Thank you! This puts into words something that I’ve been trying to explain for some time.
I’ve had a lot of discussion on the task of multi-tasking over the years. There are some who say it impossible and others who say it is easy. I’m closer to the “impossible” side, but as someone who sings and plays guitar, I know it is possible. One of the tasks has to rely on muscle memory, though, otherwise your brain is switching back and forth like the article describes.
Like if I’m trying to build a statistical spreadsheet that other people can read, if someone interrupts, I need some time to get to a place where I won’t have to backtrack. For instance: I’m trying to link a bunch of cells together to give a single output, I’m not 100% certain how to do it, I can figure it out, but if I have to position my mind to think of something else, I’ll have to start over.
We recently watched Coco and my son watched pretty quietly and attentively, which shows growing maturity for sure. But afterward he became teary when he realized he couldn’t meet his own ancestors that way. Instead he listened to my husband talk and share pictures about his long-deceased grandmother.
He can go hang out with cousins and not really engage with them much, but afterward ask a dozen questions about them, wants to see pictures of them, wants to know about them.
Recently he has started asking me if I like weird creatures, which, I do. And then he proudly says, “I like weird creatures too!" (He definitely got this from me. Our excited reactions to weird creatures are pretty much identical. In fact, that’s probably the closest I get to stimming. I can’t control my body whenever I see a squid or something.)
He is a sensitive kid with a real longing to connect with others.
Contrast that with my grandfather, who is almost certainly autistic, who brusquely says, "Never had friends. Didn’t need ‘em,” and I know he actually means it. He’s never felt anything was missing without close relationships. My grandma is the one person who understands him. I was telling her about my son’s diagnosis and the traits he had and she was like, “Sounds familiar. Sounds familiar … Oh my gosh! Grandpa is autistic!” Then later we had him over, at 86, and I think he got a real kick out of seeing a little boy like him. Although at one point he leaned over and said, “Let me ask you something. Does he ever stop talking?”
Heh, only when he’s asleep. I think that’s the ADHD.
One of the things I’ve been thinking about lately is my fifth grade language arts teacher, who was one of the best teachers I’ve ever had and whom I adored. I borrowed a book from her and then lost it. I felt absolutely terrible, because I had lots of books that I would have felt terrible if I’d lost.
This teacher told my parents that she was very disappointed in me – not for losing the book, she was a teacher, she knew that happened with kids, but that I didn’t seem to feel any remorse for losing it. And I can see that – I remember being so upset that I couldn’t really react at all when I talked to her, which probably seemed a lot like I didn’t care, even though I cared a lot.
I don’t blame the teacher at all, especially given that this was in the 80’s and neurodivergence wasn’t a thing that anyone knew about. I still remember her as one of my absolute favorite teachers. But now I wonder what that says about me, and/or about this whole autistic/empathy thing.
My impression is that most autistic people care deeply, they just don’t express it in neurotypical ways.
There’s a show about an autistic surgeon called The Good Doctor and there’s an episode where he has a gun pulled on him and becomes so upset he can’t follow instructions, and someone is shot. He insists on working that day, namely to save the life of the person who was shot, but otherwise doesn’t react any differently, until the very end of the episode when he comes home to a girl he’s been crushing on and says, quite distraught, “I messed up today. And someone got hurt." That’s all he can really say about it.
It’s a fairly polarizing show for autistic people but it seemed pretty spot-on to me and I liked the way it depicted people as assuming he didn’t care but showing how he did care.
Sometimes I envy the people like your grandfather, who are happy being alone and don’t want friends. I’m like your son; I want so much to connect with other people, but usually end up screwing up and alienating them instead. It’s often easier to be alone than to try and fail - being alone in a crowd of happily connected people is the worst of all worlds - but it’s not what I want.
Oh, me too. I have many friends, but I’ve learned from experience to keep my mouth shut when I’m struggling so I will reach out to nobody when I need support. Sometimes I will reach out to my Aunt, who is my closest confidante, but sometimes instead of actually calling her I’ll just imagine what she would say and call it a day. I try not to trouble my husband too much also, because he has to deal with other people’s intense feelings all day at his job. It takes a toll on him.
