A (very) short Autistamatic video (now with 100% extra free!)

[Autistamatic]

As I promised @Judge above, I've uploaded the other conversational style "Twitter short" I have in the can. It's a short tale of disclosure.

 

[the_tortoise]

I think lots of well-meaning people have a knee-jerk reaction to try to normalize difference....the intention may be to make someone feel good/included/accepted/understood, but the effect is often the opposite when they try to normalize it by saying things which imply that the difference is not real or significant.

Instead of pretending the difference isn't there and acting like it's something to downplay/dismiss, people should be curious, ask questions and acknowledge the difference like you suggest-- words that downplay or dismiss someone's reality/lived experience of being different are not likely to make them feel good/included/accepted, they are more likely to make them feel invisible and misunderstood.

Awesome video!

 

[Autistamatic]

There's a Disclosure 2 which I haven't got around to finishing off yet which follows on with this theme. There's so many cliched responses it's a potentially endless topic.

 

[All-Rounder]

I think lots of well-meaning people have a knee-jerk reaction to try to normalize difference....the intention may be to make someone feel good/included/accepted/understood, but the effect is often the opposite when they try to normalize it by saying things which imply that the difference is not real or significant.

Instead of pretending the difference isn't there and acting like it's something to downplay/dismiss, people should be curious, ask questions and acknowledge the difference like you suggest-- words that downplay or dismiss someone's reality/lived experience of being different are not likely to make them feel good/included/accepted, they are more likely to make them feel invisible and misunderstood.

Awesome video!

I wish I could actually get answers from my ex but he didn't like that i was asking so many questions about him neither did he want to discuss my autism curiosity.

 

[Autistamatic]

I wish I could actually get answers from my ex but he didn't like that i was asking so many questions about him neither did he want to discuss my autism curiosity.

It's just conjecture, but there is a 50% chance your ex was also alexithymic. Alexithymia makes it difficult for a person to describe their own feelings and makes many of us reticent to do so. We find it difficult to put feelings and related experiences into words and sometimes prefer not to from past experience of giving the wrong impression.

 

[All-Rounder]

It's just conjecture, but there is a 50% chance your ex was also alexithymic. Alexithymia makes it difficult for a person to describe their own feelings and makes many of us reticent to do so. We find it difficult to put feelings and related experiences into words and sometimes prefer not to from past experience of giving the wrong impression.

I asked him about it and he got super angry and said he isnt. That was after 1 year of dating when he still didn't like talking about it but he would answer but at some point he would get defensive and hurt me by being rude

 

[Autistamatic]

I asked him about it and he got super angry and said he isnt. That was after 1 year of dating when he still didn't like talking about it but he would answer but at some point he would get defensive and hurt me by being rude

That's a shame. Autistic or not, sometimes it's just down to personality. I've come across some very nasty autistic people in my time as well as some wonderful ones. There's everything in between too.

 

[All-Rounder]

That's a shame. Autistic or not, sometimes it's just down to personality. I've come across some very nasty autistic people in my time as well as some wonderful ones. There's everything in between too.

Hes not like that, he wasnt before and he changed. There were several months in which anything id say or ask hed say stuff that would hurt me. And he said it was because he was stressed, but he also didn't talk to me about anything and let me make mistakes and suffer. But some topics more often got to him generally. I think its bc i was comparing his autism with people on this site to try to understand what he has and i think he prefered to not have anything about autism in the topic even if the things he was struggling with were part of autism. I also didn't always understand autism and how different people are and I also talked to autist friends and they misguided me and I think he was fed up with it ruining our relationship but he also wasnt talking to me about it. I think he just couldn't. I pushed really hard to understand and I didn't care what would happen. Without knowledge I felt i had nothing and thats why it wasn't working. Knowledge is so hard to obtain. I m still confused about what he truly wanted.

 

[Autistamatic]

Forgive me if I gave the impression I thought he was a bad person, I was merely speculating on the range of personality types from one end to the other.

 

[All-Rounder]

Forgive me if I gave the impression I thought he was a bad person, I was merely speculating on the range of personality types from one end to the other.

No, its what i said about him. I don't like whining like he was the only one at fault, hes been as much suffering as I was. Ive done so many mistakes, ive been demanding and controlling which aspies usually are even more disliking of.

 

[Autistamatic]

No, its what i said about him. I don't like whining like he was the only one at fault, hes been as much suffering as I was. Ive done so many mistakes, ive been demanding and controlling which aspies usually are even more disliking of.

I can't speak for all of us, but Yeah that drives me nuts! Thanks for clearing that up, I don't like to offend people

 

[All-Rounder]

Forgive me if I gave the impression I thought he was a bad person, I was merely speculating on the range of personality types from one end to the other.

Im really glad you talk to me about it, I havent even tried to think about it neither talk to anyone about it. Im really angry and I hate him cause hes so confusing and he left again. But it doesn't mean hes not a good man and hes not done his best.

