On autism, spending 52 years pretending to be somebody else, and why I’ve just spent an hour talking to a computer about my feelings.
There’s something about me that I find quite difficult to understand.
I can spend hours on the telephone listening to complete strangers talking about things they’ve never told anybody else. Some incredibly personal things. Things they’ve probably been carrying around in their heads for years.
Yet I find it almost impossible to do the same thing myself.
And I’ve been thinking about this quite a lot since doing a listening duty recently.
I think everyone knows that I’ve got absolutely no bedside manner. It’s hardly a secret. I’m blunt, I’m direct, and I probably come across as though I don’t give a shit half the time.
Which is rather amusing when you consider that I’ve been a Samaritans listening volunteer for seven years.
But here’s the thing. I do care. I care a great deal, actually. I just don’t think I’m particularly good at showing it in the way that people expect.
And that causes me problems in everyday life. Believe me.
Yet somehow, those exact same traits seem to work in my favour when I’m listening to somebody who’s struggling.
And I find that genuinely quite bizarre.
Sometimes people just need to talk
I’ve always believed that one of the best things you can do when something’s troubling you is to talk out loud about it.
I genuinely believe that.
Because when you’ve got all these thoughts going around in your head, they don’t necessarily make much sense. But when you start saying them out loud, sometimes things begin to fall into place.
The trouble with talking to friends is that they’ve got a fucking opinion.
And I don’t mean that in a nasty way. It’s just human nature, isn’t it?
You tell somebody you’ve got a problem and immediately they want to fix it. They’ll tell you what you should do, what you shouldn’t do, what they’d do if they were you. They’ll tell you about something similar that happened to them.
And sometimes that’s exactly what you need.
But sometimes you just want somebody to listen.
When I’m doing a listening duty, I’m not interested in telling somebody what to do. I’m genuinely interested in understanding how they’re feeling.
I’ll ask questions. Sometimes quite direct questions. Questions that perhaps other people might take a little longer to get around to asking.
And I think some callers appreciate that.
I’ve lost count of the number of times somebody has told me that I’m different to other listening volunteers they’ve spoken to.
Now, I’m not suggesting for one moment that I’m better than anybody else. There are thousands of fantastic volunteers doing this, and everybody has their own way of listening.
But I do think the way my brain works makes a difference.
Being told that I’m different used to bother me.
When you’ve spent your entire life trying to fit in, the last thing you particularly want to hear is that somebody’s noticed you’re different.
These days, though, I take it as a compliment.
Which, when you understand a little more about me, is quite a change.
Are you like me?
I’ve had a few rather amusing experiences over the years where callers have somehow worked out that I’m autistic.
It happened again recently.
I’d been talking to somebody for quite a while. It was one of those conversations where I wasn’t entirely sure where it was going. There was a lot going on for this person, and I was simply trying to encourage him to talk about how he was feeling.
I don’t need to know where a conversation is going. That’s not really the point.
Anyway, at one stage he stopped and wondered whether I was like him.
And straight away, I knew what he was getting at.
I actually laughed because I had a pretty good idea what he was going to ask.
He wanted to know whether I was neurodivergent.
Well, yes, as it happens!
And there’s something I find quite amusing about that, because it reminds me of when I was diagnosed with autism about 13 years ago.
I was 41 at the time.
I remember phoning my friends to tell them about my diagnosis, thinking I was giving them some rather significant news.
And I remember Leslie’s reaction.
“Didn’t you know? Everybody else did! Are you seriously telling me you didn’t know?”
Apparently, I was the last person to find out that I was autistic.
And now, years later, even complete strangers can sometimes work it out just by talking to me on the phone.
It does make me laugh.
But there’s a more serious side to all of this.
I’ve spent my life pretending to be somebody else
I don’t think most people understand just how much of my life I’ve spent masking.
And I don’t mean putting on a brave face when you’re having a bad day.
I mean quite literally changing who I am depending on who I’m with.
