The Party: A virtual experience of autism

I just came across this video presented by the UK newspaper The Guardian. It is from 2017, so perhaps you’ve seen it already. But I didn’t know about it! It’s a dramatization about how a 16-year-old girl named Layla, who is on the autism spectrum, experiences the sensory overload of a birthday party.

I think it’s pretty well done. While the video is playing, you can actually click and drag with your mouse pointer to change the direction of the camera. A narrator gives you Layla’s internal monologue as she tries to keep from melting down.

I empathize with Layla a lot in this situation, caught between wanting to hide away from everybody and wishing that she could participate like the people around her. I can’t recall ever literally experiencing the way the camera goes blurry when Layla starts to get overloaded, but I think that’s probably just a storytelling device meant to represent how it becomes impossible to function when you’re overloaded.

Who knows, though? Usually in a situation like this, I’m able to find a quiet corner to hide away in, so maybe it just hasn’t ever gotten that bad for me. Layla’s headphones are an important way for her to keep a buffer between herself and the noisy world, and I definitely identify with that.

All in all, a nice attempt to convey something that’s not easy to get across.

When I was 5

When I was 5, I was…

a thinker and explorer, studying everything around me from blue eyes beneath a blonde bowl cut.

My world was made of… corduroys and crayons, Transformers and Duplo blocks, days that stretched out beyond what I could see.

I liked… traffic lights and street signs, trips to the library to check out new books, walks in the woods with Daddy to see if there were any snakes hiding under the old board someone had left there.

I hated… bug bites, earaches, and early bedtimes.

I feared… loud shouting on the TV, distorted music from a broken tape, the unexpected disruption to a neat pattern.

Happiness for me was… my shelf of books at my back, maps and drawings unfolded on the soft carpet before me, with room to spread across the infinite floor. Everything had its place.

I thought that… everyone wanted to hear me share what I had learned. They always seemed so impressed.

I learned… the names of the countries, the planets, and the stars around me. The counting of days, months, and years, and the God who made them all.

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When I was 10, I was…

small for my age, the kid skipping down the sidewalk with tortoise-shell glasses and a sheepish grin on his face.

My world was made of… pencils and erasers, rulers and dictionaries lined up carefully inside my desk, textbooks wrapped in brown paper and tape that I’d read on the long bus rides home from school.

I liked… pedaling around the driveway on my bike, exploring the yard with my brothers, then running inside to draw pictures of the adventures we imagined.

I hated… when the kids around me at church or at school talked about things that were disgusting or mean.

I feared… not knowing the right thing to do, being caught in a situation where everybody but me knew the rules.

Happiness for me was… soaring over the playground at recess on the swingset.

I thought that… if the teacher had to scold the class for any reason, it meant that I must have done something wrong.

I learned… that the way to make a friend was to be a friend.

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When I was 15, I was…

Bullying from both sides (Nerdy, Shy reflections 3)

I’ve had a tough time getting started on this post. It’s another reflection on the book Nerdy, Shy, and Socially Inappropriate by Cynthia Kim, and this time the topic is bullying.

I’m not sure if it’s difficult for me to write about because I don’t have a lot of personal experience with being bullied, or if it’s just because it’s such an unpleasant topic in general.

What’s interesting about Cynthia Kim’s story is that she experienced bullying from both sides. In elementary and middle school, she was picked on by the children in her class– they made fun of her, took her things, and in one case the biggest boy in class cornered her in a coatroom and kissed her against her wishes. For a while, she didn’t know what to do about it aside from trying to hide.

But eventually, Kim found a different way to respond– becoming a bully herself. If she could focus people’s attention on making fun of someone else, it meant that she was no longer the target. She explains that she was able to identify who to pick on, because they looked just like she used to when she was the target of bullies herself.

I thought there was a very Aspie-like honesty about Kim’s account of becoming a bully. She doesn’t attempt to excuse her own behavior– she knows it was wrong and hurtful– even when she was doing it, she knew it was wrong. It just came naturally to her. And then, as she grew older, the bullying behavior gradually faded away, along with her friendships with the other “mean girls.”

When you’re a kid, both you and everyone around you is learning social skills at the same time, and one of the things we all have to learn is how easy it is to hurt others by what we say and do.

It makes me think of how I probably treated others rudely without realizing it when I was growing up, and later I had to trust that God would give them grace to forgive or to forget my mistakes. I don’t think I ever bullied anyone, but there were certainly times when I felt relieved that someone other than myself was being teased.

One good thing that has come out of Kim’s experiences is that she is able to give a helpful list of why people on the autistic spectrum tend to experience bullying, which can be a problem at any age, not just in childhood.

