One of the major debilitating problems of autism is the inability to see the social sphere. I’m not talking about not understanding it or not seeing how to work inside of it. I’m talking about the inability to see that social interaction even exists as a thing, that people are doing something other than offer direct communication of information to each other, that their arms and legs and mouths and eyes and cheeks are doing an extra thing that isn’t just the words and their literal meaning. It wasn’t until I was in fifth or sixth grade that I was even aware that there was something that I was missing. And even after that, it has been decades for me to see that this sphere has value and to see the very devastating piece of information: that I am forever going to be unable to speak this social language as a child learns it. I will always be a foreign language speaker, at best someone who has an accent and is seen as awkwardand not quite fluent.
Even in my teen years and into my twenties, I would argue to the death that the social world was unimportant. I would insist that other people should offer their information more directly, that it was their work to do, not mine, to make their mimes more explicable. I would say that I was the one who was more moral and less superficial, less vain, by refusing to pay attention to things like my appearance or fashion or, well, eye contact and body language. I think I mostly believed it, though a part of this argument was the slowly dawning realization that there was a thing out there that I was bad at. Not just bad at, but so utterly incapable of reading, that I would always be bad at.
One of the realities of getting a formal diagnosis for autism, and reading the diagnostician’s very clinical and dare I say blunt assessment of my deficits, was the crushing realization for the first time of how juvenile I was, how far behind all of my peers. All my life, my self-image had been that I was at the top one percent, that I was smart and capable and that there was nothing—NOTHING—that I could not learn and excel at. But here was proof that the very thing that I could not see my own deficits in was a thing that mattered.
I recently heard one of my children saying that really “social skills” are the only things that mattered, not academic prowess. In younger years, I would have fought this assertion to the death. Academic skills were the only things that mattered. They were the only things I could see. But I laughed ruefully now, aware that my awareness of my own deficiencies actually show a weird step up in my ability to compensate for my autism. I have spent most of my life utterly blind to a part of the world that I could not see. But of course, until you are forced to encounter what you are missing, you cannot see what you cannot see.
You are overcritical of yourself.
Social skills matter, but they don´t matter more than everything else.
Mind a few words of advice from a mildly autistic male whose special interest is strategy games?
1. Play to your strengths.
2. Develop a gorilla mindset about your weaknesses. In other words, don´t give a ****.
3. Like yourself, no matter what.
It’s so unfair that social skills matter more than other things. I’m so good at a couple of other things, but I’m still inept at social stuff. This has held me back all my life.