User:ThatPeskyCommoner/Autism and me
You know what I am; I'm a HFA, with a bit of autie-savantism, and I've been heavily involved with animal interactions, training, rehabbing, and all that stuff, for a very long time. A very long time indeed ... I can't remember a time when I actually got on better with people than with other species. In fact, I know from my parents' and early teachers' comments that for a considerable time I self-identified as a cat rather than a human. Now this is kind of interesting; over the course of decades, I've noticed that there are some very striking parallels in the subtle body language of feral cats and the body language of autism-spectrum humans. That "aloofness" thing in cats is frequently misunderstood by humans, but it's "normal cat etiquette". And it's very similar to the apparent detached aloofness of autism-spectrum humans. It's not either dismissive, detached, or aloof – it's simply cat etiquette. Body posture and eye-contact etiquette for cats and autism-spectrum humans is much more closely related than it is for neurotypical and autism-spectrum humans. Also interestingly, I've even been on the receiving end of a "social interaction greeting", as felid to felid, from a leopard in a zoo!
Because, as a youngster, I infinitely preferred other species to Homo sapiens, and because I'm a learning-freak-type nerd, and can get wholly engrossed in subjects which appealed to me, I studied and studied and studied any other species that I wanted to be able to work with and communicate with. Books on behaviourism, field study, study of two-way communications, herd / pack / tribe structures, heirarchies, etiquette, body language, other communications, and so on. For quite a lot of species. Masses and masses (hundreds, maybe thousands, of hours) observing, internally noting, watching without interacting, just so I could learn how they ticked. At the beginning, I just wanted to know, obsessively. Because I cared about them. I never cared that much about Homo sapiens.
So ... Because I wanted to work with animals (specifically horses), I considered becoming an equine vet. But, by the time I was looking at what A-levels I'd need, I'd become self-aware enough to know that dealing with the animals would never be a problem for me ... but dealing with their owners could be a real challenge, and, to be a vet, you have to be good at dealing with people, no matter what they've done to their animals. So, instead, I decided to become a riding and horse-management instructor. That's actually much easier; all it needs is that you really know your subject and can put it across. Surprisingly, there's not much individual human interaction required!
But that also gave me the opportunity to begin to learn about humans; by teaching humans how to interact successfully with equines. To become an effective interpreter in that, I had to at least start to learn how humans worked, because it was never instinctive with me, it didn't come naturally, and I simply didn't know how to be a "normal" (neurotypical) human. (That might ring a lot of bells with autie-types: feeling that you "don't know how to be a human"; that you're failing somewhere. Temple Grandin has described this as feeling like "an anthropologist on Mars".)
It wasn't until I'd become a lot more mature that I twigged to the fact that, if I'd been able to study any other species I wanted, in order to be able to communicate effectively with them and interact with them in a way which would enable them to accept me as being "one of them", that I realised that I could choose to do exactly the same thing with humans: change the way I looked at them, and think of them as being "just another species" whose methods could be studied and learned. Bingo! I wasn't born "knowing how to be a horse" (or a cat, or a dog, or a cow, or a goat, or an etc. etc. etc.), but I'd been able to learn how to bluff my way along in it sufficiently to be able to "fool" other species into accepting me as a social companion. Gods, it was hard, though! All those other species, I liked; and I'd had over two decades of really not liking Homo sapiens very much. H. sapiens, in my experience, were for the most part intolerant, unjust, deceptive, cruel, bullying, back-stabbing, spitefully-gossipy, character-assassinating, thoroughly nasty pieces of work, with some exceptions. And now I had to make an effort to "study" them!
It turned out to be worth it. But I always have to be aware that I'm never going to be totally and naturally fluent in "human", any more than I could be in horse. I do, however, have the advantage that humans can read and write. I don't have to be in the same room with them in order to be able to communicate. I can bluff my way along an awful lot better on-screen than I can in person; but it took years of study to find out what is "species-normal behaviour" for H.sapiens.
In effect what I seem to have done is the reverse of what is described in Temple Grandin's book Animals in Translation – instead of using an understanding of autistic processes in order to decode animal behaviour, I used a deep understanding of animals' behavioural interactions in order to make sense of neurotypical human behaviour. I will probably always get on far better with non-human animals than I do with humans; though I have developed the ability to "translate" and act as interpreter, "human" will probably never be my first language.
P.S. Side effect: on an intellectual, rather than an instinctive, level, I probably now know more about what constitutes "species-normal behaviour" for H. sapiens than most humans do! I can't ever be a "normal human", but I know an awful lot about them now!