The Rehearser and the Explainer
The Rehearser and the Explainer
There are two very loud voices in my head that have come to me after many years of social gaffes and the pressure to mask. The rehearser is a voice that insists that I must rehearse every possible conversation I will have with any other human ad nauseum, sometimes more than a hundred times if it’s a very important conversation, until I’m convinced that I’ve done it the “right way.” The explainer is the voice that tries to explain to me after something has happened what it means, how neurotypical people see the world and the specific situation and what my role in it all has meant to them.
It is these two voices in my head that allowed me to figure out during my teenage years how to mask so well that no one suggested that I might have social anxiety or anything that might need mediation or therapy. I was the well-adjusted, mostly happy child, the one who resolved tension in difficult situations, and who always did what was expected of me and more. I never thought of myself as autistic. I was, instead, an empath who absorbed other people’s feelings and carried them around without being able to set them down. I wasn’t lacking a social sense. I had too much of it.
I kept thinking through my twenties and thirties that if I wasn’t able to properly anticipate how conversations would go, then I just had to rehearse more and better. I had to read more books and understand through written text what other people’s motivations were. I even wrote my own books to try to create a less confusing set of circumstances through which I could try to understand what humans are really like and what they want and why they act the way they do.
It’s not that these two voices don’t help mitigate the problems with autism. They did genuinely help me mask and that is what I wanted at the time that I created them. But now that I’ve got the proper diagnosis, sometimes the voices are just annoying. The truth is that I’m terrible at figuring out other people’s motivations. Because neurotypical motivations are often quite different from my own. I try to avoid social condemnation but am never trying to climb a social ladder or get people to like me for any reason other than not being the target of bullying.
And I’ve never once in my life had a real conversation play out anything like what I do in my head. From the first chance other people have to say something, they act in completely unanticipated ways. It continues to be frustrating to me that I am so clueless about the apparent “human condition” (which the autistic condition is not part of?) I think that other people will let me talk and present my case, but they interrupt me and tell me I’m wrong and when I try to say I’m not, they go to completely other topics and remind me when I’ve been wrong in the past. There is no straight line in conversation. It zigzags and then I stand there, mouth open, with nothing to say.
What?
How was I supposed to guess they’d go here?
Why is this at all related to that?
I don’t know if I can stop the rehearser and the explainer from continuing to take up so much of my time, and I fear that people will think of me as an asshole if I stop trying so hard to mask. But I’ve reached a point where I just don’t have as much energy as I used to and I don’t think it’s all my fault the way that I did when I was a teen. So here we go, trying stuff that I’ve not practiced for. At all.