Skill Tree

I was watching a YouTube video earlier today about how to explain autism to people who don't understand it. While watching that I had my own idea of an analogy that could help explain autism to people, so I wanted to post it here and see what people think. One of my biggest self care activities is playing video games, and I'm a fan of video games like Horizon Zero Dawn and Assassin's Creed where you build up your character by earning skill points that can be exchanged for skill from a skill tree. Obviously you'll be stronger and have more abilities and tactics at your disposal with each skill that you unlock, but each given one tends to be optional.

So I came up that this skill tree analogy, where we imagine life as the game that we're playing with a largely neurotypical society being the setting for the game's events. There's an image near the bottom of this post to help explain the analogy, but in this scenario neurotypicals naturally have most - if not all - of the skills shown in the skill tree image. Conversely, autistics tend to naturally grasp few - if any - of these skills although it's not unheard of for autistics to study, learn and achieve some of the skills. If we look at the example image, we can take the example of small talk that neurotypicals tend to naturally be good at and comfortable with. I on the other hand, can't do small talk to save my life. I myself have never taken the time to do some people-watching to study social interactions and try to learn how they work, but there are certainly other autistics who have, and had success with it to the point of being able to effectively "fake" small talk. With that said, how comfortable they may or may not be at the time is a completely different issue.

Empathy is also something that autistics stereotypically struggle with. The reality is that yes, some autistics (myself included) do absolutely struggle to feel empathy, although many other autistics do feel empathy but either express it differently or don't know how to express it at all. Sometimes, an autistic person can feel so much empathy for a person that it overwhelms them and the outwardly become what neurotypicals would deem to be overly emotional. I've never been one to feel or express a lot of empathy in face to face situations, although my empathy has really improved at work where I deal with customers over webchat instead, so the only contact I have with other humans is through a computer screen via instant message. Even then, it took a long time and a lot of work for me to learn when I should show empathy and what I should do to show it properly. If I'm completely honest the empathy is entirely fake, but it's the way that it comes across that's important in a job like mine, rather than whether you mean it.

This will make sense to fellow gamers like myself, but I hope I've explained it well enough for non-gamers to understand as well. Obviously everybody is different whether neurotypical or neurodivergent so each neurotype could have any combination of skills and abilities, but as a generalisation, neurotypicals will have many more of these skills than autistics. It's also worth pointing out that the skills shown in this skill tree image I made are by no means exhaustive as I made it purely for the purposes of example and demonstration.

Let me know what you think of this analogy. As far as I'm aware it's completely original and I hope it proves to be a helpful way to explain how autism works to people. Please remember to click Subscribe at the top of the page and follow me on social media. I'm @DepictDave on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and you can buy me a coffee at my Ko-Fi account here.

Theory Of Mind

I thought I'd do something a bit different this week. Every now and then when I'm catching up on the autism conversation I hear about theory of mind. It's something I've looked into before but only very briefly so I'm not really sure what it is. What I thought I'd do for this post then is research what theory of mind is and report my findings here. Please feel free to sound off on whether I've got it right in the comments or on social media.

So here we go... Theory of mind is basically how you understand and anticipate other people's reactions and behaviours. Despite being called theory of mind it's not so much a theory in the sense of a wider known philosophy, instead it's your own theory about the way other people's minds work and their mental state. So for example, if you give somebody some news you'll usually try to predict how they'll react. That's your theory of how their mind is regardless of whether your prediction is right or wrong

Theory of mind wasn't something that was discovered until people started researching autism. Although it's not exclusively an autistic trait (it can be seen in all neurotypes) it seems to be most prevalent in autistics. A child's theory of mind starts to develop around the age of 4 or 5, which would explain why my nearly-3-year-old doesn't seem to grasp that things affect other people quite as much as her 4 year-old brother does. If you're good at putting yourself in other people's shoes that would indicate that you've got a good theory of mind, whereas if you struggle to understand other people's points of view that would indicate that you've got a poor/lack of theory of mind.