Traits that make autistic individuals vulnerable to bullying (quoted directly from Kim’s book, with my own comments after each item):

To the Moon: Acting your age

This post contains spoilers for the plot of the computer game To the Moon.  If you don’t want to be spoiled, play or watch the game!  Otherwise, keep reading.  This post looks a bit more at one of the game’s most interesting characters, River.  (“River” is a popular name in sci-fi, isn’t it?  You also have Firefly‘s River Tam and Doctor Who‘s River Song, both of whom are also very interesting people.)

To the Moon: “Fitting in” vs. “Being yourself”

Thanks for reading my introductory post about the computer game To the Moon!  This post will start to get into the details of the plot in earnest, so only continue reading if you don’t mind finding out what happens in the game.

My girlfriend Megan has already written over a dozen posts reflecting on her reactions to the game and how it relates to Asperger’s syndrome, and they are really neat!  Her posts are a lot less spoilerish than mine, so you can check them out if you want to learn more about the themes of the game without being spoiled about the details of the plot.

Megan seems to have less trouble expressing her thoughts in words than I do; I usually have to have all of the details laid out in front of me before I feel like I can say anything.  With that in mind, the spoilers begin below…

A critical voice

Earlier, I wrote about how I was afraid that becoming a teenager would turn me into a rebel and make me fight with my parents.  That didn’t happen.  But my thinking did change.  Looking back, I think that was when I first started dealing with “the voice.”

It was a voice that would remind me of all the times I had messed up, when I had looked silly, when I had hurt someone’s feelings.  Being reminded of a mistake felt like reliving it– even years later, I would look back and shudder about the smallest misunderstandings.

It was a voice that told me to pause before speaking up, reaching out, or taking action.  What if I made a mistake?  Better to stay silent and hidden.

It was a voice that told me whenever something bad happened, to assume it was my fault.  “I’m sorry.”  I felt like I needed to apologize for everything– it probably was my fault somehow.

It was a voice that told me to compare myself to others and that I wasn’t ready for the challenges ahead– I didn’t know how to drive (or want to learn how), I didn’t have a job, I didn’t like to go out with friends, I’d never had a girlfriend, I didn’t know what I wanted to do after I graduated.  And before I knew it, it would be too late to learn.

I want to be clear about this– when I talk about hearing a “voice,” I don’t mean the sort of voice that a person with schizophrenia might deal with, where you can’t tell for sure if what you’re hearing is a real sound or coming from your mind.  (Also, I know almost nothing about schizophrenia aside from the fictionalized portrayal of it in the movie A Beautiful Mind, so my concept of it may not be very accurate.)

See, I knew that the critical voice that plagued me came from my own mind.  It was my own voice, the voice of my fears.  As I said in an earlier post, part of growing up was that I became more aware of other people, and of their awareness of me.  And that caused me to be more careful about what I did and said.  But my rule-oriented mind took it to the extreme.  And it tended to create a vicious cycle, because the more I hid from potential failure and embarrassment, the more I feared that I was leaving myself unprepared for the world by not trying.

To greater and lesser degrees, every day since then became a fight against that voice in my head– usually subtle, but sometimes exhausting.  I could fight it by distraction, or by applying myself to a task that I really enjoyed.  Better still, I could fight it with other voices– the voice of God’s Word telling me that I was forgiven, my sins had been paid for, and God was in control of my future.  The voice of the Holy Spirit assuring me that I was a beloved child of God, and the voices of my family echoing that same unconditional love.

One of the greatest things about God is that he is so near.  I don’t have to make a journey to talk with him.  I don’t have to go through a series of mental exercises to make my thoughts acceptable to him.  He is as close as my own thoughts at all times.  Just by remembering that he is there, I can turn any time of distress and doubting into a prayer.  This didn’t make the struggle go away, but it meant I never had to struggle alone.

Hopefully this post makes some sense; I don’t intend for it to be a “woe is me” post.  I’m trying to be honest about how I see my life and development.  My next post will be on something more fun and less serious.

I’ll finish with a couple of quotes from The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis that hint at how this struggle will end.  If you’re not familiar with The Screwtape Letters, they are written as a collection of letters from a demon named Screwtape, whose nephew Wormwood is assigned as the tempter for a young man.  These sections come from the last letter, in which we learn that the young man was killed in a bombing raid, and Wormwood has failed in his task:

“How well I know what happened at the instant when they snatched him from you!  There was a sudden clearing of his eyes (was there not?) as he saw you for the first time, and recognised the part you had had in him and knew that you had it no longer.

Just think (and let it be the beginning of your agony) what he felt at that moment; as if a scab had fallen from an old sore, as if he were emerging from a hideous, shell-like tetter, as if he shuffled off for good and all a defiled, wet, clinging garment.”

