[seebs]

Originally Posted by Crumb

What book?

Elizabeth Moon's The Speed of Dark.

Dr. Fornum, crisp and professional, raises an eyebrow and shakes her head not quite imperceptibly. Autistic persons do not understand these signals; the book says so. I have read the book, so I know what it is I do not understand.

...

I know some of what she doesn't know. She doesn't know that I can read. She thinks I'm hyperlexic, just parroting the words. The difference between what she calls parroting and what she does when she reads is imperceptible to me.

...

"Hi, Marjory," I say, and turn around. She is smiling at me. Her face is shiny. That used to bother me, when people were very happy and their faces got shiny, because angry people also get shiny faces and I could not be sure which it was. My parents tried to show me the difference, with the position of eyebrows and so on, but I finally figured out that the best way to tell was the outside corners of the eyes. Marjory's shiny face is a happy face. She is happy to see me, and I am happy to see her.

Extremely accurate, at least to me.

(And no, I can't explain how I made it through three chapters of this without thinking "gosh, this guy's autistic!")

So what if I thin I might be autistic, what should I do? Read something? get diagnosed? not worry about it? I seem to be doing alright with it, if it were the case.

Advice: Get a diagnosis, either way. Don't rely on a garden-variety shrink, check with a specialist. Because Jesse was vaguely upset with my behavior, I went to see a shrink, who dismissed the notion that I was autistic. After talking to me for a couple of sessions he concluded that my parents had probably not been good at expressing love, since I didn't seem confident that I was loved. (He's not the only person to have formed that theory about me.) In fact, the explanation is much simpler; confidence that you're loved usually relies in part on the certainty granted by experiencing other people's moods and states as raw data rather than as supposition.

It is useful to know. For one thing, it gives you a way to explain rudeness if you sometimes inadvertantly offend people. I told my coworkers that I'm autistic and if I do something really rude, it's probably unintentional. Bam, problem solved; even if I am rude no one will care. (They're engineers, this actually works with them.) It also means that I tend to get shunted away from, say, meetings with customers I don't know (which I'd find very stressful) and into things like "make the compiler work" which everyone else would find stressful and I find very relaxing.

Interestingly, simply knowing the name of the pattern of my "coldness" and tendency to not express empathy makes my friends much more comfortable too. Jesse isn't offended if I don't seem to be listening; after all, I can seem to ignore an entire conversation about yarn, but then I know everything that was communicated by it, so apparently I was listening after all. (For that matter, it really helps to have an explanation for "why does your husband sometimes shy away violently when you touch him" that doesn't involve any negative implications for your relationship.)