Published on 12, July, 2020
For essentially my whole life I've hated doing things where people can see me doing them. I noticed it a lot during school, because I would hate doing work around my peers. The hating doing work where people can see me thing particularly came to light in sixth form, where during "study periods" I would never study because I felt like I was being watched, and it made me super uncomfortable. If I ever needed to get any work done I had to go to the isolated study booths in the library where people couldn't see me, but there was only a few so they often weren't available. I think this is part of why I underperformed in my a-levels.
Now that I'm out of school, I notice more that it manifests in literally everything else I do. I hate cleaning when people are at home, I can't cook when people are in the kitchen, it took me months to be able to shower when people are home because I can hear the shower from anywhere in the house and therefore people will know I'm showering, which my brain doesn't like. I also do everything super quietly all the time, even stuff like opening the fridge. I just don't like that people can see or know what I'm doing ever, and I feel as though maybe it comes from being told I'm doing things "the wrong way" so much growing up. Or maybe it's just an autistic thing. Hence this post. Does anyone else feel similarly? I feel like this isn't something I see being talked about a lot, and so I'm curious as to whether it's the autism or just me being "weird" in some other way.
I have that a little (not to the extent that you do).
My first job was as a news reporter, in a very large newsroom, with the news desk (the people who direct reporters) on a raised dias where they could see everyone.
It was before computers and you would type stories on 'copy paper' - short sheets which only took a few paragraphs.
If you were writing something deadline-critical, a 'copy boy' (often in his 60s or 70s) would literally rip completed sheets from your typewiter and carry them over to the news desk one by one (you had a carbon copy to keep track of what you were writing).
Sometimes, on a big story, assistant news editors, deputy editors, and occasionally even the editor would gather behind you and watch over your shoulder, quite often offering critical comments as you wrote (that only happened when I graduated to bigger stories much later).
I was fine writing news stories under horrendous pressures of time - didn't worry me at all. But having people watching over me whilst doing it was incredibly difficult. I was decades away from knowing I was autistic so I just told myself not to be stupid and get on with it.
If you have these issues to an acute level that wouldn't work, but for me it's just a deep discomfort and though I loathed it I could just about deal with it, so I kind of scraped through (I left journalism before my 30s and never had that issue again).
After the first edition deadline passed I used to go to a little sort of private place outside the building and stand in the dark night air breathing deeply for 20 minutes to get my head back.
This is a very interesting story, and sounds like it would have been a very stressful job - especially while being watched so closely. I know I definitely wouldn't be able to handle that, so props to you for getting through it How old were you when you realised you were likely autistic, if you don't mind me asking?