A Major Autistic Life-Lesson I Learned from Watching Love on the Spectrum
A Major Autistic Life-Lesson I Learned from Watching Love on the Spectrum
Love on the Spectrum (LotS), while it is still manipulated like all reality-TV, has helped me developed some major insight. I was watching the show, and after a few episodes, I said, “Finally, a show about normal people being normal.” Then, I started thinking that if the whole premise of the show is that it’s about not-normal people, what am I thinking? I had to think about it for a few days until I reached my conclusion.
My whole life, I thought that fiction and reality-TV and movies (known as TV for the rest of this post) were so weird. I would call it propaganda and population control. To me, it was a way to get the masses to all behave a certain way. It was never anything like what people are normally like. TV characters try to be cool, play social games with each other, be mean to the weak to appear strong, conform to trends, try their hardest to assimilate a prescribed standard of beauty, etc. There were good messages too, like be nice to each other, don’t overtly lie, have morals, here’s how you resolve disputes in a healthy mutual manner, etc. Still, it was not real-life. It was not how people naturally behaved. When I would interact with people and they started acting like people on TV, I would tell them that they are acting too much like the people on TV and could probably benefit from watching TV less. When asked by someone if I think that other people will like what they are planning on wearing, I have seriously responded with, “What...are you competing in a popularity contest like on TV? Who cares what other people think? Wear what you like.” People would be upset about this, but I was proud that I “helped them see that they were being inauthentic/brainwashed”. Despite my views of TV though, I still enjoyed it for its entertainment value, but I naturally gravitated towards science shows and documentaries.
What LotS helped me realize is that...No! TV is really how “normal” people are. NTs really behave like the shows on TV. Maybe they’re not exactly like TV depicts, but they are very similar. They have their hierarchies, manipulative games, implicit/indirect communication, popularity contests, confusions, morals, small talk...all that. In my example above, the person deciding on what to wear was in a popularity contest like on TV! I made the NT-cultural mistake of explicitly pointing it out, which they understandably considered rude. Overall though, through internal and external selection biases, my life was inadvertently designed to include autistic-friendly people, which behave differently from people on TV. Either my friends were autistic or behaved with me in an autistic-friendly manner. In my personal life, I saw that non-TV-people didn’t act like those on TV, so when someone would act like TV, I thought they were brainwashed rather than NT. The whole time, I was the “weird” one insisting that the world itself was “weird”. OMG. I’m cracking up! 😆
Like all of life's lessons, I'm still building on this, so I would appreciate any input or additions. Am I wrong? Did I make an illogical connections? Am I missing anything?
Also, has anyone else been through something similar?
In friend groups I am often isolated from most of the drama. I only learn about the crazy events months after they happened. In a tv show I would be the guy with stupid jokes that almost never adds anything to the story directly yet gets the all the shit done when things go to hell then at the end never even knows wtf is going on (: And even after all that I will go back to being the side character the writings are planing on getting rid of.
That one guy in that image meme that walks into an apartment on fire with pizza basically.
I swear some people must have secret telepathic powers because there's always drama in friends/acquaintances/... groups I'm in, and yet I'm always out of the loop!
I think TV is still over dramatised to an extent and people are more likely to jump to conclusions and act in a set way and not deviate too much from their character.
I do prefer autism friendly people though for obvious reasons 🙂
I think TV is still over dramatised to an extent and people are more likely to jump to conclusions
Ok, re-read that while thinking about how NTs say that we miss the point/social cues and need people to explicitly tell us things. That's how they are!! They get the point/cues because they are jumping to conclusions. Of course, this approach causes them to make faulty conclusions, which is why they have misunderstandings. Like 90% of NT tv is them figuring out a misunderstanding that would have been completely avoided if they just spoke directly instead of giving hints/jumping to conclusions.
I hope this will help somewhat...
When an NT interacts with another person, I have to try and make sense of what they say and do. For the most part, this'll instinctively be done by imagining that they're basically like me. This leads to some hilariously wrong judgments, because the line of thinking goes something like—if my imaginary version of myself were doing or saying this thing, what would have to be going on in my/their head for their words/actions to make sense?
People tend to have pretty poor imaginations, so it's pretty easy for someone to get to, what they're saying/doing must be malicious. I think this is also what people mean when they say "projection," that projection isn't always intended as an attack, but it is almost always a failure of imagination.
It's said, "when someone shows you who they are, believe them." What's fascinating is that this needs to be said; it should be obvious. But this is basically my point: in my experience, people don't have a great conception of the reality of others, and laziness makes people fall back on just imagining (their concept of) themselves but for being a woman, being black, being ND, being trans...
But remember, for the NT, this is all done automatically, this is just the baseline NT social perception. Or at least my understanding of it. So for example, when you ask someone, are you competing in a beauty contest? who cares what people think? many an NT will take that as an accusation of frivolity; after all, why is that the thing you focused on? What's going on in your head, or rather, what would have to be going on in my head for me to ask someone that? I must not like them very much, so they must not like me very much. And so on and so forth.
I'm (probably) NT and I find this incredibly tedious, I can't imagine what it's like for NDs.
The thing is, acting is always overdone. NTs are like that, yes, but not as over the top as you see on tv and in theatre.
Like, yeah! I hadn't got that deep with it, however, lol! But I did have a similar passing thought that maybe all the exaggerated facial expressions I see on TV (and, by extention IRL) weren't maybe so exaggerated? If that makes any sense :D
All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players- some famous dead guy. It helps me to think that we all are masking somewhat, even NT. We all put on our game face before going out in the world. I think a lot of poeple play an exaggerated version of themselves, without even realizing it. This helped me to understand and navigate group settings much better. We are all actors.
If you haven't already, you might be interested in reading up about Carl Jung's Analytical Psychology theory and its descendants. He includes a construct for masks and how that plays out as potentially helpful or unhealthy.
When asked by someone if I think that other people will like what they are planning on wearing
Gets asked "Well, aside from the fact that my fashion sense is pretty much non-existent, I think it would look great :D"
My default response to everything that doesn't seem inappropriate even for me. And depending on who's asking/how they're asking, I might leave the beginning out to avoid them falling into doubts again. So much to consider