Today, I have a guest on the blog - my husband Dave.
Doing social
Having Aspergers means that I rarely have a sense of what is
going on.
Early on I learned – don’t ask me how – that the best I
could do to understand the world was to conduct constant and exhaustive
analysis. I have done this habitually all my life. It may take days, weeks,
months, and even years on some occasions. There are things I am still analysing
after 40 years and somehow the committee of brain cells is not satisfied yet.
Many of these analyses have a life of their own. They are
fired often by puzzlement. Feeling bamboozled is fairly familiar. Feeling lost.
An example – a trivial example – of such analysis is Having
People Round. They may Eat, Visit, or perhaps just Chat. Everything is OK until
they leave. I ask Sue ‘Was that OK ? Were they alright ?’ and then, whatever
her answer, plunge into analysis. I search for nuance, study body language,
remember what seemed significant moments, trying to figure out if the evening
went well. The thing here is that I simply have no circuits to tell me how it
was, whether they were OK or not. I have absolutely no sense of it, and have to
try to arrive at a conclusion by means of relentless analysis.
To normal people, this process is at best aberrant, and at
worse plain nuts. They have an intuitive feel for whether some social occasion
has been OK. They don’t need to ask anybody. The question seems absurd. To
them, whether someone enjoyed themselves or not is obvious, like asking them if
the sky is blue, or what colours mix to make orange. It is not something they
think about. Ever. This always feels like amazing magic to me: some spell I
never mastered. One of very many.
Analytical thinking was useful at work, when it was
explicitly useful. Leading a group through the foothills of analysis to the
peaks of understanding was something I could do with ease. But nobody at work knew
that the same process was constantly clicking over covertly in my head. It is
incessant. It is exhausting, but I can’t stop it. And if I ever did stop it, I
would have no understanding at all of what is going on around me. Analysis is
the best I can do.
Sometimes there are intuitive insights which make me feel
like an idiot savant. I can sometimes pick up on odd emotional undercurrents,
and can stumble upon the hidden issues to unlock problems. This can be mistaken
as being smart, when it is merely an accident of circuitry.
In particular, my radar has always been tuned to the
wavelength of distress. I have never handled happiness well, and cannot detect
it confidently in other people or myself. But misery ? That’s another story. I
seem able to see the tapestry of misery with all the subtlety of a Farrow and
Ball paint chart. I seem able to home in on people’s hidden sadness in a way
which often takes them aback.
Why is this ? Well, I do not know, of course. It was true
when I was a child, and is still true now.
This random and bizarre combination is all I have to try to
understand the world. No wonder I feel so often out of place, puzzled, adrift.
I am hopeless at ‘doing social’. I often wonder aloud to Sue
whether people I know might be considered friends, or if she thinks they might
think of me as a friend. I was never sure, am still never sure. People are at
best a mystery, and occasionally a nightmare.
Doing social was always a problem. Living in a shop, there
was a clear boundary between the house and the shop. You stepped through a door
from a private world into a public one. In the public one there were likely to
be hordes of strangers: customers, reps, deliverymen, all of whom you were
supposed to talk to. I remember always feeling tense before stepping through
the door that led from the safety of the house into the shop where strange
customers might be lurking. It often felt like us against them, though none
ever got through the door to the house and actually invaded.
When ‘visitors’, ‘strangers’ actually got into the house, it
was usually at my mother’s invitation. She even invited relatives to visit. When
they came, much to my mother’s delight, my father, grandfather and I saw thought
of it as an alien invasion. Relatives were inconvenient, verging on hostile. We
withdrew into our respective shells like alarmed tortoises. There were a few
exceptions: relatives with favoured status. We never invited anybody: relatives
had nothing to do with us. We tolerated them to please my mother. I think she
found this difficult.
I never understood relatives, and could never find common
ground with them. It was hard to even figure out how they fitted together. They
always felt like a problem that was just too difficult to solve. After my
mother died in 1971 it was an opportunity to slip out of sight of many
relatives, and her funeral was the last time I ever had any contact with most
of them. I do not know whether they are alive or dead, but either way they do
not trouble me now.
The family motto was “God gives you relatives. Thank god you
can choose your friends.”
The thing was that we did not choose many. My mother had a
bunch of them. She visited them, and they came to see her. I think she probably
needed the light relief.
My father had a friend. Jack Brownhill had improbably furry
eyebrows and appeared very infrequently. He had been best man at my parents’
wedding, and after that came around like a comet maybe once every two years. It
wasn’t a close friendship, but it was the closest my father had. Jack Brownhill
and my father both look bewildered on the wedding photographs, though that
might have been due to the fancy dress. I have no idea who Jack Brownhill
actually was.
