I'm going to use words and concepts that have helped me explain this to other people in a way where they can imagine what it's like to have this condition.

First, there is a thing called the NTnet. My whole life, it felt like everybody around me attended some seminar I missed and never even got the memo to attend. It felt like everybody around me was reading from a special set of notes only they could see and they wouldn't tell me where to get the notes. I was afraid to phrase my questions in a way where it was too obvious that most of the time, I'm just faking it hoping that someday it will make sense to me. When I received my ASD lvl1 diagnosis, it became obvious to me what this experience was. I was not attuned to pick up social signals from the diverse sub-textual ways that humans communicate, because the brain circuits that recognize that stuff never quite developed for me fully. I can stare at a social cue for days and not pick up on what it means the same way others do. The only corrective mechanism for me is social embarrassment, but sometimes I can't fully work out what it was that I did wrong when people laugh at me or get weirded out by me. I learned very early on that the best interpersonal policy for nearly everyone in my life was do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing to generally avoid attention -- unless it was one of those moments where attention was unavoidable, like getting called on in class at either church or public school. I spent my formative years blind to even the existence the NTnet, the complex web of subtextual communication that happens around me everyday, and in my anxiety I clung to the text book answers and the words that people literally said when I asked tried to ask about "it" in order to stay afloat socially. I was not having a good time most day. Most days I was dying inside especially as a teen.

NTnet blindness (officially, it's called alexothymia and porsopagnosia, but my way is easier to say) is not all that being autistic is, but it's a huge part. Autism generally is a difference of neural wiring that usually affects socio-emotional development but has other effects. It's like your neurons can't neuron the way that a typical neurodevelopment requires, so they do the best they can but this can take a number of forms. Sometimes you get someone who is just a little socially impaired but very gifted in some other ways, but other times you get someone whose very sensory and perceptual reality is so intense, they don't even learn how to speak. There are crucial years in human development where if you miss that bus, it goes bye-bye and it never comes back for you. This is not to say that the nonverbal aren't smart: many of them have gifts, special gifts, that neurotypical people can only dream of, but it came at a terrible developmental price, the lion's share of which is a general social incompatibility with the mainstream of other human beings and all the difficulties that arise from and manifest in similar symptoms. This is why we can use the same diagnostic criteria across the Spectrum when people on the Spectrum can differ from each other as much as they do from people who aren't on the spectrum.

The current diagnostic model recognizes three degrees or levels of autistic impairment: level 1 being, as I understand it, what people used to call "Asperger's Syndrome". I am an Aspie, or ASD lvl1. I am fascinated with this, because it was the last puzzle piece that made the whole picture make sense to me finally. What is this thing, this differentness of thought, this blindness to subtext, this curse that has haunted me in the form of social awkwardness and social anxiety since I can remember? Now I know. Having been born of goodly Mormon parents and brought up in the ways of my father, I was culturally deprived of the language I needed to make sense of it. Mormons are big on feelings, and if you don't feel the same way everybody else does at the essential moments in time when you're supposed to show the right social cues and mean the emotions behind it too, something is wrong with you and it's usually understood to be sin. That makes it very scary to admit too much about your differentness, and it means you're gonna be on your own figuring it out with no means of self-correction if you get it horribly horribly wrong.

In video game culture, when a weapon gets "nerfed" that means the effectiveness of using the weapon is virtually nonexistent since the last update ruined it: it's like a toy gun now, not a usable tool. The opposite of nerfing is "buffing." If the human mind can't for some reason form the connections it was supposed to form at the times it was supposed to, it can sometimes, especially while it's still young, form other connections to compensate. There's this cartoon called Pinkie and the Brain, two mice who try to take over the world. Pinkie is the able-bodied one with a full range of emotions, but he's also dimwitted. Brain is the smart one, but he's single-minded and less able-bodied and necessarily relies on Pinkie more than he would like. An autistic mind, at least in some iterations, can form like that. Where your socio-emotional brain is nerfed, but your logical/rhetorical brain or some other part will get buffed from overuse to pick up the slack. Pinkie and the Brain get into a bunch of hilarious shenanigans, but at the end of the day they are mice in a human's world. Brain comes up with a flurry of ideas that, at least in theory, could work to obtain his objective of world domination, but Pinkie either goofs it up and/or impulsively says something that injects compassion into the equation and everything goes off the rails with the humans discovering and seeing through Pinkie and the Brain's comedic facade and they always end up right back where the episode started at square one. I loved this cartoon as a kid, although I couldn't fully articulate why at the time.

