Could I explain face to face?
I’ve taken a look back at what I’ve written here over the last couple of months and I’m a little amazed at myself. There’s a lot of powerful and profoundly personal thoughts expressed, and some pieces of writing that I’m very proud of.
My little retrospective through what I’ve written has left me wondering if I could have explained the same thoughts and feelings face to face with someone. With anyone.
I don’t think I could. There’s a lot that I’ve written about that I’ve not told anyone face to face – even my wife. I find talking about feelings to be very difficult. It’s a little hard to explain why or how it makes me feel uncomfortable, but it does. It’s got something to do with not being sure how my thoughts will be taken by the other person – whether they’ll understand or empathise with what I’m trying to say.
I also struggle to find the right words to express myself with, when it comes to subjects like thoughts and feelings. Whilst I can write this article about the self same difficult subject at pretty much the speed I can type, I’d have trouble saying the same words – somehow the words don’t flow when I have to speak them, they only flow when I write them.
I suspect this is part of a bigger problem, one that I’ve touched on before in my writing. Spoken conversation is tricky for me, as I often can’t see which way a conversation is heading, and I don’t have much of a natural ability to intuitively respond to other people verbally. It’s impossible for me to ever fully forget this characteristic of my personality, and perhaps because of this I’m always on guard, and trying to think several questions ahead, about how I might respond. I’m often looking for stock answers that might fit. Perhaps you can see how this style of communication doesn’t lend itself all that well to talking about a tricky and very personal subject such as my feelings.
So, the articles I write here have very much become my voice on Asperger’s, for now at least. I realise that one day I need to start letting at least some of those around me know that I have this condition, and to explain a bit about how they can expect it to materialise itself in their contact with me.
For now, doing this seems just too difficult to tackle. I don’t feel prepared enough – how would I answer the questions that they would no doubt ask me? I don’t feel as though I know enough about Asperger’s and how it affects me yet to be confident to answer.
I also have the tricky problem that I’m fairly sure that others in my family have Asperger’s too. If I talk to my family about my own condition, it is likely to open a very large and unexpected can of worms for other family members, and will probably cause a good deal of disbelief from some others. I don’t really have a clue as yet how to tackle this.
I’ve been mulling over the idea of getting a formal diagnosis, partly so when I get the inevitable shouts of disbelief from family members, I’ll have something to fall back on rather than just saying that I’ve figured it out all by myself.
Do any of you have this same problem of being fluent on paper, but not verbally? Have you told your family about your condition? Do you have any tips of how to go about this, or things to avoid?
One things for sure, you can bet that when I do tell people, it’ll be in the written f orm, and not verbally.
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