I want to Do The Thing. A person says “Here’s how to Do The Thing” and my brain just goes straight to “Yes! Let’s Do The Thing now!”

There’s also this: I usually make up for with facts what I lack in pragmatic language skills.

If I know that I’m going into an unfamiliar situation, I go armed with plenty of background information. Then I run a continuous comparison of the information I’m receiving against my known facts. I also rely heavily on pattern recognition–people who are lying tend to fit one of a few predictable patterns.

Maybe my bullshit detection program wasn’t running in high gear. I’m usually pretty good at detecting when someone is trying to put one over on me. And at pushing back. Hard if necessary. This was a low stakes situation, though. Spending an additional hour doing something isn’t a very high cost.

If I hadn’t had The Scientist’s experience with the exact same person to compare my own experience against, I would have been inconvenienced by Doing The Thing in the Less Convenient Place, but I wouldn’t have thought beyond that. The social implications were secondary to Getting The Thing Done on that particular day.

A year or more ago, I might have felt a need to justify my thinking to The Scientist and he might have felt the same. It was a startling reminder of how much has changed in the past year to sit there in Starbucks with him, enjoying our coffee and marveling at how differently we see the world and how, as long as we’re each happy with the way we see things, that’s just fine.

Communication

Pronoun Reversal and Confusion

March 14, 2014 musingsofanaspie 142 Comments

One of the obvious early signs of autism in children is pronoun reversal. All toddlers have difficulty with learning the correct usage of I, me and you. However, sometime between two-and-a-half and three years old, most kids gain a firm grasp of personal pronouns.

Specifically, they begin to understand that pronouns are referential rather than absolute words. I can be me but I can also be you, right? It all depends on the situation.

When you think about it, that’s a pretty challenging concept for someone who only recently learned to use a potty, but somehow most kids get it. If a child approaches their preschool years and is still using I, me and you interchangeably, that’s a potential sign of autism. The same is true of a child who continues to use their own name to refer to themselves in the third person.

There are a lot of theories about why autistic kids don’t make the transition to using personal pronouns at the same time or in the same way typical kids do. Some of them are disturbing and stereotypical:

autistic people don’t know that other people are actually other people
autistic people don’t have an intact sense of self
autistic children are “solitary beings” who don’t interact with others
autistic children are more egocentric than typical children
autistic children don’t pay attention to/listen to/notice/care about other people so they don’t hear how pronouns are used in daily speech

Most of those ideas are rooted in outdated theories about autism. More likely reasons for pronoun reversal in children are:

autistic children use echolalia to communicate and say “you” because they are echoing the way other people refer to them
autistic children have difficulty with pragmatics (social use of language) Continue reading Pronoun Reversal and Confusion →

Communication

Uncooperative Words and Where I Go From Here

December 11, 2013 musingsofanaspie 118 Comments

Something strange is going on in my brain. Aside from the usual strangeness, I mean, which I’m quite used to. Back in March I wrote about my missing word problem. Over the past few months, I’ve developed some funky new issues with writing:

The missing words are no longer just small words like a or the. Now I also skip right over important words, and sometimes pairs of words. A particularly bad sentence might have three words missing.

Sometimes I repeat phrases, typing things like “I was about to about to change directions.” Those are fairly easy to catch when editing.

Verb forms have become interchangeable at times, which results in me sending ridiculous texts like “I’m exciting to see you” and mixing tenses in paragraphs.

Contractions are occasionally problematic, specifically leaving off the apostrophe and what comes after it.

The weird word substitutions continue, perhaps more frequently, definitely in more obvious forms. Also substituting homonyms like to/too and you’re/your, even though I know the correct usage and it drives me bonkers when other people do this.

My spelling has become erratic. In some writing sessions, I backspace over every third word, often more than once until I get it right. The biggest problem seems to be the letters coming out in the wrong order. Yesterday I tried to type Walmart into my GPS and I had “mwla” before I realized that wasn’t going to get me to where I needed to go.

This all adds up to making writing–from a blog posts to one sentence emails–very frustrating. Even a single line reply on Facebook will end up with some glaring–though not to me–error. In spite of multiple proofreadings. In spite of taking my time and being extra careful. Continue reading Uncooperative Words and Where I Go From Here →

Social Skills

Invisible

November 15, 2013 musingsofanaspie 96 Comments

Before we get to today’s post, an announcement: As part of the avalanche of advocacy this week, there will be a flashblog on Monday, Nov 18th. You can find the info at “This is Autism” Flashblog. It’s open to autistic individuals, parents and allies and is accepting writing, video, graphic and comics submissions.

On to the post . . .

—–

Sometimes [often?] I feel invisible.

I thought this feeling would go away when I grew up. Feeling invisible as a kid is normal, right? Everyone is bigger than you. Smarter, more experienced. And the ones who weren’t bigger or smarter or more experienced, were funnier or prettier or . . . something.

I never quite understood what that something was, just that I didn’t have it. When teachers forgot my name, I shrugged and mumbled it for them. Then mumbled it again when they mistook my mumbling for Sandy or Sydney.

And really, to be honest, I never wanted to be one of those kids who everyone knew. The popular kids. Too much pressure. Too much attention. I like blending in. Getting a “well done” sticker next to the “100%!” on my spelling test was about all the positive attention I needed to keep me satisfied.

