Is discussing what it is like to be Autistic with Neurotypical people an exercise in futility?

I always struggle with finding a way to describe it to NTs in a way they can understand. It's difficult if you're "high functioning" because you can seem so capable at many things, but other things you have zero ability. Like, utterly zero ability.

I may be able to do my finances and raise a family and do consistently well at my job, but ask me to plan something and I can't, it's suddenly like this genius has turned into a two-year-old and is fumbling around trying to do the most basic of things that everyone else can do without even thinking about it. And, I can't learn how to do planning, I just simply don't have that part of the brain. But, when it comes to learning new stuff at work, I pick it up miles before everyone else and become the expert whilst they're still trying to understand the basic concepts.

I think the problem is that everyone views the world through their own filters. You might present the same information to two people but they will filter it based on their own feelings, thoughts, beliefs and experiences, and they'll end up with a different result of the information. Trying to explain not understanding social stuff to someone who has "social" as part of their filter does just seem impossible.

Also, there's kind of two parts to autism in terms of describing it to people: you have the "Social difficulty" aspect of it, which is something all people with autism have in common, but then you also have the "autistic traits", which is a bunch of behaviours we do, but not everyone does them, and we all do them differently. It's like there's a set of 200 traits and any given autistic person might have 12-56 of them. I, for example, don't really have any stims. I do have meltdowns but they may appear different to someone else with autism. I do have a poor reflective smile, but I do not pace. I have hypersensitive hearing, but aren't bothered if my clothes are particularly soft or not.

I would love to have a way of describing autism to an NT, which would work in most cases, and not make it sound like I'm just being lazy with people and can't be bothered to sugar-coat my words or "make an effort" with people.

There was a quote I found once, which is a great description:

"Many of the social problems with autism are because the person is trying to make sense of a society governed by largely implied, infinitely fluctuating rules." (Finding Asperger Syndrome in the Family: A Book of Answers by Clare Lawrence)

I don't have the rulebook, and it's constantly changing, and I don't see what the implications are. I'm blind to them, and it's not something I can learn to do because I don't have that part of the brain that does the processing.

With something like dyslexia, you can describe it in a way that they will understand; you can say the letters seem to move about on the page, and that it's such a struggle that by the time you get to the end of the sentence you've forgotten what the first part was. You can work at it to improve your skill level but you will always have dyslexia. And you can say this even to the people who just see you as "lazy", to show them that this isn't the case and that it is a real thing because they can imagine letters dancing. But when describing autism, I struggle to find how they will understand, especially when I'm very capable in other areas of life.

That's what I tried to bring out in the piece I wrote for our Behaviour Managers at work - so that they could distribute it to all staff.  I doubt, though, that it'll do much good.  Even some of the better and more understanding staff at work sometimes come out with things that make me think 'Hm... you just don't get it, do you.'

The fictional scenario I presented was of someone getting on the wrong flight and being taken to a foreign country they couldn't escape from.  They couldn't understand the language, the gestures people used, and elements of the culture.  They learned something one day - only to have their learning challenged the next day, etc.  I'm sure most people will look at it as an exaggeration.

That's what I tried to bring out in the piece I wrote for our Behaviour Managers at work - so that they could distribute it to all staff.  I doubt, though, that it'll do much good.  Even some of the better and more understanding staff at work sometimes come out with things that make me think 'Hm... you just don't get it, do you.'

The fictional scenario I presented was of someone getting on the wrong flight and being taken to a foreign country they couldn't escape from.  They couldn't understand the language, the gestures people used, and elements of the culture.  They learned something one day - only to have their learning challenged the next day, etc.  I'm sure most people will look at it as an exaggeration.

The piece is here in case anyone hasn't read it and is interested...

Aspie Life!

That Tom is an analogy I found to help greatly, I paint a picture for them, describe an individual, each specific may be autistic in its description, once I have given every  specific pointer I ask, does that sound like they are autistic..?

obviously it is they reply,,,, I then say NO the person I just described that couldn’t socially integrate, had no idea of social etiquette, struggled with the tastes of food,  no one understood  why at specific times when certain things Had to happen for that person no one quite knew why, ( repetitive stimming type behaviour)

It was in fact a person from deepest Africa, dropped into the middle of a large city, had never seen many of the things everyone took for granted, needed to pray several times a day at specific set times, had never tasted the food that was around  them, couldn’t understand the language, so basically an alien, no matter how hard they tried they couldn’t fit in, the clothes they had been given were restrictive, itchy, only a light single piece of linen was known to them, buttons, labels, man made fibres, all to much for the senses to deal with,