Autism and Extreme Emotion
I’ve often been called cold or unemotional, kind of a female Spock. I tend to analyze every situation to death, and I’m very slow to act, the opposite of impulsive. So other people perceived me in my childhood to be strangely mature. One of my nicknames in my early teens was “mature Mette,” because I was much less interested in dating and didn’t particularly like romantic movies. I didn’t ever go through a “boy crazy phase” and I remember when I first saw the movie “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” I walked out of it because I considered it below my moral standards.
The truth is, I was not “mature.” My experience of feelings is one of the areas in which I may be immature, though maybe it’s just plain different. It’s not that I have no emotions, even though they rarely show on my face. It’s that my emotions show in different ways. In fact, I often think that I feel emotions more strongly than other people. They are so overwhelming, and it seems to me that this is one of the reasons they don’t show on my face. They are just so far down in the depths, they don’t rise to the surface. I’m so busy feeling them that the social aspect of showing them doesn’t happen.
When I am happy, I am very, very happy. Sometimes it feels impossible for me to feel any other emotion but tha tone. I remember in a religious setting that sometimes I would get praise for my extreme happiness, and of course, was often told that I should “praise God” for all my blessings, since clearly I was so unusual in my excessive joy.
But when I was sad, I think I was also sadder than other children my age, and that the sad feelings tended to linger longer. I remember being offended when my mother once suggested to me that “you can be sad for a little while and then do something else and forget about it.” I’m not sure that it would be fair to label child-Mette as someone who held grudges, though sometimes other kids would accuse me of this. I felt like what I was doing was gathering information to make good decisions about who was trustworthy. There is some truth in that, and some truth in the reality that children are no trustworthy friends and you probably get along better socially if you don’t keep score or have a good memory for past hurts. I, sadly, had an incredibly good memory.
But it’s also true that along with being extremely happy when I’m happy, my sadness is just more lasting than seems true for others. This is true for me even as an adult. When my daughter died and people seemed to think a year was a good amount of time for mourning, I was horrified. I’m still grieving her loss almost eighteen years later. The pain lingers, and it’s not just because I’m refusing to let go of it. I think I just experience emotions different than other people do, in extremes. I don’t think this is something that you can control.
When I see other autistic children being filmed having a “tantrum” (what should be called a shutdown or meltdown in autistic terms), I feel a deep affinity for the kind of ecstatic pain they are expressing. That is often what it feels like inside of me, even if you can’t see it. I cry in so many ways that people don’t read as weeping. One of the primary ones is simply shaking. Sometimes it’s barely perceptible shaking. Sometimes it looks like shivering. Other times, it’s full on waves of body motion that mean I can’t sit still in a chair.
I wonder as an adult if my tendency to go hide away if I’m feeling emotion of any kind, good or bad, is something I learned in childhood as a protective tendency or if it is natural. (Someday I will write an essay on the topic of what symptoms of autism are autism and what symptoms are the trauma of being autistic in a neurotypical world.) I will sometimes draw a very hot bath and that will help me feel like I’m able to “get the emotions out.” Sometimes I will also hurt myself, either by punching a fist into my body, grinding my teeth as hard as I can, or pinching myself — even exercise is an impulse of this sort in my mind. Pain gets the emotion out, at least temporarily. And I’m so full of emotion.
I used to think that everyone was like this (the blindness of an undiagnosed autist is the assumption that everyone is like you, but is just lying and saying they’re not). It turns out that they are not. Other people do not experience emotions in the way that I seem to. This is not really a pathology. It is one of the reasons that I stim, however. My stims are extreme exercise and extreme knitting. It helps get stuff out of my body that I can’t find another way to get out. Why not cry? I don’t know. I’ve tried to make myself cry before. I used to be able to do it more than I can now. Mostly crying just gives me a headache and it does nothing to get the feelings out. So, yes, I run or lift weights or bike, or go to a blissful pool where all is quiet while I exorcise the demons inside.