So long story short, theory of mind is really the understanding that other people have different thoughts, different feelings and different experiences than you. It sounds like something very simple that anybody should be able to grasp, but in reality it's not that easy for people like me. I remember one point in my teens not long after I left school a friend was talking to me about his complicated love life while we were hanging out one day. I was quite happily listening to him when he mentioned that he doesn't think I understand what he's talking about. I 100% understood the events that he was explaining to me, but I think what he was getting at is the emotional side of it and what affect things had on him. I had completely missed that whole part of what he was telling me because he didn't specifically say it with words, which would definitely be explained as a lack of theory of mind now that I know a bit more about it. In this way theory of mind has also been liked to empathy, and everyone knows the stereotype that autistic people don't have empathy at all. If we go back to purely theory of mind in itself though, there have always been little hints in my personality that my theory of mind isn't very good. I've always struggled to understand how some people don't like wrestling or don't like Nightwish (my favourite band of about 10 years or more). When I'm upset or angry I also seem to automatically think that people will know why even if they've had no involvement in the situation. This isn't helped by my alexithymia meaning I struggle to put words to my emotions.

There is a common theory of mind test that psychologists use on children when assessing for autism. It's called the Sally Anne test and consists of showing the child 2 dolls (called Sally and Anne, hence the name). One doll has a basket and the other has a box. The assessors will then put a marble in Sally's basket, Sally will go away for a bit, and Anne will take the marble and put it in her box. When Sally comes back the assessors ask the child where Sally will look first for the marble. The idea being that children with a good theory of mind will understand that Sally hasn't seen the marble being moved so she'll look straight in the basket where she first saw it. Those with poor theory of mind tend to believe that because they know the marble has been moved it means everybody including Sally knows that the marble has been moved, and they will usually say she'll look in the box because that's where it actually is. I wasn't given the Sally Anne test during my diagnostic assessment, but now that I know about it I'm starting to understand more about certain parts of my assessment and why the assessors did certain things.

For me, learning about theory of mind is one of those light bulb moments when you look back at yourself and think "That's me!" The same kind of moment happened when I learned that alexithymia is a thing, and I hope that by doing posts like this it helps other autistics understand themselves better, as well as helping neurotypicals understand us better. If you've enjoyed this post please click Subscribe at the top of the page and follow me on social media. I'm @DepictDave on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and you can buy me a coffee at my Ko-Fi account here.

[Image description: Black silhouette of a male head on a white background with rainbow-coloured cogs in the brain area. At the bottom of the image is "Autism" in rainbow colours and "Theory of Mind" in black.]

Friendships

As an autistic person I've always struggled to make friends. That's not to say I've never had friends because I absolutely have, but the few friendships I somehow managed to make were mostly temporary and often circumstantial. I had a couple of friends at college but as soon as we graduated we pretty much stopped talking to each other. When I was at school I had a couple of friends who I spent pretty much all my time with, but didn't make friends with anyone outside of our little group of 3 until much later on in the final year of school. Looking back now they weren't all they were cracked up to be as friends, but I enjoyed what I had.

I think one of the reasons that I've never found it easy to make friends is because my special interests have never matched up with what anybody else was interested in so I didn't have anything to talk about. I've always found it hard to know what to say to other people, especially if I don't know them. Similarly, if I see anybody I haven't seen in ages I struggle to know what to say there too, which is why I don't like meeting up with people I haven't seen in years. It's like my head reverts back to them being complete strangers and I start getting anxious, even though I'm a lot more comfortable with those exact same people if I see or hear from them on a regular basis. I wouldn't go as far as saying it makes me more socially competent, but it makes me more comfortable if nothing else.

I think my definition of friendship has changed as well as I've grown older. When I was younger I used to define a friend as somebody I would be happy to go out to a pub with for example. I once explained to some colleagues at one of my old work places that there are lots of people working there who I like and get one with, but nobody I would consider a friend. There were only a handful of people at the time who I would have happy gone on a night out with, and there are even less of them these days. Nothing against most of the people I knew or work/ed with, it's just that I don't value most people's company as much as spending some quiet time on my own in peace.

Nowadays I've come to realise that I wouldn't even necessarily want to go on a night out with a friend. For example, my current team leader at work is probably the closest thing in-work that I've got to a friend. I help her with a few work bits and she's really been there for me when I needed her, brought me out of my shell and massively helped me raise my game at work. I'll be sad to lose her as my team leader when things at work change over the next couple of months, but we'll still be around to see each other which I'm glad about but that doesn't mean I'd want to go on a night out with her. I feel more comfortable going out as a team so that there are at least a few other people there meaning I can fade into the background when I need to. Just as another quick example, there's my friend Emma who I met on Twitter (you can check out her mental health blog here). We've never met in person and I can't say I'm overly keen to change that, but we've got a couple of things in common and we've tried to be there for each other when we needed it so I consider her a friend even though we don't talk online that much.

