9:43pm June 3, 2013

When people say I see people like objects, machines, or furniture.

It’s not true. It is not true at all. And it’s not even true that I treat people that way.

It’s just like… This weird stereotype people have about autism. So when they see people with sensory processing difficulties that make direct interaction difficult, or people struggling to communicate, or people not making eye contact, or people who just don’t have the energy to send out certain social signals, they accuse us of being cold and uncaring.

I’ve always said that people have gone from refrigerator parents to refrigerator autistic people. Actually it’s always been refrigerator autistic people, it’s just that parents only saw fit to get rid of the refrigerator parent myth, not the rest of it. In fact many parents actually willingly keep the refrigerator autistic myth alive.

One time a reporter published an article saying I acted like she wasn’t there. Nothing could have been further from the truth. I opened the front door. She came into the room with her camera crew. The thought that this was all being recorded and going on the news was too much for me and I ran for the window and looked out of it, with my back to the reporter. Then I felt so self-conscious about looking so uncontrollably autistic that it made it even worse and I couldn’t force myself to turn around and interact with her. But I wasn’t acting like she wasn’t there. If she wasn’t there, I wouldn’t have run away from her, I wouldn’t have my back studiously pointed in her exact direction, I wouldn’t be staring out the window and radiating utter terror.

It’s this kind of thing that gets misinterpreted as seeing people as furniture, and I see it all the time happening to other autistic people. To me, their every movement shows an intense awareness of the location of every person in the room. But to other people, they are acting like the people in the room don’t exist. I don’t quite know what makes them think that. I’m reminded of a time my friend interpreted for me and told a case manager exactly what I was thinking. The case manager told her it was impossible for her to be interpreting all that from my body language, because I had no body language.

There’s a big disconnect somewhere. If we can’t read their body language, it’s because there’s something wrong with us that we can’t see something that is obviously there. If they can’t read our body language, it’s because we have none to read. And I think that disconnect has a lot to do with the idea that we treat people like furniture. They can’t see the body language that indicates we see people as people, so they assume it’s not there. Or they interpret perceptual and cognitive difficulties that can make it difficult to identify ANYTHING in our surroundings, people or not, as the result of a social deficit in understanding that people exist. Plus, people can be more complicated to perceive, which is again a generalized cognitive and perceptual issue, but it gets seen as a specifically social issue.

What is the reality about how I see people?

I see all human beings as people. All of us. Not just the ones most people see as people. I see autistic people as people, I see people with dementia as people, I see people with every possible kind of cognitive impairment as people. That is more than most people who say I “see people as machines” can say. Most such people don’t even see me as a person. In fact I have dedicated my life to convincing people that there is no such thing as an unperson. That’s not the act of someone who sees people as things.

Of course as far as objects go, I kind of see them as alive too. I don’t mean in an anthropomorphic way. I mean they seem to have a life that is totally unique to their physical properties in the world. It has nothing to do with being similar to humans or animals or plants in the way we are alive, it’s a completely different form of aliveness.

So I don’t even see objects as objects, at least not in the way that people who say such things see objects. They see them as dead and lifeless and inert in a way that baffles me.

So to sum up:

1. I see every sort of human being as people. Which is more than most people from my surrounding culture do.

2. I see all forms of living things, whether plant or animal or microbe, as having awareness of things in a way that most people in my surrounding culture seem unaware of. And not in an anthropomorphic way, or a way that necessarily has to do with brains, ibut a way that differs by species and individuals.

3. I see inanimate objects as having a sort of life on their own. Again, not anthropomorphic or necessarily similar to the way animals and plants are alive, but something different and specific to the object. It’s extremely difficult to explain because English doesn’t seem to be built around any of the concepts involved whatsoever.

And yet people (who see objects and machines as dead, which is important for understanding the meaning of the expression) say I “see people as objects or machines”. People who themselves see many human beings (including, often, me) as unpersons. Who see animals as lacking most awareness and plants and microbes as lacking all awareness despite the fact that all of these life forms sense and respond to their environments. Who see objects as completely dead. Tell me I’m the one who sees people as essentially inanimate.

This is such a damaging way of viewing autistic people. I’ve talked to many autistic people who view the world the way I do. The things I’ve described above are not things I or the people I know chose to believe. They don’t seem to be things we absorbed through our cultures either. In fact for many of us, it goes against what out cultures have tried to teach us. These are things deeply rooted in our perceptions of the world, which themselves are deeply intertwined with the reasons that we are considered autistic in the first place.

