batelite | Talk of autism

Below the cut there are first a few paragraphs relating to the previous entry, and then goes into the proper topic - autism as it relates to me (eventually, the first bit is complaining about someone else). I get into describing a suicide attempt at some point in the latter half. This entry is also loooooong

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Before I get on with the subject this time, I figured I'd first say that most things the previous entry was about (the described events leading up to it, not the underlying emotional fuckery) have been more or less resolved. I don't think that is necessarily of interest to any of you, but it something else came up in me after.

It feels to me like a lot of this is emotionally manipulative on my end and I don't know why. I'm not trying to be. Even offering someone a virtual hug when she feels a bit down (something that she does herself at other times) makes me feel a little like I'm trying to take advantage of her. Apparently part of my inner discourse thinks I have to manipulate people for them to interact with me.

I don't think I explained it very well last time but some of these feelings become recursive somehow. I pretty much know it isn't but writing the previous post feels manipulative, as does explaining things here. And so on.

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Pointless introduction

[EDIT: apparently this anecdote is a scene from Good Will Hunting, which I haven't seen. Please disregard this bit and move on to the next.]

I have a third-hand story so start with. There's this person, I don't know what the profession is called in English, who is meant to assist me in developing in areas where my autism creates weaknesses.

The second to last time he was here (~a month ago, I certainly got some stuff wrong about the story) I caught the tail end of an anecdote they were sharing about another of their clients - I don't know who, obviously.

This supposedly occured at a therapist or consultant or whatever. The client in question had seen a bunch before, if I remember because they couldn't find motivation to do anything or something. At some point the client started talking about a drawing/painting on the wall, about how the colouring and composition are al wrong and so on. Then the therapist stood up and grabbed the guy by the collar, and said something like "Well that may be true, but that picture was made by my dead wife."

(I strongly hope including stuff like that is considered ok)

I think the guy telling this story was trying to illustrate how autists (a considerable part of his clientbase) have difficulty understanding people's emotions. Now, maybe it's because I'm autistic but it seems hardly fair. I don't suppose that therapist had mentioned his wife before, why would he? It's not like there was a plaque with "This was made by my wife who's dead.", was there? Judging from some of the stuff I've seen around my dentist's practice I wouldn't even rule out that the picture could have been a purchase in bad taste would I have been there. Given all that, how could the client have known there was an emotional aspect to keep in mind?

Point is, I think the guy assisting me doesn't realize how he doesn't know what he's talking about. I don't think he's awful but lately it feels like he's acting condescending unintenionally quite a few times, as if he thinks I fundamentally don't understand people after observing people for years. Maybe when and if I make myself angry about it I'll write him a long mail about it someday. I can't stand people acting authoritively about subjects they clearly don't have a clue about. That last bit occurs more often with him but mostly on less important matters. It still annoys me though.

I wonder if I'll show him this place someday, and if so what he'll think about this bit.

No one in my real life knows about this place, and I suspect they don't know half of what I'm going to write below.

I suppose that intro has little to do with what's coming, but I still feel like including it weeks after hearing the story.

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History and diagnosis (actual start of the relevant bits)

I've been diagnosed with a form of autism at a fairly young age - a cursory look suggests ~9 years old. I fell into what I suspect was a depression at that point, crying all the time for no reason I understood and unable to talk about what I felt. I don't know if the crying and stuff actually had anything to do with autism, but at least it got noticed at that point. The therapeutic centre that I was then sent to (brought and taken home daily for 2 years) had a classroom with it, so I more or less changed schools as well. Looking back at it that was probably a bit of luck, since the school I was going to up to that point was surprisingly fundamentally religious for Europe. I remember a teacher at some point before showing a documentary or something to disregard the bit with dinosaurs because dinosaurs weren't real.

I didn't particularly enjoy the place I now went to much either, largely because the teacher for that classroom could fake being angry very well for someone who claimed to never get angry.

I was diagnosed with MCDD - Multiple Complex Developmental Disorder. I think it later got bunched with PDD-NOS (the latter part of which stands "not otherwise specified". Seems we went backwards to me.) I'll go into more detail below, but the general differences from other forms were described as

-Less difficulty with learning and understanding than other types of autism

-In addition to social difficulties usual to autism, there are also problems with emotional regulation, and (distinction between) fantasy and thinking. I'll do the emotion stuff last since I think that will double the length of this.

