Autism in My Own Words Part 1

Autism in My Own Words Part 1

 

I don’t know how we do it. Or how “normal people” do it… they gather, have parties, talk, drink, eat, “mingle,” etc. I find myself talked at while I find a person’s eyebrows or lips moving and try to lipread to help decipher through the noise what they are trying to say. I thought I was the only one contorting my face in a carefully practiced dance of lips, cheeks, and especially eyebrows to make level expert look what everyone else looked like what level easy looked like. I’ve been doing it my whole life, and I’ve been doing it so long that I’ve forgotten I’ve even been doing it.

Until I got diagnosed with autism and found others like me. And my mask slipped. Suddenly I was “being autistic” and “not who I was before.” Everything was harder, and my eyebrows took more energy to move, my eyebrows could hardly stay awake, and so many more things took so much more energy. I have hardly been to a social gathering since then. But today I was talking to a friend for not even an hour. Half an hour into the conversation I almost fell asleep, and not because I wasn’t interested in the conversation. Part of it was because of the pain I was in and because I didn’t have much sleep the night before. Part of it was because I just didn’t feel like keeping up the charade that was “conversation” anymore. But part of it was because just sitting there, being there, in public with my mask, even with this friend with who I felt comfortable unmasking, felt impossible to continue.

I read or watched or was reminded of family gatherings or gatherings in general this evening which inspired this post, and I just wanted to share what I actually have gone through. You see, when I excuse myself to take a nap because I “feel unwell,” I am literally overstimulated. Meaning that your brain filters out hundreds if not thousands of things that my brain simply does not. My brain is to the point of being overwhelmed and hurting by the point I’m actually conceding “taking a nap” or leaving. I’m exhausted because your brain does things on auto-pilot that my brain does not have an auto-pilot for.

For instance, you “brush your teeth,” and that’s all you think to do. I think to take out the toothpaste, unscrew the cap, put the toothpaste on, screw the cap back on, put water on the toothbrush, brush my teeth in a particular order and fashion, and then put my toothbrush away. There is no simply “brushing my teeth.” There are ten steps to everything I do, and I have to think through each individual step in order or get everything wrong.

A different type of example is eating. Your body tells you “I’m hungry,” and you go eat. It usually happens around the same time every day, right? You have conditioned your body to tell yourself to go eat around the same times each day. It’s not like that for me. I mean, sometimes it is. But usually, I have to look at the time, see that it’s around mealtime, and then decide to eat. Otherwise, my mood will shift. My already low stamina will switch into nap mode and just power off for a nap. Or I will be too hyper focused on something to notice anything around me. I set alarms for med time and mealtime because I can’t trust myself to look at the clock. There is a particular term for this that I am forgetting, but autistic people have it where their bodies don’t connect with their minds all that well, so not only do they have problems connecting emotions with language to express their emotions, but they have problems knowing what their bodies need. Add to that certain sensitivities, memory issues, and other things, and it’s a natural disaster that is not our fault. It’s just a part of autism that we have to learn and be aware of and figure out ways to solve.

Does any of this make sense?