Eyeballs

Here's a link: http://ballastexistenz.autistics.org/?p=110

It’s one reason why it’s generally good for people living in a pluralistic world to think consciously about the rules for eye contact we’ve learned, which seem so basic and so important to us, and the possibility that other people feel equally attached to different ones.

There are others. This post fascinates me partly because I was steered to it (by rozasharn.livejournal.com) right after checking out another link, to a post where Brad Hicks said among other things that “those of us on the autism spectrum are the ones who absolutely must repeat certain behaviors in a certain way and in a certain order every time.” That’s one major difference between their neurological wiring and my “more typical,” dyslexic wiring: if I repeat behaviors in a certain way and in a certain order every time, my dyslexic brain starts throwing in mistakes just to fend off the boredom. I think this insight does a lot to explain why, despite benign intentions, I don’t relate well to autistic people; just as, being an ear person, I don’t relate well to deaf people. It’s a kind of disability on my part, not theirs. Don’t ask me to work with them, anyway.

My astigmatism gave me a different experience with heavy eye contact as a means of communication. I don’t have a need to repeat things in a certain precise way, so I’m not thrown off balance by the mobility of eyeballs.

I can stare into people’s eyes. On a date I’ve even been known to find it romantic to stare into the right pair of eyes.

That may be one reason why I’ve felt more often punished than rewarded for staring at people’s eyes long enough that I actually see the eyes.

When other people have presumably felt that they’ve “made eye contact” with me, they may depend on this: While they were forming their first emotional reaction to my eyeballs (“just staring, no reaction”) I wasn’t seeing even the color of their eyes. During those seconds my eyes were focussed at a different distance. I was looking in the direction of their faces and seeing a blurry blob of face-color. By the time I was actually seeing details like eyeballs their eyes were usually reflecting a hostile judgment based on the fact that they'd pulled their faces into some sort of "expression" that I didn't see. 

Astigmatism isn't going away, so if you have good vision when you take time to focus your eyes, your goal becomes avoiding live conversation with eye thinkers.

Except if they were young men. Young women’s bodies do a certain amount of communicating with eye thinkers for us. What young men picked up, and still do, from my body shape alone, was “BODY!!!!!!!!”. If I added the prolonged eye contact I need to see the eyes, on top of that, what their eyes were reflecting would probably be “SHE WANTS MY BODY TOO!!!!!!!! WHEN? WHERE?” I didn’t, so why bother with that? Of course in some cases other complications could make it more like “EVIL FOREIGN SLUT IS TRYING TO SEDUCE ME!” I didn’t need that, either. 

Fortunately, when the reptilian brain of the weaker sex is overwhelmed by the concept of "BODY!!!!!", the message it picks up from lack of eye contact is "She doesn't want my body...yet. MUST TRY TO MAKE A FAVORABLE IMPRESSION!!!" As a young single woman I generally got along very well with men. Then as a married woman I let my husband deal with them. Now I just try to identify and avoid talking to the eye thinkers, the same way I do with women.

I believe my having learned to minimize eye contact (and go through life without knowing what color most of my acquaintances’ eyes are) may have saved my life. My Indian adoptive brother had clued me in that in Muslim countries holding eye contact and smiling at someone of the opposite sex is likely to be understood in what most Americans would call the wrong way. I advertised odd jobs and would work anywhere. One evening I did some typing for a student from Iran. He was polite; I might have been his aunt. At twenty-four I was not yet an aunt and wasn't used to being treated like one, but I liked it. He paid cash. I left his apartment complex with a favorable impression of him. On the way home another young man grabbed my arm. I made a scene; flashing blue lights appeared; the young man grabbed my bag and fled. Police returned the bag, minus the cash, early the next morning. Later a police officer called to suggest that I might want to watch the evening news. Apparently an Iranian living at the polite student's address had been identified as the serial murderer police had been hunting down for two years. (The student had mentioned a roommate...) The murderer had arranged for women who advertised jobs to do some work at his flat, paid the ones he regarded as honest workers, and left the remains of the ones he considered slutty in black plastic bags near dumpsters.

So I’ve been glad that, in my family when I was growing up, eye contact was optional. Mother was the one from whom I inherited my astigmatism. Dad didn’t have it, but when we children picked up “Look me in the eye and say that” routines from school his comment was, “Brutus looked Caesar in the eye and killed him. Don’t ever think you can trust people just because they look you in the eye.” And at school I read about one of the studies that showed that some people did better at spotting some kinds of lies in phone conversation than in face-to-face conversation. As an ear thinker I’ve always felt that more can be said, and accurately interpreted, without the distraction of eye contact.

So, whatever eye thinkers may think about me, they don’t want to be my friends. It’s their decision but I can’t say I’ve ever noticed any loss.