So the upshot is that I end up oversharing on the Internet and texting friends who live in other states. I rotate through them so I don’t annoy any one of them too much with my feelings. And I avoid everyone else as much as possible.
What I don’t have is a friend I can just call up for support or just have be a part of my daily life. You know the friend that’s in every rom-com? Don’t have that.
Probably not a great dynamic. But I do have a great family. My husband and son. I’m very lucky in that at least.
My husband recently remarked that while we’ve always had loved ones, we’ve always and forever been logistically isolated. There is no real tangible support in our lives and never has been. It’s always been the two of us trying to figure out how to make it work on our own.
I think that people confuse empathy and sympathy and that’s part of why autistic folks can seem to lack empathy. Sympathy (my definition) is compassion – feeling FOR someone. Empathy is feeling WITH someone. As a kid I could feel what others were feeling, but I lacked the social tools to do anything with it. It took a long time before I learned how to control my empathy, which was sometimes upsettingly tangled me up in other people’s feelings, so that I could feel compassion, which is an outside-looking-in.
It is also true that most of the time I was a lot more comfortable tuning other people out. I never knew how to respond to them, and they always seemed to expect something from me and then were disappointed. I never knew what that something was.
My kid is a little like @Spice_Weasel ‘s grandfather (and actually, now that I think about it, a little like her dad). She now likes hanging around other kids (which she didn’t up until she was 14 or so), but she doesn’t feel the need to have close relationships or keep up with her friends by text or whatever (same with her dad, who has friends whom he likes, but not close ones and doesn’t particularly keep up with them). Maybe that will come, I don’t know. She does have a “best friend” where they are friends mostly because they were the only girls in their tiny class for a while, but I have to basically stand over her and tell her to text this girl and what to text. (I’m talking about stupid stuff like, when her friend texts “I miss you!” when they’ve been apart all summer, she needs to text “I miss you too!” back. She knows that doing stuff like this is important for her friend, it just is not something she enjoys or even really understands.)
I’m lucky enough to have a best friend (and a lot of it is luck – we became best friends in high school, and she’s pointed out that if we’d met as adults we probably would have been friends but probably not best friends, as a lot of that was growing together for years) and we talk every other week, but we aren’t like the rom-com friends where we are daily parts of each others’ lives. My sister and I do more of the daily-ish “hey this is the random thing I’m thinking about/struggling with today” but that’s much more driven by her (she is NT). Though part of this is might also be that bestie and I grew up in an time where we didn’t have texting/chatting and we’re not really used to communicating like that (although before the era of cell phones, we used to write really long emails). My sister is not that much younger but chat and text are much more of a thing for her and her friends, I’ve noticed.
One thing I’ve noticed about me is that it has always been really hard for me to be a part of a group. Like, I’ll even make friends with one person who belongs to a group but then be sort of apart from the larger group. For example, my two good friends from college were both part of another bigger friend group but I never really jelled with either bigger friend-group, even though they were totally nice people who I’m sure would have welcomed me if I had been able to figure out how to be part of them. I also haven’t managed to figure out how to really be part of the social group (as a group) at my kid’s school or at church, although the nice thing there is that both groups are pretty inclusive even of people who are kind of at the edges socially, so I don’t usually feel like I’m missing out or anything. I think it’s not a problem with them, but with me – like, I would have to spend more energy and interest on a wider swath of people than I’m really comfortable doing.
I’ve read a couple of things (can’t remember where, maybe on reddit? so take this with a huge grain of salt) that imply that sometimes girls’ groups, in particular, can have a lot of weird undercurrent dynamics and so may not be as happy and connected as they look from the outside. I suspect that’s not true of all of them – some of them probably really are great! – but that has made me feel a little better about it.
This describes me pretty well. I don’t have many friends, nor am I a good friend to those I do have. Like, I will never reach out to folks to see how they are doing, or just randomly want to pop in and visit people… same with family, I visit my mother/grandmother at the expected times (Christmas, mostly, sometimes Thanksgiving) but not really any other time unless I’m asked to go to something (birthday parties and whatnot).
If I’m asked to go to an event, I will generally go, but I just don’t have a need to see other people. Definitely explains (in large part) my failure to maintain my marriage, but also explains why I eventually realized “single” is the status I should stick with. It’s better for all involved that way…