Guardian article about self discovery and being uncanny

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I knew people found me uncanny and strange – then came the diagnosis that explained it all - Joanne Limburg

ecently, I taught a course that had Stephen King’s On Writing as a set text. The book opens with a section called “CV”, in which he describes the experiences that formed him as a writer. Exploring the genesis of his novel Carrie, he explains that its title character – the teenage outcast who enacts a horrific, telekinetic revenge on her tormentors – emerged from uneasy memories of two girls he knew during his own high school years. These girls looked wrong, sounded wrong. They dressed in the wrong clothes. Both came from unusual homes, but what made them – in King’s words – the “two loneliest and most reviled” of the girls in his class was something less tangible than background. Returning to the subject in his introduction to my edition of Carrie, he suggests that this was a something “that broadcast STRANGE! NOT LIKE US! KEEP AWAY”

King speculates that this broadcast occupied a “wavelength only other kids can pick up”, but I’m not so sure people ever grow out of that receptiveness. They may learn to respond to it less unkindly, but they still sense it. There is even a word for the experience of sensing unplaceable difference: “uncanny”.

The dictionary definition of “uncanny” is “strange and difficult to explain”. King grapples at length with the question of what it was about those two girls that gave rise to uncanniness, but can come to no definite conclusion. Giving their fictional counterpart destructive telekinetic powers provided some kind of retrospective imaginary justification for the sense of discomfort they provoked. Reading King, I felt uncomfortable, too, but for a different reason. It seemed to me, as I read, that the something King describes – the something “off” – was not only his reviled classmates’ something, and his character Carrie’s something, but my something, too. I know what it is not only to encounter the uncanny but to be it.

There was always something “other” about me, and people noticed it. They couldn’t have said what it was they were noticing, but they sensed it in the room. I noticed them noticing. Sometimes, as I was walking down a street or a corridor, I would register that this person or that was visibly disconcerted by looking into my face. Sometimes they looked bewildered; sometimes they would even shrink back. It was the nameless something at work. Some people sensed it as vulnerability, explaining things to me very slowly and carefully, or asking me if I was OK. Sometimes people interpreted what they sensed as physical fragility and insisted on carrying things for me when I hadn’t asked. Some people caught it the way predators catch the scent of prey. Some felt repulsed or a little threatened and shunned it. Most people, at least some of the time, laughed at it. A few were drawn towards it, and, when they laughed, laughed with it.

In his 1919 paper on the uncanny, Sigmund Freud quotes the influential German psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch, who writes that “one of the most successful devices for easily creating uncanny effects is to leave the reader in uncertainty whether a particular figure in the story is a human being or automaton”. One of the hard lessons of my life has been the realisation that to register automatically as a fellow human to other human beings, it is not enough to have a human body, a mind, the capacity to experience, bleed, laugh, etc, if somehow the way you hold yourself, walk, dress, speak and arrange your face fail to combine in such a way as to signal: “I’m like you.” People seemed to read humanity – or the lack of it – off the surface. What I learned from their responses to me was that they could not always quite bring themselves to relate to me as human.

When you are not quite human, the assumption is that you cannot be hurt, that you can be talked about as if you were not there. Being talked about as if one were not in the room – being objectified – is an experience most of us have had at some time. Most of us have probably done it to someone else. We do it routinely to children. Medical staff do it to patients. Along with the vast majority of other women, and some men, I have experienced it as street harassment. (“Did you see her tits?”) It is at best awkward, and at worst humiliating.

It was partly the wish to avoid this humiliation that drove me to try to identify the thing about me that made people react so badly; identify it with a view to obliterating it. When I was playing an improvisation game in a drama lesson, and another girl made a pointed comment about a character wearing “white knee socks”, at which everyone but me laughed, I took a quick look round at all the legs in the circle and made a mental note to change what I wore on mine. When I was hurrying to an appointment at university, I heard laughter in front of me and then a voice behind me saying: “What’s funny? Is it her running?” I made a further note, to run as little possible in public. When I attempted to join a conversation at my first workplace by telling a story that started with the phrase: “You know, once …” and one of the people I was trying to talk to turned to the others and said: “You know, once … I forgot what I was going to say, but I’m sure it was a hilarious anecdote.” I became positively phobic about using that particular opener ever again. A few months later, I was discreetly – I thought – reading a book and eating a sandwich on the tube on the way home; this time the shriek of laughter came from a woman a few seats along. She described me to her friend: “First, she opens her mouth, then she picks a bit out of her teeth. Then she looks at it, then she flicks it away!” It was news to me as well as to her friend: I had forgotten to remind myself that I was visible to other people even when I wasn’t looking at them.

