I am neurodivergent. Probably. I have no official diagnosis, but it’s something I’ve slowly come to realize over the past few years. There are many reasons I never considered that I may be autistic, and I want to focus on one of them today. It’s the truism that autistic people can’t lie. They have to tell you the truth, no matter what.
I can lie like the proverbial rug. I can lie glibly and without blinking. I can lie and make you believe it’s the god’s honest truth. There are just many different factors that have to be met in order for me to do that. Or a combination of several of them, if not all.
1. If youu’re a stranger to me or someone I only see in passing, I will lie about all the little things that people consider small talk. An example. I hate the heat. And to me, anything over 70 is hot. I start getting grumpy at around 65 degrees, and if we go over 80, I will be a very unhappy person.
And yet, if someone like a cashier at the grocery store starts talking about how wonderful the weather is and it’s 90 and sunny, I’ll just nod and smile. “It sure is summer!” I’ll say without hesitation. I will never acutally say I’m happy for it to be hot, but I’ll give the impression that I agree.
In this case, it’s a very low-stakes situation with no consequence for lying. I’m not going to have a frank conversation with someone I’m so superficial with. There’s no point, and my brain is fine with this.
By the way, I understand that many autistic people find this difficult because they can’t fathom why they should lie about something so inconsequential. It can fuck them up in the workplace because they don’t understand that small talk is just a social lubricant to keep the wheels spinning easily.
I don’t give a shit about any of it, but I was forced at a very early age to learn how to do it. Not because of society, though that was a byproduct (that I learned how to be socially competent for the most part), but because I became my mother’s emotional support human when I was young (eleven or so).
As a result, I have become very adept at suppressing my own emotions, reactions, and inner workings. So much so, in fact, that I–well, let me back that up a bit.
Ever since I was a kid, I had no idea what I felt. Again, this was because I became my mother’s emotional support human at a young age, but it’s also because, I think, of my neurospiciness. This is a hard one to tease out because I was defeated by life by the time I was seven. I remember realizing that I would die one day and being both terrified by the idea and drawn to it.
I wanted to die. I was miserable, severely depressed, and felt like I did not belong in the world. I was overlooked because I was a compliant girl child who had learned her place (at the very bottom), and my brother had more outwardly noticeable issues that my mother had to deal with. Just my mother because my father abdicated all his parental duties except making money when I was very young.
My mother had very antiquated ideas about how children should act, and it was rigidly delineated by gender. Boys were allowed to be boisterous, to run around, and to shout. Actually, I should say my brother was in part because of his undiagnosed neurodivergency (he presented in a much more classic way), which was not something she realized. I can’t actually blame her for that because this was in the seventies, well before autism was a thing (I mean, it always existed, but it wasn’t recognized in the seventies), but that meant that 90% of her attention was on my brother. The 10% that was on me was for the sole purpose of her leaning on me for emotional support.
This is why it took so long for me to realize that I probably was autistic. I had so thoroughly tamped down my natural responses/impulses/feelings (or rather, had it thoroughly metaphorically beaten out of me), I could easily pass for a normie, albeit a weird one.
How does this tie back to lying?
2. I cannot lie about things that are important to me, but I am adept at finding a way to dance around it if need be. I have learned not to tell my mother anything that is truly important to me because she will inevitably make me feel bad about it and myself. I keep everything very superficial with her, and even things that seem deeper really aren’t.
3. I am weirded out by the things that society say are acceptable lies. Such as Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. Parents tell their kids never to lie and to be wary of strangers, then they break both these things in one fell swoop. I found out about Santa at a faairly young age (eight or so) , and I was puzzled by it ever since.
These plus things like not telling someone their dress makes them look fat are called white lies. Supposedly harmless lies. I don’t necessarily disagree in theory, but it was very confusing to me as a child/teen to figure out when it was ok to lie and when it wasn’t. It seemed very arbitrary to me, and I couldn’t see why I wasn’t supposed to lie in other situations.
Which brings me back to the point of this post–I have made my peace with lying when it feels right to me. Or when it doesn’t really matter. But then I’ll get tripped up over seemingly meaningless details where it would not matter if I was off by a bit (so not exactly a lie, but not the concrete truth, either).
This is the neurodivergency in me again. Getting stuck on having to get the little details right. “This happened last Thursday, I mean Wednesday. It was in the afternoon, or wait. Was it in the morning? Anyway, I went to the store, and I bought oranges. Or did I? Maybe that was the last time I went.” That’s just a sample script of the way my brain thinks. Even if I manage to keep most of it to myself, it’ll run through my brain as I’m talking.
I’m done for today, but I will revisit this tomorrow.