What is the fuss all about? Are aspies just faking it for attention?
Definitions:
Aspie: Someone with Asperger’s Syndrome, a high functioning form of autism.
Neurotypical: A person with a typical brain structure , entirely off of the autism spectrum.
How many times do you think you’ve met someone with high functioning autism? Well, around 1 in 100 people have autism though granted, the exact percentage of those that are high functioning is very difficult to know for certain due to the difficulty in testing such a thing concisely.
What this means is that every day you go to the store, school, work, or any place with crowds, the odds of you walking past someone with autism is enormously high. Typically you won’t even notice many of these people because they are “high functioning”, meaning they are able to operate “normally” in public and keep stimming to a minimum.
So the real question becomes:
If people with high functioning autism can go through life without standing out more than others, surely they are pretty similar to neurotypicals. Right?
Right! Here’s the deal. Aspies are almost identical to neurotypicals save two very critical things. 1) Sensory inputs are more stressful and 2) Social interactions are more complicated. That’s it! And these differences are super easy to relate with, even for a neurotypical (statistically, that’s you).
Sensory inputs are more stressful
Aspies have a much harder time processing sensory information. This means sounds, lights, smells, tastes, and touches are all more intense than they are for most people. All this means is that sensory information tends to lean towards the stressful end of things for an aspie.
This is all quite similar to how neurotypicals are capable of getting stressed from sensory inputs when they have a headache or feel sick.
Imagine not being able to filter out some or all sensory information. Every light, sound, and touch hits you directly. It’s brutal, but it is entirely relatable because it is not exclusive to those with autism. It just tend to be more persistent for us aspies.
An easy exercise to help simulate what this may be like would be to try to hear absolutely everything in an environment – specifically a loud one. Try to hear the clock ticking, the chattering of tens of people, the air conditioning, the music, the banging dishes – everything. Now imagine someone is talking to you and expecting you to understand what they’re saying and wanting you to respond. Make sure you’re doing that all without being able to tune out any of it. Can you see why that would be stressful? And that’s not even taking lights, smells, tastes, or touch into account.
Social interactions are more complicated
While I admittedly don’t have a full grasp on the science of it all, I can share from personal experience that an aspie has a much harder time keeping up with social interactions, expectations, and roles.
This one is ridiculously easy to empathize with! Imagine the first time (or perhaps all the times) you spoke in public. Doing so is terrifying, awkward, difficult to adjust for, and requires keeping in mind a lot of things you wouldn’t otherwise have to worry about nearly as much. Such as a crowd’s mood, body language, gestures, keeping an audience’s attention, and more!
For an aspie social interactions of any kind bring similar stresses that speaking in public brings to a neurotypical. Keeping this in mind when you inevitably run across an aspie is going to help you a lot in understanding what’s going on 🙂
And just like that, the biggest “mysteries” of autism have become relatable and hopefully, you can start to understand what the world looks like through such a different perspective!
If you still have questions, send them my way at wouldaspie@gmail.com! And with that, have a wonderful day!