Source: Facebook

“Guilt Pangs of Autistics”

Pangs from those many times throughout your life where you correct teachers and professors with autistic frustration over some error they’re making, and they they interpret it as emotional investment on your part, or offense, or criticism of them.

No. Um. We just can’t stand mistakes. You’re just an object like a desk or a pet. It isn’t personal. We don’t have the concept of ‘personal’ until later in life. Really. And we’re horrified when you ‘take it personally’. You just convince us that the world is full of crazy people.

Those of us who succeed, learn to role play by imitating others. And we obtain through discipline and study that which you obtained at birth. I still may not always be able to read your facial expressions but I can read your body language just fine. The reason being that your face is subtle but your body is not. It states your understanding of our relationship every second, the way your face states your feelings.

I have a lot of guilt pangs over those episodes. Not the least of which is in the knowledge that I couldn’t control my impulse to ‘correct’ the teachers and professors. By the time I was in my early twenties I learned to just leave the room. “There is nothing to be learned here”.

And into my thirties I did the same with meetings (really). “There is nothing smart going on here”. I learned to vote with my feet. This had the consequence of producing respect (and fear). When it was just an attempt to control my frustration at ignorance, error, and stupidity, and to devote my time to more important issues. Walking away from stupidity is the greatest negative reinforcement you can provide.

Now, my understanding is that along the spectrum – before we develop unrecoverable damage, we largely have higher neural density, and it simply takes longer to program that neural density with intuition than it does with practicing (repetition).

If that is the case then we are the next step in evolution, and that next step in evolution. Why? it will take us longer to mature a human through learning than it does an animal through instinct.

And that is an interesting evolutionary risk. Since at some point if you are so dependent upon learning over intuition, then it is a weakness for a genome.