mellowtigger (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
mellowtigger) wrote2022-11-13 02:35 pm
mellowtigger) wrote2022-11-13 02:35 pm
the day I learned that other humans are people
Long ago (and long before my autism diagnosis), I mostly thought of humans as noisy and obnoxious animals. Sure, my bipedal appearance seemed to match theirs, so we were similar, but they vocalize so frequently and interfere so aggressively. Rather annoying creatures. Best just to avoid them.
I was in my late teens when I happened to be watching one particular scene in "The Breakfast Club". I never would have gone to a movie theater to see a social drama, so it must have been on HBO or Showtime on cable tv, playing in the background while I did high school homework or something. Which means I must have seen it in early 1986 or late 1985, after the original theater run. I was 17 or 18 years old at the time. The scene that made a life-changing impact was where the rich girl says something to the effect of:
That was it. That was the precise moment when I realized that humans are people like me, with experiences and concerns like mine. Many years later, I heard Jim Sinclair share a story at Autreat where he used puppets to mimic an autistic kid's historical social interactions back at him, and the child experienced a long pause of self-reflection as realization of sameness dawned. I know there's a word in sociology for that dazed pause when people in native cultures without mirrors see themselves reflected for the first time in a glass mirror, like Narcissus of old Greek stories. I had that too-still-to-breathe pause too, hearing that dialog in The Breakfast Club.
Amongst some autistics, apparently, that pause is not caused by understanding for the first time how others see us but how we see others... at long last. For the first time, listening to that movie scene, other people actually existed in the realm of my experience. From there, it seems that we develop a strong sense of morality and a loud insistence that the noisy humans collectively should behave better. If we learned, after all, then so can they. Some researchers seem to be studying this effect.
There's even a recurring internet meme that insists fictional Orel Puppington is autistic. He's that wonderfully literal and concerned-about-the-common-good boy from the excellent Moral Orel tv show that was somehow too bizarre even for Adult Swim. Welcome to my world. Still no real talent for person-to-person stuff. In college, I still lived very much a solipsistic life, but I remain very concerned about the health and fairness of systems that carry us all into the future.
I was in my late teens when I happened to be watching one particular scene in "The Breakfast Club". I never would have gone to a movie theater to see a social drama, so it must have been on HBO or Showtime on cable tv, playing in the background while I did high school homework or something. Which means I must have seen it in early 1986 or late 1985, after the original theater run. I was 17 or 18 years old at the time. The scene that made a life-changing impact was where the rich girl says something to the effect of:
"I know my problems aren't the same as yours, but they're the most difficult things that I've experienced, and you shouldn't trivialize them."
That was it. That was the precise moment when I realized that humans are people like me, with experiences and concerns like mine. Many years later, I heard Jim Sinclair share a story at Autreat where he used puppets to mimic an autistic kid's historical social interactions back at him, and the child experienced a long pause of self-reflection as realization of sameness dawned. I know there's a word in sociology for that dazed pause when people in native cultures without mirrors see themselves reflected for the first time in a glass mirror, like Narcissus of old Greek stories. I had that too-still-to-breathe pause too, hearing that dialog in The Breakfast Club.
Amongst some autistics, apparently, that pause is not caused by understanding for the first time how others see us but how we see others... at long last. For the first time, listening to that movie scene, other people actually existed in the realm of my experience. From there, it seems that we develop a strong sense of morality and a loud insistence that the noisy humans collectively should behave better. If we learned, after all, then so can they. Some researchers seem to be studying this effect.
"Given the well-documented differences in commonsense psychology among autistic individuals, researchers have investigated whether the development and execution of moral judgement and reasoning differs in this population compared with neurotypical individuals."
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/development-and-psychopathology/article/abs/morality-in-autism-spectrum-disorder-a-systematic-review/CBC37C81E0DCEB9C89E6089B449C6DBA
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/development-and-psychopathology/article/abs/morality-in-autism-spectrum-disorder-a-systematic-review/CBC37C81E0DCEB9C89E6089B449C6DBA
There's even a recurring internet meme that insists fictional Orel Puppington is autistic. He's that wonderfully literal and concerned-about-the-common-good boy from the excellent Moral Orel tv show that was somehow too bizarre even for Adult Swim. Welcome to my world. Still no real talent for person-to-person stuff. In college, I still lived very much a solipsistic life, but I remain very concerned about the health and fairness of systems that carry us all into the future.