Oh by the way, the following is my personal experience so please don't go thinking that this is a guide on a subset of autistic people. I'm also not going to exhaustive with regards to the traits, only picking ones I feel I have something to say about.

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Thinking

The sites (not official reference material) I'm going off for the diagnostic traits aren't in English, so the bits below are translated. For some reason these are all written assuming the autist in question is a pre-pubescent kid, I wryly assume because by the time an autistic person is an adult they're either passing well enough or all hope has been given up.

Oh yeah, that was another grievance of mine regarding the intro. It's apparently simulatiously the case that I'm good enough currently and that whenever I and other people collide it is me who needs to change or cope.

*"These children have difficulty separating fantasy from reality"

I think the place where this fits with me most is in regards to the dark. I don't know how fear of the dark works in other children, but in my case it was (and still is, but less so) that my mind quite happily tries to populate dark places (especially in doorways) with jump-scare like awful stuff. A few examples from years gone by:

-At some point when I was young I and my brother were surfing some humour site (people submitting various cartoons and .gifs they likely didn't make) I've not seen before or since. At some point someone had done a series of uploads (one image per page I think) of .gifs of the various Teletubbies dying in gory ways. I only remember the green one getting crushed from above. My brain at night decided that that .gif might as well take place on loop in my room's doorway. I wasn't able to sleep by then.

-I'm not sure of the name of the level, but at some point in Rayman 2 you go through a boney nightmare cave in search of an antidote. Part of the level near the start has these long, spindly arms that will try to grab you and pull you into the wall. (I think that's an instakill?) For some years my brain decided that one of those arms might as well be in the alcove with the coat rack in the entrance hall.

-Not related to darkness, but it is related to Rayman 2 - For some time I had a feeling that the skeleton of Rayman was floating behind my back, but would move to a side if I were to look around so I still couldn't see it. His bones were clipping through one another resulting in a surprisingly grey pile of bones that were difficult to make out from one another.

By the way, I don't deal with horror very well.

On a less personal note, there are a couple things people do that everyone agrees is lying to young children, santa for example. If you're going to make children believe that essentially magic exists you shouldn't be surprised if they don't see through someone else's bullshit. This trait doesn't seem to me particularly indicative of autism.

*"Sometimes they have an unlogical way of thought or sudden leaps in though that are difficult to follow."

*For some reason it's not noted on any of these pages, but one of the traits of MCDD was a muscular or overactive fantasy

Children thinking unlogically? What a surprise!

More seriously though, I think the two are related in origin, although I of course don't know by what mechanisms the mind works. The sudden leaps occur because there seems to be a transistive effect when thinking.

Concept A may be related to B,C, and D and although C isn't of much interest it is related to E, which would be funny either in concept or because I can make a pun out of it. The leaps tend to occur when I leave out C, although I might not even consciously realize that I went through C.

That's why I think the two are related. Combining concepts in fantasy works in the same way. My fantasy is very active regardless, possibly I've nurtured it since it provides me with considerable joy. It helps during transit and I use it to drown out other things when going to sleep.

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Social interaction

No, this hasn't appeared in the intro but we both knew it was coming, don't we?

*"Children with MCDD sometimes display social disinterest and avoid social contact."

That might be called "being introverted", although it may or may not a a chicken and egg situation. I don't know if introversion is something that you are predisposed to from birth or not.

*"Sometimes they do seek contact, but have difficulty understanding social relationships."

I do have difficulty with social relationships, mostly a bunch of the bullshit that goes about them. It mostly has to do about honesty.

What I suspect has been the case for me, and this is entirely conjecture and guesswork on my part, is that there's no inbuilt understanding of how social interactions work in me. I think I've been trying to make my interests clear when I was young, but then couldn't explain why. Sometimes this might even cause anger. Anger that I'd not understand. Eventually it becomes easier to just shut up and not voice yourself. Learning social contact is easier when you're listening anyway. I'm very observant which helps. I usually wait for others to set boundaries as well, so I suppose if you wanted to do some kind of interaction with

Whether that is how it happened or not, I've had a record of severe socially desirable behaviour. People have asked me if I ment what I said I wanted twice, possibly three times on occasion.

