It is said that autistic people focus too much on details and don’t see the big picture. I never thought about myself like that, but that didn’t really describe the experience from my perspective; better way to describe it would be: I want to focus on specifics instead of general information, even when it doesn’t make much sense.

I realised that recently during two chats; one was really weird so I won’t include it here but I can include a conversation I had with my psychiatric nurse around a week ago about some of my delusions that I won’t be mentioning here.

The nurse: I trust your judgement and you can be aware that you feel paranoid.

Me: During my last psychotic episode I knew I was psychotic but that was different because I believed my delusions. I don’t suppose I can have delusions and at the same time understand they are not true.

The nurse: Insight develops with experience.

Me: Do you mean the more delusional I get, the better?

Can you see what I did here? I went from general information to specific one. I was perfectly aware while typing that’s not what the nurse meant and yet, that’s how my brain interpreted it. I felt like I had no choice but to ask.

The nurse responded with: No, I mean you have gained insight already so can judge.

I didn’t comment any further. I didn’t know what else I can say.

Obviously the current advice is to be as specific as possible when speaking to autistic people, but then I already mentioned on the blog a few times that what people consider specific can still be misinterpreted by us.

Yesterday me and John talked briefly about all the food we bought on food festival and he wrote this:

I might use one of the curry kits too, I have to make a sauce with onions, garlic, ginger and water. It makes loads so it should be interesting and I might need more containers.

And I thought what kind of imprecise communication that is? And that isn’t how John normally communicates; he is always very precise with his choice of words, too precise at times I would say. And in here he said that curry will be interesting because there will be loads of it and because he needs more containers. He has plenty of containers already!

I kept thinking about it for a bit and it came to my mind that he’s hinting me to deliver him 4 containers. Why 4? Because onion, garlic, ginger and water, 4 things.

And that’s my thinking for you: looking for a hidden meanings where there isn’t any. Luckily I managed to convince myself to go from specific to general and I could then respond with ‘I can see you’re really looking forward to try this curry kit’. It was easy to do that in an email conversation but I’m not sure I could do that in a face to face chat, and even if I could, would that make my social interactions any easier? Would I not become robotic if I do that? And anyway, is that how people actually speak in real life – by constantly bringing the conversation from specific details to general? I really don’t understand.