Over the years, I spent untold amounts of time and energy adjusting and tuning my surface so that it read more smoothly, in the hope that one day I would wake up like Pinocchio, and discover that I was real at last. I was always looking for signs that my efforts might be working. I married my husband because I love him, and had our child because I dearly wanted one. But it is also true that I saw marriage and motherhood as proof that I was getting there. As I navigated each coffee morning, shopping trip and school run, I marked every positive interaction as another step on the way to shedding my uncanny skin. Occasionally, I would force myself to mingle at a party: if I practised partying assiduously enough, I might actually enjoy it one day, and in that moment I would become, in Carrie’s words, a “proper person”.

Of course, the moment never came. No amount of conscious adjustment can fully compensate for a missing set of defaults. I accumulated failures and collected diagnoses – depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder. None of them were inaccurate, but they still left my otherness unaccounted for. Then, when I was in my late 30s, my family went through a crisis, and my brother took his own life.

He had been struggling for a while. Not long before he died, he had been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and told me he was certain we all had it. I couldn’t pursue the question while our mother was alive, but after she died of cancer three years later, I went back to it. While I was researching ADHD, and failing to find myself, I saw a Facebook post from a woman I had known at university, announcing a diagnosis of Asperger syndrome. I remembered this woman as sociable and empathic. I had thought Asperger’s was rare in women. I typed “Asperger syndrome women” into Google – and there I was.

I was lucky: my county has an NHS service for diagnosing adults. I was also lucky to have an older cousin who, in the absence of any living parents, was able to give the psychologist a sense of me as a small child. Apparently, I walked on my toes, flapped when I got frustrated and talked at people. I brought along some letters from my childhood: one from an educational psychologist who noted my advanced “reading age”, but thought I may be deaf, and another couple from a speech therapist commenting on my lack of eye contact. I got the diagnosis.


That was seven years ago. Since then, I have diverted some of the energy I had been pouring into the work of changing myself into the more rewarding work of accepting my difference. I have learned about the cultural history of autism and disability, about ableism and how we come to internalise it. I found other autistic women, in books and online. Some, like me, could speak and write; some wrote beautifully, but could not speak. I also found non-autistic people who wrote with love of autistic family members who were not able to speak nor write. I learned that while some autistic people are not able to adjust their surfaces and might appear more “other” than I do, I can still recognise their experience of the world and their embodiment as similar to mine. Then one day, I sat face to face with another autistic woman for the first time, and saw in her expression not a reflection of my uncanniness, but myself – my differently, but properly, human self.
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Funny, I read the post title literally.

Guardian (i read it not as the newspaper but as the name suggests, a child or vulnerable adults "guardian"),
writing an article for their kids/vulnerable adults about their own self discovery and uncanny valley...

which started to sound very rude in my head.... lol

but now that i read the article, sure. i guess sometimes people can appear to be "uncanny",
however i would say that this often has a lot to do with people's perceptions of others and also
how teen age kids want them selves to appear to their peers.

The way someone looks can often be misleading. For example. When i grew up, in my late teens, i used to hang out with a group of hippies / ravers and punks.

I would say that the punks would appear the most volatile in terms of appearance as all of us.
And in fact, i was a raver to start with, and developed into a hippy with long hair.
A guy who was a friend of mine at the time, was over 6 foot 6, and was a 6th former doing A levels at a private school.
When he was at school, he would wear his uniform, blazer, shirt and tie. etc.

But as soon as he got out of school, he would put on his studded leather jacket with "the Dammed" (punk band) logo
on the back, put on some scruffy clothes with rips in including big army boots, and spike up his hair with soap, so it was just a mad head of big 6 inch or bigger spikes shooting out his head.

