Ninth of Asperger’s Ten Traits – “Feelings and other people’s actions are confusing”

“9) Feelings and other people’s actions are confusing. Others’ feelings and our own feelings are confusing to the extent there are no set rules to feelings. We think logically, and even though we are (despite what others think) sensitive, compassionate, intuitive, and understanding, many emotions remain illogical and unpredictable. We may expect that by acting a certain way we can achieve a certain result, but in dealing with emotions, we find the intended results don’t manifest. We speak frankly and literally. In our youth, jokes go over our heads; we are the last to laugh, if we laugh at all, and sometimes ourselves the subject of the joke. We are confused when others make fun of us, ostracize us, decide they don’t want to be our friend, shun us, belittle us, trick us, and especially betray us. We may have trouble identifying feelings unless they are extremes. We might have trouble with the emotion of hate and dislike. We may hold grudges and feel pain from a situation years later, but at the same time find it easier to forgive than hold a grudge. We might feel sorry for someone who has persecuted or hurt us. Personal feelings of anger, outrage, deep love, fear, giddiness, and anticipation seem to be easier to identify than emotions of joy, satisfaction, calmness, and serenity. Sometimes situations, conversations, or events are perceived as black or white, one way or another, and the middle spectrum is overlooked or misunderstood. A small fight might signal the end of a relationship and collapse of one’s world, where a small compliment might boost us into a state of bliss.”

Used with permission from @everydayaspergers. Originally published in Samantha Croft‘s -now former- blog, Everyday Asperger’s, as The Ten Traits.

I must confess it took me time to accept that EVERY SINGLE THOUGHT of the emotional maelstrom summarised in Sam’s 9^th Asperger’s Trait, is not a picture I contemplate, but a movie I’m living…

I urge my reader(s) to read it carefully and slowly, simply because understanding is a first step towards the self-acceptance of ultimately who you are as an autistic individual, entitled to at least as much societal acceptance, as the amount of effort expected of you, from an environment which somehow always fails to invite autistics when setting its rules…

In my case, emotions oftentimes exist as extremes of a capricious pendulum, and I have emphasised capricious purposefully, because the dialectic motion-confinement of a pendulum doesn’t seem always acceptable to the neurobiological autonomy advocated by my brain. You see, a pendulum is predictable, bound to return onto its own origin every time it leaves it, until friction has its last word. Sometimes however, my pendulum just freezes, having decided not to return anywhere, because as much as Asperger’s and Autistics are inclined to routine and patterns, the final touches of every ‘e-motion’ are dictated by details imperceptible to neurotypicals, each such attribute presenting itself as an indispensable cog in the refined machinery of our emotional displays. And if you think that these cogs are some standardised items floating around awaiting to fall in some specific spaces, well, you may be wrong…

Exempli gratia, think of these cogs as rather aggregated molecules of water, always H₂O, but “expressing” themselves in shapes and forms depending of the environment, but ultimately influencing it, changing it…

Remember the boiling water from your home kettle, so indispensably helpful to your tea, but so devastating on your skin; or the soothing embrace of your favourite beach’s waves, becoming cruel undertakers for a sinking ship; or the cooling rain soaking the thirsty grain fields, just to turn into murderous fist sized hail-stones underneath a cold cloud, and the list could go on forever. That’s exactly how the autistic emotional responses will be shaped by unaware, oftentimes ill intended individuals and their approach to Asperger’s and Autism.

So, remember, if the water-cogs of my neuro-biologically predisposed surprised/confused reaction, encounter your frozen/patronising/demeaning attitude, don’t be surprised to find snow on your shoes, ice under your feet, on your way out of my phonebook…