 

[Autistamatic]

I'm happy to talk about it as are most of us. Sometimes it can be difficult drawing the line between autism and personality, and personality is shaped by experience, which is itself partially influenced by autism.... In your time here you will have seen how many questions we ask about ourselves, so from your perspective it's fully understandable. I'm just glad you're here engaging with us rather than relying on some tired old stereotypes as some people do

 

[All-Rounder]

I'm happy to talk about it as are most of us. Sometimes it can be difficult drawing the line between autism and personality, and personality is shaped by experience, which is itself partially influenced by autism.... In your time here you will have seen how many questions we ask about ourselves, so from your perspective it's fully understandable. I'm just glad you're here engaging with us rather than relying on some tired old stereotypes as some people do

Yeah sometimes I think maybe I would have done better if i learned him without the whole autism thing. But then there are some things I could not have found out about if i wouldnt have come here. Even though its too late now I understand much more about autism and what to do and how to think about it. And with my best autist friend this talk has been very useful. I feel like she feels i can understand autism and her more than her family and the general prejudices and thats been my goal for a long time now.

 

[Autistamatic]

That's good to hear @Rexi
I've just finished a short academic course on Autism and I've befriended a couple of the people involved in making the course elsewhere. One of them (who is on the spectrum themself) said to me the other day that they feel communities like this are at least of as much value in understanding autistic people as any study course. They even suggested that people should be being referred to such communities by their diagnosticians because of the value it has for newly diagnosed autistics.

 

[All-Rounder]

That's good to hear @Rexi
I've just finished a short academic course on Autism and I've befriended a couple of the people involved in making the course elsewhere. One of them (who is on the spectrum themself) said to me the other day that they feel communities like this are at least of as much value in understanding autistic people as any study course. They even suggested that people should be being referred to such communities by their diagnosticians because of the value it has for newly diagnosed autistics.

This is one way to really educate people and hopefully minimize misconception. Reading though and studying especially at first didnt help me understand, like the concept is clear but I felt like I couldn't feel it enough, I couldn't imagine it. I read so much about it and I felt like I wasn't getting it, like really getting it. I couldnt trust it for him either since he was like the opposite of autism. He seemed to be much more than he was wanting to admit or knew he was. But I think he was right about himself.

 

[All-Rounder]

Usually I i magine and feel what it's like really easily with people and situations but this was so blank, got nothing.

 

[Peter Morrison]

Great video. I avoided the noisy one (thanks for the disclaimer). I'm like many others commenting here. I can't read or focus attention on something if I hear a voice. My attention always shifts to the voice, even if the person isn't speaking to me. This realization helps me understand why I always had trouble taking notes in school. I can't write about one thing and listen to different information. It's one or the other - no simultaneous listening and recording. It always frustrated me, and I never understood what I was doing wrong. In school, if I managed to write down some important person, event, and date, I would miss the next 3 sentences coming from the teacher's mouth. Then, I'd be lost again and have to pick up in the middle of something I didn't understand because I was too busy writing. It hurts me now as I think of it. I kept trying to function like everyone else, or so I thought, but it was constant frustration and failure. I dealt with this for years, hoping that practice would improve my note-taking skills. It was a futile endeavor. Simple fact: I just can't do it.

 

[Progster]

Great video. I avoided the noisy one (thanks for the disclaimer). I'm like many others commenting here. I can't read or focus attention on something if I hear a voice. My attention always shifts to the voice, even if the person isn't speaking to me. This realization helps me understand why I always had trouble taking notes in school. I can't write about one thing and listen to different information. It's one or the other - no simultaneous listening and recording. It always frustrated me, and I never understood what I was doing wrong. In school, if I managed to write down some important person, event, and date, I would miss the next 3 sentences coming from the teacher's mouth. Then, I'd be lost again and have to pick up in the middle of something I didn't understand because I was too busy writing. It hurts me now as I think of it. I kept trying to function like everyone else, or so I thought, but it was constant frustration and failure. I dealt with this for years, hoping that practice would improve my note-taking skills. It was a futile endeavor. Simple fact: I just can't do it.

Listening tests in French and German at school were always a challenge for this reason, as you are supposed to listen, read question and write your answers to questions all that the same time. Luckily, we could listen to them twice and had time afterwards to write the answers to the questions. I had to concentrate hard on listening only, taking in and recalling the information, only answering the questions when the recording had finished. The other problem I had was with concentration - being distracted by my own thoughts wandering (suspected ADHD)... as I said, luckily, I got to listen to them twice and they were usually quite short. This was one of the most difficult parts of the exam for me (the other was speaking), and I tended not to do as well on it as I did on the other parts.

As a teacher, I can tesitify that this multitasking isn't just a problem for people on the spectrum, all students find this difficult... in reality, no person can multitask and what people do is switch focus quickly from one task to another, whilst holding the information for each task in their short term memory. What is often difficult for us is the switching tasks quickly, or holding infromation in our short term memory.