The cuckoo in the nest of life

One of the really great things about the Internet from my perspective is that you can learn from others. Each morning I eagerly look at my Google Reader to see which of the blogs that I follow have new entries. I follow lots of content about a lot of different things, and I learn a lot from the experiences of others, but perhaps my favourite blogs are those written by others on the Autism Spectrum.

This morning I read a short but rather striking piece by Sophia Battenburg on her An Ordered Mind blog. I say striking, because as often happens with AS blogs, the writer has put things in a slightly different way to me, and from that I’ve seen new connections to how I behave and interact that I’d not seen before.

Sophia says, in the context of having her routine interrupted by noisy people in her living space:

I am coming to terms more with emotions, as I’m conscious that I block a lot of the negative ones out.

This rings true for me. What it has also done is make me think about why both I and Sophia block out the negative emotions in situations that we are not comfortable with. I think I know why.

Both Sophia and I did not discover our AS until we were adults. This means that we’ve grown up having to make sense of the world from an angle where it actually doesn’t make a great deal of sense a lot of the time.

In my case at least, social interaction has most of the time come from repetition of what I’ve seen others do, through a bit of guesswork, and from learning when my reactions have seemed to be inappropriate. In other words, it’s lacked the intuition that most people use. In order to survive, I’ve had to blend in, using mimicry.

You have to remember that this was the thing that came naturally to me, not the intuitive interactions that my peers used. It seemed like the normal thing to do, even if it was a little confusing, as it didn’t seem to be quite the same as what my peers were doing.

With all this in mind, you can see how a situation such as that described by Sophia ends up with her bottling up her negative emotions. When I feel uncomfortable with a situation such as invasion of my space by noisy people, I too will bite my tongue.

Why? Because I have observed over the years that no-one else comments on it.

These days, I can see that no-one else sees it as a problem – they simply don’t have the same sensory overload and broken routine issues as me. Until it became clear how my Asperger’s affects me, I assumed that others too felt the same discomfort, but simply didn’t feel it polite to comment on it. As my social responses are primarily learned from others rather than being from original thinking, I’ve always towed what I think is the correct line. I say nothing, because that is the response of those around me. I bottle up the discomfort and negative emotions, just like Sophia.

Those of us who grew up with undiagnosed Asperger’s are cukoos in the nest of life. We mimic those around us to get by. If that means keeping quiet about situations that cause us discomfort, then that’s what we do, because that’s what those from whom we learned appeared to be doing.

Can I break this behaviour now that I’m aware of it? I think so. Ask me in a year.

Related posts:

1. Life derailed I’ve written before about how my daily routine is on...
2. The momentum of life Life has a momentum to it. Perhaps everyone’s life does....