Reflections on autistic self-erasure and the strange discomfort of inclusion

Shane Conroy

2 hours ago

I had travelled to Bali alone, on assignment for a glossy travel magazine. My job was to spend several days at a luxury resort, experience its facilities and produce a suitably enthusiastic account of the experience.

It was one of the great privileges of working as a travel journalist. My accommodation, meals and entertainment were provided, and I was being paid to enjoy a holiday that other people would spend considerable amounts of money on.

The resort was a sprawling collection of swimming pools, restaurants and manicured tropical gardens, designed to provide guests with an uninterrupted succession of pleasurable experiences. There were organised pool games, group activities, enthusiastic entertainment coordinators and a nightly disco where holidaymakers danced and drank sweet cocktails from sticky plastic cups.

The staff were relentlessly cheerful and approached every interaction with the apparent conviction that there was nothing more important than ensuring their guests were having the time of their lives.

I found the whole thing exhausting.

My first mistake, apparently, was arriving alone. I was perfectly happy with the arrangement. Travelling by myself was one of the things I enjoyed most about my work. I could follow my own interests, explore unfamiliar places and spend long periods in the comfortable company of my own thoughts.

But the resort staff seemed to regard my solitude as a problem that required urgent attention. One young employee, a cheerful fellow called Brad, took a particular interest in my welfare. Whether through personal concern or professional obligation, he appeared to have appointed himself responsible for ensuring I was never left alone for very long.

Each morning, I would find a quiet table at breakfast, order something to eat and settle down with a newspaper. This was precisely how I liked to begin the day. I could enjoy my breakfast, read about what was happening in the world and spend an hour without having to talk to anybody.

But whenever Brad spotted me sitting alone, he would make his way over, pull up a chair and begin chatting. He wanted to know how I was enjoying the resort, what I had planned for the day and whether I might be interested in joining one of the organised activities. He was friendly, attentive and apparently determined to rescue me from the misery of my own company.

I understood that he was being kind. He saw me sitting alone and assumed that companionship would improve my experience. What he couldn’t have known was that I had been thoroughly enjoying myself until he arrived.

Nevertheless, I would put down my newspaper, smile and engage in conversation. I asked questions, expressed interest in his answers and displayed appropriate enthusiasm. Outwardly, I was a perfectly agreeable guest enjoying a pleasant conversation with a friendly young man.

Internally, I wanted him to fuck off and let me eat my breakfast in peace.

The discrepancy between those two states is something I’m trying to understand. It wasn’t that I disliked Brad. I recognised his kindness and appreciated the effort he was making. I didn’t want him to think I was unfriendly or ungrateful, and I certainly didn’t want to hurt his feelings.

So I continued making small talk, despite finding the experience uncomfortable and exhausting. There was something absurd about the arrangement. I was a guest at a resort whose employees were professionally committed to ensuring my happiness, yet somehow I’d taken on responsibility for protecting one of those employees from the discomfort of discovering that I preferred to eat breakfast alone.

I was making myself uncomfortable to prevent somebody else from feeling uncomfortable. And although Brad was doing nothing wrong, I began to dread seeing him approaching.

So I decided to escape.

I left the resort and headed into Denpasar, determined to explore something of Bali beyond the immaculate gardens and organised entertainment.

Denpasar, by contrast to the curated calm of the gated resort district, was chaotic. It’s the kind of place where throngs of haphazardly interweaving traffic follow no discernible road rules, and people are too locked into their own daily struggle to pay any attention to a passing outsider.

By the end of the afternoon, I found myself following a group of men I understood to be motorcycle thieves through a dark labyrinth of workshops and illicit trading spaces in the city’s black market.

Stolen motorbikes were being dismantled and sold off as parts, worn tyre threads were being recarved by hand with sharp tools, and an unfamiliar world of illegal commerce unfolded around me. I had little understanding of what was happening and no idea where my curiosity might lead.

It was chaotic, noisy and unsettling. Yet I felt remarkably comfortable. Nobody knew who I was or cared whether I was enjoying myself. There were no organised activities, no enthusiastic invitations to participate and nobody making a determined effort to ensure I felt included.

I could observe what was happening, follow whatever captured my interest and engage with people when I wanted to. For a few hours, I was free of the pressure to belong that had made my supposedly relaxing resort stay so exhausting.

At the resort, I was surrounded by people making every effort to welcome me, yet I felt increasingly uncomfortable and desperate to escape. At the black market, I was a complete outsider, moving through an unfamiliar world with no established place in it, yet I felt entirely at ease.

