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May. 24th, 2012 01:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stormdogAfter the wedding reception for my friend Resee and her partner (Whose well-executed steampunk theme was really quite lovely!), Danae and I drove back to my place. Along the way, we had a conversation that ranged pretty widely over a number of things.
She suggested that maybe my social blossoming was delayed not because of being on the autism spectrum, but because of my prosopagnosia. She pointed out that most people get feedback on other people's thoughts and feelings via three routes: facial expression, words used, and body language. Because of my great difficulty in evaluating faces and body language the way most people do, I was at a disadvantage in learning to interact with others the same way. I'm only getting something like a third of the feedback, so maybe it took me three times as long?
This is, of course, armchair psychology, but I think there's something to it. I've been wondering for some time whether I'm really autistic. It's such a large part of how I've come to understand myself and manage to find explanations for the difficulties I've had that it's very strange indeed to think that I might have been wrong. But the way I interact with people now is not at all in keeping with that previous conception of myself. It's all more than a little puzzling, to be honest.
That and other insights into the way my brain works made me think about other such conversations I've had through my life. A number of people in my life have presented their conceptions and understandings of what I'm thinking. Often, they've had some deeply insightful things to say to me. Danae, Lisa, and other people have had really interesting thoughts about how I think, and have sometimes presented me with intriguing concepts I'd never considered before. Some of them addressed specific bits of mental oddity, like considering how exactly my perception of attractiveness differs from other people's and how I could compare those concepts, or realizing that my prosopagnosia and topographical agnosia may be tied to a sort of failure of topology in general in my head. That maybe that's why I'm bad at things from massage (because mentally I can't really process the anatomy that my hands are feeling) to reading maps (I've been told that I don't make the mistakes that someone who doesn't know how to read maps makes; I actually interpret them incorrectly which is a different mistake).
And on a general level, I have conversations wherein another person talks to me in a way that makes me feel like they've looked into my head and not only seen what's going on in there, but have presented it to me accompanied with insights into why it's there and what to do about it. I had that sort of conversation with Danae in the car and it made me feel a little lacking. As if my partner has spent so much time really getting to know and understand me, and I have not returned that favor. I worry it will seem like Danae, or others who have varying levels of insight into my personality, are less important to me than I am to them because I don't have the ability to see how they're wired at the same level.
Danae pointed out that there are different forms of intelligence, and not everyone has them in equal amounts. She feels that she and I are pretty close, generally speaking. The fact that I'm not as good at understanding other people's deep mental processes doesn't mean that I'm not intelligent, or not a good boyfriend. I hope that's the case. There's a part of me that worries that a serious relationship partner should have a deeper understanding of you than I do, or perhaps can. How my partner is feeling, what stresses them and how I can help, or what makes them happy and how to do those things are deeply important to me. I do worry about being good enough at those things, and about not being as good at it as my partners are.
She suggested that maybe my social blossoming was delayed not because of being on the autism spectrum, but because of my prosopagnosia. She pointed out that most people get feedback on other people's thoughts and feelings via three routes: facial expression, words used, and body language. Because of my great difficulty in evaluating faces and body language the way most people do, I was at a disadvantage in learning to interact with others the same way. I'm only getting something like a third of the feedback, so maybe it took me three times as long?
This is, of course, armchair psychology, but I think there's something to it. I've been wondering for some time whether I'm really autistic. It's such a large part of how I've come to understand myself and manage to find explanations for the difficulties I've had that it's very strange indeed to think that I might have been wrong. But the way I interact with people now is not at all in keeping with that previous conception of myself. It's all more than a little puzzling, to be honest.
That and other insights into the way my brain works made me think about other such conversations I've had through my life. A number of people in my life have presented their conceptions and understandings of what I'm thinking. Often, they've had some deeply insightful things to say to me. Danae, Lisa, and other people have had really interesting thoughts about how I think, and have sometimes presented me with intriguing concepts I'd never considered before. Some of them addressed specific bits of mental oddity, like considering how exactly my perception of attractiveness differs from other people's and how I could compare those concepts, or realizing that my prosopagnosia and topographical agnosia may be tied to a sort of failure of topology in general in my head. That maybe that's why I'm bad at things from massage (because mentally I can't really process the anatomy that my hands are feeling) to reading maps (I've been told that I don't make the mistakes that someone who doesn't know how to read maps makes; I actually interpret them incorrectly which is a different mistake).
And on a general level, I have conversations wherein another person talks to me in a way that makes me feel like they've looked into my head and not only seen what's going on in there, but have presented it to me accompanied with insights into why it's there and what to do about it. I had that sort of conversation with Danae in the car and it made me feel a little lacking. As if my partner has spent so much time really getting to know and understand me, and I have not returned that favor. I worry it will seem like Danae, or others who have varying levels of insight into my personality, are less important to me than I am to them because I don't have the ability to see how they're wired at the same level.
Danae pointed out that there are different forms of intelligence, and not everyone has them in equal amounts. She feels that she and I are pretty close, generally speaking. The fact that I'm not as good at understanding other people's deep mental processes doesn't mean that I'm not intelligent, or not a good boyfriend. I hope that's the case. There's a part of me that worries that a serious relationship partner should have a deeper understanding of you than I do, or perhaps can. How my partner is feeling, what stresses them and how I can help, or what makes them happy and how to do those things are deeply important to me. I do worry about being good enough at those things, and about not being as good at it as my partners are.