Going back to my friendships being circumstantial for a minute, almost all of my nights out when I was single had a purpose. That was to get me out and about and hopefully meet someone to start a romantic relationship with. Of course it never worked until I met my wife when I wasn't even trying to (I had bigger things to worry about that night), and it's not that I didn't like being around my friends and have fun because I really did, but for me the centre of every night out was putting myself out there to find love. Looking back, my friends did put up with a lot from me and I appreciate them being there because the search for love in itself became somewhat of an autistic special interest consuming almost every part of my life - which ironically is probably a reason it didn't work! I met my wife one night when I was doing stand-up comedy and was too preoccupied with my set and how badly it failed to worry about meeting anyone, but I did. My comedy group was another set of friends who I almost immediately fell out of touch with as soon as I started working full time and got together with Sarah so I didn't have the time to commit to the actual comedy any more like I used to.

I guess at the core of what I'm trying to say is that I don't gain anything from sociable interaction. It could either be because I'm autistic, or because I'd learned due to bullying etc that I'm better off staying reasonably isolated, or it could be a mix of both. I often wonder what neurotypicals get out of socialising with each other, and especially from small talk. To me, talking to people is a way to get information. I really don't believe that I need or want 90% of the information that people seem to give and take from each other but for some reason that I'll never understand they enjoy it. A perfect conversation for me is if one of us asks for information or an outcome, the other one gives it, and that's the end of it, we both go about our day. I feel very similarly about reading as well. It's rare that I'll ready anything for the enjoyment of it, but if it's something I want or need to know then I'll end up reading everything that I can find about it.

So that's how my autistic mind is with friendships. I'm sure a lot of autistics will likely agree with me, and so I hope it's given you an interesting insight into how we - or at least I - tick. If so, please click Subscribe at the top of the page and follow me on social media. I'm @DepictDave on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and you can buy me a coffee at my Ko-Fi account here.

[Image description: A handshake between a black hand and a white hand. The image is on a white background with "Autism" towards the bottom in rainbow colours, and "Friendships" under that in black.]

Autism Advocacy

It's World Autism Awareness Week so I thought it would be an ideal time to discuss what autism advocacy means to me and why I do it.

I started this blog just over a year ago in the run up to last year's World Autism Awareness Week partly because I wanted to raise money by doing a 10 mile walk with the blog being a way to spread the word of what I was doing, and also to raise autism awareness in general. After I did the walk I carried on blogging once a week because with my busy schedule of work and parenting it's all I've got time to do in terms of advocacy. I wanted to make sure I was at least doing something.

So what is autism advocacy? It's a way for people (usually autistics themselves) to actively engage in the conversation around autism as a condition and to ultimately aid society's understanding and acceptance of us as people. I sometimes see debates online where people argue that we need to focus on autism acceptance rather than autism awareness, and therefore they disagree with things like World Autism Awareness Week. While I do agree that acceptance is the ultimate goal, I also think they go hand in hand. In my opinion, to achieve autism acceptance people need to understand autism, and the way to understand autism is by advocates such as myself explaining it - i.e. raising autism awareness. Autism awareness is about more than just letting people know that autism exists. I don't believe that you can have one without the other, so for that reason I think World Autism Awareness Week is a great thing despite the fact that in an ideal world we shouldn't need to dedicate a specific day or week to it, it should just be the norm. But obviously not much in this world is ideal.

I do wish I could do more for the cause, but my hours at work will be changing very soon so maybe that'll give me a bit more time to dedicate to advocacy in the future. World Autism Awareness Week is 30th March to 5th April.

For now though, I'll just remind you to please click Subscribe at the top of the page and follow me on social media. I'm @DepictDave on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and you can buy me a coffee at my Ko-Fi account here.

[Image description: The word "Autism" in rainbow colours on a white background. Directly underneath it are the words "Awareness", "Accessibility" and "Acceptance", all in smaller black text. Towards the bottom of the image are the hashtags #ActuallyAutistic and #Asking Autistics. This is the image used on my Instagram to promote this post.]