I had escaped the discomfort of belonging by going somewhere I clearly didn’t belong.

I’ve since come to recognise something fundamental about my experience in that afternoon. Throughout my life, I’ve often felt painfully aware of my differences, and the experience of being excluded can awaken a deep and familiar sense of not quite having a place in the world.

Yet when people make an enthusiastic effort to include me, I frequently experience an immediate and almost instinctive resistance. Sometimes that resistance feels like irritation. Occasionally, it approaches anger.

It’s a contradiction that has troubled me for years. I want to belong, yet I resist being included. I feel hurt when I’m excluded, but often exclude myself. For a long time, I assumed this was simply a consequence of being more comfortable alone. But I think there’s something more complicated happening.

I’ve spent most of my life understanding, at some level, that I’m different from other people. Long before I knew I was on the autism spectrum, I was aware that many of my natural behaviours and responses didn’t seem to align with what others expected.

I don’t always smile at the appropriate moments, make comfortable eye contact, or reflect enthusiasm and excitement in the ways people anticipate. My silences can be mistaken for disinterest. My facial expressions don’t necessarily communicate what I am feeling. I can get so absorbed in a task that I’ll forget to eat, drink, and interact with others for extended periods of time.

These differences weren’t necessarily problems in themselves, but I gradually learned that they could make other people uncomfortable. And somewhere along the way, I came to understand that managing this discomfort was my responsibility.

If my lack of eye contact made somebody feel disconnected from me, I needed to make more eye contact. If my silence was interpreted as moody, I needed to speak more. If my face didn’t reflect the enthusiasm somebody else was feeling, I needed to arrange it into an expression that did.

Over time, these adjustments became so deeply ingrained that I barely noticed making them. And even today, in social situations, I continually monitor my expressions, body language and responses. I’m conscious of whether I’m smiling enough, making appropriate eye contact, speaking too much or too little, or failing to demonstrate sufficient excitement.

I’ve come to recognise this as a form of self-erasure. My needs and preferences haven’t disappeared; I’ve simply learned to put them aside whenever they might make somebody else uncomfortable.

The effort isn’t simply about fitting in or avoiding rejection. It’s also about a deeply conditioned sense of responsibility for other people’s emotional experiences.

I don’t want somebody to feel awkward because I’m not making eye contact. I don’t want them to feel rejected because I prefer solitude. I don’t want them to mistake my silence for unhappiness or my lack of visible enthusiasm for a lack of joy or connectedness.

So I try to take responsibility for preventing those misunderstandings. And the more I do it, the less attention I can give to my own experience. During a conversation, I can become so preoccupied with monitoring how I’m behaving that I feel detached from the interaction itself. I’m simultaneously participating and observing myself participate, continually assessing whether I’m meeting expectations that other people may not even be consciously imposing.

It’s an exhausting way to engage with the world, and it creates a profound contradiction. The behaviours I’ve developed to help me belong can prevent me from experiencing the very connection they’re intended to secure.

I might appear relaxed, interested and socially engaged while internally I’m preoccupied with the effort of maintaining that appearance. Other people may enjoy my company, but I struggle to feel present in it myself.

The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre wrote about how being observed can make us suddenly self-conscious, aware of ourselves as an object in somebody else’s world.

I often live in that condition. It’s as if there’s always a version of Brad sitting at the table with me, meaning well, expecting me to engage. And in response, there’s a version of me who immediately begins adjusting how I’m sitting, what my face is doing, whether I’m talking too much or too little, whether I’m giving the right signals.

For me, belonging would mean being allowed to set that work down. It would be the relief of not constantly checking myself against somebody else’s expectations.

When I went to Denpasar, I found a temporary version of that relief. Nobody expected anything from me, so I didn’t need to monitor myself. I could simply be present. But that’s not belonging. It’s refuge.

Yet when I find myself among people, I instinctively return to the behaviours I’ve spent a lifetime learning. I smile, make conversation and conceal the parts of myself that might make somebody uncomfortable. And when the effort becomes too much, I withdraw. Leaving brings immediate relief, but it also takes me away from the very sense of belonging I want.

Perhaps that’s what I still need to understand. How to remain among people without feeling obliged to become somebody else. How to trust that I might be accepted without first having to make myself acceptable.

For most of my life, the only way I’ve known how to stop performing has been to remove myself from other people’s company. What I haven’t yet discovered is how to put that performance down without walking away.

I know how to leave. I just don’t yet know how to stay.

https://themalcontent.substack.com/p/the-work-of-belonging

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5913904&forum_id=2#50196498)