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3:54pm June 29, 2014

Introduction: A conversation where I couldn’t say ‘neither’.

[This is an introduction to another post.  The next post is here:  Finding Neither:  Possibly the most important thing you can ever do.  This post only exists to give background to the next post.  It would have been really long to have both together.  And the next post had so much joy, it almost felt like putting this story into it directly, would infect it with the jealousy and anger in the memories of this post.]

I’ve described this conversation before.  Many times.  You may be sick of it by now.  But it was a big turning point in my life, even though I didn’t know it at the time.  My rage at this woman, my jealousy of her abilities, made me forge pathways in my brain that I didn’t know could exist.  So as much as I hate to say I owe a bully anything, maybe in this case I do.

The conversation went like this, between me and two other people:

Her:  Do you think in words or pictures?

Me: Pictures.

Her: Then you’re autistic!

Him:  It takes more than that to be autistic.

Me:  Do you think in words or pictures?

Her:  I think in thoughts.

To understand the tone of her last statement, picture a spoiled child at her own birthday party.  Her rich father has just gotten her a one-of-a-kind, handmade, imported toy with real gold and diamonds all over it.  She is as smug as smug can be, and wants to show off to all the other children what she has that they can never have.  This woman had the same smug show-off voice.

But what was she showing off?  She was showing off the fact that, unlike me, she could step outside of echolalia to answer questions.  She didn’t have to restrict herself to one answer or the other.

The truth is, I don’t think in pictures.  And I wasn’t interested in whether she thought in words or pictures.  I was following a conversational script, one of many that allowed me to communicate with people in what sounded like a natural way, but that gave little to no access to my actual thoughts.  The rules I followed were pretty simple.  Answer an either/or question with one of the two answers.  And if asked a personal question, ask the question back at the other person.

When I said I thought in pictures, I was actually at the peak of my communication abilities for that kind of conversation.  Meaning, I actually chose to say pictures and not words.  Many times, I would have had to choose one of the words at random — “words” or “pictures”.  But this time, I was able to put some thought into it.  I was able to choose the word that was the least wrong option.  Words was the most wrong, so pictures was the least wrong, and I said pictures.  That itself felt like an accomplishment.

Which is why it was such a devastating blow when I asked her the same question.  And she not only gave an answer that wasn’t part of the question.  She also said it in the smuggest way possible, like she knew full well what she was doing that I couldn’t do.  It was horrible.  I was humiliated and I was jealous.  I was always jealous of people who weren’t trapped by the same rules I was trapped by, but she made it harder than normal.

When I say I was trapped by rules, I mean there were all these ways that I had to live my life.  I had no say in these things.  In most instances, I had no awareness of what the rules were.  This meant that I could not pick and choose what rules to follow.  The rules were simply there.  And they had to be followed.  They could not be deviated from.  And they were not mine.  I didn’t write them, I had no say in them, I had no conscious awareness of them, and I had no control over them.  I only became aware of them when I saw someone breaking them so easily.  And then I became jealous.

But this time, I was both jealous and angry.  She had used my rules against me, and she had been happy to do so.

This made me determined to find a way out.  By which I mean, find a way that I could communicate, for real.  Not just have conversations based on rules.  And in particular, this made me desperate to understand and communicate about what my thoughts actually look like.  Because they’re not words or pictures, and they’re not just ‘thoughts’.  I’ve spent every single year since then trying harder and harder to explain how my thoughts work to people, and that was the event that set it all in motion.

But it’s not just about explaining my thoughts.  It’s about being able to be asked an either/or question and say “neither”.  That’s one of the most most important skills I have ever learned in my entire life.  And I’m going to write more about it in another post.  This post is just the introduction, because it would have made the next post way too long.

The next post isn’t written yet, either, so if it doesn’t appear for awhile, that’s why.