Asperger's on the Inside

And now for another one of my random Aspie wandering of thoughts…

One thing that has come to my attention over time is that some people really don’t like the way we Aspies are so direct with the truth. As I mentioned in the previous chapter, Edward found me to be seriously lacking in political savvy this way. “Hold on to the information for a while. Don’t say everything you’re thinking.” And for many others, it can be the sheer bluntness of our words that offends. I guess we do have a tendency to be brutally honest in our attempts to focus on accuracy, and sometimes we forget to consider what a person may really want to hear or if our words somehow constitute social taboo. People find it extremely rude and unacceptable.

However, there’s a flip side to this picture. I wanted to stop for a second and talk about how neurotypicals look to us Aspies!

Have you ever noticed how often typical people say things they don’t really mean? For example, when someone says, “Hi, how are you?” they don’t really want to know the details of your latest dishwasher troubles and how your leg is covered in lumps from mosquito bites. They’re usually just being polite.

When someone says, “Wow, what a fantastic job!” to a friend (or especially a child), it’s impossible to know whether they really like the work or not. They may be saying they do regardless, because that’s what typical people do with people they know!

When a friend recounts a troubling incident, have you noticed how others will gather to validate the person and tell them they were right, despite how logical or illogical their behavior really was? Those same friends could then easily talk to the other person involved and tell them they were right too. It’s all about making each other feel better—support in the form of words without any real meaning. To an Aspie who values and may genuinely want to know the truth, this can all be exhausting to have to dig through!

Back before I had my first son, Isaac, I took part in an infertility forum online and found it quite eye-opening to observe the “rules” of question and response. When a person posts, “Help, I am nine weeks pregnant and I just had some bleeding. It was pinkish red and has been starting and stopping lightly for two days. Is the baby going to be okay?” they don’t always want to hear, “Well, there is a 50 percent chance the pregnancy will survive. Bleeding happens a lot in early pregnancy for unknown reasons. About half the time, it spontaneously stops or continues as a harmless bleed, and the other half miscarry. Only time will tell.” (I’ve written answers like that before, and they don’t seem to get responded to!)

It seems the correct answers are more along the lines of, “Great big hugs,” “I feel for you honey,” “Oh how awful for you to be going through this,” “I’m thinking of you XOX,” etc., or to recount a positive story about a friend who had bleeding and ended up with a beautiful baby! So I guess the real point of the exercise isn’t fact finding but making the person feel less stressed regardless of what the truth may be, and somehow, just hearing these words does seem to work for typical people! (I have no idea how.)

To someone like me, however, this alteration in the game from fact finding to “emotional support” can be frustrating, because when I post a question, I really do wish to know the answer! I want the latest statistics on baby survival rates for people in my situation narrowed down by age, stage of pregnancy, hormone levels, etc., if possible. The more data, the better!

In that moment, I don’t care about great big hugs or whose thoughts are with me. That doesn’t help. I don’t even know these respondents, so to me, it doesn’t feel authentic. All I really want to know is what my odds are so I can brace myself for the outcome. Why is it so hard to get an honest answer out of people?

Similarly, if someone doesn’t like me, I wish they would just tell me instead of acting like everything is fine and forcing me to work it out for myself. When I first moved to Houston, which I will talk about later, I knew a lady who, at one point, started to give me confusing signals. She would say positive, supportive words to my face with enthusiasm and a smile but in between began excluding me in a way that gave me the impression she perhaps didn’t want me around. I related events over time to my friend Irene back in Australia, and we decided after a while that the lady indeed didn’t seem to like me.

After one amusing conversation about it, Irene and I jokingly coined the term “snot face” to describe people who behave in this way. It wasn’t because we were implying it to be something awful or the person bad. It was because if this were a childhood playground, all this confusion could’ve been avoided by a few simple interactions.

The lady would’ve poked her tongue out at me and said, “You’re a snot face!” I would’ve replied with, “Well, you’re a poo-poo head,” and then it would all have been over. I would have known where I stood and could have moved on. “Snot face” became an ironic label for someone doing exactly the opposite!

I once worked out the reason I think women do this two-faced sort of behavior. It’s something about keeping their place in some social hierarchy that typical people aspire to—one that I guess I fail to see or acknowledge. I suppose the more that people like you, the easier it is to maintain a good position in the eyes of others. Direct aggression could make you enemies who would find ways to bring you down. Backstabbing is a big problem. So it seems the normal way to go is to only direct your annoyance at people subtly and keep it deniable; i.e., with coolness and distance and gossip behind people’s backs.

I, however, don’t think in terms of hierarchy and often have trouble making sense of these ingrained behaviors. It wasn’t until later in life that I even understood why people would be inconsistent in how they talk to you directly versus how they really feel.

But at least learning this has helped me understand how typical people tick and what they really want when they’re upset. When I see a friend who is feeling down, I often do genuinely want to help. I do have compassion, despite what many people assume about Aspies. So if random supportive analogies and xox’s is what a friend needs to feel better in a time of trouble, then so be it. Hey, it seems silly to me, but if I really can help a friend by showing support in that way, then I guess it’s worth doing. Let the craziness begin!