I know it's been awhile, but I realized just today that my therapist is on vacation for a couple of weeks and there are things I want to talk about. This way, I can (yes, you are ALL my therapists now. You're welcome.) talk about them so I won't be obsessing over them until she returns and so I won't forget them.
One thing happened just a couple of weeks ago, while we were having Shabbat lunch at a friend's house. We knew most of the other guests because this family has regulars. I think we currently count. However, there were two who were unfamiliar, a father and teen-age son.
As soon as the young man opened his mouth, I knew he was on the spectrum, and further along than I am, or less socialized, or both. I'm over thirty years older than he is and I'm a woman and these make a difference in how a person on the spectrum presents.
First, he was loud. He wasn't shouting, but it was at an inappropriate volume. This is a tell. It's something that those who know me also have to endure, although I hope I'm not as loud as he is. I don't know.
That's right. I do not know my actual volume, or rather most of the time, I'm not conscious of it. I can make an effort to change it if I'm in a situation when being louder or softer, but not shouting or whispering, is necessary or appropriate, and keep it up so long as I'm in that situation. I can also adjust my volume when someone else tells me I'm inappropriate (usually too loud) but that is very short term.
I am told that most of the time my volume is set on the loud side of normal. I believe them but as the difference is subtle and I can't detect it, I can't do anything about it. My hearing is just fine for a woman my age. I just don't hear the difference between my volume and someone else's.
This young man was set even louder than me. To his credit (I think) his father never criticized him for this, and everyone else took their cue from him. It is very frustrating to be told to talk softer all the time when you can't do it very long if at all, and frustration is one of those emotions that overload quickly.
The second thing I noticed was his formality. He was extremely polite - everyone was sir or ma'am, he said please and thank you. In my mind, he was following the rules of good manners in the way that the other teen-agers present (who had excellent but informal manners)did not need to. THEY had the rules internalized and knew when to be relaxed about them. HE did not, and he chose to be more formal to avoid making mistakes.
Rules are very comforting things to me and others like me. They mean you know what to do in many situations that neurotypicals may understand instinctively. They mean that either you will do the right thing OR if you are wrong, it's not your fault. You followed the rules. One of the best things I ever discovered was Miss Manners Guide to Excrutiatingly Correct Behavior. It gave rules for both formal and informal situations and made interations with other humans easier. It's also one of the reasons I love being Orthodox. There are rules for everything!
I believe he also spoke without a great deal of inflection, which is NOT a problem I have, according to people I've asked. I may be loud but I don't sound otherwise odd. However, I really don't know for sure.
I did discuss comic books with him at one point - like me, he loves them,although he prefers the humorous, not the superheroic.
This leads to another thing. I just finished reading Jim C. Hine's Libromancer,which is an urban fantasy novel which uses books as sources of magic. Which books are - this is definitely a book aimed squarely at the SFF fandom community. I was sad that one of the books he mentioned doesn't actually exist. Recommended.
One of the secondary characters in the novel was described by another, highly empathic, character as "autisitic." This surprised the main character who had worked with this person for years. The empath read autistic people's emotions differently and with more difficulty because they accessed them differently and this occured with the person in question.
This was not presented as a positive or negative for the person in question, just as an obstacle for the empath. The person in question is portrayed as highly intelligent and competent at their job, with a deep love of animals and affection for other humans, as well as a deep love of rules. In other words, it was merely another character trait along with one character's love of science fiction and fantasy and another's need to take of people. They were not less of a person, less of a human. Just different than most, but then most of the characters can also do a form of magic, and that's also different.
I really, really loved this.
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