*"Children with MCDD have difficulty placing themselves in the thoughts and feelings of others. They have a very deficient Theory Of Mind" and deficient empathic ability"

...But when people voluntarily do this it's called solopsism. Actually that's not really fair.

I believe the Theory Of Mind stuff has been critisized elsewhere. I'm not up to date with the discussion surrounding it, but I don't think it holds up at all.

I'm going to be a bit irresponsible and make a guess as to what other might be thinking. I don't believe that autists have a particular deficiency in empathic ability. As far as I know there's been some research suggesting that autists have little to no mirror neurons, and that those play part in feeling for others. In my case at least, this seems to have been remedied by simply observing people over the years. It just simply isn't hardwired, so more thought goes into it and effort has to be put into learning it. That said, it'd be great if I knew what to do with half of this shit. I haven't gotten the faintest clue how to comfort people in distress, aside from maybe just listening to them.

But that sort thing appears to be supposed to come to you just naturally, doesn't it? Nobody else seems to be having problems interacting with eachother. I've slowly been trying out things over on Mastodon, which probably skews the things I come in contact with one way or another. I'm so afraid of hurting or dissapointing others though, and once you've hurt someone what's the point in going on? You might as well not try to begin with. Making mistakes doesn't seem very appreciated in general, let alone social situations.

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Regulation of emotions

(from short to long, since I'm ending this section on a long anecdote. The lists repeat themselves a lot.)

*"They can sometimes be fearful of unusual situations or objects. This can be severe enough to be a phobia."

Spiderwebs in my case. I love spiders, even those in webs, but I will still flinch if I suddenly notice one close I've not seen before. I've become very good at spotting them by the way. I've stopped playing certain games because there's spiderwebs, and if I don't I tend to be on edge the rest of the game. Luckily the game industry seems to forget spiderwebs exist largely, but when they do they pile loads and loads of them in. The worst (real life) webs are ones with a lot of surface area caused by (I tried looking up if there's nomenclature for spiderwebs but I can't stand the parade of images on the Wikipedia page. It's the longer support/frame strings I'm talking about) and less so the size of the orb itself. Frozen ones are worse and better visible. In those cases it can be just a few bits of abandoned string and I'd not want to get near.

*"A noticable characteristic is that a little anger can quickly become rage. This also goes for fear; This quickly turns into panic. They get overwhelmed by their feelings and their reactions look disproportionally severe.

*"They often have low tolerance for frustration."

*"These children sometimes display mood swings without a clear cause."

In regards to facial expressions it's usually other "normal" people who react disproportionally as far as I'm concerned.

In regards to my emotions themselves, they do seem a bit extreme conpared to those of others. I don't know if the following is true for everyone with MCDD (don't assume so) or how my experience relates to others. That's a problem with all of this: I don't know what it's like to not be autistic, so hell if I know if I'm just making a fuss about nothing special.

What I'm pretty sure happens is that my emotions function via positive feedback loops. Sometimes it's just the thing that caused it being stuck in my head making things worse, but it can snowball into associating other unrelated subjects as well.

Being slightly angry (and inevitably thinking about it) makes me angrier. I'm not angry very often nor does my rational side shut off at any point, but quite a few times I've been seething over being fucked out of a train connection. Goofing about with people on social media as I've been doing instead of writing this sends my mood in various directions but usually up. At this moment it's increased considerably because of it over 10 minutes, and it seems that the simplest things on there have at least some lasting effect on my mood.

Similarly, sadness can swing right into tears or worse. I have at least once gone from feeling I could take on the world to suicide ideation in the span of maybe 30 minutes. I haven't actually tried it since that depressive episode from the history part. At the time I apparently thought I would be able to slit my own throat with a butter knife. I just cried behind the couch until my brother found me so no harm done in the end. Knowing my pain tolerance back then I wouldn't have been able to do much anyway.