I’m like a chameleon.
When I meet somebody, I adapt to them. I pick up on how they behave, how they speak, what they find funny, what they expect from me.
And I adjust myself accordingly.
I mimic people. I match their personalities. I become whatever version of myself seems most likely to get along with them.
I’ve been doing it for as long as I can remember.
And the problem with doing something for that long is that eventually you don’t really know where the act ends and the real person begins.
There’s something I’ve mentioned before that probably sounds ridiculous to people who don’t experience this.
I find it incredibly difficult being in a room with more than one friend at a time.
And it’s not because I don’t like groups of people.
It’s because I’ve developed a different version of myself for different people.
So when two friends are together, which version of me am I supposed to be?
I know how to be around one of them. I know how to be around the other. But suddenly they’re both there, and I struggle.
I don’t think I consciously decide to do any of this. It’s just how I’ve learnt to get through life.
And it’s exhausting.
I genuinely believe that this is a large part of why I ended up in autistic burnout.
Fifty-two years of trying to fit into a world by pretending to be somebody I’m not.
And for much of the past 18 months, I’ve been trying to make sense of what that’s done to me.
Because when you’ve spent your entire life adapting yourself to everybody else, there’s a rather obvious question.
Who the fuck are you when there’s nobody else around?
And that’s not quite as easy to answer as you might think.
The bit I find difficult to admit
Something came up in that recent conversation that I’ve been thinking about ever since.
Fear.
And I realised that there’s something I’m actually quite scared of myself.
I’m scared of letting people see the real me.
Not the blunt, sarcastic person who takes the piss out of everything. Not the person who comes across as though nothing particularly bothers him.
The person underneath all of that.
The one who does care. Who feels things quite deeply, actually, but doesn’t always know how to express them.
And I find this really difficult to explain.
Because I’m perfectly comfortable having conversations with complete strangers about their deepest feelings.
I can listen to somebody who’s frightened, confused, upset or struggling to understand themselves.
I can ask them questions that perhaps nobody else has ever asked them.
And I’m genuinely interested in hearing what they’ve got to say.
Yet I find it almost impossible to have those same conversations about myself.
Even with people I’m really close to.
And there’s something rather ridiculous about that, isn’t there?
I can spend hours helping other people find the words to describe how they’re feeling.
But when it comes to my own feelings, half the time I haven’t got a clue where to start.
It’s not that the feelings aren’t there.
They’re very much there.
I just struggle to get them out.
And I think that’s one of the things people misunderstand about me.
Because I can appear quite cold and uncaring. Sometimes I probably am rather insensitive.
But appearing not to care and actually not caring are two very different things.
And I don’t think I’ve ever been particularly good at letting people see that distinction.
Which brings me to AI
Yes, I’ve used AI to help me write this.
In fact, the conversation that eventually led to this article started with me sitting at home, talking to a computer about a telephone call I’d taken.
I wasn’t trying to write an article about autism. Or Samaritans. Or anything particularly profound.
I just wanted to talk about something that had happened.
And then, as I started explaining it, other things came up.
We started talking about my personality. About why people sometimes seem to connect with me when they might not connect with somebody else.
Then we started talking about autism.
Then masking.
Then burnout.
And eventually I found myself talking about something I don’t think I’ve ever really explained properly to anybody.
That I’m actually scared of showing people who I really am.
And here’s the thing.
I’ve spent the best part of an hour talking to a computer to get to that point.
Not because I asked it to tell me what I should feel.
Because I was telling it how I felt, and it was helping me make sense of what I was saying.
I’ve said before that AI is to me what a wheelchair is to somebody whose legs don’t work.
And I know that might sound like a rather strange comparison.
But that’s genuinely how I see it.
There are things that I find incredibly difficult to do because of the way my brain works.
One of those things is understanding and expressing my own emotions.
And AI helps me do that.
It’s not doing my thinking for me. It’s helping me organise thoughts that are already there.