You’d think I’d do well with autistic people since I don’t distract them with EYEBALLS EYEBALLS EYEBALLS, but they distract me and I distract them in other little ways that may or may not ever have been described at an Aspie blog, like my dyslexic brain’s resistance to doing things exactly the same way.

It never would have occurred to me that images of eyeballs flattened out in pictures would distract anyone, and yet, sometimes, I do consciously withhold eye contact when I can see the blur that is a face moving in a way that suggests it’s pushing for more eye contact. Usually I do that on a street, with someone I either don’t recognize or don’t want to talk to, or in a store where an employee is trying to chatter inappropriately, in order to communicate one thing I can communicate efficiently to most eye thinkers: “I don’t want to talk to you.” And if the person is brazen enough to demand eye contact in so many words, I do find that distracting, though in a more conscious way. The person is clearly being disrespectful and rude, refusing to heed a polite message. A stronger, harsher rejection is necessary!

If goaded enough I’ll speak to the person--withholding eye contact while speaking, just to make the person uncomfortable. People who do this will not enjoy what I have to say to them. What they’ve given me was verbal abuse. So is what they’re likely to get in return.

I believe it would be as wrong to reward obnoxious, pushy behavior  as it would be to tell a lie. This is not a neurological reflex, nor is it an emotion. It is a moral belief. The very kindest thing to say to inappropriate yapping is “Shut up.” If any more noise comes out of the yap-hole, whatever response we make to that noise should be increasingly punitive. Extroverts need to be trained that, if they’re allowed to speak to people who didn’t even make eye contact with them,  they must expect a rebuke. There will be no sale, no smile, no favorable attention.

Occasionally when I’m willing to make conversation with someone who has not demonstrated good (introvert) communication skills (which are based on showing respect for self and others and proving that you’re not a pushy pest), person has made some sort of pushy pest noises like “Look at me! I don’t know what you’re thinking!” The answer to which, of course, ought to be pounded into all eye thinkers in kindergarten: “When you are looking at people, you do not know what they’re thinking. You may imagine that you know, but usually you don’t. You have to know someone very well to guess.” 

I had a teacher (fifth grade history; I liked her) who did teach us that. “Everybody look at my face and try and guess what I’m thinking,” and she waited while all thirty of us guessed, and finally said, “Dale came the closest, guessing ‘Thank Goodness It’s Friday.’ I was thinking about what I’m going to do over the weekend.” It was so painless and so instructive. Every teacher should be doing that. You cannot accurately "read the face" of a person you don't know very well. You can get a very general impression of person's physical state of tension or relaxation from the face, and if you stare long enough you are likely to get an accurate impression that person doesn't like you, but in order to communicate you have to stop staring and listen to what the person says.

The misunderstandings produced by an eye-locked conversation might be harmless or even funny. The person might want to flirt, which might even be fun, especially if it’s a stranger on a train (just make sure the person does not follow you after you leave the train). But the useful conversation is over at least until you’ve taken the time to demonstrate to the person how per eyeballs are filling per head with misunderstandings.

I might say, “Oh, you’re one of those people, are you? Very well. Look at me. What am I thinking?...Wrong. I was consciously thinking about spotted horses’ tails. (Why spotted horses’ tails? Because somebody once recommended, if you want to stop thinking about something else, trying to remember whether the last spotted horse you saw had a white or colored tail.) Would you like to try again?...Wrong. I was thinking about what you get when you divide three hundred and forty-five by seven. (Why those numbers? Because I got tired of horses’ tails.)”

Then again, the older I get, the less time I have to waste on such silliness and the more I incline to think that people’s parents and teachers ought to have demonstrated this to them already. So I’m more likely to say, “Oh, so you don’t listen to what people say—just look at them and guess for yourself, right? Make up the whole conversation inside your head? Very well. This conversation is over." I might say it nonverbally: "You may look at the back of this newspaper.”

Usually this kind of thing can be said nonverbally, in real life. 

These neurotypical responses might work for people who have autism and don’t want to talk about it, too. Of course they don't win friends. My experience has been that people who "do most of their communicating with their eyes" aren't friends, anyway. 

Will simply accepting that their friends are going to be at least strong ear or hand thinkers, if not visually impaired, serve autistic people as well as it serves ear thinkers? I don’t know; the blogger doesn’t say. Maybe someone Out There has had an opportunity to study this by now.

But it’s interesting to see firsthand, at that blog, what a completely different mental process might be going on for an “Aspie” who’s learned to discourage visual miscommunication in the same way that works for ear thinkers. The piece of communication that works is so similar, while the mental activity behind it is so different! That, by itself, ought to help discourage eyeballers from relying on visual miscommunication.