One of my mission companions once said to me, "I don't get it Elder [Cold-dodger], you're, like, dumb but you're also smart." That cut pretty deep at the time, because I knew what he meant, but I didn't understand it either. The part of me that thinks in words and knows that it is the "I" behind my eyes cannot always get the words out in person that I want to use and it doesn't help that when I call attention to myself, I can read the room wrong, send subtextual signals that conflict with my words, or just come across as a bit of an oaf which docks my social credibility. My relationship between my logical/rhetorical and visual/spatial centers and how those connect to my social-emotional brain and my motor cortex frustrates the hell out of me. It's almost comedic sometimes. I can so aborbed in my own little drama of just trying to communicate thoughts the way that I have them that I come across to others as a pompous windbag who loves to hear himself talk. Actually, I hate attention when I'm the object of it. But if the object of attention is some idea or subject that I've spent hundreds of hours of high-energy passing thought trying to figure out on my own, I want to be part of that conversation and I want to share my thoughts, but they don't come out in person the way they do in writing usually.

My passive thoughts are strangely well-constructed, and my active thoughts can run circles around everyone else on specific subjects. The trouble with existing like this is that I am my own self-contained world, and my thoughts are not always illuminated by the same cues as everybody else. In other words, my path of consciousness criss-crosses the well-trod one only occasionally. The one time in my life where this general truth was subverted was on my mission. For once in my life, the thing I thought about every day was the thing everybody was thinking about everyday, or at least acting like such. It was a huge step in comprehending how other human minds are constructed. The scriptures were the words of life in those days, not just because they were the words of my Heavenly Father, but because they were the objective things that I could study to tease out how other people formed their own perceptions of reality, in this case spiritual reality. Other people, for once, would gladly sit at my feet for as long as it took to tease out a cool take on scripture, especially when I was explaining how everybody can interpret a verse in so many different ways and why the Book of Mormon was the key to understanding why Mormon doctrine was the correct way. I was teaching myself about people and people things at the same time that I was attempting to save souls. I genuinely meant every word and would have died inside if I said the words but did not mean them, because I relished the sense of connection that I briefly had to other human beings.

I never felt that before then, because of top of being an undiagnosed autistic, I was a bishop's firstborn. I grew up in a glass case, not even understanding how to properly discern social nuances from a distance. I felt so horribly alone in those days, and it didn't help that my father, whom I sought to emulate, made several remarks over my life that the entire field of psychology was all made my the devil so that sinners had an excuse to sin. I also has some unmedicated ADHD to boot, which didn't help my mood stability during all of my social cluelessness. I had a very lonely, very turbulent childhood full of the anxiety of the weight of ideas and social responsibilities in my head that my disabled socio-emotional scaffolding could not bear but I tried anyway. I found a pose that worked well enough, but not well enough to save me when I started piecing together that it was all bullshit.

I can't not think a thought when I know it's possible to think it, especially when everyone says God hates people who think such-and-such thoughts, I can't help but ask myself why. I'd ask the other person why, but years of experience with most people have taught me some things cannot be said so tacitly without blowback. I was at a point in my life where the other Elders and sometimes my mission president called me for scripture references and thoughts about how to counter criticisms. In those days, we didn't have gospel topics essays or anything like that. The Brethren and all of our approved references were completely silent about things that our critics googled all the time. I was a missionary in the first years of the age of Google and Facebook. I understood very intimately that there was a niche the church higherups were not addressing, and I didn't understand why except that most people did not have the gifts that I had and were too intimidated to go find the answers. I wasn't. I believed I'd find them. Where my companions would have born their testimonies and walked away, I always tried to walk right into the fire, because we are called to save souls and they're not gonna get it anywhere else, right? I had to shove down levels of anxiety that most people do not experience unless they've had severe trauma in their lives in order to do that, but for me that's another day that ends in Y. I would not normally put myself in situations where my social anxiety could hurt me badly, but I did it for the truth, or what I thought was the truth. Because I was the one that people brought their doubts to, I got a well-developed picture of how much people actually "knew" despite what they said during Fast and Testimony Meeting. I knew how far that the Mormons, my people, were afraid it was not true, and I... wanted to help them have more faith than that. But the end result of a long story is that I lost mine instead and I was back to square one. There is wisdom, apparently, in plugging your ears and saying "la la la la" on a skeptic's doorstep while trying to spin your own intellectual cowardice as a positive... if securing your place in your Mormon social life is all you want.

