This goes for this post and a bunch of other ones.

I’m sort of ignoring the bit in this post that I didn’t understand, which was the same bit everyone else didn’t understand…
But what got me was the whole section about “Part of our role in society is to notice what other people miss. This is not a better role than the roles of any other kind of people, but it is an essential one.”
… I once tried to tell someone that he had “a beautiful mind”, and this was what I meant deep down, although I had no idea how to explain it, and ended up insulting him because of that movie and because he had inaccurately been called schizophrenic before. But what I meant was this whole idea of seeing things others don’t see. And I meant it in the sense of things that are a lot more useful than if he were seeing people who aren’t there (although who am I to say that those couldn’t be useful too, under some circumstances)… I meant this idea of the other perspective. And just as John Nash couldn’t get rid of his hallucinations without also losing his amazing math thoughts, so it is with us. We can’t see everything every way at once, no more than NTs can.

“Do not be alarmed. There is nothing wrong with your PC. We are controlling transmission”.

Do-do-do do-do-do

I also think that, whether we like it or not, and whether we try to or not, we’re likely to be violating them right and left, and that’s one reason we can get so hated so easily.

I think, to echo an author I know, that one of the most useful things to me has been learning to manage the risks involved, since there’s no way I could avoid them altogether (and in some areas, no way that I should).

Breaking taboos in general in my view is always potentially dangerous and needs careful judgement. It is good to be honest but it is never good in my view to just walk all over someone’s finer feelings. Making off-the-cuff comments about an acquaintance being ‘nuts’ in the presence of a recovering schizophrenic, for instance, is surely an absolute no-no. Sometimes there are very good reasons why the elephant in the room *should* be ignored. I’m not convinced that autistics aren’t at a real disadvantage in this regard.

I am also blunt and direct when asked for advice. This one is harder to decide how to deal with, but I eventually figured out that anyone asking for my advice is specifically looking for the kind of advice that I will offer. If they want someone more sensitive and less direct, they will go to someone else. And maybe they will do both, but I don’t have to feel responsible for figuring out what is appropriate to say. If they want appropriate they go somewhere else.

In my previous job my supervisor and I split up the people we were supporting. She dealt with most of them because she was tactful and most people appreciate that. But some of them were up to me to talk to because they weren’t particularly subtle and needed to be whacked over the head with a 2″ * 4″ in order to get the message. My supervisor was too tender-hearted to be that direct and assertive, so I got that job. Because I’m not subtle either, 2″ * 4″ whacking is my natural mode of communication. I need to be kept away from most people, but for a significant minority I speak their language.

And no, I’m not talking about assault or cruelty, but about communicating directly rather than suggestively. Most very socialised people prefer suggestive communication (“Don’t you feel warm?”) and feel assaulted by very direct communication (“Won’t you take off your sweater so I can look at your tits?”) which is why I use the whacking analogy. But un-subtle people like me feel mind-fucked by suggestive communication because we can tell that someone is trying to tell us something but we can’t figure out what. Or we have no idea that someone is trying to tell us something and thus have no idea why they are so frustrated that we haven’t understood. When someone says exactly what they mean, we’re very appreciative even if the message isn’t one we find agreeable. So I don’t make all that much effort learning to respect the taboo against directness, because I know someone out there *appreciates* directness.

So I think I know what you’re talking about, ballastexistenz, and I’m NT! Taboo-breaking must be a much more dominant theme in your life than it is in mine, and I feel it all the time.

That hits home. I’m not autistic, but geeky, and having so much trouble with this at the moment. Um. Can’t really find the words, but you described it so well.

But it’s not what those particular things are that’s the point, really, although I do wish I’d been able to be more detailed in other parts of it. It’s that we do seem to violate various taboos (not limited to the ones I refuse to discuss, and not limited just to major or minor ones but spanning the whole range), just as a matter of course, and that this probably contributes to the vehemence of some of the responses we get.

I’m unfortunately trying and failing to think of other examples. I know the shape of what I’m looking at, but I can’t remember the precise words for all of them. I mean, there’s the obvious nudity taboos (in American culture, at least) and stuff that a lot of autistic people violate, but there’s things a lot more subtle and important than that too.

For some of them, to use the usual metaphor, if there’s an elephant in the living room, then when everyone else is carefully avoiding looking at it or mentioning it, some autistic people are going to be staring straight at the thing constantly, and others are going to be saying “Why is there an elephant here?” or “Get that elephant out of here” or “There’s an elephant here,” while fewer will be joining other people in studiously avoiding looking at it. Both of which (the verbal and non-verbal responses) call attention to the presence of the elephant that everyone has agreed not to discuss or even necessarily perceive. Which is going to scare or anger most of the people who are trying not to perceive it, and intrigue some others. Not that autistic people are the only ones to do this, or that non-autistic people never do this, but I do think autistic people are more likely to do this.

I don’t know why my mind is failing me so badly on concrete examples of this right now.