Children are never aware of the social boxes we are put in. So you can imagine how weird it was when I hit secondary school and slowly watched all my friends lose their minds, and put me in a social box I did not recognize. Conversations with people I had known my whole life suddenly made no sense, like they were speaking a language missing half the words. It wasn’t just alienating, I literally felt like an alien unable to understand who these people were or what was going on.
Turns out, they had started puberty and were building their foundations for navigating the subtext of the social universe, and I had suddenly run into a solid, invisible, brick wall called Aspergers.
Aspergers and Autism are largely absent from mainstream media, besides the 100% false accusations that you can trigger them through vaccines. The best way I can describe Aspergers from my experience is that the part of the brain that builds and interprets social interactions is essentially underpowered, kind of like a naturally weak muscle, making advanced social communication really difficult.
Everyone on the Aspergers/Autism spectrum experiences it differently. In my case, I couldn’t read people’s faces, tone of voice, social cues, and just forget about sarcasm or catching a hint. I could display emotion but wasn’t aware I was doing it half the time because my conscious brain couldn’t sense all the emotions I was experiencing. And when I could experience my own emotions, I would be totally overwhelmed with whatever I was feeling and couldn’t contain it no matter what was going on around me. My emotional awareness ranged from happy, sad, excited, scared, angry, and sleepy. With such a narrow comprehension of human emotions, you can visualize how many friends I had by the time I was 13.
Unlike most people on the spectrum, who are introverts, I’m an extravert meaning I NEED friends, which was really hard because of this giant communication wall between everyone around me – including adults. So how does a 13-year-old with Aspergers make friends?
Get a counsellor. They can tell you wtf is going on.
Tell People. I spent years explaining how I wasn’t trying to be inconsiderate, I just literally had no idea how they were feeling because I couldn’t imagine their emotional experience on my own.
Ask a lot of questions. Ask people how they are feeling or how something made them feel. The hardest thing for a child to learn is to connect an emotion to the word/label that defines it, which is especially hard for people on the spectrum. The best thing I’ve ever done is to ask people if their experience is like some event in my own life to see if it’s similar to how the person I’m speaking to is feeling at the time. If I was wrong, I’d try again until I got it right.
Roleplay A LOT. In your head, in a mirror, with a family member, with a pet, it doesn’t matter, just replay situations in your head over and over again and really think about how it made you feel, and how it made the other person feel based on whatever was said or done. Try to put it into words then run it by someone neutral who you trust to give you real feedback.
Steps 3 and 4 I believe are THE MOST important to practice. By practising all these mental-social exercises you will strengthen the social-interpretation part of the brain, making it easier to understand people and a great capacity to experience empathy.
I did a lot of roleplaying in my head as a teenager, almost like a form of meditation, coupled with a lot of asking questions – which I still do to this very day. Some people hate it because it forces them to talk about their emotions, while others love it because I am genuinely and intently interested to hear their feelings and share their experience because I REALLY want to get where they were coming from.
There can be a downside to developing better social skills. After 3 years of slowly learning social cues and subtext, I noticed my analytical skills had decreased. As a kid, I could memorize enormous volumes of information in fine detail, and retain them for years. Unlike body muscles that can continue growing so long as you keep feeding them with healthy food, no amount of amino fatty acids can dramatically increase the energy your brain can produce, which is finite. From redirecting brain power to my social brain, I was losing my advanced analytical skills. I had a choice to make – continue learning the social skills I required to maintain and build the friendships I’d made and needed to be happy, or stop practising and retain my monster brain-database which was a huge part of my identity.
Spoiler, I went the social route.
Good news is this obsession to learn everything I could about human behaviour and why we do the things we do lead me to a degree in Anthropology, and a deeper understanding of how and why humans think and feel from a very scientific perspective. Plus, my brain is still a pretty impressive database and long-term memory bank.
There are a lot of other upsides to being on the spectrum that are often overlooked in the panic parents feel when they find their kid can’t easily learn social cues and have no idea how to support them.
We Can Easily Retained Love. That obsession you have with a song that you love, but every time you replay it the specialness gets less and less? A lot of people on the spectrum can relive the same experiences over and over and each time they do it again, it’s as amazing as the very first time they did it.
We’re Pretty Non-Judgemental. Since we never really learn a lot of the details people use to judge each other, if we are going to judge you, it’s probably based on how kind you are to us and the people/things we care about.
We Have Very Little Social Anxiety. You know that moment between age 10-14 when the two-way mirror you’ve looked through your life (never considering how the world might see you) suddenly does a 180 and it feels like EVERYONE is staring at you? Those on the spectrum usually experience that late in life, if at all. I was 21 when that first happened and for about 10 minutes I was petrified over what everyone around me thought about me. Then I realized this is EXACTLY what my friends had been talking about for almost a decade and I could never understand before now. Thankfully, I was old enough already to know what others thought didn’t really matter, and I haven’t given it much of a second thought since.
We Can’t Lie. I mean you can try, but it looks SO obvious. This is a small issue at times, but I love it because we know the people who are in our lives really love us for our 100% authentic self, and appreciate how genuine we are with our totally unfiltered compliments and criticisms included. It also means we are really easy people to trust and be honest with – so long as you can take the good with the bad.
We’re Really Passionate About What We Are Interested In. Ever hear about the woman with autism who had this amazing connection with cows and invented a humane method for slaughtering them? That’s but one example of the many things people on the spectrum channel all that brainpower towards. For some it’s music or writing, for others, it’s math or medicine. This makes choosing a career path a lot easier too.
We’re a Haven for Emotionally Hyper-Aware People. This isn’t always true, but I have noticed those who are so hyper-tuned into the micro-emotions of the world around them that being with someone on the spectrum is the only safe space where they can be themselves. They can relax without worrying about how their emotions may cause impact, and if there is an impact it can dealt with directly.
We are Almost Oblivious to Bullies. I can’t say this works as well for guys who tend to get bullied physically, but for girls, this is honestly my favourite part about being on the spectrum. We really don’t care what other people think about us, especially that new invention the mean girl has come up with to dominate the people around her. Most of the manipulation goes right over our heads, and all we can see is this mean person whose negativity and baggage we don’t need in our lives.
I honestly thought to myself every time a girl would try this with me,
“1. You look and sound ridiculous, and 2. Don’t you have anything better to do?”
I don’t know about y’all, but I have always been too busy pursuing my dreams and frankly don’t have time for people trying to put me down. I’ve always known my worth, those who love me, and if you ever try to take that away from me you are frankly in my way and wasting my time.
Being on the spectrum CAN be hard, and makes some parts of life really difficult, but from my perspective, it isn’t any harder than anyone else’s experience, just different. I really think people on the spectrum are widely misunderstood, over-dramatized, and undervalued. I’ve always been very open with my condition because I want it to be as normalize as ADD/ADHD, and obviously having Aspergers made me unaware anyone would ever judge me for it anyway (funny how that works eh). The only real downside I personally experience on a daily basis is the extra work that is required to see through the wall I know exists but can’t feel between me and everyone else. The cool thing about walls though, they are also pretty stellar at protecting us from the chaos of the outside world, which in my case is a whole lot of very complicated emotions. Call it a blessing and a curse I s’pose.
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