Autism as a Special Interest

Reflections From a Late-Diagnosed Mind Unmasking the Past

It’s such a bizarre feeling to realise you spent your life trying to be something you couldn’t. That what you were striving for revolved around a brain that couldn’t achieve it.

I guess it’s like someone with colourblindness, understanding the concept of red, but never internally experiencing it. Perhaps me in a social setting is like someone in a rose garden who can’t see red. You can see everyone swept up in the awe and beauty, but you just aren’t feeling it.

So, I’d pretend. Do the face, say the right things, some back and forth chat. But I wasn’t engaged with the experience like others. I didn’t embody it. It was a performance, like reciting lyrics without the melody.

I was caught in a loop of flat affect, feeling out of place for it, and consequently melancholy to match. I’d never remember names when introduced. I wouldn’t even hear what they were saying, so consumed was I with ticking the boxes of staged interaction. My brain had no space left to experience the actual conversation.

I’d lost myself to the act. I no longer knew who I was, who I was trying to be, or who others expected me to be.

Communication

I need to talk about interesting things. And ‘alright?’ is not interesting. I’ll often go too deep too soon, or be selectively mute. If I’m not quietly thinking what a load of nonsense people are chatting, I’m literally telling them, honest to a fault.

I’ve learnt to keep quiet and listen. But if an opportunity arises to reveal some animal facts or question the nature of reality, I’m all in.

Groups are tough. Not just because everyone’s talking over each other, but because when I do find a groove with the person next to me, I’m still filtering the other conversations in the room, mining them for interest. It makes my own chat stilted as I try to process different threads of thought.

I’m a one-on-one savant if we hit a mutual interest. Completely at sea if it’s group banter and nonsense chatter.

Authority and Justice

I’ve always found it bizarre that authority figures are treated any differently to the rest of us. If we’re all fallible humans bumbling along, how does landing a particular job make someone’s opinion more valid when it all comes down to logic and reason?

No amount of demanded respect ever made sense to me. This caused issues with teachers, bosses, and of course, my parents.

Coupled with my strong need for autonomy and control, I never took kindly to being told what to do, regardless of anyone’s position. My expectation of fairness and good sense often crashes up against bureaucracy.

My idea of justice was a bit of a tyrant. I found the world of bullying intolerable. Fairness was paramount, bad behaviour inexcusable. Double standards were unbearable alongside my desire for logical consistency. These sorts of principles can cause all manner of issues when social nuance is disregarded.

Sensory Stuff

Spending so much time in silence, loud noises can be unbearable. The invention of noise-cancelling headphones was a gift from the gods. Bamboo and merino wool fabric brands must be an autistic gold mine, especially when they print on the fabric or create tearable tags so you don’t have to unpick the stitching to avoid plasticky itch. To that extent, I have a uniform, all the same pants and socks, all the same tees and jeans. For decades any attempt to veer off the favourites usually results in a section of wardrobe gathering dust.

With a rather flat baseline, speed and danger also have sensory appeal. Getting that rush of endorphins via death-defying stunts is where the real smile emerges from an otherwise flat affect.

To give that some context, I’ve had several solo skydives but found bungies gave a better buzz. I’ve been out in storms, pirouetting sailboats, or watching fellow surfers get plucked by helicopter out the back while I struggled to navigate a rip. Snowboarded off-piste via helicopters, free-climbed sketchy cliff faces solo, discovered the top speeds of a few motorbikes and how they perform on their back wheel. All this, simply to feel alive, the same way the average person might when heading out to a party.

Echolalia

Doesn’t everyone mimic animal noises? Don’t you hear a word or phrase, turn it over in your head and out your mouth for the good feels? Don’t most sentences have a word or sequence that hits on the lyrics of a song, coming out with all the vigour of a dog greeting your return home?

I always thought it was a musical ear, a detail-driven thing of patterns and notes, like hearing a blackbird sing “I’m a Barbie girl”, but that might just be the local dialect of ours.

Thinking and Processing

Routine and structure are great. I have the same breakfast every morning. Woe betide anyone showing up unannounced when I’ve mentally mapped out my day.

I’m process-heavy. There’s an optimum way to do everything, and I’ll do it the same way until it’s as fluid as a master sushi chef.

Metaphors and idioms were lost on me as a child. It took a while to notice people said things they didn’t mean. Where was this bird with the white wing that kept dropping me in it? Why would first prize be picked up at the school dentist?

