The Good Things

Ana Maria, if you are still out there reading me, please give it a shout in the comments.  I have thought of you several times while scratching out notes.

I can get caught up in the things that irritate about Aspies, because things that have gone horribly wrong for me (one huge one in the 1990s) I try not to think about.  Yet they must not be fully resolved, because my lack of forgiveness shows up quickly and I start getting carried away with proving them wrong, even though they are long since gone.  When I started my Nostalgia Destruction Tour, my wife advised me not to include ex-girlfriends "Because every time you run into one, you argue with her in your head for a month."

But there is a reason I fell in love with them in the first place, however it ended, and the preponderance of guys who are at least a little Aspie among my friends over the years and now in retirement indicates that there is something I like about them. There is a problem reading overviews in that they focus on children. There is often a picture of a cute white kid at the top doing something upsetting, like crying or screaming.  Even the ones that show a kid intensely focused on something it is usually not something useful, but stacking cans from a cupboard over and over again. I get it that this is what people are looking for on the internet. What is wrong with my kid?  What can I do about it? That is the area of greatest need for information, I agree. But for my crew it is an incomplete picture, minimum. And I'm also not that interested.

But they are great to have around, possibly because I have enough of it in me myself to be on their wavelength. I never see it mentioned that they have offbeat senses of humor, but that is certainly my experience. Unusual phrasing is something I prize, so I remember fondly the one who spread her hands palms downward at a meeting that had gotten testy, closed her eyes and said "Let's all take a Lamaze cleansing breath, shall we?" knowing that particular audience. I got the phrase "There's a lot of emotional leakage in this discussion" from an Aspie, and many others. Sometimes it is my pure joy at seeing their autistic approach so clearly illustrated, as my chemist pal who was trying to sort out what he thought was a mixed message about salvation in the New Testament: "So I made a spreadsheet..."

It fits the double-empathy theory, that autists understand each other better than they understand the nonautistic and vice versa. (There is evidence for this.) Like people who speak a separate language from the dominant one, they can sometimes get each other more easily. Females like other females who don't have the "drama and manipulation" they see other women displaying. It becomes an interesting question, and one of the foundations of the neurodivergent school of thought, that their socialising is not really wrong, just different.* Adults tend to restrict/curate their friend-groups anyway, which gives them a social life. Everyone does this to some extent. It gives all of us something of a silo effect, an echo chamber as well. While this may be particularly true of Aspies, it is not unique to them. When they perceive that the majority is not like them, they have a strong tendency to view those others as "just wrong," because they and their friends agree with that. If we think that this misses the fact that the neurotypical culture doesn't see things that way, they could plead the same. At that point we are arguing numbers. "Well, there are more of us than of you, so it is up to you to adapt." That may be wise in order to make your way in the world, but is it right? Children are less able to choose who they will be with, so it may not just be lack of emotional control that make it harder for autistic children to keep their tempers.  They can't moderate their environments as we can.

Yes, they can like a particular joke too much and use it over and over, but I'm in no position to criticise there. My brother notes that people get irritated at a joke about the third time, and progressively more irritated up until about the ninth time, but then there is a breakthrough and they start to giggle again and it gets funnier every time.

The articles do mention intense focus, but seem to only grudgingly acknowledge it is a good thing. Because your third-grader isn't going to find out anything new about dinosaurs it doesn't charm so much for them to keep telling you stray dinosaur facts. Yet this is very much a useful (and entertaining) quality in adults. They know stuff about a subject, so if you are also interested they provide you with brain food you have been seeking. Son #2 can discuss off the top of his head who the backup center is for Sacramento, and who might be out there that they can trade him for or replace him with.  He can tell you who might win many down-menu Academy Awards and why. He can remember exact quotes from dialogue in novels he has read, even novels he didn't like much. This includes back to fourth grade. None of those have anything to do with his job. 

There are lots of qualities we try to squash in children that are pretty useful to have as adults, especially around independence and thinking outside the box.

*I think this argument, though it has some explanatory power, ultimately fails.  We'll be getting back to this.