I hope you keep these blogs comming. Your story is important, it needed to be told. I respect you, not because of the story, but because you (unlike most of the people I encounter) use the brain in your head. In fact, you use it better than most. Bravo.

Meanwhile you have to manage your body and your appearance to look and act and sound and smell in a manner that is appealing or at least neutral to the audience. If people are distracted by involuntary hand motions or whatever, then you have to try focusing energy on stopping/controlling that while still keeping the line of thought going for whatever you’re talking about.

With written material like this blog, none of that matters.
– You can take as long as you want to read, reread, and think about what people have written.
– You can take as long as you want to write, rewrite, and think about how you are going to reply.
– Your appearance and anything else that might distract people in a real-life conversation is unseen and unimportant, so you don’t have to try to control any of it and “appear normal”. If you want to sit at your computer naked while typing a reply, nobody reading your message is able to know that. No effort needs to be wasted on trying to “manage” your appearance to be acceptable while typing.
– If you’re having a bad day or cannot think clearly at the moment, there is no problem with just simply stepping away and not writing anything for a while.

So yes, written material on a delayed-communication system like this blog is completely different from trying to talk to people live and in person.

How is your experience with online chatting such as on Second Life? How does it compare with the live conferences and posting on this blog? I would bet it is somewhat easier than live meetings since you don’t have to be concerned about physical appearances, but still somewhat harder than blogging since you can’t take your time writing out replies to people.

This meant among other things that I, and another autistic person I knew, were instinctively very wary of a social worker who turned out to be breaking the law several times over. All the non-autistic people involved were shocked when they found out and said she “seemed so nice” and had “tricked them” into believing she was a nice person. They were surprised that I and the other person had picked up on the danger all along, long before they had.

Some of the non-autistic people involved in that began asking me about other people, and I tended to be right more often than not, and to pick up on social undercurrents before they could (because they were too busy reading the “I am nice” signals and other signals people were more consciously sending out). (Keep in mind that in order to pick up on these things I might not understand a word someone is saying — I remember being shocked later that a person was “asking questions” in the literal-word sense, because he had seemed to me to more be firing hostility accusations, turns out the mask in that case was hostility-disguised-as-questions.)

I know an autistic woman who was given a test as part of her autism diagnosis, in which actors acted out facial expressions and such. She was unable to read the acted facial expressions but able to tell from their level of tension and unconscious postures and such what their actual emotions were — which confused the testing process a good deal.

At a book-signing by Dawn Prince-Hughes in Berkeley a number of autistic people (me included) discussed being able to tell underlying emotions but not the social masks and such that people were putting on, and how this was different from the usual stereotype of autism.

Donna Williams has written more about it in the book Autism and Sensing, if you want a good deal of detail on this topic. I don’t totally agree with her analysis of it, but I do have a similar underlying experience as her in terms of the patterns we are able to pick up on when symbolic processing is not there to muddle up perception.

The trouble is even perceiving these things doesn’t mean I can always react in ways that show comprehension of it at the time, I am more likely to, for instance in dangerous situations, find my way into a safer part of the pattern, but will not be able to necessarily show comprehension of why I am doing so. Some people were trying to kidnap me at one point and I instinctively recoiled because of their underlying sliminess but did not realize the precise danger I was in (kidnap and rape) until later when I’d had time to process the language. It’s a different kind of processing, and there are things I miss when I am perceiving in that way, just as there are things that people are missing when they are not perceiving in that way. Sometimes you can come to equivalent conclusions from different parts of the data (“back off because this is slime personified” versus “back off because the things they are saying are things that they would say if they wanted to kidnap and rape you” both result in backing off), and sometimes someone seeing one part will see something the other person seeing the other part does not see and vice versa. Both modes of perception seem valuable.

Amanda, if it isn’t too much trouble, could you provide an example of the kinds of underlying things that you can pick up in a room or social setting that we NT’s can’t?