53. Information-management disorders
An AS needs a great deal of time to understand all kinds of external and social information, and in the midst of action it arrives very quickly, too quickly. In encounters, in town, on public transport, at work, at school. In neurotypical people, information processing is automatic. For the AS, everything is manual. Nothing is automatic; everything requires preparation.
As with an automatic car, all you have to do is press the accelerator and off it goes; the sensors in modern vehicles measure distance, make parking effortless and also spot pedestrians who surprise us as they cross. This is a description of the allistic person.
“And now the AS is the vintage manual car: everything has to be done by hand—the gearbox, the clutch, steering without power assistance and therefore very heavy, one mirror on the left instead of the three found in modern cars, and an engine that struggles to start.”
Understanding the social world proves to be a complex undertaking that sometimes draws on all my energy and abilities as an AS. Social information often arrives with a disconcerting intensity, too immediate, almost too intimate: the ability to detect a multitude of personal details turns out to be unsettling. For my part, I am naturally reserved and have little desire to dwell on all these elements. Yet make no mistake: most of us have the ability to read facial expressions, and far more besides, even if we instinctively choose to look away. Because deciphering a face is not simply a matter of grasping its features; it means exploring an entire universe, discovering a whole story. We are not impulsive beings, eager to sniff out every scrap of information that comes our way.