The Double-Edged Sword: What Social Interactions are Like for Someone with Asperger’s

Three figures talking to each other, with speech bubbles over them

By:  Michael Ting

Now that I’ve been in college for a year, with so many more new social interactions I’ve had to face, both in my professional and personal life. I’ve had so many more job interviews and meetings with superiors like professors and managers, as well as the new interactions I find with peers and classmates on campus now that I’m an “adult”.  Because of all this, I’ve had some new time to reflect on my identity as a person with Asperger’s syndrome and how I view living with it through all of these new situations.  I hope having a first-hand source will help you understand a bit more clearly what goes on inside the brain of someone on the autism spectrum during all of these social situations.

By far, one of the worst parts about Asperger’s is this: I have enough social awareness to know when I’m being awkward or when I’m making a situation uncomfortable, but not enough to know what I’m doing wrong at all, nor what I should be doing in the future to fix it. It’s like there’s somehow a giant book of unspoken rules that everyone around me knows to follow, but I wasn’t given a copy. One reason why social interaction can be so draining is because of the sheer amount of effort it can take to understand all of the social cues from different situations, especially when they’re new and unfamiliar.

And it’s so dang frustrating when we get it wrong. I’ve heard it described in a pretty great way in a book called Look Me in the Eye by John Elder Robison:

“A person with an obvious disability—for example, someone in a wheelchair—is treated compassionately because his handicap is obvious. No one turns to a guy in a wheelchair and says, ‘Quick! Let’s run across the street!’ And when he can’t run across the street, no one says, ‘What’s his problem?’ They offer to help him across the street. With me, though, there is no external sign that I am conversationally handicapped. So folks hear some conversational misstep and say, ‘What an arrogant jerk!’ I look forward to the day when my handicap will afford me the same respect accorded to a guy in a wheelchair.”

Unfortunately, this social disability can have effects even when I’m not even the one talking, but my difficulty in interpreting underlying social cues and implied meanings actually contributes a lot to social anxiety. I’m lucky enough to not have many huge examples personally that are a clear demonstration of how my difficulty with social situations has caused some giant disaster or meltdown on something like a big stage (I have heard horror stories from others though…), but I can sure point to countless small ones that really add up. It’ll be VERY tiny exchanges, like when I ask a dumb question, and someone responds saying “That’s not what I meant at all”, or if they interrupt me. For some reason, my brain heavily fixates on these words, and alarm bells start ringing all throughout my head because it starts thinking down this path that keeps overanalyzing maybe just that single line over and over again.  I start to think things like “Man, they really hate me now”, or “What did I do?”. I know it sounds a bit childish, but I usually need to go to a bathroom or somewhere quiet to calm down and think more rationally in extreme situations. In other words, because of the way my brain reacts to these situations, it doesn’t take a whole lots of words to ruin my day.

On the other side of the coin, I think lots of people might have the misconception that people like me just always suck at social interactions and making conversation all the time. But truth be told, 99% of my social interactions nowadays are perfectly fine, but mostly because they all occur within this comfort zone of mine. I already know most of the people I’m talking to, I know what kind of jokes I can make, and what kind of actions are appropriate around them. I have already found this “rule book” for social interaction, and now that I have clear and precise instructions, I don’t have proceed with having to think about my every word being acceptable or not or them being taken the wrong way. In fact, because my friends share many interests with me, I can be comfortable talking about anything with them including the strict weekly schedule I follow regarding on which days I go to certain dining halls or how I found out a way to generalize that funny math Tweet I saw the other day that 987654321/123456789 is closer to 8 than it should be.

I’ve heard lots of other motivational speakers and people on the spectrum calling their disabilities a superpower. In my own humble opinion though, I disagree. There are certain aspects of my disability that I love, nothing is more satisfying than when someone gives me the space to really just rant on and on about something I’m really interested in. However, as I have mentioned before, some aspects of it also make many important social interactions with anyone from potential friends to potential employers way more difficult. So in this way, I think my model of living with Asperger’s is sort of like a double-edged sword; awesome in many scenarios, but just as not awesome in just as many others.

I know that talking about one’s disability can often lead down a spiral of negativity and venting from frustrations that have arisen from very bad past experiences, so I really hope that I was able to paint some of social challenges I deal with daily in an informative way that isn’t just me ranting about how horrible the world is to disabled people.  Either way, if I had one piece of “advice to give on talking to people with Asperger’s or autism it would be just treat the conversation as normally as you can.  If you ask something, don’t be surprised if they rant on and on, and give them enough space to do so, because depending on the topic, that definitely could happen. Oh yes, and don’t be surprised if we don’t look you in the eye.

 

Originally Posted:  16 December 2019