What is a young man without a testimony? A sinner, probably. I knew I had sins, and my brain flitted back and forth between daring to question what I was supposed to believe, what I'd always tried to believe, and exploring the alternative that I was losing the spirit because I was sinner. There was a strain of thought in my head that I didn't know how to argue with, because I was afraid to process what anti-mormons had been trying to tell me in many dozens of encounters over two years to understand the other side of the argument sufficiently to argue with it. In the last quarter of my mission, I started to come unglued. It wasn't just the result of mission disappointments, although that was a big part. It was also the result of years of discerning ideas in higher resolution than some other people would and trying to put my logical brain away before it got me into trouble while using it to explain away what I thought I saw and make myself blind again for the sake of what little social traction I had. But doing this disgusted me with myself, but doubting also disgusted me with myself and everything and everyone. Adult life was coming at me like a train along with possibly some temple marriage I'd be sucked into without thinking just because that's what my Mormon culture "masking" behavior would have had me do. And all this without a single clue yet what the NTnet was and why i struggled socially so much. To boot, I had feelings of despair in the pit of my stomach, such stress as you would scarcely believe, that I had never yet placed, but which I've since identified as sensory stress. Sounds and light, either in their intense qualities or in their specific textures, can rub me the wrong way, but when you're 20-years old male trying to fit in and find his way, that just feels like being a little b**** and it's not something you would cop to unless you had better ideas about what it was. I thought it was sin and the Holy Ghost withdrawing from me, and it was hard to argue with this impression, except that towards the close of my mission, I had an arsenal of knowledge from which to argue. A secular picture of the world came into clearer focus for me against my best attempts to achieve otherwise, because despite my desire to have a testimony I would not knowing commit intellectual dishonesty to have it. I would stare raw truth in the face and then take a week off to crawl around on the floor and pull myself together emotionally again and then start over, because I couldn't ignore it.

My mother had overtly threatened me with disownment before I left if I didn't serve the whole thing and honorably. So, I had that to look forward to as my testimony fell apart. I would stress and stress, and what I do when I'm stressed is think about what the autistic community on the internet in 2023 calls "my special interest," but my special interest was what was stressing me out. I know from the many faith crisis stories shared here and elsewhere that I'm not actually as different from other people as I feel sometimes. These are thoughts and feelings many of us have had, and it doesn't mean we're all on the spectrum together. Being on the spectrum could be stated otherwise as being born the right extreme mixture of sensitive, straight-forward, obsessive, and clueless in regards to how others think and feel so as to devastate yourself with with your own thoughts and anxieties like you've been bullied your whole life and end up at the end thinking you're all alone in whole wide world in the most human of experiences, only dialed up to levels most people don't have to experience firsthand.

There is, behind my eyes, a soul, even if it's a mortal soul made of material parts, that sees the world in vivid logical detail and maybe in other ways too and wants to be part of it, to contribute to it, to have it, but I don't know how and absolutely nothing I was given to experience from the church itself to me was helpful in any possible way. It was a waste of my time at best, but often it was abusive too. Yet, this is my special interest: figuring this out. I derive a certain ease, I can put my anxiety away to an extent, when I think about all the things I know for certain and how they build on each other. A lot of what I know for certain comes from doing experiments with what I was taught at church in a careful, methodical way almost like I was going to publish a paper on it a journal somewhere, and I think this way rather naturally insomuch that I don't have to edit much when I write, I just write in a single draft and it comes out the way I need it to come out. Binge watching Cosmos at BYU alone in my dorm room and really letting myself learn scientific thinking wasn't as painful as I thought it would be. It was more like coming home in a way.