These moods tend not to last longer than maybe a couple of hours most of the time. If this holds for others with MCDD and those also have as stoic facial expressions (to neurotypical people anyway) as I do it's not surprising to see "low frustration tolerance" - Most of the buildup would happen before expressions or behaviour change above the noticability threshold.

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-----This was going to be some big example of what I was talking about, but I think the

-----suicide talk has more or less shifted the mood to make this petty by comparison. Heh heh.

-----

For example: Yesterday I had a momentary collapse in mood (couple of hours, but the residual mood lingered on longer) caused by complete silence to a drawing I posted. I'm apparently insecure enough that a single thing like that can swivel my mood one way or the other. Here's a timeline

-Having just had some minor dissapointment I see that there's nothing about the drawing in question, itself also a minor dissapointment.

-However, I'm fairly certain that people have seen the thing and have had a chance to judge it. Being that I wasn't confident about the drawing ever since I made it, my mind went to assuming they hated it or at least disliked it. There's apparently no ground for indifference.

-In state of mind, my thoughts wandered to the physical drawing I did the night before and how I always overestimate my ability to draw.

-Also I remembered how the evening before (or the one before that, can't tell) I made a comment that, if you were to interpret in the worst way you could, might maybe possibly involve me bragging on a post about someone being sad rather than me just trying to say I agree and give my position on the matter. I think you'd have to try to not give me the benefit of the doubt on that.

-Oh wait I remember I make awkward comments slightly more often that don't get responses. I don't know what if anything people thought of those but surely people haven't forgotten, right?

-Then my brain went something like "While we're on people's possible opinions of you, remember that shitshow of a drawing you did? They probably dislike you at this point."

-Sometime during this buildup I retreated to my bed for an hour or so, where I simmered in my snowballing emotions until they started to clear up

-Somewhere during the recovery to normal mood (not at the faint trail part yet) I post a reply to the drawing post bitching about it. This gets one response at first, which wasn't that bad.

-A few hours later someone else (who I'm sure is pleased by my bitching and attention-seeking) responds. That was 4 hours ago at time of writing and I've not yet read it. I think I'll have to face that dread though, since I should probably tell her that I'll incorporate this event into this post.

I like to think that when it comes to interactions like that I'm not so much bothered by the lack of attention as much as I don't know whether I'm being social right. I think that might not be true though. I'm fairly certain I might not be that secure in my feelings. I don't even honestly think that the response will be negative, maybe confused or slightly annoyed at best.

How the fuck can I both believe that AND dread looking at the same time? I don't even know if I'll look at the fucking thing this evening. (I didn't)

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One of the sites had some traits that weren't otherwise categorized:

*"Because they can't properly select/process stimuli they sometimes have difficulty paying attention to class"

This site is aimed at teachers I think.

Isn't it a known thing about autistic people that they tend to be occupied more with details than with larger things? It's the case for me anyway. Couldn't that be a cause? Even though I translated it the original was worded as irresponsibly. I doubt that they can back up that stimuli bit.

*"Further remarkable is that it's difficult to estimate their abilities. They seem capable of one thing sometimes and not other times."

At that therapy place during the depressive episode they sometimes let some of us do small chores. At some point they appointed me or I volunteered (for some reason some small children love doing this kind thing) to water some plants. I remember on at least one of these occasions asking again if they wanted me to water these plants, unsure if they really wanted me to.

I think I was just that worried about screwing things up; If I played it safe and not water them it'd be easy to fix in case it turned out I should have watered them, but watering them when I shouldn't have is not really a thing you can undo. I guess I was and still am very averse to disappointing anyone.

Watering plants is usually not a dilemma for me, by the way.

*"These children can react slower than others."

That's called overthinking every single move you make, as I've described above.

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Conclusion:

Maybe that gives an indication of what might be going when I inevitably do something weird in a place you can see?

I should put the fact that I've got autism into my Mastodon bio, maybe. That seems to be a thing people do for clarity.

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P.S. If nothing else, would you reader(s) be so kind as to give some feedback on the theme and especially the colouring? I have little experience with making web-pages readable. I have a fairly good screen and relatively good eyesight, and there may be a bit of bias on my end with how well this reads. I put this scheme together around last post simply so it's not the default and because I hate blindingly white stuff. I'm not very pleased with the way it looks yet.