My grandfather had a tiny group of friends who never
visited, though he went to see them. They were previous colleagues from work,
and all of them female. He – and I – always got on more easily with women than
with men. Neither he nor I were competitive, and both of us were vaguely
cerebral, probably feeling safer in our heads than out in the company of
people.
As a kid, I had friends at primary school. I even did Susan
Sloboda’s maths in exchange for her doing my sewing. My stuffed Bambi still has
Susan’s tiny seams punctuated by wild blanket stitch where I took over. My
sewing looks like the webs spun by spiders after being given marijuana. But I
was taken home ill from the end of school leaver’s party. It was the social
stress that made me ill, rather than the jelly and buns.
Secondary school was a nightmare of Kafka-esque proportions
from the first day to the last, and ‘friends’ there were never more than
acquaintances really. The school used surnames only, so I guess that friends
were the people whose first names I knew. The main task at school was to
protect myself from the school’s desire that we should all fit in with what
were odd rules of behaviour. I did this by being difficult when I was there,
and by being there as infrequently as was possible. I was often not there when
I was actually there – playing truant inside the school. I have been playing
truant all my life.
I did A levels at 16, and went to university when I was just
17. I was socially inept, hideously immature, ill-at-ease, but good at Latin.
It was not a promising prospect.
The university wanted me to go into hall. This was a
deal-breaker as I simply could not face spending time in the company of so many
strangers. I wrote to say that I would not be going to the university at all if
I had to be in hall, and so I ended up in digs with a dozen other misfits,
oddballs and eccentrics. They were delightful, though Sue always felt we were
faintly creepy as a bunch.
University was the best period of my life. By light years.
There were very few, if any, rules. Nobody seemed to care very much what you
did, and there was no pressure of any kind. I failed to turn up for any
departmental meetings, parties, meals or wine tastings, and did not go to
graduation. I missed not only lectures, but whole courses of lectures. I read
voraciously and discovered delight in so many areas of learning. I bought
astonishing numbers of books and had VIP status in the bookshop as a result.
As an adult I have studiously and creatively avoided groups
of people wherever they gather. Shops, parties, weddings, sports, festivals,
collective bonhomie of all kinds. I am most alone in groups of people, and feel
existentially threatened. I have been to three weddings, one of which was my
own, but could not face going to my wonderful children’s weddings. There are
many reasons for that, but social events are something I welcome as much as the
invitation to have flu for a month, or have someone push wires under my
toe-nails. I break into a sweat at social events, feel my pulse rate and blood
pressure rise, and can’t wait to get away.
To other people, it seems incredible that I have this debilitating
lack of social feel. It is unbelievable to normal people that anyone can lack
this basic capability. I look un-ironed but otherwise almost normal. My
behaviour is a little eccentric, but not wildly enough to have me barred from
public spaces. But there is just no circuit in my head which can tune in to how
happy people are, whether they like me, whether they are having a good time,
whether they are satisfied.
Analysis, analysis, analysis … there are usually several
simultaneous analyses continually running in my head. No matter what I am
doing, however absorbed I am in some obscure woodwork or music, committees of
brain cells are beavering away trying to find answers to impossible and often
trivial questions.
I cannot tell whether people are angry or upset. This is
true of myself, too. It is hard to distinguish between them. I try not to get
into that whole territory, as it feels rather scary. On occasions when I have
been angry, I feel out of control and unstoppable. Martial boggled at the rhino
displayed in the arena. He commented that it was slow to anger, and hard to
provoke, but once aroused it was ferocious beyond belief. The Romans were
awe-struck that a rampaging rhino, suitably goaded into action, tossed anything
in its path. Its fury was indiscriminate and implacable. I know how it felt.
Until really recently, and decades after her death, I always
thought of my mum as volcanic. She seemed to me to have two settings: calm and
explosive. There was no mid-setting, and she moved unpredictably from pacific
to violent without warning. It was scary and made me feel a bit insecure. Now I
see that she must have had infinite gradations of gently increasing annoyance.
The puzzle for her must have been that I ignored the warning signs and ploughed
on regardless. It must have been so frustrating and inexplicable. But I simply
did not notice any warning signs, could not read them, did not even see them. I
simply went on with whatever nefarious thing I was doing, and kept on
enthusiastically until she exploded, much to my complete surprise. And much to
her huge incomprehension. How could I be so wilfully annoying ?
No relevant circuits, that’s how.
I am colour-blind. My rainbows, wonderful, glorious, and
moving have only two distinct colours really. I see yellow and I see blue, and
maybe am aware of another colour, though I don’t know what it is. Not for me
the ROYGBIV version which I know exists for other people, but never see. It’s
just the same with emotions. You have to work with whatever you have.
The second instalment to Dave's explanation is here.
