4:50am June 20, 2013

➸ Making Room for Other Roots: Also, I know this might make me strange in the Autistic community, but...

Also, I know this might make me strange in the Autistic community, but communicating on the internet vs. in person - I’m not that much better at communicating on the internet. Because I’m more comfortable typing than speaking - but what’s way more important than that is the *interaction*.

…

I’m another who deviates from what is expected of internet autistic people.

Real life is easier all the way. Internet is usually words. Offline has sounds and smells and movement patterns and tones and texture and feel.

You can’t beat that.

Note that what I get out of those things is entirely different from what nonautistic people get out of them. Just because two people are good at nonverbal communication doesn’t mean they’re both good at the same parts. I’m good at parts they don’t even know exist.

Sometimes this scares them. They start to realize their attempts to hide things from people in general don’t work on me because I am communicating through different channels than the ones they block from most people. Usually they become happier as they see I am discreet about what I see unless it’s harmful to someone.

One staff person told me she was resigned to never being able to hide anything from me. Because she would come in putting on a show and my perceptions didn’t even see the show but saw her underlying anger. And if we didn’t talk long enough for her to give me an explanation, it’d rub off on me and both be grumpy all day.

So she would tell me she had a fight with her girlfriend, and that’s enough, tension explained, I could go about my day.

But she couldn’t hide those feelings from me even though she could hide them from other nonautistic people. Because the areas nonautistic people use to understand nonverbal communication may be blocked, but there’s all this other nonverbal communication out there, including the stuff I pick up. I’m by no means perfect but when I feel it I feel it.

Autistic communication is even better in person. Especially people like me. Or close. It’s different with us. It can turn into resonance between people who are really on each other’s wavelength. Don’t ever assume someone won’t be on your wavelength just because they are too low functioning or too high functioning or have a different diagnosis than you. The real similarities and differences have never been there when they come up with official categories. So don’t let those categories limit your opportunity to meet people who resonate with you in ways you couldn’t imagine. My favorite thing to see in large mixed gatherings of autistic people is watching people group up with those they clearly resonate with, discarding every category and stereotype to do so. It’s beautiful when people realize they have that potential experience and go for it.

Anyway give me offline any day. Put me and Anne in a room and see how fast we are communicating with our backs to each other with all this nonverbal information flying. I want to experience this at least once in my lifetime. Texture and movement and feel and pattern all flowing in and through and out of two people at once each experiencing it to their fullest and amplifying it for the next person.

I can get surprising things out of text at times. The patterns between the words giving me a glimpse of color and texture and movement behind the words. But text can never give me what I just described. Language can’t contain a fraction of that experience, even if, to people who love it, it has its own compensations.

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