This drama I constantly rehash on this board is the story of how I found myself in the context of greater humanity, and the capstone was my diagnosis. Superficially, it may sound to some Mormon like I'm constantly trying to reinforce and convince myself of something I don't actually think in my heart of hearts, but to be fair that's what the critics say about Fast and Testimony Meeting too, isn't it? But what is the tbm retort? It's good to reinforce core truths you know in a place of like-minds where there is nowhere else to get such encouragement or should I say socio-emotional nourishment. Call it spiritual if you want for lack of a better commonly-known word. It's rejuvenating. It's cathartic. It's refreshing. It's edifying, especially socially. It's not wrong to have that. It's just factually wrong specifically when all the available evidence says something else is true, and then we can debate the cowardice of intellectual dishonesty on top of that, but the act of sharing one's convictions, telling one's story, finding one's identity, in front of other people for the purpose of using their subtextual feedback to edify your own thoughts and how you share them with others is not wrong in and of itself. It's necessary, especially for me.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/13/2023 10:17PM by Cold-Dodger.

C-D, you write really well of what it's like to see life from the point of view of someone on the autism spectrum. Mormonism is not terribly tolerant of divergences, is it? It must be a particular form of hell for people who have a lot of trouble fitting in.

I have one, maybe two undiagnosed students right now who I believe are on the spectrum. The one that I am pretty sure about often seems lost in her own world. She's verbal, but not by a lot. Her responses, when she does respond, are normally slow. I worry about her. I don't want to make school any harder for her than it already is.

Your student sounds exactly like me when I was in school. I nearly got held back in second and third grade, and got unsatisfactories in reading not because I couldn't read, but because I couldn't answer questions about what I read, and they thought I couldn't read. I entered kindergarten knowing the alphabet and how to read simple books.

My grades were mediocre until I got to the stage where we were getting "standardized" multiple choice tests. I aced those suckers. My grades were still semi-mediocre, but the teachers knew I wasn't dumb.

Basically my grades were slightly better every year from first grade through grad school. I was smokin' by the last year. :)

Students can be puzzles to teachers. :)

It's a case of "something is not quite right here," and then trying to figure out what that is. It could also be multiple problems. This particular child is a "C" level student, so her grades are not currently a worry. It's more her entirely flat affect, seeming lack of enjoyment of life, and response time that feels like she's responding from deep underwater. I push her to respond at her own pace, but I don't want to treat her abusively. I don't think it's depression, but instead autism.

I did ask our special ed. teacher to have a look at her, and will need to follow up on that.

Summer,

I'm looking for another job right now. I have a sub cert. I'm thinking about it. You once warned me against the profession, because you hadn't guessed just how much anxiety I deal with every day. That was back at the height of my dysfunction with my parents though. Would you still recommend I try something else?

I'm reading a book series right now called Foreigner by CJ Cherryh. It's about a human ambassador who lives among aliens who look human but everything under the hood is hardwired differently. Third person limited point of view: the reader is stuck in the protagonist's head. He voices many, many feelings and opinions about how people tick that I have had before. He never quite figures them out, because they have emotions humans are not wired to comprehend, but there are analogues that help them get close to figuring it out. My existence kinda feels like that. I'm sure that's how your potentially ASD student feels too.

You can help them by instilling a love of figuring things out and the possibility of being understood and empathized with. I had many compassionate teachers in grade school who noticed me. They noticed me more than peers did sometimes. Simple kindness goes a long way, especially patience.

My responses in school were slow, but looking back on it, that was because I lived every day "in anxiety," which is something I recently heard Prince Andrew say to a journalist on Sixty Minutes. That's how he described his boyhood state of shock and PTSD after his mother died. He didn't begin to heal until he was a soldier wearing the same uniform as everyone else and people depended on him for something. It pulled him out of it. I completely understand this.

