I was diagnosed with High-Functioning Autism last year.
I am 38 years old.
One thing I have always noticed about myself is that I don't have a sense of personal identity. The other day I read this is a symptom of Autism and that led me to research this some more since - despite all the research I have done - I never knew this was a symptom until now.
When I wake up in the morning - I have zero personality. I don't have an opinion or idea about anything. My brain is completely empty. It takes me hours and hours to "warm up". If I take in enough intellectual stimulation, I have something approaching a personality by the end of the day. But really it is a kind of collage made up of other people' opinions and my reaction to other people's opinions in the books, blogs and newspapers I have read.
There is no Prime Mover, so to speak.
It is said that we hate in others what we see in ourselves. I can relate to this when it comes to my younger brother. He shares a few autistic traits with me - but not anywhere near enough for a diagnosis.
One trait he shares is that he also has zero personality. However, he makes no real effort (in the way I do) to disguise this. He is what he is. He has no strong opinions on anything. He has a flat voice and is just a formless void that lacks any real identity. Because this is something that I dislike about myself - I honestly hate this trait of his. Even though we are otherwise good friends.
I don't have any strong opinions on anything either. But I sort of disguise that fact by creating a personality which is kind of eccentric.
My personality is shaped in two ways.
I adapt to the person I am talking to (I sort of play up to their "image" of me), and I often throw out controversial opinions so that I can wrestle control of the conversation so that the conversation is now about the weird set of opinions that I am trying to defend.
This makes it especially hard for me to form new friendships since I don't have an "image" to play up since the person I am speaking to does not know me. However, if I meet somebody new whilst in the presence of somebody else that I already know - then I can play up to the "image" that the person who knows me already has and transfer that on to the new person I am meeting for the first time. As such - I often find I get on very well with the partners of my close friends since I can adopt the same persona around them as I do around my close friend (since the close friend is likely to be present in any conversations I have with their partner).
Now - the reason I have gone down this rabbit hole is because I have come across an ingenious experiment that proves that people with autism lack a sense of personal identity. Of course - the conclusions of experiments such as the one I am about to mention can be argued with in any number of ways. But I want to put aside those philosophical arguments for now in order to focus on the results of the experiment.
I will link to the research below. But to quickly sum it up. The experiment got a bunch of sportspeople (who do not have autism) to imagine they were playing their favourite sport. They scanned their brains and saw which part of their brain lit up. They then got some non-autistic people to play a game against autistic people that involved money. It doesn't go into the exact details but it seems to be some kind of strategy game where you try and win the most money possible by bidding against your opponent. For instance - it could be something like that the amount of money is split evenly unless you bid more than your opponent. This means you will win more money on this round, but because you have broken the other person's trust you are more likely to lose on the next round when the game is repeated.
So, to sum up. The person with autism and the person without autism did equally well in terms of the amount of money they won. So, they "understood" the game. However - when they scanned the brain of the person with autism, the part of the brain that is related to self-identity did not light up. This part of the brain did light up in the non-autistic person who was the opponent. This part of the brain also lit up in the sportspeople mentioned earlier (their brains were scanned in the first place to try and identity where the "self-identity" part of the brain was likely to be located).
The reason areas of the brain light up is because the scanners can measure increased blood flow to those parts of the brain.
By coincidence - when I woke up this morning - I had to quickly rush straight out of my flat to visit a family friend who was visiting my parents. So - I got to experience the massive void that is my personality when I wake up and have yet had a chance to soak in information and inputs from others (from media, and so on). It was agony, and usually I organise my life better in order to prevent being trapped in such situations.
It was like I had woken from a coma. I just had nothing to contribute to the conversations around me. Not just because I had no personality (another way of saying "self-identity"), but because I had yet to spend the time creating a fake personality for the day ahead in the way that I usually would by spending a few hours by myself absorbing media before I head out into the world in order to interact with others. I cannot stress how important this need to re-create myself each day is. It is far more important to me than simply having breakfast or a cup of coffee to wake myself up. It is literally at the core of who I am. And if I am forced to leave the house without first taking the time to "create" a personality for the day I am left floundering like a fish out of water.
I should add that the reason I think people with autism are so kind, considerate and understanding is because they are without prejudice. But the real reason for this is because they have no self-identity. Therefore, the idea of hating another person on the basis of how they choose to live their life makes zero sense to us since in order to hate somebody you need to have a strong sense of your own identity in order that you can react negatively against the other person's core beliefs and actions.
In my own case - since I have no real personality - I often find myself adopting a kind of sub Jeremy Clarkson personality in which I make controversial remarks in a semi-ironic way so that the excitement generated by this acts as a kind of misdirection from the fact that I don't actually care about anything or actually have strong opinions about anything. Sadly, this sort of game is a dangerous one to play in the modern world of work and can easily catch you out when somebody who does not "understand" you is within earshot of a controversial remark you have made.
I know this is a long post. But I feel like I have gotten to the core of my own inability to relate to the world and others. Along with finally understanding the coping strategies that I use. As such I wanted to share the above with others to see if others share similar coping strategies as myself? For example, using controversial remarks as a way of manipulating conversations so that you can hide behind those tendentious remarks in order to hide the fact that actually you don't really have a genuine opinion about anything.
As you can imagine I was particularly pleased to discover the ingenious scientific experiment (mentioned above) that was able to cut to the core of these issues.
