ELECTRICCHALK

Image: Luke Cantrell Att-NC-ND

I’m extremely grateful to Nick Shackleton-Jones, the BBC’s Manager of Online and Informal Learning, for letting me share this with you verbatim.

I was trying to write a post about personal styles having undertaken a Myers Briggs Type Indicator questionnaire as part of a team exercise. It was principally about questions of identity, learning, social interaction and having a strong preference for introversion, but could never quite nail what I wanted to say…

…so I gave up.

Instead, here’s Nick’s very personal, articulate take on a similar theme. I wanted to post it here because it’s a really interesting insight into someone whose natural style is to keep things hidden. I’m naturally quite reticent, finding it hard to express what I’m thinking and why I’m thinking it so I found Nick’s candour very surprising and refreshing.

Originally posted on his blog, he’s allowed me to present it here as a guest post. I don’t recognise all the aspects he’s talking about in myself but there are things that I relate to very closely.

I should clarify, I’m not posting this as a claim that I have Asperger’s. I just thought it was a great piece of writing.

Read to the end; it’s not merely an apologia.

Please have a look at his fascinating blog on learning, Aconventional, and follow him on Twitter.

“We are not and never will be real boys and girls. At best we are mimics. Most people feel awkward as teenagers, but for us that awkwardness does not resolve itself but instead crystallises as a syndrome – a collection of characteristics which, if we’re lucky, lie just beyond the normal deviation. Often the breakthrough is realising that whilst we can never be real there are rules that we can follow and that by carefully observing and mimicking these, by learning to play the game, we can seem real – sometimes even more so than the people who learn such things implicitly. We learn that the secret to relationships is eye-contact and listening. We learn to monitor our use of space; of the physical space around us and of the space we occupy in a conversation. We match phrasing and gesture. By concentrating on such things we find that successful interpersonal interactions in a finite context can easily be achieved.

But however good we get, certain things will mark us out and establish beyond doubt that we are not merely introverts or nerds: no matter how proficient we become interacting with people is always an effort and a challenge. Nothing is more exhausting than a day full of meetings; at the end of a such a day we can barely hear people when they speak. Unlike most people we do not actively seek out other people or interaction and encounters are only ever draining. A party can literally leave us feeling dizzy and sick, engaging in the ridiculousness of small talk in the shameful hope that at some point the conversation might turn to something important.

We suspect that other people can sense this instinctively: we are rarely approached, the seat next to us is invariably the last to be filled. It is as if when we are not concentrating on engaging others a light ‘goes off’ and people steer clear. If we are in a room with someone else we feel no need to speak to them – however long we are in that room – beyond the sense that according to the rules we should, or that it might make the other person more comfortable if we did so.

In meetings we struggle to understand turn taking – bursting with something to say, but it feels like trying to cross a busy motorway on foot. Eventually we dive in and cause a pile-up. Most of all, though, never, never understanding that because someone is your ‘boss’ that one should accord them, or their views, some special status.

Telephone conversations are difficult at best. This might seem strange, but calculating how to respond is so much easier with the help of non-verbal cues. Often people say ‘is this a good time to talk?’, sensing our phone strangeness. It’s such an effort of concentrate so hard to do pull these off – I find it helps to walk around. Physical contact is perhaps the most paradoxical area of all – if we are not careful we instantly give ourselves away here: protective of our distance, anxious regarding the decision to hug, kiss or shake hands. Even now it takes great effort of will to suppress this kind of trepidation. And yet physical contact can be where we feel most at home – the only real connection that we will have with another person.

I can’t help loving my routines – much as I despise myself for it, a stereotypical routine stops my day feeling like chaos, and when something spoils my plans I have to work hard to convince myself that things might still be ok. Humour is tough to master, but it should never be thought that we lack feeling: I have learned that it is only a very small part of the mechanism that has failed. Our mirror neurons work just fine; we empathise with the pain registered in the faces of sufferers, we cry in movies. It is as if our reward system doesn’t kick in for social stuff; we have to learn it the hard way because it doesn’t come naturally. We learn to connect with everyone and no-one.

Developing professional relationships over the medium or long term is almost impossible: there comes a point where other person realises that there is something ‘fake’ about your delivery – you see it in their expression – and from that point you are doomed. ‘Trust is essential’ as the saying goes, and there are few things more damaging than perceived dis-ingenuity. How do you begin to explain to someone that pretending to be a real person is what makes you the person you really are?

But it could be much worse. We are not excluded, we are not institutionalised. We find it easier than most people to visualise things or to spot patterns of thinking. Unlike most people we really do care about stuff – rather than just friends – and for that reason alone we have the potential for greatness. And we appreciate that diversity expresses itself in many ways, some more visible than other, but all forms essential to success in a creative world.”

Does this reflect you? Do you recognise this in the people that live and work around you? Give us your thoughts…