I think a lot of the symptoms we associate with autism are really just shock and conflict avoidance behavior. Being noticed is dangerous to such an one, and it makes anxiety -- it at least makes for caution. Aspies are not qualitatively different from everybody else, just quantitatively. We've got the same desire to belong and participate and connect that everybody else does, but those desires get frustrated and lost in emotional translation. Sometimes the Aspie doesn't understand their own emotions and gave up trying a long time ago. It helps when your being resembles the people you're trying to fit in with, because you have more analogues to use as guideposts and possibly as mirrors to see yourself. As a kid, I gravitated socially towards the company of older people, but they did not reciprocate that. I was a child to them, but I had more going on in my head than someone for my grade level. I never connected with my peers in any grade. I didn't feel connected, I should say. There was a vivid world inside of me and I entertained myself with that instead.

Aspie brains mature faster than their peers, I think. But around junior high time or early high school, we peak as far as socio-emotional development goes and then we get left behind as far as passing as normal. As adulthood approaches, it can feel like a train coming and we're tied up on the tracks. We're told that mastering school subjects can help us secure a good life when adulthood comes, and at that we can excel if we believe it. But we need more than just the standard curriculum if we're gonna succeed. We need to be seen; we need to be told it's ok; we need to understand what we are and what we can do and what we can't do; and then we need positive affirmation to push and become something that suits our talents. I was alone for all of this, I think because I masked it all too well for so long.

I liked my teachers. Each one of them left impressions that stayed with me, inspired me. I think I loved having the right answer when called upon, and I loved the simple approval in a superior's face or voice at the effort it had taken to get the right answer. Very simple social transactions, those. It was good enough that I paid attention to lectures and commited vast amounts of it to memory simply by listening. I was a lousy reader and a lousy note taker, but I remembered things and that got me by with As and Bs.

C-D, in my opinion education would be the wrong choice of career for you. It is not for the highly anxious. It has a high workload, a lot of demands, student behavior can be extremely rough, and you get thrown a lot of curveballs. You have to have at least an average level of ability to socially/emotionally connect with others. Plus, educators can often get a lot of negative feedback, and until you build some experience and emotional strength, that can do a number to your self-esteem.

I think you'd be happier in a field where your interaction with others is limited, and you can focus on objects instead -- maybe IT work where you are out in the field, or computer repair, or some other type of technical work. I think that others on this board might have some good ideas for you.

I thought the term "Asperger's" was out now since Hans Hans Asperger's activities came to light? I know a lot of autistic people don't like the bame for various other reasons.

The reason the merged all the different kinds of autism in one spectrum disorder is because there was too much overlap between them to bother drawing hard lines. I don't think it had anything to do with what the Nazi collaborator did. Lots of people still refer to themselves as Aspies in the internet communities I've discovered, and it is a name the public recognizes. Preference I guess.

I figured out that I am mildly autistic; mostly on my acute interests, extreme feelings and social anxiety. It took me 50 some years to figure myself out.

I concur with summer, that being an educator may not be a good fit. The obvious is working with students who may never appreciate how hard you work to prepare an engaging lesson that makes a grand slam.

I've been a teacher for more than 20 years working with teenagers and I have more communication problems with adults; especially admin and other colleagues. You wouldn't believe how many can't respond to a simple yes/no email.

I find myself confused at reading social cues and am still talking while others have conveniently stepped away.

I was forced to go on a mission, and the entire time I was in denial about about the coercive dimension of it. Despite my anxiety, there was nothing to do but the work, and they made it easy: just follow all the rules. I learned how to teach or more specifically to articulate my thoughts in fine detail. The communities I've discovered call it "infodumping". I guess I learned a better way to infodump and I liked it. But, I paid a high price for this skill with a breakdown as soon as I got home. I think when it's up to me, I'd elect not be in front of people, but if I had to be, I have a way of leaning into it. I even enjoy it some days.

Mormons have such a twisted and f*****d up view of persons with developmental disabilities. My daughter (adopted) has Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD) and 25 years or so ago I told a TBM that we were buying a home in the city for her to live in with her support staff. They were flabbergasted and critical of us for not keeping her home and caring for her until we died!

If it's at all possible to give your children any measure of sustainable independence, that is the is the greatest gift you can give them.