I read “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time,”and I very strongly identified with the point of view of the autistic boy telling the story. It helped me to understand myself.
In the story, the autistic boy finds the neighbor’s dog dead on the neighbor’s lawn. The dog has just been killed, but nobody is around. The boy goes in the yard and kneels down on the grass beside the dog. He’s feeling sorry for the dog, wondering who killed the dog, and he realizes this is a mystery that he might be able to solve. He liked the dog. The neighbor, the woman who owned the dog, opened her front door and there she sees this autistic boy, who she knows is autistic but she doesn’t understand autism (who does, after all?) and she sees this boy with the “mental problems” kneeling beside her dead dog, and she starts to scream and she calls the police.
The boy likes policemen because they are easy to identify and you know what they are about. Policemen have a known role and rules and that is very dependable and without so many unknowns, so the boy likes them. Regular people, you don’t really know what they’re going to do.
So, the policeman comes and of course he has a lot of important questions for the boy and he begins to ask them right away.
Now, the boy has trouble relating to people. He can’t really tell what mood they are in from looking at them, and in fact, he can’t stand to look at people while he is talking to them. He also has a great many thoughts all at the same time, and has to consciously sort them out in order to communicate them verbally. In addition to that, he knows, he has learned through hard and painful experience, that people often do not mean literally what they say. You know, we use idioms and figures of speech and hyperbole and sarcasm and lots of ways to say things that are not at all the precise meaning of the actual words that come out of our mouths, and normally people get that, but the boy has to work it out every time. He knows that somebody might not actually mean what they just said, so he has to figure out what the person actually needs and wants from what they said. And that takes some time to figure out. And all the while, his thoughts keep piling up in a sort of logjam inside his head while he’s figuring out what he should say and what the other person needs.
Of course, the policeman doesn’t have the time or the inclination for all that, and he doesn’t even know that’s what’s going on, he’s just expecting to deal with a normal person and he has answers he needs right now. So the policeman isn’t in the frame of mind to take the time, patience, love, care, special insight and understand that it takes to deal with this kid, and because the kid isn’t answering quickly the policeman begins to increase the pressure by asking more questions, getting louder, and pressing harder. Now as you might imagine, that increase in pressure is not helpful to the boy and only increases his frustration, so the boy loses it and begins moaning and holding his head and bobbing back and forth and pounding his head on the grass.
OK… now…. I know how that boy feels. The difference between him and me is that I have this really nearly unbelievable high IQ. I’m not saying it to brag and I’m not saying it’s a great thing, it’s just part of this little explanation of what goes on in my head a lot.
When I’m dealing with rocks and trees and bird sounds and wildflowers and physics and stars and chemistry and stuff I have no problem. I enjoy it, I’m comfortable, there’s not a lot of pressure and there’s no “other self” to deal with. Now, when I’m dealing with people, it’s a different story. I have to try to understand them, what they actually mean compared to what they are saying, I try to guess how they will receive what I am about to say… will they understand? Will they know the vocabulary? Do they have the study background to know what I’m referring to? Do they know the cultural references, the literature, the movies, the songs, the jokes, the TV shows that I am borrowing from? Will references to philology, linguistics, and foreign languages (which are so helpful to me in my understanding ) be understandable to the person I’m trying to relate to?
It’s like trying to reconstruct the entire theory of human communication brand new every time I talk with people… not every time, but sometimes… like when a waiter asks if I want cream in my coffee. I take my coffee black sometimes, sometimes with cream, sometimes with cream and sugar – I hadn’t thought about it ahead of time, I might want my coffee a different way by the time he brings it to the table. I’m not particular about it, I can enjoy it any way he might bring it. Does he really need to know that? Can’t he bring the cream and sugar and leave it there and let me decide how I want it two minutes from now? Will he be offended if I say the wrong thing??
Oh god, the confusion! LOL
And I do this. So the difference between me and that boy (there are other differences, but for the purpose of this explanation this is the pertinent one) is that I can do it. I can reconstruct the theory of human communication in the half second it takes to answer the question of whether I want cream in my coffee, or whatever other thing is going on. But it takes ALL of that ridiculous IQ to do it. It’s overkill like you wouldn’t believe, but that’s how it works.
Now you maybe can understand how relived I was when at age 52 or so I learned to say “Fine.” I used to agonize over the question “How are you?” Surely the person doesn’t really want to know how I am!? Or do they? So off goes my brain trying to figure it all out. I was telling someone at my old workplace, a friend there, about it, and she said “Just say ‘fine.’” OH man, what a relief! LOL…. That’s all I had to say, without going into my inner existential crises and excitement about seeing a yellow bug outside on the way into the building that morning. ”Just say ‘fine’” made my life easier.
And then later, when I told other friends about that and how much easier it made my life, after that sometimes someone would say “How you doing?” and I’d start to go inside my head to find the long answer and remember and then I would say “Fine, thanks!” and they could see in my face what just happened and they knew I started to go to the ends of the world to get that answer and they could see that I remembered what I was supposed to do and they grinned and were happy for me to see me with that first uneasy pause and then I relaxed and said fine and they would laugh, because they knew the joke.