This wee unique feature of being neurodiverse constantly keeps tripping me up. On ‘neurodiversity celebration week’ I thought I’d give it a shot explaining this to you neuro-typicals!
I think in images. That means no words are involved. My mind creates still or sometimes moving images of whatever it is I am thinking about.
In other words I see problems, thoughts, worries. I see them as real time real life events in my mind.
If I have not understood you, it means my mind has created the wrong image in relation to whatever you are talking about.
It boggles my mind actually, to imagine problem solving and thinking about the world, life, anything, in words and sentences. I’m assuming that’s what non Autistic people do?
To translate my mind into words and sentences is not easy, for me or anyone else that is autistic. Pictures are our first language. The spoken and written word is at the very least, a second language to us.
This is why we need extra time to figure out how to do that. To figure out what words actually work to explain what we can see in our mind / thoughts. This is what the neurotypical world calls a processing delay.
The perfect example of this is something that happened today. I got some wheelchair luggage out. The frame that the bag sits on had come apart.
I took one look at it and immediately knew what needed to be done to fix it. But, I was pretty tired from everything else that I had been doing so left it on the kitchen bench to come back to.
Hubby came in and took a look at it, asking why it was there. I said it had come apart and needed to be screwed back together. The solution should be pretty simple if he was to look at it.
Silly me. There’s my autistic brain in action again. 😏
He looked at it, but only partly understood what needed to be done. I hadn’t left a message because I was tired, making that picture – words translation just a little bit more difficult again. I’m not sure I could have even put it into words there and then either. It just seemed to be so visually obvious to me. But it was absolutely not obvious to him. So we came to blows and had to walk in different directions for a bit.
You see, it takes so much more energy to fit ourselves into a neurotypical world. That is extra energy beeddd on top of normal energy levels required to get through the day.
Add onto that the 40% more energy I also need, being an amputee, and you can soon see why I fatigue so fast sometimes, in certain situations.
Hopefully that snippet makes a bit of sense, but please comment below if it does (or indeed, doesn’t.)
Thanks for reading
