Emma Talks about communication
Communicating
Throughout my life, communication has been a challenge. Very often I would find it difficult to make myself clear, or I would think I had made myself clear but then discover others hadn’t picked up on what I meant. I often felt that I communicated differently to most people and that communication was one of the many things that I think has made me stand out as ‘different’. Here’s how:
1. I don’t always understand what I’m being told, and I need very direct and clear instructions to feel ‘safe’. For instance, I have a lovely colleague who gives me a lift every week to something we lead together, but every week unless he tells me he’s picking me up, I ask or assume he isn’t. I was so thankful when he said last week, ‘Emma, just assume I’m giving you a lift every week’… I was grateful for the clarity!
2. Because I need such clarity personally, I anxiously seek to give clarity as much as possible. This often means I repeat instructions or requests to others, say it in different ways or use over pronounced (well-practiced) facial expressions and hand gestures. Another way I do this is by giving a very detailed back story or adding a lot of detail (which I was once told made me sound as if I was lying… which makes me even more anxious!).
3. I connect with people by finding something from my own experience. This, for many years, disturbed me because I started to believe I was ‘self-centered’, needing to make every story about me which made me feel horrible. I’ve heard so many neurodivergents say they have to do this too to connect with others. This is one way in which neurodivergent communication differs to that of a neurotypical.
4. I can’t always recall words fast enough due to delayed cognitive processing, which means verbally my vocabulary seems very limited; I often find myself relying on filler words, or using words like ‘thingy’, or ‘uming & arring’. Someone I occasionally work with gets frustrated with this and tries to fill in my blanks, doesn’t give me time to respond and then just assumes I’ve said whatever he believes I’ve said. (Grrrr - please don’t do this to your autistic friends and colleagues, our voices are worth listening to.)
5. When I’m tired or stressed I often lose the ability to speak in whole sentences or lose words and phrases. This usually happens at the end of long days and evening meetings, but I noticed it happened when I arrived at a summer festival this Summer, nervous and unsure about how we were going to camp, which I found very stressful. Stress and sensory overwhelm often cause it too.
6. I can’t always think what I want to say or how to respond there and then. In the same way, I can’t always recall a story or a sequence of events. This is why sometimes I have to say, ‘let me think about that’, because I need time to make sense of what happened in order to be able to verbalize it to others. This has caused me all manner of issues before with people who demand an answer, decision or response there and then, or want me to fill them in about what has happened. Sometimes I just have to go away, right it down, take time to process and remember the details, and the order something happened… and then I reply in email because it’s easier.
Phew! If you feel exhausted reading all that, imagine how I feel holding all that in my head. No wonder I feel so tired and on edge all the time. Perhaps part of my problem is that I’m in a professional, pastoral, role where communicating well with others is extra important.
No wonder communication has become somewhat of a ‘special interest’ for me and something I’ve learned and practiced and put an enormous amount of time into ‘perfecting’. For me, it’s not natural, it’s performative - it’s a learned skill which will always be a source of anxiety and struggle, but it’s this level of commitment to learning to communicate effectively which I believe makes my close colleagues tell me they experience me as an excellent communicator (which touches my heart, so thank you those people!).
This level of anxiety about communication is not unusual in autistic people, but perhaps some of the added pressure is because I am an ordained ‘Priest’. Practically, I always want to get things right for others – I want to understand and be understood, so I can help - but also because I believe that what I communicate to others should reflect something of the divine… and of how God relates to us as human beings. The God I know is one who longs to communicate with us because God longs for relationship with human beings.
And with us all; no-one left out, no-one ignored, no-one marginalized, no-one’s voice taken away and no-one thought strange or different.
But then perhaps I’m looking at this all wrong… as the Bishop of Birkenhead told me yesterday, you don’t need to change… just carry on being you.
And you know what, I will. Because by being me I communicate something to the world that is valuable and vital: that is, that there is more than one way of ‘being’, thinking, feeling, speaking, relating and communicating… and every way is important and valid in God’s eyes, including we who are autistic. And how do I know this?
Well, because God chose me.
