A burning need to communicate

If you have something people desperately need to know about, you probably tell them, don’t you? It’s a natural human instinct to want to share news, good or bad, as well as gossip and information. But your desire and need to communicate doesn’t necessarily result in you getting your message across. This is really obvious among many of we autistics – we get passionate about something and dump all the information we have about it into the ear of the nearest person who can be made to listen. Supposing I, as an autistic person, feel the need to tell you about medieval English history. (This may happen.) I am quite capable of downloading a hour’s worth of information about the Kings and Queens of England from William the Conqueror to Richard III into your unwilling ear but unless you’re listening carefully, or happen to be a history-fan yourself, you probably won’t take much of it in. My passion to communicate doesn’t equal a convincing exercise in communications.

My Christian year

I’ve been blogging since August but I’ve also managed a sequence of blogs bouncing off seasonal Christian themes running from Advent at the start of December 2022 to Pentecost 2023 last week and now it’s Trinity Sunday which in my mind at least is the last of the big hoo-hah Sundays of the Christian year. We now go into endless “Sundays after Trinity” until we get into the big Remembrance events of November and start all over again with Advent.

A burning need to communicate

If you have something people desperately need to know about, you probably tell them, don’t you? It’s a natural human instinct to want to share news, good or bad, as well as gossip and information. But your desire and need to communicate doesn’t necessarily result in you getting your message across. This is really obvious among many of we autistics – we get passionate about something and dump all the information we have about it into the ear of the nearest person who can be made to listen. Supposing I, as an autistic person, feel the need to tell you about medieval English history. (This may happen.) I am quite capable of downloading a hour’s worth of information about the Kings and Queens of England from William the Conqueror to Richard III into your unwilling ear but unless you’re listening carefully, or happen to be a history-fan yourself, you probably won’t take much of it in. My passion to communicate doesn’t equal a convincing exercise in communications.

What do you expect to see?

Sometimes it not only matters what’s said (or seen) but the context and how it’s framed. Today is the Sunday between Ascension (when Jesus went up into heaven) and Pentecost (when the Holy Spirit came down from heaven to the disciples). I’m crow-barring in here the idea that where things and people are makes a huge difference. Since Jesus and the Holy Spirit are both parts of the three-part God (doctrine of the Trinity here if you’re feeling strong enough) it shouldn’t make much difference which was on earth, should it? This time of the Christian year says that it really did. Jesus the Son of God ascended into heaven, but the Holy Spirit came down and inspired a group of people who had been Jesus’ followers to form the world-wide Church.

A life of difficulty

Have you heard the analogy that neurotypical people have one brain operating system and neurodifferent people another? If I find life difficult, it’s because I’m trying to run Mac programmes on an Apple, or vice versa. There’s a lot in that but it might seem to imply that there are only two types of people whereas of course we’re all different, even while we have some characteristics in common. So I like another analogy I came across this week – that every human life is like a computer game and most people have the “brain type” setting on “easy”, whereas I have and other autistics have it set on “difficult”. If you think about that you can see how transformative it might be if you’ve lived all your life feeling you were a bit of a failure suddenly to discover that you’ve had things much harder than everyone else, so if you failed relative to them, that was only to be expected.