Delayed Understanding

One of the realities of being an older autist is bursts of understanding of past events, which at the time you didn’t pick up the social cues to understand, didn’t understand the language being used not literally, or didn’t parse the body language and the facial expression necessary to gather what was actually going on. As  you grow and develop a little more social skills, it can seem like your mind is busy re-interpreting past events as a way to learn more about the world and about neurotypical humans. But this whole thing can be very unpleasant as you realize how mistaken you were about things that you thought you understood—but didn’t.

This week, I’ve had a particularly unpleasant realization about an event nearly a decade ago, where I thought one thing was going on. I’m embarrassed now at how obvious it seems from other information that I’ve parsed together, but because there was no direct speech about what was actually going on, I blithely interpreted things in a kind way, as I wanted to see them, instead of the rather angry behind-the-scenes thing that was actually going on. No one told me that I needed to reinterpret this event. Instead, I’ve had recurring dreams about it every night this week and have been unable to get it out of  my head during my waking  hours. My autistic brain has decided that this is its latest dog-bone that it can’t let go of, and so I circle back to it again and again.

This is just one example of something that happens again and again as I grow more adept (still not very adept) at social interpretation. Most of the time, the reinterpretations aren’t quite as painful. They are often much farther back in the past, in my childhood or teenage years when my social clumsiness was truly awful. I realize now that a girl who was saying the opposite of what she thought in a sarcastic tone meant to be mean to me. But I can be amused about it because it was a defusion of the situation. She really didn’t have another way to up the stakes once I’d sailed past her meaning.

Frequently, I find myself realizing that people meant to hurt me but were unable to because they were unwilling to be clear enough to get through the literalist world that I lived in mentally. I am rather relieved now that I didn’t fully understand how unpopular and even loathed I was, how people thought I was aloof and superior when really I was just clueless and oblivious. I have no wish that I’d understood all those years ago how unpopular I was. I understood enough for it to be clear I had only one friend through those difficult years (who it turns out has come out as also autistic).

It is far more painful to realize that even as an adult woman, I still can’t figure other people out. At some point, maybe things will flip upside and I’ll realize that people were trying to be nice to me and I didn’t understand that, either? No, probably not. I have lots of friends now, something that is completely wonderful and unexpected, given my past. I suppose part of that is also my autism, because I tend to interpret everyone’s actions in the best possible light, giving them the benefit of the doubt and hoping for better from people who aren’t even trying. There are worse things, I suppose, than living in a cruel world with rose-colored autistic glasses.