Published on 12, July, 2020
I know this is pretty futile musing, although maybe some of the more neurologically typical people on here can help! (I shy away from using the term "NT's" because it feels a bit "them and us" to me).
I've found myself wondering, as I'm accepting, exploring and deepening my understanding of my own atypicalness & ASD diagnosis, about what it's like for others.
For every "aha!" moment I have about e.g. noisy restaurants, eye contact, lack of capability / impetus to maintain friendships, exhaustion in social situations, there is a corresponding "What's it like for others?" moment.
So for example, for typical people:
I can tell you even neurologically typical people struggle with most of those . As a NT person I don't really have any interest in what other people did on their holidays,I'm certainty not thrilled at the prospect of going out several evenings in a row and an constantly exhausted after social events with friends .There are no absolutes for NT people because as the old saying goes we are all on the spectrum.
This... I'm done with Christmas Cards - I think your premise that NTs are 'opposite' to us NAs is flawed and as NAS64857 says, some NTs don't enjoy the stuff you list any more than we do.
FWIW, my musings...
I think you're ascribing too much difference to NTs... they're more like us than you think - just 'diluted' and more their interests tend to be 'odd' from our perspective...
Interesting thoughts - thanks. Yes I could well be starting off from a false assumption, resulting from me realising that I'm atypical and then wondering what typical feels like.
My bullet list did get progressively more tenuous as I struggled to come up with more examples :-). But what really sticks with me is eye contact; I get nothing from it and find it uncomfortable, whereas as far as I know many/most(?) NT people get something positive from it that is enough to draw them *to* it - so genuinely opposite.
I know this all varies across personality types too......
Eye contact varies wildly based on culture though...
Western/European = sign of confidence/engagement & is deemed 'necessary'
East Asian e.g. Japanese = disrespectul for someone of 'lesser rank' to make eye contact with a superior & expected that sustained eye-contact is not made
Middle-Eastern = eye contact between sexes is 'forbidden' in many countries hence the extreme form of the Burqa which has mesh across they eyeholes
African/Latin American = can be seen as a 'challenge' to someone's authority
Also take sub-sets e.g. I bet in a prison setting most NTs would avoid making eye contact unless they wanted to challenge someone
Think of it as the same as a firm (rather than limp) handshake as a way of projecting confidence or like a subtle *ahem* to catch someone's attention... or like a shared whisper or a passed note of shared understanding... it's *just* a type of non-verbal communication... almost like if you knew sign-language you could say something with your hands without speaking or modify what you said with a hand signal...
I think the wider world really needs to get over its obsession with eye-contact (or lack thereof) and what it 'means'...
As an experiment, next time you see someone trying to join a queue of traffic observe the forcible resistance to making eye contact the people already in the queuing cars make to the person trying to join & the desperation of the joiner trying to 'connect' through their eyes!