As an Adult With Autism
I am an adult on the autism spectrum. I have a condition called Asperger’s Syndrome. There are many misconceptions about what autism is. Simply put autism creates difficulties in sensory processing, usually slowing down a person’s ability to perceive the sensations they are experiencing. For some people, autism causes many of their sensory experiences to become more intense than they are for people without autism, neurotypicals. For many people on the spectrum every sound, touch, smell, and color can feel more intense than for a person without autism. The result is that most people with autism are easily overwhelmed by what is going on around them. Other people on the autism spectrum may have some of their senses turned down. Some people on the spectrum are highly insensitive cold and heat, not feeling the need to wear a winter coat, and maybe being able to touch things that are too hot for others to pick up.
The most widely publicized understanding of autism is that people on the spectrum have social difficulties. Psychologists estimate that ninety-three percent of all communication is nonverbal. Due to the processing delays that people with autism experience, it is common for people on the spectrum to miss most of this non-verbal communication going on around them, making them blind to most communication. Many neurotypicals feel that speaking what they are feeling is only a last resort to communicate, and are generally angry by the time they actually need to say something to someone. Many people on the spectrum have great difficulty processing nonverbal communication and the only way that they understand other people is through explicit instructions. It is easy to understand why many neurotypicals do not like being around people with autism.
For me, the result of my autism is that there are things that I do well and things that I do not do as well, except that in my case the difference between these two seems more extreme than for neurotypicals.
Because of my autism, I have difficulty understanding spoken communication. I do not have a hearing problem; in fact my hearing has been tested to be better than most other people. The problem is that I have a hard time processing all of the information that I hear. What I understand is that neurotypicals have the ability to pick out the sound of one person’s voice in a noisy room. For me, any sounds in a room that go on in addition to the person talking make it hard for me to understand what the other person is saying. I am also highly sensitive to any movement. Any moment in a room can be so highly distracting that I can lose my thought when I am speaking.
In addition to these deficits, my autism has also given me several gifts. I have been tested to have an IQ that is well above average, although I have had a hard time translating this into a living income. In my life, I have had difficulty maintaining employment. The best work that I can find is working from home making some money as a technical writer. I write content for websites, computer manuals, and technical marketing material. Writing is something that I can do alone in a completely quiet environment and just focus all of my attention on the words that I am writing and who I am writing them for.
Communicating through writing is much less stressful for me than talking to someone directly where I can get distracted and I am always at risk of saying the wrong thing with no way to edit what I have said. When I do talk with other people using voice I prefer to communicate over Skype than by talking to a person face to face. If I could find the right person to work with, I would like to collaborate on my writing over Skype, using Google Docs so that each of us could see what the other person was typing as we composed the piece.
Another gift that I have as result of my autism is an exceptional ability to understand objects in three dimensions. I can picture a three dimensional objects in my mind and rotate them freely in my mind to understand what they look like from all sides. Because of my strength visualizing three-dimensional models, the virtual world of Second Life was easy for me to understand.
Also, like many people on the autism spectrum I am very good with computers. Being a skilled computer user, I quickly understood the server-client model of the virtual world of Second Life. Computers always communicate using explicit instructions, and never become upset with me no matter how many times they need to repeat the same information. For me, the technology of Second Life also played to my strengths.
For me the social interaction in Second Life was more comfortable than in real life. I liked that most of the communication was typed, not spoken, and it was good that I had a longer time to process what other people were writing and longer to respond than I would in a spoken conversation. Also, because most of the environment in Second Life is very still, I didn’t get distracted by any other visual stimulation than the avatar I was looking at. Finally, I was never judged for how I actually looked or sounded. Second Life allowed me to have friends in a way that I couldn’t in real life. For all of these reasons, it is clear why there is a large autism community in Second Life. But of course, all of this was taken away from me when Dante Portland was killed.