Word power: communication difficulties (with digressions into climate change and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis)

(this was originally going to be a comment on Bev's blog, but as i don't feel like i've been posting enough about autism as such on my own blog, i decided to expand it into a post proper...)

Bev at Asperger Square 8 has been saying a lot of good stuff about speech and communication recently that i strongly identify with, even though i've nearly always been regarded (by myself and others) as a very verbal person.

As I have mentioned before, writing is easy for me. I can tell you much more in an e-mail than I can in person. Telephone calls are the hardest method of communication.

This is incredibly true of me. I really, really suck at telephone calls with people i don't know well. Calling someone i need to contact but have never spoken to before can be such a daunting task that it can take me literally months to get round to it. (It was September of last year, at a protests against the Labour Party conference in Manchester, when i first met and got the phone number of a fellow disability rights activist here in Birmingham - it was at least November before i phoned him... and then the phone call was an utter nightmare because i couldn't understand his accent. I still haven't called the number of someone who could help with my screwed up benefit claim that i was given at least 2 months ago.)

On the other hand, there are emails to people that i have procrastinated for as long or longer about sending... but in those cases, the reasons for the procrastination are somewhat different. One particular problem i have is when sending emails in "formal" contexts (job applications, enquiries about postgrad courses, etc) is how formal a writing style to use - the normal email style of "Hi" or no salutation whatsoever doesn't feel right, but old fashioned "formal letter" style feels somehow wrong for an email as well - as if i'm some anachronistic luddite who still thinks he's using a fountain pen. (Although, to be fair, i actually am the latter in many respects...) Generally, though, i'm a shitload more fluent in writing than i am in spoken conversation...

(and, when i'm speaking, especially about technical or theoretical subjects, i tend to use the same parenthetical, multi-clause-sentences, uni-essay-like style that i use when writing... which has been known to confuse or infuriate some people...)

(you know you're hyperlexic when you wish you could speak commas, semicolons, quotation marks, ellipses, parentheses, and even, since i've started blogging... HTML links ;o )

I do the drawing/doodling to focus attention while listening thing too, and remember being told off by teachers for it (one weird thing when i first self-diagnosed as Asperger's is that the first book i found about AS had a design on its front cover almost identical to my doodlings in the margins of my school books... i can't remember the exact title or author of the book, but it was an orange and black cover...).

(EDIT: I found the book through the comments to Bev's blog entry - and it is, in fact, a doodle by an actual Aspie! Maybe there is some kind of... shared style, or something? That's actually a bit spooky...)

And another common experience at school was being told off for "not listening", when in fact i was listening, i just wasn't looking... one thing i always want to say is "I can either look at you or listen to you, but not both". Even as a child, it seemed deeply illogical to me that, to be percieved as "listening", one had to be looking in the direction of the person or thing one was supposed to be listening to - after all, humans (unlike many other species of mammals) have eyes on the front of our heads, and ears on the sides of our heads...

~Don’t jump to conclusions based on body language. I have often had people interpret my posture or facial expressions to mean something far from what I was thinking or feeling. If you know someone is autistic, be aware that that person’s face or body may be speaking a foreign language. Nothing kills a conversation faster for me than having someone tell me what I am thinking. Don’t assume.

YES YES YES AND A THOUSAND TIMES YES. I have had some... interesting experiences with friends and acquaintances who thought they could tell what my "body language" was "saying", to put it mildly. One very close and long-running friend (at 5+ years to date, the longest-running close friend i have ever had, in fact) claims that she can interpret my facial expressions, and that they are "consistent" (to my actual emotions), but not the same as the facial expressions a neurotypical person would have while experiencing those same emotions. I'm actually not sure about that one myself, though i'm willing to accept the idea that i do have some meaningfully communicative facial expressions, even if they're not the same as neurotypical ones and/or learned rather than "instinctive" - however, even if it isn't strictly true, i would probably prefer people (who don't know me very well) to assume that my facial expressions are not intentionally communicating anything.

A particular (and possibly related) communication difficulty i often experience (especially with not-particularly-close friends, and/or people who are NT but "sensitive") is that, when i state facts, particularly negative-seeming facts, about my impairment or my life, i get a response which seems to assume that the purpose of what i said was to try to get the other person to deny it, or to "reassure" me that it isn't really true. This is probably one of the most frustrating and upsetting responses anyone can experience, and has led directly to the end of several friendships. A tip to any IRL friends/acquaintances who might be reading this - when i state something about my life, please don't contradict me. If it's something negative and i'm saying it in what seems like a despairing context or tone of voice (the latter, again, is not a reliable indicator of real emotion for me), then the response i'm looking for is not "reassurance", aka denial, but acceptance of the fact, or at least my perception of it, and suggestions for ways to change that reality.

