1. My apologies for the long post; I originally wrote this to try to explain to my friends why I seemed so unsociable. I then thought that R/Aspergers would like a read, both for those interested in the condition and those who feel the same way:
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3. Imagine that your friends have invited you out.
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7. You look around at your purpose-built sanctuary; it's every touch, smell and taste familiar and undaunting to you and your hypersensitive nature. The soft lighting, the meticulous choice of fabric, wood, plastic and metal for the sake of feeling and sound, and the smells of such a place are all calm and comforting to you.
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11. All this built specifically to house someone who's sensorium often tends to overwhelm them.
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15. But...you've spent far too long here, and have developed a sort of cabin fever. so you acquiesce to their request. You leave your temple to tranquility behind and head into town on a busy saturday night, where your friends have invited you to a cinema outing to see a new release.
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19. When you arrive, however, you are notified through text that the plans have changed; you are no longer going to the cinema; your friends bought tickets for the wrong bloody month. This disruption of the night's itinerary causes you almost physical pain; A sucker punch to the soul, as it were.
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23. Instead, they invite you to a nearby place; Hollywood Bowl, a bowling alley chain. You've never been there before; already your gut starts to twist with anxiety, a common feeling when you start anything new.
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27. The hours of mental prep work that would've allowed you to sit, in comfort, quietly with many other people and watch a film is now useless to you, and try as you might it can't be adapted to this environment; The place is swamped with people from young to old. Toddlers to old age pensions; a melting pot of the ages; unusual for a saturday night hangout. There must be over two hundred people here, all standing in one open room. The heat, and subsequent smell was overwhelming, but you've long since learnt to pull your attention away from certain senses and can happily do so for a limited time.
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31. You had only prepared yourself for some light conversation before and after the movie, you hadn't prepared for anything else.
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35. Quickly, you scan faces, trying to find your friends and putting together a roughshod battleplan to help deal with the probable events you may find yourself in, such as not finding them, finding them in an argument or running into someone, etc etc. At last, you find them.
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39. Smack dab in the middle of a throng of people; sitting in a center booth.
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43. They wave you over. One stands up like a beacon over the din of noise; no turning back now they've seen you. You saunter over, unable to hide your reluctance of getting into so close a proximity with so many people. Your willingness to socialise disappeared the moment your plans changed. The usual fare of pleasantries takes place; greetings, comments, updates on personal life. Your friends are already in a state of minor inebriation and continue to discuss matters you can't seem to draw your attention to as the place you find yourself in is so very loud. You let your mouth run on automatic, giving out the same idle small talk as everyone else here. You find your focus flitting about the room; you can hear about 20 voices but only coherently can you make out three local conversations.
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47. You listen in (not like you have a choice; your focus isn't that controllable), and it's the usual stuff people always talk about when they get together. Relationships, annoyances, wishful thinking...the usual. You wonder why people keep repeating the same strand of conversation over and over again, as though expecting it to thread off in another direction, but this is a puzzle for another time. You observe the behavior of the three groups that make up this place's clientele; you have the teenager/college crowd; most of whom appear to be in the process of trying to get laid, with some halfway there already if the amount of snogging is any indication. A girl from this group catches you scanning around the room and gives a small smirk in your direction:
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51. You begin formulating another plan in the event she walks over and attempts to talk; but you have no idea how to politely inform her that you are only interested in your own gender still remains a mystery to you. A man steps close to her, tracks her gaze back to you and gives you an aggressive, dominant stare. You immediately update your battleplan to account for emotional or physical violence, to either yourself or to her. She notices his presence, looks to him and drops her smirk, taking on a small, sad frown in it's place. This holds your interest only for a moment as you attempt to plot out the nature of their relationship from this short glance, hoping to improve your social skills all the while. Evidently they have a rather complicated relationship.
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55. The other two groups are also rather strange; the middle-aged and elderly are also here, although in either very small groups or as couples. Most of them are gazing around the room as well, much to your bewilderment; best guess, they were looking out for the last group; The last is one of small, thoroughly noisy children playing amongst arcade machines far in advance of the machines you encountered in your childhood; whereas they would usually only be comparatively simple devices with toy rifles with infrared capabilities, these modern machines seemed capable of speech and gaze recognition as well as body tracking.
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59. Your inner techie yearns to explore these machines you were denied in your youth, but your inner socialite, educated through laborious trial and embarrassing error, knows all too well this would be an intrusion on the children's play area; despite your technical intentions you know even approaching that area will gain you attention you cannot handle, and if directly quizzed, suspicions would only be raised. Plus your friends may not take kindly to you abandoning them in favor of mechanical distractions.
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63. Your attention returns to what your friends are discussing; they are looking at other movies to watch at the Cinema and have settled on two choices; one is a romance/action film and the other is the story of a robot becoming human. Both seem boring, the second sounds cliche and a rehash of Short Circuit. In either case you weren't terribly willing to spend the £20 required to watch the film. In the case of the first especially, you would find the romance confusing as you knew from past experience you would not be able to recognise or understand many of the romantic actions and other subtext, so you feel you'd be left thoroughly bored for most of the film.
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67. You make your excuses, and hope to slip away. The noise, as well as the repetitive and seemingly looped conversations are giving you a headache. Your friends know your habits and aren't nearly so willing to let you slip back into your sanctuary, so they try to form other plans to keep you involved. They attempt to enrol you in conversation, but your headache is getting painful, and worse still, you identify the signs of heavy stress on your mind. One of them buys you a drink; it tastes like someone poured coffee, orange juice and chocolate into a heavily used rubbish bin then served the resulting brew.