I am sure he looked very intimidating to the conventional and conservative folk of the sheltered island that i grew up on. Funny thing was, out of all the people at the time, he was the most reasonable guy out of the group, and generally good natured. Compared to some of the hippies, and even straight looking conservative banker types.

So in his case, his scary looks perhaps didn't do him justice in terms of perception.

As for the uncanniness with autism spectrum disorder.
I think that sure, people can sense something a little strange about us. I think to start with most of us have anxiety, often generalised, so are always on edge.

Many of us are also hypersensitive to sensory information, which in the long term, ends up causing a hypervigilant state. Being a bit twitchy and jumpy, makes people think that were up to something. as when criminal people are up to something they often get stressed and hyper vigilant

But we are already stressed and hyper vigilant before we do anything dodgy.
So its all a bit unfair. Especially if you are one of the many ASD sufferers that is very honest and generally kind natured unless pushed over your stress threshold.

Then we have the problems with communication that comes with ASD, which, if someone questions us if they think we are up to something, then makes us look even more suspicious, as people who are guilty often act nervously and ramble along or miss words, and mess up what they are saying... which we also do too!! ! and which people with ASD often do even more when put on the spot, which increases the pressure and stress.

And then theres the meltdowns!! which make us look like anti social sociopaths! kicking off at every opportunity, causing trouble just for the sake of it... but we with ASD know that isn't true either...

and then we have the inappropriate behaviour because we don't know how to gauge our behaviour and what is or is not suitable.

So, in people with ASD's case, i don't think we have the same uncanny'ness as real delinquents
i think the main difference is that we do these things unintentionally out of a medical condition
where as people who simple want to cause trouble, choose to do these things.

Big difference i think.
Cheers

That was a wonderful read. Thank you!

Good article. That has always been my experience too, some undefined *thing* that people pick up on. Never mattered if I kept quietly to myself or tried hard to fit in - they'd just zero in on it every time. I still don't know what, exactly, I do that is so different.

It seems that the "Uncanny Valley" applies not only to humaniform robots, but to people as well.

When people get that funny feeling that something just ain't right about someone else, when a mother takes one look at her child's date and simply knows that he or she is no good, when a man suddenly realizes that the person on the other side of the street poses a potential threat (regardless of the races of either person) -- when all of these people are later proven right -- then there has to be something to the idea that intuitive (?) understanding of the "Uncanny Valley" plays a big role in social interactions.

Yes. I have such experiences.
But not the whole bad ones that involves accusations and harassment (so far).
Heck, in random times, I get to reverse the whole thing instead of negative and patronizing crap. I haven't figure this one out myself...

But something remains persistent from my point of view... Something out of reach.
No matter how close, no matter the level of trust, no matter the level of attachment, no matter how much in common with one another, no matter how it is to be 'with'.

Though most people treat me like any other human, respects me like any other human...
It's just there's some things that no one understands. No one gets it.

Some noticed this, but their attitude towards it varies rather wildly.


Main reason I got so much leeway is that my culture has certain attitudes to the 'foreign', yet not any better with 'other' and less so with 'unknown'...
They had took this 'unknown' as another 'foreign' instead of 'other'.

And they treat 'foreign' well better than 'other'.
If one sees an 'unknown', they'll determine if it's 'foreign' or 'other'.
Most regions happened to be more tolerant of 'other'. From gender and sexual differences, to neurodiversity and skin color as long as they got the term. If not, well...
If 'unknown' remains 'unknown', they'll either turn to the terms of their collective influence, be it instinctive (the obvious route), cultural (superstitions, etc), or intellectual (in which curiosity or speculation comes).


It's a part of a pattern I kept seeing in most people. It's a persistent one.

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...I guess the " difficulty with social codes " part of Asperger's was why I would, at times, turn people off immediately or close .

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I suppose an 'advantage' in having pronounced autism is not experiencing the almost fits in but puts off a weird vibe phenomenon. It is obvious there is something significantly wrong. An obvious disability. Especially when it is accompanied with a pronounced coordination disorder.

Over the past year I've done some things to move out of the uncanny valley which has made social interactions easier.

So, yes, I'd have to say that I've seen it first hand.

Nice article.