1:45am September 23, 2014

Do other autistic people do this, or is it just me?

There are time periods where I give an age that happened within that time period, to symbolize the entire time period.

For instance.

Ages 2-5, roughly.  The ages when I lived in Campbell for real, as opposed to San Jose surrounded by Campbell.

I feel those ages as one place in time.

And so I often say “when I was 3” or “when I was 2” to mean that entire time period.

Because at that point I was unable to know what age I was as things were happening.  I have an excellent memory for that time period, but I could not tell you “This thing happened in 1983, and that thing happened in 1982, and that one happened in 1984.”

So I will pick either a year or an age, and use it to symbolize the entire period.

“1983.”

“When I was 4.”

Etc.

I do that to some extent with later time periods, but it’s most evident for that particular time period because I have such clear, vivid memories that come from it, but I don’t have any conception of what year something happened.

I have a hard time with time in general.  But at that age, I had no concept of time whatsoever, not even a vague abstract one.  So I could not put things on what later became a synaesthetic timeline that has served me fairly well over the years.

My synaesthetic timeline is basically a helix that wraps around me with me at the center, and has different colors and shapes for different years, months, and days.  I can zoom in and out on it, which changes its shape and colors.  I can’t perfectly place every event on it, but I have much more luck doing so than I used to.   I remember I used to tell people about it, and they’d be fascinated until they heard a little bit, and then they’d say “But time isn’t really shaped like that” and lose interest.  As if my brain came up with it in order to match physics or something, rather than just because synaesthesia does strange things.  (It was usually nerds who had that reaction… this was before people knew about synaesthesia, so they’d get really interested that my brain had this idea of time as a shape, and then really disappointed that time wasn’t shaped how it “should” be shaped.)

Anyway, I just wanted to know if anyone else does this thing where “When I was 3” can mean anything from “When I was 2” to “When I was 5”.  Or other approximations of similar sort.  I’ve described it that way for as long as I can remember describing it at all – pick a random age from within that age range, and use it to cover four years of my life instead of one year.

This is one way my language and communication issues get used against me, by the way.  If I keep changing the number, people get mad at me.

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