Asperger's on the Inside

Sitting at the playground, I can see a water skimmer, a little fly-like bug perched on the surface of a puddle. I can’t really see it moving more than a twitch, but it must be, because it’s making little ripples outward intermittently. The moving circles bend the light, and reflections of the sky and tree branches shake before coming steady again. The twigs distort in unusual ways. It’s fascinating. I’m watching to see if I can pick up where the little movements are coming from. A twitch of the wings, and then…

Oh crap, someone is talking to me. Time to snap back to attention and act interested in the playgroup conversation. It can be hard to stay tuned in sometimes.

So, when I last touched base with you about my life in Houston, I was talking about expatriate wives and the difficulties I was having with making the type of close friends I’d imagined. My new environment was somewhat strange to me and definitely different from anything I’d experienced before. In my previous life, in engineering and university, I’d become used to guys—men, men, and more men surrounding me, with few other women in the mix. Men had always made up my closest friends and confidantes, and I was used to male interaction.

But here, I was suddenly thrust into this world with all women—privileged women at that—and was supposed to suddenly know how to relate. They weren’t like the girls in my girls’ group. They were, on the whole, more focused on material things and appearances. I didn’t know how to talk to them.

Feeling more like an outsider than any real part of the group, I spent a lot of my earlier days just listening to, observing, and analyzing the ladies around me as if they were an odd sociology experiment. The talk was usually light and fluffy. I like to joke about it all being the four C’s—children, castle (decorating the house), cooking, and cruising (holiday planning). But more seriously, in light of the depression I was in, I was finding myself bored by it.

How could I care about how much flavor raspberries add to muffins when I was so focused on finding the key to making friends? “What are your deeper thoughts and feelings?” That’s what I actually wanted to know. And “how can I connect with you?” (Not that I actually said that, of course!)

Some days, I would feel a bit down and find myself really struggling over the idea that perhaps I was never going to fit in. I mean, what if it was just a fact that no matter what I did, I was never going to click with these ladies as well as they did with each other? What if nobody ever wanted me over or invited me to the more intimate and interesting gatherings? After all, I wasn’t one of them.

On those days, the lonely times could become particularly depressing, and they began to feel like a prison sentence that was going to go on and on, and just at a time when I was craving the warmth of company so badly. How I longed to have another house to go to that wasn’t my own, that person whom I could drop in on unannounced and always be welcome, any change of scenery other than my own walls, which were starting to feel claustrophobic.

It certainly gave me a new appreciation for my mum’s house at home and how comfortable I’d always been dropping by there. I loved how I’d always been free to just spread out on the couch, help myself to food and snacks, and be around someone who was so familiar and welcoming to me. It’s amazing what you take for granted and don’t notice until it’s gone. I guess I was feeling homesick.

Other days, I had a little more spirit and focused on trying to work out my next plan of attack—friendship-wise, that is. Who to approach next, and how to approach them. What events or invites could I come up that would interest people?

And while I didn’t have a whole lot of success in that, I did learn one thing over the course of my stay with these ladies, and that is that women are complicated. I had no idea how difficult it could be to just communicate “right.”

For example, I learnt that if you are a woman yourself, you have to be really careful with tone or even avoid saying things in a neutral, direct way, because often, “neutral direct” is how women say unhappy things and “positive fluffy” is how women say okay or good things. It’s like a code, and if you get it wrong, others may completely misinterpret your meaning and can take it very badly.

And for the record, I’m not writing these things to complain about women. But I do want to explain how hard it can be for someone who doesn’t naturally speak this language to make sense of it. We have to decode it, because this is often a real problem for women Aspies.

At one point, I remember how a friend of mine, Angel, gave me feedback that I said too many things that sounded like complaints, when I really didn’t think I did. Her comment really surprised me. But it turned out that many things I’d said were just coming across badly.

For example, saying, “I need help,” to somebody who I guess already had been helpful might be taken as, “You’re not helping me enough. I’m hinting because I’m disappointed in you.” But when I say these things, there’s really none of that negativity implied in it. I just mean them as statements of fact. “I’m still so unhappy. I have an issue, and I want you to help me in any way you can.” I guess I’ve never been good at that happy happy, hugs and kisses, rainbows and kittens language or seeing how others might interpret my words.

A friend of mine, an Aspie mum named Kathy, once told a group of us how her Aspie daughter was learning to speak “Womanese,” which I think is a great word for it. It’s the language of bending your words to be extremely positive and only presenting your negative comments in flat, neutral hints. It seems that it’s a real “must-learn” language for any Aspie girl who doesn’t want to be forever frowned upon by other women in her life, although admittedly, it’s a skill I’m still a little ordinary at and still improving on myself!

But anyway, enough analysis. I definitely don’t want to bore you that way! So it’s time for me to move on and tell you some actual stories of the experiences I had.

Over the next however many chapters, I’ve decided to tell three stories about my experiences with other women in Houston. Two of them, “The Story of Angel” and “The Story of Playgroup B,” are examples of troubles I had fitting in socially, where I remain confused about what exactly went wrong. The third, “The Story of Paula,” is a happier story to remind us that despite stereotypical behavior, there are always some good people in the world. So let’s begin with the more positive one.