eye contact

Eye contact is the go-to example often used in autism discourse when talking about masking. Growing up, I was often told how important it is. As a kid, as a teenager, it didn't come naturally to me, and so easy it is to chalk it up to being nervous. There is a presumption that we all have to learn social skills and some learn faster than others. I learned to make eye contact, but to this day I'm always worrying about whether I'm making enough or too much, or where I'm supposed to be looking exactly.

If we don't even try, we look autistic. What if that's because we are autistic? It takes us much greater effort to do, but we do it anyhow, it to mask what we are.

As I've written about in myriad ways, I reject any solid notion of who or what we are. We are always changing, growing, dying, learning and forgetting. It's a mistake to think a label makes it any more immutable. We shouldn't be judging ourselves, and we should always strive to do better, regardless.

Eye contact isn't just this trivial thing people do. We are animals, our lives full of systems evolved to help us adapt and flourish. We use our superior cognitive abilities to blind ourselves to all that, reducing everything to arbitrary choices we make. Eye contact stimulates oxytocin, which produces feelings of trust and affinity. For autistics, that system may not work as it should, so eye contact doesn't do anything for us. We don't feel trust, we don't relate, whether we make eye contact or not.

What does this mean for those we interact with? Do we want their trust? Do we want them to relate to us? Do we want to try to overcome this obstacle to human connection, or do let our current circumstances define our entire lives?

Jenny was big on this idea of being who we are. We are all different kinds of flowers and that's ok. No pressure, no judgment. I believed in that, too. I stopped masking so much. I played Civilization V all day every day for over a year. I stopped making eye contact. Towards the end, she commented that she only ever sees my profile. I barely thought about it at the time.

I've grown a lot. I don't like calling it masking. I thought I was superior to everyone, but I had so much to learn. I still do. We can call autism a disability or a superpower, but no matter what we are or what we call it, weaknesses will be overcome and strengths will atrophy, depending on what we do with what we are.