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3:46am March 22, 2015
autistic-mom asked: I feel like you are like me in respects, but more so. I can remember my childhood in detail, but I can't think about how it looked from adult perspectives.

Interesting.  I have trouble looking at my life from an outside perspective in general.  Especially an outside neurotypical perspective.  (I use neurotypical to mean not just nonautistic but not having any neurodivergence at all.  I don’t have a better word.)  

I’ve certainly met a lot of people on the Internet who are “cut from the same cloth” as me, as it were.  I don’t know you well enough to know how much we have in common.  But I definitely have a very long-term memory, as in I can remember infancy.  And in many cases I can’t remember what I would’ve looked like to other people, unless they’ve told me or (in some cases) I’ve done a lot of study on the matter.

One thing that I think makes a huge difference between different autistic people, is memory.  It’s whether certain states of thinking, certain states of being, if they existed for a person at all, are things that person remembers from when they had a firm grasp on memory, or whether the memories have faded and they can’t fully get them back.  I have known a lot of people who were a lot like me before the age of four, and then we diverged – extremely – in our cognitive development, with theirs becoming far more typical than mine ever did.  And that makes a huge difference in how we relate to the world.

Especially since… a common one is to have a ‘sensing’ way of approaching the world (a term coined by Donna Williams, I don’t have the spoons to explain, other than to say it has nothing to do with Myers-Briggs or Jungian-based personality typing) and then for it to stop at age four or so.  I’ve met people over and over and noticed that pattern, and recently found out Donna has written of it too.  Those of us whose ‘sensing’ continued past that age… other people (who lost it before age four) can’t imagine what it’s like for us.  They imagine that we are just like they were at three.  I’m a 34-year-old who is still highly sensing-dominant in my way of understanding the world.  That’s very different than a four-year-old.  Because I have developed entire ways of understanding the world through sensing, whereas a four-year-old temporarily sensing-dominant autistic person is going to not have that higher-level sensing online yet, nor are they practically ever going to if they switch to a more literal-meaning cognitive style.

Anyway I’m rambling so I’ll send this.  I just got out of the hospital recently, and while my brain is recovering nicely from the delirium, words are still very hard for me.

I’ll quote a Robert Burns poem (”To a Louse, On Seeing One On a Lady’s Bonnet In Church”) that has an interesting line in it, given my difficulties in this area (bolding mine):

O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
It wad frae mony a blunder free us,
An’ foolish notion:
What airs in dress an’ gait wad lea'e us,
An’ ev'n devotion!

Translation from Scots:

And would some Power the small gift give us
To see ourselves as others see us!
It would from many a blunder free us,
And foolish notion:
What airs in dress and gait would leave us,
And even devotion!

I always think of that line, “To see ourselves as others see us!”/”To see oursels as ithers see us!” when I think how hard it has been for me to do that.  I’ve gotten better, but even now I can only do it with great difficulty and usually in hindsight. I know plenty of nonautistic non-cousin people will say “I have that trouble too”, but autistic people and cousins really have this problem to a degree that goes far beyond what most people can imagine.

I also like the poetic line much better than I like the loaded jargon, theory of mind, which presumes way too much about what goes on in our heads.