1:38am January 13, 2015

My brother once threw a question at me…

“Hey Mandy, what does it mean when they say: A rolling stone gathers no moss?“

I mulled it over for awhile. I had two answers, one real answer and one joke answer. I gave the real answer first. Mind you, I was proud of myself. Immensely proud of myself for figuring this out:

“If a rock is rolling, see, then moss can’t grow on it, because moss needs to grow in a place where everything is still and unmoving.”

My joke answer was, “They’re rich enough to afford toilet paper.” When my family went on camping trips, if we ran out of toilet paper we used moss. And I vaguely knew that the Rolling Stones were a very rich band. So I figured they wouldn’t have to gather moss for toilet paper.

Anyway, my brother was nonplussed. He’d read somewhere that it was a sign of mental illness to be that literal. And he fully expected me to understand the metaphorical dimensions of the whole thing, which of course I didn’t, because I was a 12-year-old autistic kid. But I think up until then he thought my weird behavior was just me fucking around with people, and my sincere and literal answer frightened him a bit.

I remember when I tried to understand metaphors… like his girlfriend talked about reading a book where everyone walked around with their ‘core’ on their shoulder. I asked what she meant by core — I knew, really knew, that it was more than an object. But I coul22dn’t get to what it really meant, and I wanted help, and I got ridicule instead.

He said to his girlfriend, “Mandy’s so literal that she probably thinks you’re talking about apple cores.” They both laughed.

Not that I blame him. Ridicule is part of what older siblings do to younger siblings, and he was exceptionally good at it. When I read about Fred and George in Harry Potter, I thought of my brother when we were growing up. He was always playing pranks and there was rarely any malice in them, just an outlet for his creativity.

Anyway, years later, I asked him about that conversation. He asked me, “Did you ever think that maybe it wasn’t a conversation you were meant to overhear in the first place?” He sounded really annoyed.

But the thing was… the conversation took place about two feet away from me in a room I was sitting in. I don’t know how I’d be expected not to notice it. I mean I know it took me a longer time than usual to learn the social rules about when it was and wasn’t okay to take part in a conversation. I was shocked in my mid twenties when a friend on the spectrum told me she had just found out that conversations have a boundary around them that you’re not supposed to cross except under special circumstances.

But I was a 12-year-old kid, I deserved some kind of slack. And I’m probably going to wonder what book this was, for the rest of my life. These aren’t conversations I forget. They get stored in the memory vaults and replayed over, and until they get resolved, that is where they stay.

Not that I never used metaphors. But I used them in two separate ways. One was the echolalia way — where I used a metaphor because it was part of a chunk of words I was already using for something else.

The other was the ‘sensing’ way — the way most professionals have meant in diagnostic criteria like “If speech is present, peculiar speech patterns such as immediate and delayed echolalia, metaphorical language, pronominal reversal.” (That’s from the very first DSM to include autism criteria.) That’s where we take a word from a situation and apply it to another situation… hard to describe without examples.

Okay so my brother hid in a closet and barked at me. I felt a jumbly feeling in my chest that I associated with being startled. But since I didn’t know the word for startled, I’d say “He gave me the dog” or “She gave me the dog” to mean “What that person did gave me the same sensation I got when my brother pretended be a dog and scared the crap out of me.”

Donna Williams talks about singing the Gilligan’s Island theme song every timer family went out somewhere, and it was because she was thinking “We’re going out into the unknown, this is scary, are we ever going to come back? Is everything going to be okay?“

Unfortunately few if any people around her spoke Donna-ese, so they couldn’t translate. Same with men other ways.

I used to sing, play, or hum songs that had relevance to the situation I was in. I’d do it so incessantly that normally fairly nice people would tell me to just shut up already. The problem was that it was frequently only one or two lines from the song that had relevance to what I was trying to say, and I was humming/singing/playing the entire song.

So one day I decided to sit down and take out only the lines that meant what I meant. It was a long and arduous process. But I made a tape, in the end, that expressed several things I’d been unable to express in any other way. It was like… snippets of different songs, by different people. Some of them were repeated often for effect, some only once. Everything from Pink Floyd to Peter Gabriel.

And I played it for someone.

And he laughed.

Not a malicious laugh, again. He genuinely thought I was making a joke. Possibly making a joke about people who make tapes like that one? I’m not sure. All I know is I recorded over it and never tried to communicate in that way again. I did, however, get really good at making mix tapes — ones that expressed something of the personality of the person I was making them for. I think sometimes people got the meaning I was intending, but not anywhere close to always. There was only one girl who seemed to get it more than half the time.

But most of the time it was “Shut UP already…”

Oh also I had no concept of an “overplayed” song, but that’s a subject for another post.

Anyway this is how autistic people’s communications are described as both literal and metaphorical at the same time. One is that they are often describing two different (but common) stages of autistic language development. The other is that we can be overly literal in some areas and overly metaphorical in others.

Notes: