Being Alone and Being Lonely For Autists
I’m a solitary soul, an introvert who never looks like an extrovert. I’m autistic, but being an introvert and being autistic are actually not the same thing, which was something I had to discover along the way. There are actually autistic people who are extroverts, but I am not one of them. As a child, I was bullied, but was at least partly protected from the effects of bullying by not understanding other people being mean and also not caring very much because I tended to prefer my own company. I remember a teacher once asking us what we would take to a deserted island and I had many happy fantasies of living on a deserted island and just talking to myself forever.
I suppose it makes sense that the introverted child who enjoyed time with her own thoughts became a writer, who also enjoys time with her own thoughts. Not all writers are introverts, either. But I like nothing better than to sit at my computer and play with imaginary people in imaginary worlds. A friend of mine said once, “Everyone needs time with other people. Maybe you just need less than most people.” I’ve turned this thought over and over in my mind and I think it’s probably true that I need other people, but the time I like to spend with other people is so much smaller than others that it’s probably dramatically off of the bell curve, even for autistic people.
For the last two years, I’ve been living alone after a complicated divorce situation (still not resolved). I keep expecting to eventually feel lonely and that is possibly still coming. But one of the things I’ve realized is that I probably don’t feel lonely very often and that even when I do, I don’t feel lonely in the way that neurotypical people do, so it’s hard to notice that feeling and it’s hard to realize that it’s actually loneliness because I would describe loneliness in a completely different way.
For many autistic people, social media and the rise of the internet has changed dramatically the way that we are allowed to have relationships and it has been an enormously good thing. For autistic people who are non-verbal or who struggle with neurotypical expectations in real life interactions, the internet has allowed autists to have meaningful relationships without the difficulty of having to parse facial expressions, body language, and all the other sensory input that have been barriers to us for so long.
Emojis can be a really useful way to explicitly state emotional cues that simply didn’t exist before, at least not in such an obvious way. I used to wish that I could get “closed captioning” for social cues, a verbal depiction of what emotions are being displayed — actual closed captioning is helpful for me in describing the emotional content of music, something I never really understood well before.
Sometimes I hear a neurotypical person insist that online relationships aren’t “real” and that is frustrating for those of us who often find online relationships more real or at least a lot easier than those in real life that require so much other effort that doesn’t seem to help strengthen relationships for us at all. This is a kind of privileged assertion and it has a lot of prejudice toward autists and others who simply have different kinds of relationships that aren’t, actually, worse or less meaningful.
I spend most of my life alone, working from home and only connecting to others through Zoom. For me, this has made having a full-time job viable for the first time in decades. I can decide the temperature of my working environment for myself. I can make sure that I have what I need at my desk at all times. I can take breaks when necessary. I’m very productive precisely because I’m not in real life.
When do I get lonely? Rather than relying on a sense of “loneliness” or a desire to contact other people, I monitor my depression levels and if they go up, this is a signal to me that maybe I should reach out to an online friend who lives nearby and see if they want to go to lunch. I’m still not sure I know what “loneliness” feels like for other people. For me, it isn’t about feeling a pull toward others. It isn’t about feeling stir crazy. It’s just a sense of something missing. Often, weirdly, when I’m loneliest, I feel least like contacting other people because I feel bad about myself. This has been a cycling problem that I’m learning to see differently now.