And:

“Defeated, out-manœuvred fool! Did you mark how naturally—as if he’d been born for it—the earthborn vermin entered the new life? How all his doubts became, in the twinkling of an eye, ridiculous?

“I know what the creature was saying to itself! ‘Yes. Of course. It always was like this. All horrors have followed the same course, getting worse and worse and forcing you into a kind of bottle-neck till, at the very moment when you thought you must be crushed, behold! you were out of the narrows and all was suddenly well. The extraction hurt more and more and then the tooth was out. The dream became a nightmare and then you woke. You die and die and then you are beyond death. How could I ever have doubted it?’

“As he saw you, he also saw Them. I know how it was. You reeled back dizzy and blinded, more hurt by them than he had ever been by bombs. The degradation of it!—that this thing of earth and slime could stand upright and converse with spirits before whom you, a spirit, could only cower. Perhaps you had hoped that the awe and strangeness of it would dash his joy. But that is the cursed thing; the gods are strange to mortal eyes, and yet they are not strange.

“He had no faintest conception till that very hour of how they would look, and even doubted their existence. But when he saw them he knew that he had always known them and realised what part each one of them had played at many an hour in his life when he had supposed himself alone, so that now he could say to them, one by one, not ‘Who are you?’ but ‘So it was you all the time.’

Awareness of others

Hello again, readers!  My perfectionism has created a lot of writer’s block recently.  I have about five posts in various stages of incompleteness, but I find myself looking at them and saying “Who wrote that?”  Let’s see if I can get things moving again on the general topic of Asperger’s in adolescence.

A while ago, I posted about how I was worried about becoming a teenager because I thought it meant I would be rebellious and fight with my parents all the time.  Thankfully, that didn’t happen.

But there were changes in my thinking and behavior that I didn’t expect.  One of the most significant was this:

I became more aware of other people, and of the fact that they were aware of me.

Hopefully I’m not overstating things, but I believe I honestly didn’t care what my classmates thought when I started elementary school.  They were just other kids, after all, and I usually followed the rules about sitting quietly and keeping my hands to myself better than they did.  I took my cues for how to behave from my teachers or whoever was in authority.   I was taught to be polite from an early age, so I hopefully wasn’t rude.  But I saw no reason to be bothered by the fact that I kept mostly to myself at recess, for instance.  Comparing myself to those around me didn’t usually occur to me.

That gradually began to change as I got older, though– I began to think about the fact that my classmates had interests, thoughts, and feelings of their own.  I suppose that means I developed my “theory of mind.”

Looking back, I think one reason that I wasn’t caught totally by surprise by this was that I had one good friendship from early on in elementary school– in first grade, I became best friends with a boy named Ryan.  I think it started with something as simple as him choosing me to help him pass out papers to the class for the teacher, but I am very thankful he so easily accepted me as his friend.  We sat together at lunch and talked about our favorite TV shows and video games, and we stayed over at each other’s houses several times.  In addition to being fun, it meant that I actually developed a few social skills.  : )

Social interaction gets much more complex very quickly as you get older, though.  I had learned how to make friendships on a childlike level based on mutual interests, but there began to be a quality to the conversations of my classmates that I found very hard to connect with; they talked about things I understood very little about, like popular music and sports.  They joked about things I didn’t know how to laugh about.  If I tried to participate in the conversation by doing what had worked for me as a child– copying how other people sounded– it felt horribly awkward, as if it wasn’t me speaking.  So I mostly kept quiet and listened.

I eventually realized that I had gone from feeling more mature than most of my classmates (because I was able to handle the rules and schoolwork of elementary school so easily) to feeling like I was much less mature than they were.  I began to think of myself a lot differently.

I’m not sure how much of this discussion is revealing things about Asperger’s syndrome; it very well may be that this is just a part of growing up that everybody goes through– understanding that you have weaknesses as well as strengths.  Whatever the case, I had a lot more to learn about both.

Afraid of growing up?

My parents had explained to me from an early age that I was growing every day, too slowly to see, but that after a number of years, I would eventually become a grownup like my Dad.  That was a good thing, I thought!  My Dad was the smartest person I knew.

Like most children, I was asked “What do you want to be when you grow up?”, and like most children, I had some pretty funny answers to that question based on whatever interested me most at the time I was asked.  When I was fascinated by road maps and traffic signs, I thought that I’d like to be the person who makes all of the stop signs, street name signs, and exit signs.  There must be someone who does that, right?  Well, then, maybe I could be a cartographer.  That was a person who made maps.

When I was fascinated by learning the bones and organs of the human body, I thought I might like to be a doctor just like my father.  He took me to work one time and showed me an actual skeleton they had there for medical students to study (I guess?), and I amused my Dad’s coworkers by pointing out and listing the names of all of the bones I had learned.