Still, I assumed being an adult would mean an end to feeling invisible.

Invisible is like this: I’m at a neighborhood holiday party. I’m sitting on the couch, talking with someone I know and enjoying it. A stranger sits beside me, inserts herself in our conversation as strangers do at neighborhood parties. She asks typical stranger questions. Do you live in the neighborhood? Where are you from? What do you do? We both turn to her and answer, suspending our conversation in favor of this getting-to-know-you talk.

Do I sound resentful of this intrusion? A little, but more in retrospect, because I know what’s coming.

Slowly, gradually, nearly imperceptibly, I feel the three-way conversation is becoming a two-way conversation between the stranger and the person I was talking to. Eventually, I settle back into the couch so they don’t have to keep leaning forward to talk around me. I listen to their words volley back and forth, unable to find a way back into the conversation, which has now turned to a subject they’re both passionate about.

I wait it out some more, picking at the plate of food on my lap, stuck in a rut of smile and nod as they glide from one subject to another. As much as I want to regain a footing in the conversation, I feel like I’ve disappeared from their radar. Bored and uncomfortable, I finally excuse myself, pointing to my empty plate, saying cheerfully that I want to go check out the dessert table. They look surprised and maybe a little chagrined, as if they only just realized that I’d fallen silent ten minutes ago.

It’s easy to assume they had something in common–something I didn’t share–so it was natural for them to become intensely involved in a 2-way conversation. Except that this story repeats itself too often to be “them and not me.”

This is probably fixable. If I was more assertive, made more effort, worked harder at learning conversation skills.

But the invisible feeling comes up at other times too. It’s there when I watch other people take credit for something I’ve done. It’s there when I post something to a group and no one responds. It’s there when someone seems to contact only if they need me to play tech support for their ailing computer. It’s there when someone promises to do something and then forgets, leaving me waiting like an overexcited kid who hasn’t yet realized that there will be no trip to the amusement park today.

That’s it–right there–the powerlessness that creeps up inside me and makes me feel small.

The problem, I see, as I’m writing this, is not so much the practical side of learning to be assertive in social situations. As a child, I was clueless about how to make myself seen and heard. As an adult, I have the potential to do something about feeling invisible, but the feeling itself is now the problem.

To write this, I had to force myself to be with it. Invite it to sit here beside me so I can examine it. And I don’t like it. I don’t want to do the hard work that I know is necessary to befriend the feeling and defang it. But I don’t want to let it haunt me anymore either.

Communication

Silence III: Intention

November 8, 2013 musingsofanaspie 36 Comments

The Scientist and I have done another experiment. A twenty-four hour vow of silence. We began at noon on a Tuesday and finished at noon on Wednesday. The agreement was no spoken communication, but we would text if something urgent arose.

The first couple of hours were odd. I’ve never been intentionally silent simply to see what would happen. I’m comfortable with silence, but I felt like I was having to internalize a new rule, which made me a little tense. Also, there was the factor of the unknown. What would happen? Would we be able to sustain 24 hours of not talking?

After the first few hours, I felt myself start to settle internally. I love the sense of quiet that comes over me when I don’t have to speak or process spoken language for an extended period of time. It allows my internal processes to run uninterrupted. On a practical level, I’m more focused. Emotionally, I feel peaceful.

As the day wore on, I realized a few things:

A lot of what we say in the course of a day isn’t especially necessary. We speak as a touchstone or on impulse or without even thinking.
Without spoken communication, you have to pay a lot closer attention to the person you’re with. I thought it would be the opposite, that we’d feel disconnected. It turns out that not being able to shout from one room to the next about something forces you to be more intentional and aware.
I’m much more naturally inclined to silence than The Scientist is. That’s not surprising.
Being silent created a feeling of being present, focused and energized. I felt more mindful of my actions during the day.
Not being able to communicate complex ideas would get frustrating if I did this for more than a day. We managed to communicate simple things with gestures: time to walk the dog, meet you on the couch in five minutes to watch TV. Beyond that, I had little idea what The Scientist was thinking, which was strange and a bit disorienting.

We managed to make it the full twenty-four hours. Sort of. The Scientist had to take a work-related phone call and he volunteered to go pick up a package at our apartment building’s office. I slipped once and exclaimed “oh” when a man appeared out of the dark beside us as we were walking the dog at night.

All of those felt like reasonable exceptions to the experiment. We never did have to text each other about anything.

I now understand why monasteries that limit or prohibit talking have strict routines. We relied a lot on routine to navigate the day without speech. We always walk the dog after dinner. We always go to the gym on Wednesday morning. If not for those routines, it would have been harder to get on the same page about all the simple activities that fill up our days.

A caveat if you’re thinking about trying this at home: twenty-four hours of silence can drive you deeply inside yourself. The Scientist and I both agreed that we liked this part of the experience a lot. However, two days later I found myself experiencing some intense feelings that had surfaced as a result. If you decide to take your own 24-hour vow of silence, it’s a good idea to be sure you have a support network in place, in the event that you find yourself having a similar experience.

Like our other experiments, this one has taken on a permanent nature. We’ve decided that from now on, Mondays will be silent. I’m looking forward to seeing what the long-term effects of having one nonspeaking day a week will be. And, of course, I’ll be back to share the details.