As I floated around yesterday in the ether of social media (I’m not normally a procrastinator, but I should have been starting my compulsory bi-annual First Aid training course) I found myself replying to a couple of posts written by my autistic friends, both of which noted that they react in fairly extreme ways to certain concepts: they are either over or under, never walking that line of normal. This, I realised, was so much of what autism is for me.
Whenever I am asked for an analogy for autism, I always reply that, personally, autism feels like running a race. I streak ahead, easily outdistancing my fellow runners, then, suddenly, just at the bit that is supposed to be easy, I fall flat on my face and they pass me by. Obviously, it is not everyone’s autistic response, and I am thinking of those most severely disabled by their autistic traits, those with learning disabilities, other conditions and life challenges. I completely respect that everyone experiences their autism differently, but I am going to focus on this tendency to skip the middle ground.
If I am asked to describe how I will react to something as an autistic person, I normally reply by saying that I will absolutely love it or hate it. That it will capture my attention fully or I will be completely uninterested. That I will be so sensitive to it that it will be painful, or that I will feel nothing. Whatever we are talking about, go to towards the extreme ends of that experience either way, and that feels an autistic response.
These extremes can be more apparent in our skill sets, and goodness does it cause a lot of issues as we move around a neurotypical society. This is what we call a “spikey skill set”, and it is very typically neurodiverse. The idea is that, being autistic, we notably excel in some things whilst struggling in others.
“Sounds normal,” you might say – doesn’t everyone do that? Well, yes… and no. Everybody has things that they are good at and things they struggle with. But for autistic people, those differences tend to be exaggerated. We really, truly have our specialist subjects: we know everything about them, they have interested us for as long as we can remember and they shape our life. Sometimes, these skills are so exaggeratedly magnificent that we fall into the 9% or so of auties who can be labelled “savants”. But even for the vast majority of us, we have the things that we are very, very specifically good at and highly interested in. These might not be particularly “normal” things, either: as autistics, we are pattern spotters and seekers. Our powers of recall, or our ability to analyse, might be excellent. We might be able to do maths intuitively, we might have a formidable eye for detail, or be able to sense things that others can’t.
The flip side of these special interests and abilities can be stark, however. The disparity between what we can and can’t do is exaggerated compared to other people, and not especially coherent. For example, I am pretty good at fine embroidery and tapestry, both of which require a lot of fine motor skill. You would think that I would be good with my hands in general, but actually I am really clumsy in handling objects, and drop things frequently. You would then infer from that that maybe I would be uncoordinated: actually, I studied ballet until I was an adult, and trained at a fairly high level. But I do also have issues with interoception – I am often unable to work out what is going on in my own body, particularly if I am ill or injured. Unfortunately, for autistic people, the bottom line is that when we struggle with something, we really do struggle.
Society conditions people with regard to expectations, and those expectations are based on neurotypical behaviour. We are expected to be consistent, and inference is often used when trying to predict a person’s performance. “Oh, a person can do A, so they must be able to do B.” But that may not be true for an autistic person, and this can lead to our abilities either being overestimated or underestimated.
It seems to me that several autistic traits feed into a spikey skill set: delayed processing, hyper/hyposensitivity, hyperfocus…all of these things and more build us into “all or nothing” people. Autism is also a fluctuating condition, which means that our skill sets will fluctuate as well. I loved being in the kitchen from a young age and was a confident cook as I grew up. But, at secondary school, my home economics teachers scared me. I went from cooking for my parents at home, to being unable to turn the oven on at school. I am not saying that non-autistic people have completely stable skill sets, but we can really fluctuate to an unusual degree.
It doesn’t help that autistic people can struggle with things labelled “easy” by other people. For me, I can write a novel, execute some fairly complicated ballet steps, and I have a photographic memory. But I struggle with “basic” self-care sometimes. I stick to a rigid schedule for my meals because otherwise I wouldn’t know when or what to eat. I struggle with showers from a sensory point of view. I have to remind myself how to clean my teeth twice a day. If I have to go somewhere for a work meeting, it isn’t the meeting I am worried about, it is getting the right entrance and the right waiting area, or having to ask for directions.
Most people tend to watch you for a bit, or look at your academic record, and assume that your skill set will be consistent, and this creates problems across the spectrum: highly academic or gifted auties will struggle under the weight of expectation, as they are very much not excellent at everything. Autistic people who appear in the mid-range and coping may not be. When you are confronted with an autistic person whose traits are severely disabling or who is non-verbal, other skills and abilities they have may be missed.
Can we even out the spikes in our spikey skillset? Make the spikes more like gentle, rolling hills? I am not convinced. There have been times when I have really set my mind to something and worked at it for years, and slowly seen improvement. But that improvement has been slow and hard won. A lot of people talk about autistic traits easing as we grow older – the result perhaps of more practice at living in a strange world, or perhaps just learning to hide our autism more successfully. Do we ever even out our skill set? I would say that adulthood just gives us more room to manoeuvre; more freedom. I personally engineer my life to stay away from things I have trouble with, and embrace the things that I am good at. There comes a time where the disparity doesn’t matter so much for me – other autistic people are not so lucky.
I think that this autistic disparity of mine scares me a little, to be honest. It is yet another example of my brain behaving in a strange way, and I hate the lack of predictability. I also hate the fact that it IS predictable: knowing that I will always struggle with some things. But ultimately, I just have to learn to live with running ahead, falling down and picking myself back up again.