My speech can be slow. It’s like I’m thinking deeply about things but struggling to get the words out in a clear, timely manner, especially when on the spot with a question. Serious questions need thoughtful answers.

Then there are the conversations, the majority of which happen after the fact. Like replaying scenarios on what I should have said, where it could have gone, having been short circuited by pressure or conflict at the time. So much of life is lived in some internal rehearsing studio without any guests.

Special Interests

When a subject sparks intrigue, I go deep. Forget to eat. Struggle to sleep.

I’m not sure bringing genomics to the public domain was good for me, and my knowledge of bee society is unnatural.

Reading old university textbooks on psychology as a teenager wasn’t exactly what my mates were up to, but I was fascinated by all the quirks that make people weird and complicated.

I may have seen every nature documentary going, and I always seem to spot animals with hawk-like vision.

My autodidact approach never felt like natural talent, as people presumed. It was a desire to figure things out, to recognise patterns. I didn’t last long with music lessons, being told what to do and how to do it felt like a chore. But in my own space, I’d play a piece on the guitar or piano for hours on end until it was grooved into my neurology like vinyl.

I didn’t understand the nuts and bolts. Reading music wasn’t for me. I played by ear. Mimicry was my gift. Copying an artist, visually or phonetically, let me get away with looking like raw talent. I didn’t have original songs or visuals seeping out of me like a real artist.

That said, I recognise I’m not knowledgeable to the intensity people often associate with autism. I’m not reeling off dates or memorising reams of information. I focus enough to know a bit more than average, but probably not enough to impress.

Emotional Regulation

I’ve begun to reflect on emotional moments throughout life, noticing the childlike ferocity of overwhelm when confronting conversations arise.

I’d either be cold and disengaged, mentally going offline, or inconsolable. Often the latter followed the former. The performative nature of control and internal processing would give way to self-pity and quiet reflection behind closed doors.

From being told off as a child to adult relationship struggles, I had an image to maintain that couldn’t be rattled, only to meltdown privately as the moment was processed. As I got older and more in tune with my emotional self, that started to merge and show up in real time, mortifying both me and the other party.

It wasn’t temper tantrums or rages. I’d maintain calm bodily control. But the sadness, or anger turned hapless, would just quietly leak out.

With sensitivity to criticism and rejection, anyone adding to the already highly abusive internal critique would send me into a tailspin.

Out of Sync

As a child, the world seemed to whirl around me like I was an observer from another planet.

How curious I found all these weird and wonderful characters. Why did they behave like that? I was drawn to the troublemakers, the zesty, excitable folk, the sparkly people so at odds with my black-and-white thinking.

Perhaps I thought some of their charisma might rub off, or I could tame them with my more pragmatic, calm demeanour. Although I now realise many are neuro-divergent themselves.

Everyone seemed to have something I was missing. An innate sense of self perhaps, of belonging, that I just wasn’t experiencing.

Birthdays

Never had one. Or more accurately, never a party.

There were rare occasions in adult life where I relented to dinner with a select few. Otherwise, I didn’t want to know. How self-absorbed, I thought, to celebrate ourselves annually for our mother’s big day.

I often thought birthdays should be mother’s days. They’re the ones who did the work. What did we contribute?

I’ve been to plenty of other people’s birthdays, of course. Where everyone’s expected to celebrate your awesomeness by showering you in gifts. Giving yourself a hangover for simply existing another year.

Not to mention the now popular self-aggrandisement of asking people to use up their holidays and wages going further afield, simply because it happens to be a nice round number.

Selective Amnesia

Long before the drugs were on the scene, I felt I had some type of very early onset Alzheimer’s. How often family and friends would try to engage in a memory that I had no recollection of. I often consider how this must affect my personality, in that so many of the stories that make up a person’s life are missing. I seem to gravitate towards negative memories that darken the mind and push out the happy ones. Is this because the so-called good times are often social, and that’s a battleground taken up with strategy over experiential archiving.

Selective Mutism

It’s not conscious or consistent, that’s what makes it selective. I was like a little mute robot in public in my younger years, meetings in the corporate world would result in a great many important things being said, but only in my head. Sometimes I just couldn’t bring myself to engage, especially with multiple people where the dynamics are a free for all that I can’t begin to untangle. I don’t like fighting for attention, so the bigger characters could run riot.

Ultimately it’s no longer a search for answers, cures and fixes. It’s about recognising my being needn’t mirror some self-proposed ideal in response to a feeling of not being enough. That what draws me to anonymity and quiet solace is my true self, and maybe that’s ok.