(If i was talking to you about climate change, you wouldn't, or at least i hope you wouldn't, respond with something along the lines of "It sometimes seems like that, but climate change isn't that bad really, here are X, Y and Z reasons why - you just need to change your despairing attitude" - you would, hopefully and assuming we're on the same page in understanding that climate change is really happening, respond with ideas for activism against climate change...)

Someone in the comments mentioned not liking it when ze asked people to repeat things and they rephrased them. This is kind of ironic, because i absolutely hate being asked to repeat what i have just said, and often actually can't repeat it in the exact same words, thus often responding with an expanded or rephrased version of it...

The same person talked about difficulties with "passive" language:

I particularly have a hard time when folks make their language “passive” in order to make it sound more polite, or something. Not only is it condescending, it also quite literally changes the meaning.

This strikes a chord with me, because another thing i have an absolutely unreasoning hatred for is the passive voice (I would seriously like to see it wiped out of the English language). The commonest example of this i encounter, and therefore the one that irritates me the most often, is the phrase "Are you being served?"... which raises really interesting questions about how language shapes ideology and vice versa (the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis - a big influence on George Orwell and Ursula Le Guin, both of whom are big influences on me), because of my corresponding horror of the concept of "being served", which is a major component of both my libertarianism and my submissive orientation, and the reason i really don't like going to restaurants... i am actually quite glad that i'm not a PA user). Oddly, i don't have anywhere near as much of a negative reaction to the colloquial use of "to get" to form the passive as i do to the passive formed with "to be". Running with that Sapir-Whorf thing, i can't help wondering if, in a language with no grammatical passive voice, people would be generally more "active" or "do it yourself" in attitude...

Back to the topic, and moving on to the earlier of Bev's posts, there are times when i find talking almost impossible, even though i am "usually" a fluent talker (or at least within my areas of interest)... it's just that the people i socialise with don't tend to see that side of me much, because i only go into social situations when i'm already mentally prepared for talking. For instance, although i'm capable of having a perfectly fluent internal monologue (and even of rehearsing conversations i intend to have, another thing that i have done pretty much all my life without realising until very recently that it was an autistic trait), and of reading and engaging with long discussions online, as soon as i wake up, it takes me at least 2 hours of being awake (and preferably food and caffeine within those 2 hours) before i can coherently talk to another person.

I also, perhaps paradoxically, find it much more difficult to talk to people in my own home than i do in other places (although this is another one which doesn't apply to people who know me well) - i think this is because, in my head, my home is the place where i can "shut down" all the extra brain activities that i feel the need to use in the "outside world" - similarly, most of my sensory issues (hunger, aversion to cold, unpleasant textures, etc) are easier for me to cope with outside the home than inside. I often find myself relying on memorised "script" phrases (basically, echolalia used consciously and constructively) in conversations required of me in the home.

One particularly (although, of course, unintentionally) irritating and stressful habit of several of the people i've shared houses with (none of whom i've been "out" as an autistic person to, although i'm sure they've all percieved "something wrong" with me) is that of shouting out a greeting as soon as they hear someone enter through the door - thus creating an expectation of a reply which i feel both an obligation and an inability to meet, resulting in major (even if arguably trivial) stress. I can usually manage only (at most) a mumbled, inarticulate sound in reply, which i tend to desperately hope vaguely resembles a greeting-word (sometimes i think it's pretty close to "Hi"). Greeting-words in general are a particular difficulty for me, as they seem to be for many autistic people - i find it very, very difficult to pick the right one...

The pressure-to-respond thing also strikes chords - very often, i am much more able to say or do something when i am not being asked or expected to do it than when i am (another possible contributory factor to my libertarian philosophy?). I remember one particular incident when i was cooking for myself and the friend i was living with at the time, when i was literally just about (as in, within half a minute) to start cooking, when said friend knocked on my room door and asked me when i was going to start cooking, The interruption both delayed me starting to cook by about 10 minutes, by forcing me to restart several trains of thought, and made cooking the whole meal a much more stressful experience than if i had not been "prompted" to do it.

I'm not sure how to conclude this post (another of my quirks of verbal communication?), so, er, i'll just... stop here... but, big thanks to Bev for her posts...

Amanda at Ballastexistenz also has a good recent post in the same general subject area here...