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71. Great. Now even your tongue is overtaxed. The drink itself was fine, but the amount of stimulus is causing the senses of your body to go into overdrive. Everything is just too intense. Even the lights are getting brighter in here.
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75. You wished you had just made your excuses the moment you learnt your plans had changed; but you know from experience that your friends don't really understand the sickening anxiety you feel, or the emotional upheaval you find yourself in as you try to quantify and follow everything that's happening around you, especially without any preparation as to how to deal with it.
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79. You feel the charade begin to unravel and the mental prosthetics of your mind; built up from many experiences, starts to break down under the stress.
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83. You try and formulate something, anything to say; but your mouth slips over itself; your brain, pulling at strings of thought, can't find a thread of conversation that won't end in two minutes with an awkward silence. Your lack of preparation for this sort of social event is evidently causing you problems. Normally you would have had two dozen conversations already planned out and you'd be reading, free-form, from a mentally prepared and rehearsed script; enough to get you through two to three hours of socialising. But without the hours put into such prep work; you stutter, slur and fall over this horrible, ad-libbed mess that so often happens when you try to articulate raw thought.
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87. One of your friends turns to you and says "Heyyy! you should relax! Enjoy yourself! THIS" she said, pointing to the throng of flesh and blood which overwhelming smells badly of body odor, cheap deodorant and even cheaper booze, "is what life is all about! Revel in it!"
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91. You look at her as though she has just suggested that wearing used nappies on your head is the latest in haute fashion. The tendrils of your attention now focussed completely on her; she is relaxed and carefree; you have no idea how this is possible. You go back to scanning around and watch two men attempting to court a a young lady. Watching them, you can't help but draw a comparison to this scene and the animal documentaries you saw the night before; you wonder what David Attenborough's narration might entail were this one of his works:
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95. "And here we have the fabled homo sapien sapiens. The wise man. Here he is, attempting to court a female by a simple, but effective mating display. He slouches and draws out his chest whilst thrusting forward his sexual organs in an attempt to make himself seem more virile than his opponent."
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99. You feel alienated from the others here; divorced from the throng of humanity surrounding you. It's noisy, smelly and there is too much stimulus. As a matter of fact, you find only stress and a growing sense of bewilderment at the repetitious nature of your fellow humans. You no longer feel able to even recognise them as human; just spinning, noisy things making too much of a racket for you to think clearly.
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103. You feel like an alien visitor to this planet. Does your friend not realise that this is anything but relaxing?! Your focus is constantly grabbed away by anything you haven't already seen; you are constantly analysing your environment for threats and potential interactions whilst simultaneously attempting to formulate plans to deal with both. On top of that, you are attempting to filter out noise from signal and plan your next conversational move.
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107. Of course, by the time you manage to plan that move, the window of conversational opportunity has already closed and you must await the next one, by which time whatever you wanted to say is already a page or more behind the conversation.
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111. If you don't do any of this; you are screwed; your mind will go into instant retreat and shut down everything from expression and conversation to executive function. You can't just 'stop' planning. Every attempt at doing so has turned you into a zombie. You'll end up a barely functional mute; unable to speak as your thoughts don't translate well into words and you'll pay attention to nothing as huge parts of your sensorium will close down to protect itself from the massive amount of information you are attempting to sift through.
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115. For those that have some trouble holding onto this; imagine being a biologist in a cage filled with lions, tigers, great apes and venomous snakes and it's mating season. You must actively work to avoid getting in the way of others; make only certain movements and hope and pray like hell nothing happens whilst you work. This is what socialising in a group is to you. Hard work that is unpleasant, with terrifying consequences if you screw up.
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119. The social prosthetics you've built up; a variety of mental machinery and techniques over the years to help you cope is instead about three seconds away from catching on fire. Were you a computer, you'd be getting SYSTEM FAILURE messages in big, red, hollywood-style lettering. Random thoughts and vague flashbacks come to you in haphazard formation, unrequested. Your mind is overclocked and your brain is burning.
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123. You note with annoyance that despite throwing yourself into some challenging, mind-bending stuff in the past, that simple socialisation feels considerably more difficult than any academic pursuit. You feel a shudder throughout your mind as the tools you've built to help you process collapse under the strain; such machinery grinding to a halt. You feel a growing sense that you need to get away. You need to escape.
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127. Eventually, beset by ticks, a headache and pure exhaustion from both trying to participate in conversation and deal with the environment, you are released from your torment and you head back to your sanctuary.
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131. The journey home is externally uneventful; but internally your mind, trying to keep up with demand no longer required; processes everything; analyzing and simulating and sampling everything it can see, hear, touch, smell and taste. Your thoughts focus on everything from the layout of the pavement to recreating the designs of passing cars to mapping out the local weather. You are overclocked, and you are burning out.
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135. You find yourself wondering why people do this to themselves, but then you remember that most don't suffer as you do. To others, this is 'fun'. To you, this is a nightmare that you cannot avoid; so many expect you to attend such events and be glad of the opportunity and grow frustrated and impatient when you mention your reluctance.
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139. Upon arrival, you immediately close the door, draw the curtains and embroil yourself in two books and one video game, playing and (re, and re, and re-reading them) for the next few days until you feel somewhat whole again and your mind takes on that calm, cool, mechanical feel. During this time, your sleep is minimal and you find yourself sweating with anxiety.
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143. Congratulations. You've just survived a social encounter. Barely. Let's try again next month.