FOMO (that is Fear of Missing Out to the uninitiated) became a “thing” a couple of years ago. “Do you suffer from FOMO?” Screamed a raft of magazine articles. “No,” I would reply, bewildered. “I don’t “
But perhaps I have a slightly more complicated attitude to socialising than the above suggests. Casting my mind back to my late childhood and teenage years, I seem to remember being constantly caught between a rock and a hard place: I would feel sad at not being invited to something, but then I wouldn’t have wanted to go anyway.
My adolescence was fairly….erm….quiet? Arid? Peaceful? From a social point of view. Autism aside, I have a sneaking suspicion that I would always have struggled to fit in at secondary school. I was a Jewish girl, a Londoner originally, plopped into a Home Counties boarding school. There was one other Jewish girl in my year, and she left after receiving anti-Semitic hate mail that the headmistress refused to do anything about. In order to fit in you had to be blonde and sporty: zero out of two, then. My teenage school years were the most unhappy, but paradoxically it was the time that I was most at ease with my autistic qualities. My social life was fairly non-existent, I ignored most of the other girls. Did I care? Nope.
As I became older, I accepted what I then labelled vaguely as a lack of sociability. I blamed it on being a left-handed, Jewish, Virgoan only child, because I just didn’t realise that autism was a thing that could happen to me. My friends also accepted that I was somewhat anti-social. I watched the look of apprehension steal over their faces as they asked me to a party; their look of disappointment when I made my excuses and left early.
For some autistic people, their difficulties ease over time. Like fine wines, they get better with age (don’t worry, I am not going to continue with that simile). I think that the reasons for this are psychosocial rather than neuro-scientific: when you do something over and over again, it becomes easier. At various ballet classes at various points in my life I have watched deeply untalented adult amateurs bang away at it until they reach a vague approximation of doing it properly. As autistic people, we can get better at being around others because we have to do it every day.
Aging has also seemed to have a positive effect on my social life: the older we get, the more we can structure our lives to fit us rather than break ourselves trying to fit in with other people. Few autistics in mainstream education get through school and university unscathed by the experience. Then, there are the early-mid-twenties, an intense, busy time of juggling work, boyfriends and friendship – often exhausting, even for neurotypicals. But gradually, friends get married, babies come along, work takes over, and people just calm down in general. As I headed towards my thirties, my friends suddenly started to want to meet for coffee one on one, or to have dinner rather than go to a club. All this suits me just fine.
The amount of mental preparation required for a social event, from a party to anything done in a group would be phenomenal, and I am not talking about the decision of wearing a dress or a jumpsuit. I spend a lot of time obsessing over how it will go, trying to imagine how many people will be there, what we will talk about, where the exits are (yes, really). All of this is involuntary, and causes me a lot of stress in the days, sometimes weeks leading up to a big event. When I finally get there, I often enjoy myself. For a time. But then I have to go home again and deal with the overstimulation that the noise and crowd have created in me.
The concept of staying at home but wishing you were somewhere else seems an odd one to me: when I am at home, I am far too busy with my selection of hobbies/special interests. I draw, read, paint, sew, look after the garden and cook. Judging by the number of times various friends have commented upon it, I am fairly well versed in the domestic arts. As I grew up and developed my interests, I thought that it was sometimes a shame that my hobbies weren’t more group-orientated, that they didn’t involve being outside more, in the fresh air – you know, with other people. Once I got my autism diagnosis, I realised that I had adopted all those loner hobbies precisely because they didn’t involve prolonged contact with others.
Wracking my brain for times when I have felt as though I was missing out, I really can’t think of anything. Normally, my reaction was one of relief, even though I was expected to be disappointed. The only concern I felt was really metaphysical: I was concerned over my lack of concern at missing out. As with many autistic people, I was visited with a vague knowledge that I wasn’t reacting in the way that I should – the way that I should really being another way of saying neurotypically.
Perhaps things are different for younger people today: we are schooled to accept diversity far more than we were thirty years ago. But when I was a growing up, socialising was cliquey and conformative – if you were different, you missed out. My indifference to climbing the ladder to popularity, my lack of concern at cultivating a busy social life, my distaste for noisy pubs and clubs were seen as weird.
But I am no longer a gawky teenager, I am a grown woman who runs her own business and does things on her own terms. Nowadays my lack of FOMO is interpreted quite differently, positively in fact. I am not saying that my friends admire me in any other sense, but they have often commented that I am lucky because I always seem to know my own mind. I am “independent”, where once I would have been called a loner. I am called “confident” where once I would have been called anti-social. Basically, I can say no, and that seems to become a valuable skill as we get older, as we have to take responsibility for ourselves and work out where our priorities lie.
I have a neurotypical friend named Elise. I am very fond of Elise, and on the surface, she has an enviable life: good corporate job, a nice husband, little girl and house. But she suffers from chronic insecurity, constantly veering from one upset to another as she obsesses over whether people like her or not, whether she should be doing more, going to more places. Being friends with her can be tiring, as it requires a great deal of reassurance – as you can imagine, reassurance does not always come easily to an autistic girl. I earn a fraction of her wage, I am not married and I don’t have children, but we both know that I live a happier life because I am not always judging myself by other people’s standards.
Ultimately, I can be content with my own level of sociability, even though it is not as high as other people’s. I do not spend my time worrying about what other people are doing, and goodness it saves me a lot of time and energy. Really, self-containment and contentment are some of my greatest strengths; skills that enable me to be happy. I have my Autism to thank for that.
