On being too non-literal.
A lot of autism “experts” claim that autistic people are too literal. They start with real behavior–
many interpret language literally, and do not understand other people’s people’s sarcasm or metaphor.Â
some do not engage in narrative or pretend play when very young; they line up objects instead.
–But then these “experts” claim that autistic people lack the ability to understand symbols (that one thing can stand for something else). An ability that they think makes people fully human. (Dehumanization alert).
Obviously, most of this is nonsense. Most autistic people can understand and use symbols, even if they do so unconventionally. And even if they could not, they would still be fully human. But I want to talk about the other, more subtle assumption: that symbolizing and being non-literal help you socialize.
Because my own experience suggests the opposite. You can be too nonliteral, and it can hurt you socially.
I was as nonliteral as you could get. I don’t remember ever playing with objects as they were. Everything stood for something else. That yellow block with visible wood grain in it? It was a piece of cornbread, not a building material. Even when a toy didn’t stand for something else it resembled, it was a prop in a story. One of the many objects I got obsessed with was a rose that decorated our table at a Chinese restaurant. I brought it home and watched it dry, tortured by the fact I was watching it die, and told a story about that. (It dried beautifully, by the way, and I kept it for years).Â
Every game I played as a child was a story. I would act out stories with my Happy meal toys, my dinosaur figurines, my dolls, and my own body–filled with good fairies and wicked queens. When I drew, I drew scenes standing for stories, a panel per page comic-book style, telling the story out loud as I scribbled. When I played with other children, I wanted them to help me act out the stories I wanted to tell. They rarely wanted to do so, either because they wanted the story to go in a different direction or they just wanted to play. I would get angry. Adults told me I was “bossy.” I wasn’t bossy because I was a girl with leadership qualities, as a lot of people on Tumblr would assume. I was bossy because I wanted to direct my own drama, my peers wouldn’t cooperate, and I wasn’t willing to compromise. Needless to say, I wasn’t popular.
I was also too emotionally invested in my stories to relate to my classmates. When I was four and in preschool, I decided to pretend to be a mother hen and sit on some eggs from the toy kitchen. All was well until some classmates decided they wanted to cook some eggs. So they tried taking them from me (I can’t remember if they succeeded. Probably). I felt as if my own children were being taken from me and cried bitterly. Made such a scene that my teachers told my parents about it. They might even have sent me home; I don’t remember. I was too busy being upset about my “children” being taken from me and trying to get them back to notice this sort of detail.
I was obsessed with fairies, which to me, were a metaphor for the sense of wonder I often felt. I would watch snowflakes fall, gracefully and silently, and call them “snow fairies” because they seemed magical to me. I was four years old when a classmate told me, in a superior way, that “there was no such thing as fairies.” This child thought I was a fool for believing in them. He missed the point. Of course I knew that fairies were imaginary, just like I knew I wasn’t really a mother hen. I thought he was the fool, but I never found the words to explain why even to myself until recently. Here’s why: imagining things is a game. Of course you know it’s a game, but you spoil it if you say so. I knew that at some level when I was four. My peers didn’t. But to them (at the tender age of four), I was a naive fool who “still believed in fairies.”
Furthermore, even though I knew fairies weren’t real and I wasn’t really a mother hen, the associated emotions were just as real as the emotions triggered by real life. My peers and teachers wrongly thought I didn’t know the difference between fantasy and reality. That’s because they only saw two possibilities: being unmoved by fantasy, or not knowing the difference between fantasy and reality. They didn’t understand that you are supposed to have emotional investment in fantasy. Stories are vicarious experience. The point of role playing and consuming stories is to empathize, to understand what it’s like to be someone or something else. If you don’t feel, and feel deeply, you’re doing it wrong. The real problem was that I didn’t have the emotional maturity yet to react in a socially acceptable way.Â
Being a girl, and a highly agreeable one at that, when I was angry or felt like things were unfair, I didn’t run or fight. I cried. I spent a lot of time crying under furniture. My teachers worried and tutted to my parents about how I would manage in kindergarten. They were charmed and confused at the same time. They admired my reading, writing and speaking ability, but knew I couldn’t fit in. They wanted to fix me, and told my parents I was socially immature.
You might listen to all this and think, “maybe she was nonliteral, maybe she understood language, but she didn’t understand her peers, so obviously she didn’t have theory of mind.” Not at all. True, I didn’t understand my peers, who liked different things, reacted differently to most situations, and had almost the opposite strengths and weaknesses from me. Furthermore, like most children, I didn’t realize I was different yet. But it wasn’t because I lacked a “theory of mind.”Â
How do I know? One day when I was four, my father wrote down a conversation we had that day. (I know it happened and how old I was at the time because he included the date). He was pretending to be a silly character who hid his head and said, “If I can’t see you, you can’t see me.” (He often played logic games with me because they made me laugh, and I loved explaining to a grownup why he was being silly). In response, I hid my head and asked, “Can you see me?” He replied, “yes.” I said, just as he could see me–even though I couldn’t see him and thought he couldn’t see me–I could see him–even though he couldn’t see me and thought I couldn’t see him. “That’s a proof,” I said. Not the Sally and Anne task exactly, but lots of complicated syntax, predicting his perspective, and comparing it to my own. Probably more complicated in terms of language, logic, and perspective taking than most theory of mind tasks, to be honest, and I did it spontaneously. Surprised the hell out of my dad. My father, by the way, was impressed because I understood the concept of a proof and came up with my own–not because of the advanced language and theory of mind involved.
Fast forward seven years. I was eleven and in school for the first time. I was at a private school for gifted children. I had no friends. I wasn’t quite at the bottom, but there were only two or three children below me. I was an outcast at a school for misfits. When I finally did make friends there, it was with the other outcasts. Since, I have been isolated and rejected by most people I’ve met. I’ve made a few close friends along the way. All of them have been different in some way. Most have long thought of themselves as “weird.” Many were also outcasts.Â
My nonliteral way of thinking is still holding me back as an adult. My speech is peppered with metaphors and analogies. When was the last time you heard those at a casual conversation at a bar or a work event? Â I can talk to you for hours about your life story, the meaning of life, or arcane scientific topics. But I struggle to talk about real-world things, like sports, the weather, or places my conversational partner and I have been. I have trouble even learning about these things in the first place.Â
I can’t talk about movies right because–if I manage to overcome my audio and visual processing problems enough to understand what’s going on–I get sucked into the story. I don’t notice special effects or celebrity cameos. I even recognize celebrities backwards (when I do so at all). For example, I think of Sarah Michelle Gellar and her associated roles as Buffy, not vice versa. Think about how many conversations revolve around movies and actors, and you’ll understand why I have trouble participating in conversations with most people.
It’s not that I think my topics are more valuable just because they’re more abstract and some people say they’re “deeper.” I think real-world topics are valuable, if only because they interest other people. But I just can’t think and speak about them the way most people do. Between my non-literal thinking and my disabilities, my brain just doesn’t work that way.
So, to autism “experts,” I’d like to make a counterproposal.
Like emotional empathy and just about every other human trait, non-literalness is only good in moderation. More isn’t better. Too much can make you a social outcast, just as too little can.
TL;DR: Autism “experts” say that being non-literal is good and makes you socially successful. But too much can make you a social outcast.Â
[I’m tagging @withasmoothroundstone in this because she is often on the literal extreme and I want to know what she thinks].
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