When I was fascinated by learning about the stars and planets, I thought I’d like to be an astronomer.  Then I could write the books I enjoyed reading so much.

But as I began to get a little older, I started hearing some things that made me worry.  My aspie brain was constantly taking in information from what I heard people say, from what I read, and from what I saw on television.  I learned that before I became a grownup, I would first become a “teenager.”  And I didn’t think I wanted to be one.

Why?  Well, the first thing most people seemed to say about teenagers was that they didn’t get along with their parents.  I heard it wherever I went.

Adults would warn/tease their friends with young children: “You think being a parent is tough now– just wait until they’re teenagers!”

At a Christian concert, the singer joked about how it’s hard for parents to watch their children grow up and leave home when it seems like the time goes so fast, but that God had provided something to make it easier for parents to let go:  “It’s called the teenage years.”

In stories and TV shows about families, the teenage characters always seemed to be either arguing with their parents or trying to get away with something without their parents knowing.

Teenagers often seemed to be portrayed as a bad influence in morality tales for younger children. (And in the 1980s and 1990s, even some of the most mindless children’s shows tried to present themselves as morality tales!)  If a story was about the evils of alcohol or drugs, or just trashing the house with a party while your parents were away, one of the first signs of trouble was getting the “big kids” involved.

It’s pretty silly, but I began to dread becoming one of these teenagers.

I didn’t want to fight with my parents!  I knew that the Bible said that children were supposed to obey their parents.  Besides, I liked my Mom and Dad!  I decided that I would try my best to make sure that I wouldn’t become rebellious.  (The idea that I thought I was in danger of turning into a rebel is actually pretty funny now, knowing my personality.)

[I just thought of an interesting tangent I could follow here, but I’m going to try to save that for another post, because this one is taking me too long, and I’m ready to be done with it!  🙂 ]

I don’t know why I didn’t talk to my parents about my fears until much later (when I realized I hadn’t turned into a monster after all).  Even then, I spent a lot of time thinking to myself, trying to figure things out.

I wonder if other kids worried about growing up the way I did.  Hopefully, most people are not as literal-minded about it as I was.

There’s a neat story I want to share with you.  I’m remembering it second-hand, so I might not have all of the details right, but I can explain the gist of it:

A while ago, my parents were visiting a church while on vacation.  The guest speaker was a pastor from a sister church in Africa.  One of the things they remembered from his message was that he spoke proudly about his teenage children, who were seeking to honor God and help others in whatever they did.  He said that he was dismayed by how much he had heard the idea expressed in America that teenagers are lazy or a burden or always up to trouble.  God can use anyone at any stage of life, and we should not let ourselves or others be defined by human labels and categories.

That’s such an encouraging message!  I think it’s important to realize that even when an idea seems universal in our culture, that doesn’t mean it’s correct.

An Aspie Adolescence

A while ago, I made a few posts about my memories of what I was like as a child, and the ways in which I think having Asperger’s syndrome influenced the sort of child I was.  Lately, I’ve been thinking of how I might continue along the same lines, to talk about being an adolescent with Asperger’s.

In online discussion forums about autism and Asperger’s, I’ve seen a few people relate something like “I could always tell that I was a bit different, but it didn’t start really becoming a struggle until I became a teenager.”  I think I’d have to put myself in that category as well.

For me, I think a lot of it has to do with having a very rule-based mind.  A lot of childhood is about learning to follow rules.  Rules to keep you safe, rules about how to treat people around you, rules that allow you to begin to understand how the world works in subjects like geography, math, and language.

I loved the structure of elementary school, with a subject for each hour and a book for each subject.  I was able to figure out how things worked, and by the measure of my grades and what my teachers said about me, I thought I was doing really well.  I had no idea that my Aspie mind may have had a lot to do with making me take to elementary school like a fish to water.

But as you get older, a lot of areas in life become more complicated, and operating primarily according to rules seems to become gradually less effective and less looked upon as a good thing.  The gradualness of it can catch you off guard.

I’ll try to go into more detail about what I mean in later posts.  Hopefully they will not be too scattered– I’m finding these topics more difficult to write about because I think my memories of adolescence are perhaps more muddled than my memories of childhood, in that they involve thinking in a way contrary to how my mind prefers to work.

At the same time, I’m thinking back a long way from a very different point of view as a thirty-something adult, but I’m also closer to and less objective (?) about these things because I’m still working on that same transition in thinking even all these years later.  Still, I am hopeful that examining them will be helpful to others dealing with the same things.

I think I’ll start by writing about the way I thought about growing up when I was still a child, before it began to happen.