And believe me, it’s not as though I’ve just asked it to write something and accepted whatever it came back with.
I’ve spent ages arguing with it!
Telling it that what it’s written doesn’t sound like me. That it’s too polished. That it’s made me sound like somebody giving an inspirational speech.
At one point, it kept putting the word “bloody” into things I’d said, presumably because it thinks that’s how British people talk.
I was ready to throw the fucking computer through the window.
But that’s part of the process.
I say something. It tries to make sense of it. I tell it where it’s misunderstood me. And sometimes, in explaining why it’s got something wrong, I end up understanding something about myself that I hadn’t quite appreciated before.
And that’s what’s been happening.
So yes, AI has helped me write this.
And perhaps some of you will read it and think it sounds more articulate than I normally do.
Fair enough.
But every experience, every thought and every feeling in this article has come from me.
The computer has simply helped me put it into words.
And I genuinely don’t think I could have written something like this without that help.
Which is rather ironic, really.
I’ve spent most of my life changing the way I communicate to fit in with other people.
And now I’m using a computer to help me communicate what I’m actually thinking.
Why I became a Samaritan
Anyway, I want to come back to something I mentioned earlier.
Seven years ago, before I became a listening volunteer, I got chatting to a couple of women on Facebook.
Two completely separate people.
And eventually those conversations turned into telephone calls.
Now, both of them said something to me that I found rather interesting.
They told me that within about half an hour of talking to me, they’d shared things they’d never told anybody else.
And both of them suggested that I ought to become a Samaritan.
I hadn’t particularly thought about doing anything like that before.
But when two people independently tell you essentially the same thing, it does make you think.
So I looked into it.
And I became a volunteer.
Seven years later, I’m still doing it.
And what’s particularly interesting is that I still have callers telling me the same thing.
That they’ve been able to talk about things they’ve never felt comfortable telling other people.
And I find that incredibly rewarding.
Not because I think I’ve done anything particularly clever.
I’m not solving their problems. I’m not giving them some wonderful piece of advice that’s going to change their lives.
I’m just interested in them.
I want to understand how they’re feeling.
And if they finish a conversation having been able to express something they’ve never managed to put into words before, then I think that’s something rather special.
It certainly means a great deal to me.
And that brings me back to the thing that’s been going around in my head since that recent duty.
So where does that leave me?
I find it genuinely fascinating that the same personality traits that cause me so many problems in everyday life seem to help me when I’m listening to other people.
The bluntness. The directness. The curiosity. The fact that I don’t necessarily respond to things in the way people expect.
All the things I’ve spent years trying to hide or change about myself.
And then there’s the masking.
I’ve spent 52 years trying to be the person I think everybody else wants me to be.
Yet when I’m listening to somebody who’s struggling, I don’t feel that same pressure.
I’m not trying to impress them. I’m not worried about whether they like me. I’m not particularly interested in what they think of me.
I’m just genuinely interested in what they’ve got to say.
And perhaps that’s why it works.
I don’t know.
I’m still trying to understand it myself.
But there’s one thing I keep coming back to.
Seven years ago, two women told me they’d been able to share things with me that they’d never told anybody else.
And here I am, seven years later, still having those sorts of conversations.
Still helping other people talk about things they struggle to express.
Yet I’ve spent the last hour talking to a computer because I can’t do the same thing myself.
I suppose that’s the real reason I’ve written this.
Because for all the people I’ve listened to over the years, and all the things they’ve trusted me enough to share, there’s an awful lot about me that even some of my closest friends probably don’t know.
Not because I don’t want them to know.
Because I’ve spent so long hiding behind the version of me that I think people want to see.
And I’m still rather scared of letting that go.
I don’t have some wonderful conclusion to all of this. I’m not going to tell you I’ve finally worked out who I am, because I haven’t.
But I am trying.
And I suppose writing something like this, and actually letting people read it, is part of that.