So for some autistic people, being autistic makes us see far more people and things as people, or aware, or alive, than the average person around us seems to. And yet the average person around us perceives us as doing just the opposite.

There are certainly times when my awareness of people and things in my surroundings are highly altered. Where I can’t make much sense out of anything coming in through my senses. And often conceptual thinking, even basic concepts, are not there so much. But that’s not the same as seeing people as things, it’s more like serious perceptual and cognitive confusion. Sometimes at times like that I can still pick up on the movement patterns of people even if I don’t have standard conceptual ideas of what is happening, and get a “feel” of what is happening to a degree of depth that is unusual. It’s not the same mode of perception of people that most people use at all, but it’s still perceiving them and perceiving important things about who they are.

Recently, I was putting all my effort into interacting with a man and he exploded at me at one point, “YOU NEED TO UNDERSTAND THAT PEOPLE ARE HUMAN BEINGS NOT MACHINES!” He said this while I was still not back to normal after anesthesia, was having intense cognitive problems, probably some mild delirium, severe pain, severe sleep deprivation from sleeping only a few hours in my week in the hospital, I was terrified and trying to find out information, and it took everything I had just to interact with him. He had already accused me of hostility I didn’t have and threatened to leave the room without telling me what medications to take at home, which was stressing me out further. I would not put all that effort into using language to communicate with a machine. I was doing everything I could at the time, couldn’t possibly do any more, and it felt like a slap in the face for him to start snapping at me about how I supposedly saw him as a thing not a person.

To quote a poem by Jim Sinclair:

I built a bridge
out of nowhere, across nothingness
and wondered if there would be something on the other side.

I built a bridge
out of fog, across darkness
and hoped that there would be light on the other side.

I built a bridge
out of despair, across oblivion
and knew that there would be hope on the other side.

I built a bridge
out of helplessness, across chaos
and trusted that there would be strength on the other side.

I built a bridge
out of hell, across terror

and it was a good bridge, a strong bridge, a beautiful bridge.
It was a bridge I built myself,
with only my hands for tools, my obstinacy for supports,
my faith for spans, and my blood for rivets.
I built a bridge, and crossed it,

But there was no one there to meet me on the other side.

http://web.archive.org/web/20040228221947/http://web.syr.edu/%7Ejisincla/bridge.htm

Note that Jim specifically points out that the poem is not about loneliness or rejection. Xe says, “This is about hurt, frustration and anger that come from dealing with people for whom nothing I can do is ever enough.”

I couldn’t possibly put it any better.

It felt like… I could barely see, barely think, barely hear, everything around me was scrambled, I could barely find my body, barely force my fingers to move on the keyboard, barely force my brain to understand language, barely force my brain to generate language, barely force my brain to process huge amounts of social information in the nanoseconds he seemed to give me. Unable to do any of this stuff skillfully, missing a lot of information, messing up timing, messing up the words I was trying to use and my comprehension of his words. I was holding my entire brain together with string and duct tape and using my stress and terror to get the energy to do all this. I was interacting with a guy who could do all of those things instantly and more or less effortlessly and was expecting me to do the same. I was building that bridge Jim talks about, like a thin filament reaching from my brain to his, with everything in me focused on that one line, trying to hold it up. And it wasn’t good enough for him so he snipped it in half and blew up at me and threw it all back in my face like an accusation.

I didn’t see him as an object of course. You can’t mistake that kind of hostility and cruelty for something an object would do. Objects aren’t always friendly, but they are simpler. Interaction with them is purely sensory, you don’t have to climb that cliff into the realm of concepts and language. You can just snuggle up to them, rub them on your face, tap on them, smell them. And if they are friendly, it’s wonderful. I have a key I wear around my neck that is very friendly. It takes less effort to interact with it, it’s more direct, it’s perceptual rather than conceptual. I have always had plenty of friends that were objects.

I almost wish I’d really thought I was interacting with an object. Or better yet, BEEN interacting with an object. Less strain on my brain, less stress, less trauma. Only people can be that nasty and unforgiving and calculatedly cruel. That makes it really damn easy to tell the difference between a human and an object right there. Objects don’t sit there thinking up the most hurtful things they can say to you because you inadvertently pissed them off. Sometimes I prefer objects.