From mind-blind to masking

I came across the term mind-blindness today. Ostensibly the inability to tell what is in someone else’s mind. I have seen it before and not thought to apply it to myself. If did apply to me then what else might my mind be blind to?  This time something suddenly clicked.  It brought back a flood of memories and made me think back on my own journey of early development. It made me look at events in an entirely different way and to draw some startling conclusions.

So much is usually focused on the milestones that are visible to the outer world. A medical professional can point and say “Aha!” to the parent and put a tick or a cross in a certain box at a certain time. But what of the inner workings of the mind?  Who knows how and when these develop?
In my case I can see that during my education any staff that came across me from the sidelines who had some knowledge of psychology must have known that I was different. I wonder what conversations went on secretly behind the scenes. There was such stigma attached to such things in the 1970's that I can imagine any concerns were quickly put aside for fear of causing upset to parents. They clearly knew that I struggled mightily in every subject all the way through school. Why then, I wonder, did the school not try to support me beyond telling me off and piling on extra work? Probably because, four decades ago, not much was known or could be done. The knowledge just wasn’t there. Whatever they saw was noted in a private log and taken no further. It was brushed aside with the assumption that I would catch up with 'good old fashioned' hard work. This would explain why from starting primary school until the end, I would randomly be taken from class by a strange visiting professional, whose role was never explained. They would just watch as I did some task or other, such as arranged blocks in a certain order, or read in my slow and faltering way. Only a few other children ever had to do this.

My reaction to the term 'mind blindness' has also led me to think about my perceptions of self as I grew up. I have always seen my early personality, my childhood one, as something of a separate person. I was so different. I felt so free. A personification of childhood innocence. Somewhere along the way, I lost that carefree sense of joy and freedom. It was stripped from me, as more and more demands were made upon a mind that just could not cope with them. Very quickly I began failing academically. Year upon year of scathing school reports. I failed and failed. I crashed and burned over and over again. Academic failure fuelled a new alienation from my peers, who had no such troubles.
I also failed in between failing. At school break times, the social situations made me an outcast as time went on. Others developed interests that I could not fathom and I could not be part of the conversation. My own inability to start conversations meant that I was excluded from much of the social aspects of school. I was forced to wait for others to approach me to start a conversation, and I didn't know why. Thus my social interactions became fewer and fewer as time went on. So my sense of failure became two-fold. I was socially outcast and academically lost. This is what early school life represents to me, when I think of it. It was like starting at the very bottom of a mountain. Every day being pushed up one step at a time, whether I could climb or not. At the end of the day I would stop to look at how far I had come, only to realise I had come crashing down and was back at the very bottom. Every day began with the sense of a vast mountain looming over me, that I could not ever hope to climb.

I remember those very early days sometimes. Memories are blurry, like looking through a sepia veil. Everything was very one dimensional and from my sense of perspective. My mind was truly blind. I had no awareness, interest or idea that other people had their own points of view. I was very slow in coming to this realisation. Here, I automatically want to say that I am 'behind' my peers, but as I accept myself as I am, I realise that I am just different to them, moving at a different speed perhaps, but no less valid. One of the probable reasons for this is the way I spent my time and how I engaged with the world around me. I did not have a big or even average amount of social interactions. I was safe within the bubble of my small family circle of my parents, and occasionally my brother and sister. Instead of social engagements I often lost myself in play. Thinking back, my play with toys was not original or hugely imaginative in and of itself. But it was a repetition of my favourite scenes from television and films. Toy soldiers would enact action films over and over. Lego models would be created, not from the plans printed on their box, but to recreate scenes from children’s television or from exciting iconic moments in cinema. Much later, when I had finally learned to read, I would enact scenes from books with toys in the same way.

Due to the lack of diversity in my social circle I was extremely attached to my parents in particular. They were very protective of me and even in adulthood have always stepped in to fill the void and take the role of the friends that I never had for most of my life.

Over the years I have had to make many social mistakes before I finally understood how to behave in a given situation. Most people would by that time in life instinctively know how to navigate these pitfalls and avoid them. I have been slow to build up this social knowledge, yet I got there eventually. In doing so I have learned to pause, take time to examine each social  situation that I find myself in. People have remarked on my careful nature, calling me empathic and in some sense perhaps I am, because I have learned to look deeply and carefully, rather than just give a casual glance. On the other hand, I have also been called 'too intense'. At least I now have some sense of the mental state of others compared to my own. I can recognise the behaviour of others by the other examples I have seen. I have learned to value the social abilities that others have always just taken for granted. For they have been hard fought and won.  These scars and old wounds, defeats and victories are all on the inside, invisible to the external eye. They are part of my make-up and they guide me in being more socially able than I was. This is useful in navigating the world, still seeming so far ahead of me in some ways.

During all of this time I also learned another instinctive skill that I have in common with other autistics that I have met. Without anyone to help support our needs we learned to mask. We learned to copy the mannerisms of other neurotypicals around us. This helped us to appear to be more like them. It also caused us to disappear off of the radar in terms of any support in the future. So many of our needs were never addressed. This is certainly the case with me. There are things that passed me by that suddenly occur to me every day in my fourties, that I should have naturally picked up in my teens. These developmental facets went over my head and were buried in false assumptions for decades. This has probably led to decades of social faux pas that I was not even aware of at the time. 

How strange it is to realise all these years later that in a lot of ways I never grew up. I assumed that because I changed from naturally exhibiting my stimming and other autistic traits to masking, that this was the transition from childhood to adult behaviour. Now that I look at it through the lens of knowing about my autism however, this was clearly something else entirely. 

Everybody's Changing by Keane. A song I identified with as soon as I heard it.