Quote:
What is it that people think is (or isn't) happening inside an autistic person when they don't see us as intelligent enough for it to be a horrible/scary thing to not be able to communicate? This isn't a rhetorical question, I'm actually really curious. I have given talks to parents and seriously affected them, a common comment is "You look just like my child, but until now I didn't think my child was thinking in there." But I don't know what that means. I've tried for years to understand, and I can't, because every time I look at anyone I see someone in there, and I'm supposed to be less socially aware than most people.
I think it has something to do with the way that, if you are NT, you get really used to using those strong social skills to read other people. You don't even notice that you are processing people's faces and voices and whatnot to understand them--you just look at a person and see their feelings on their face. You come to expect that anything a person is feeling or thinking must necessarily be expressed on their face and readable by you; and you assume that if you can't read it, it's not there. So you might see somebody who isn't "speaking your language", whom you can't read, and just figure there's nothing there to read. I can only assume it must be a little like being red-green color-blind and never having been told of the existence of red and green, and then using a spectroscope and realizing there are more colors than you thought there were, in the gaps that looked like gray to you.
20 Apr 2011, 4:47 pm
