X-Envelope-to: autism@sjuvm.bitnet
X-VMS-To: IN%"autism@sjuvm.bitnet"
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.autism
Date:         Wed, 7 Oct 1992 04:21:00 EST
              <AUTISM@SJUVM.BITNET>
From:         Speed Bump <DNWIEBE@OWUCOMCN.BITNET>
Subject:      Stuff

James writes:
>I came across the analogy between autism and blindness somewhere which
>I think is a fairly good one.  Like blind people can't see, autistics
>can't express themselves in the usual way.  I don't think I would phrase
>it as their body or mind telling them not to though; perhaps as their body or
>mind _not_ telling them how to express themselves.  It's not that they
>feel they can't-- they _can't_.

        Lots of emphasis on the "in the usual way" part.  I think it's probably
incorrect to say that autistics can't communicate the way blind people can't
see.  I can communicate.  But unless I take into account much of what I've
learned over the years about how normal people communicate, and translate what
I might naturally do into what normals would expect a normal person to do,
normal people generally don't understand me--or worse, think they do but
really don't.
        Again I must reiterate that I haven't been officially diagnosed as
being autistic, but assuming I am, it's easy for me to imagine that lower-
functioning autistics are not able to come up with all the transformations
necessary to translate their native communications into something the world
at large can understand.  *I* haven't figured all of them out yet, either;
it can take me quite awhile to make people understand what I'm talking about
sometimes.  There are things I experience that I'll probably never be able
to put into words and communicate to a normal person, and there are things
normal people do that they will probably never be able to explain to me.
        Probably it would be more accurate to compare an autistic to someone
who didn't have the standard sense of sight, but instead had some exotic
sense that provided a gamut of information that overlapped, but not necessarily
coincided with, the gamut provided by sight.  Consider, for example, the
X-ray vision so touted in cheap comics.  A person with X-ray vision might
learn to have about the same degree of situational awareness that a person
with normal sight would learn to have, but his concepts of things would be
modified by the facts that A) he'd have a hard time understanding how something
as insubstantial as a piece of paper could block others' view of things,
B) the idea of color would be quite foreign to him, and C) it might be very
difficult for him to understand the concept of objects having surfaces.
        This is roughly the way it is for me to communicate with normal
people.  There are things that are second nature to me that normals find
difficult or impossible, and there are things that normals do without thinking
that I'll never be able to do or understand.

In an earlier message:
>I can get really nervous when I have to call someone I don't know on the phone.
>If I don't have to say much ("Hi, could you tell me how late you're open?")
>it's not too bad-- in that case I just work out what to say beforehand
>and memorize it.  If I expect I'll have to say a bit more than that, I'll
>write what to say on paper beforehand, then when I call I just read what I've
>written.  If I have to say so much that even this isn't feasible, I'll write :-
   )

        I feel very much the same way.  I've always attributed it to my first
girlfriend, who liked to stay on the phone with me for four or five hours at
a time, not conversing, but just listening to me breathe, and who would leap
into a towering rage if I (a farm boy, with pressing responsibilities
especially during daylight hours) suggested to her (a city girl with almost
no responsibilities after school) that I had better things to do.
        But my fiancee likes to do a somewhat mitigated version of the same
thing, except not with the telephone.  She likes to snuggle with me, with
no talking and no dynamic physical contact (stroking, caressing, etc.), just
being close, for long periods of time.  If I'm sleepy, and can drift
comfortably off during this time, it's great, but if I'm wide awake with
nothing to do but sit or lie there while she sleeps and stare at the wall or
the ceiling, it gets intolerably boring in the same way that staying on the
phone with my first girlfriend used to be.  But my fiancee hasn't turned me
off on snuggling; so maybe my first girlfriend wasn't the one who turned me
off on the telephone.
        Cover-my-ass clarification (my fiancee's on the list): It's not the
snuggling that bores me; I love to snuggle with her.  It's the wide-awake
inactivity that gets old after ten minutes or so.  What we generally do is
either pick a time when we're both sleepy, or fix it so that I have something
to do while she sleeps--for example reading (can get touchy; the movements
required for turning pages wake her up) or watching TV (much better, except
for the noise).

Shalom,
Dan