I have confirmed prosopagnosia (face blindness) and a diagnosed central auditory processing disorder (CAPD). I also have, for several years, described myself as having a "pragmatic language impairment" (PLI) due to my inability to recognize social subtext, many forms of non-literal language, vocal tone, body language, sarcasm, passive aggression, etc. I am in the process of talking to my therapist about possible/probably autism/asperger's, and am considering the idea of official diagnosis.
When I talk about having a PLI, or having prosopagnosia, or having CAPD, I talk about them using a narrative to explain it to people. "The part of my brain that recognizes faces doesn't work right, so I am unable to connect your face to a memory of your face." "I can't seem to filter foreground and background audio really well, and tend to get easily confused if I'm in a noisy situation." "While I can often see that there's something I'm missing re: non-literal communication, I can't figure out what it is exactly, at least not in real-time, in the midst of a conversation."
Now that I'm considering the possibility that the reason I have these various experiences is because of autism, I'm wondering what the connection is between them. I've been reading first hand accounts of autistic people, and they often describe themselves as feeling "overwhelmed by information" when it comes to trying to process things like faces, non-explicit communication, audio, etc. I don't know if I have that experience or not. If I do, I've always used different narratives to describe it. I *think* I get some sort of mental strain or something... But... I dunno. I really haven't paid attention to it in the context of autism before, especially now that I've been learning more about autism.
If you have these sorts of struggles, what is your experience of it? What does it feel like when you try to recognize a face, or a chunk of non-literal communication, or handle audio discernment? What is the story you tell yourself about why you can't do what NT people seem to be able to do so easily?
27 Jul 2016, 1:14 pm
