The ‘Deep Compensation’ of Social Calculus
By: Karawynn Long
Tags: Psychology, Autism, Actuallyautistic, Mental Health

The ‘Deep Compensation’ of Social Calculus

Some autistic brains do a lot of heavy lifting behind the scenes

When I was twenty-four, in the course of a conversation with my therapist, I created an analogy that I would use throughout my life: when I walk into a room of people, I immediately start running ‘social calculus’ on everyone in sight.

It really did feel like doing advanced math: it was that complicated, that deliberate. And I could tell, even by twenty-four, that I was putting out more effort than everyone else I knew. Other people seemed to be doing social arithmetic, not social calculus. Their conscious awareness was surface-level at best. They didn’t analyze every fleeting facial expression or nuance of body language; they didn’t observe conversational patterns in search of clues that might reveal a person’s personality or motivation.

The more people I had to interact with at one time, the harder everything became. With one person I could monitor all of her nonverbal emotional cues, process the semantic content of her speech, and analyze the decision tree of possible responses, while constantly running subroutines to ensure that I spoke at the correct times and not too much, that my face was making the appropriate expression from moment to moment (interest, amusement, sympathy), and so on. Each extra person, even if they weren’t speaking, was a whole new locus of body language that I had to monitor and respond to; once multiple conversations were happening, as in a party, I often became overwhelmed.

I couldn’t always make it all come together — never in a large group, I think, before my early twenties, and only intermittently thereafter. Sometimes everything was just a cacophony of input, and I couldn’t think fast enough to sort through it all and figure out the right way to insert myself — which usually meant that I would stand, alone in a crowd, burning all my cycles on trying not to appear as anxious and humiliated as I actually felt. I learned that alcohol reduced my anxiety, but also my capacity for observation and calculation; the anxiety was debilitating, so that became a tradeoff I often made.

But then, on the times I did manage to send my brain into that hyperdrive of serial processing, and people responded positively, it felt amazing. It was like conducting a full orchestra while simultaneously playing all the instruments. I felt brilliant, capable, and — briefly — socially successful.

By my early twenties I also knew that being around people fatigued me more or less in inverse proportion to how well I knew them. I chalked this up to ‘introversion’, having no better explanation. I suspected my constant physical exhaustion, which seemed to be an order of magnitude greater than even the other self-proclaimed introverts I knew, might be ‘chronic fatigue syndrome’. I assumed that most of my mental difficulties, especially my social anxiety — which though it might sometimes diminish over the course of a particularly successful social interaction, would inevitably reappear at full strength on the next occasion — were a result of my CPTSD.

In the decades before I knew I was autistic, I also figured social calculus was a hypervigilant strategy I’d adopted as a result of my abusive childhood. But though it may have begun as self-protection, I used it to help other people as much as possible. As someone who has so often been on the outside, I am uncommonly sensitive to other people who are struggling. I am often the one person who will notice someone hovering just beyond the circle of conversation, and angle my body to make space, or who will cross a room to speak to a person standing alone and looking awkward. I will recognize when someone is repeatedly being interrupted, and make a point of turning to her and asking her to continue.

It was like conducting a full orchestra while simultaneously playing all the instruments. I felt brilliant, capable, and — briefly — socially successful.

Over the past quarter-century I’ve described my concept of ‘social calculus’ to many dozens of people: sweethearts, friends, and a long series of therapists. I explicitly referred to my theory that other people were doing ‘social arithmetic’ — less mental work, generally resulting in reduced awareness. In this construct I was, at my best, one of the most socially aware and adept people I’d ever met.

I never imagined, nor did any one of those people ever suggest, that other people don’t do social math of any sort. That most people might not need to consciously run all of those calculations, on themselves and others.

It was only when I started to suspect that I was autistic, and began to listen to the experiences of late-diagnosed autistic women, that I ever heard anyone describe an internal process that I recognized, or learned that most people weren’t doing any such thing.

Turns out, I wasn’t just doing more work than everyone else, I was doing a completely different kind of work.