Those Blurry People
Autistic alienation in a reopening world.
Autistic alienation in a reopening world.
I’m sitting on a crate in a big warehouse filled with bodies, and I can’t seem to process anyone’s face.
My mask is pulled up high on my nose, with my glasses perched over the seam of the fabric, blocking the cloud of my breath. It’s the middle of the day, the very start of the film festival, and the warehouse is flooded with light from second-story windows. People are moving about slowly, grabbing complementary beers, and moseying up to one another to exchange waves and astonished, gosh-I-haven’t-seen-you-in-forever hugs. I can trace the outlines but I can’t see the details, can’t bring any of the shadowy figures into focus.
It’s the first indoor, in-person performance my boyfriend’s theater company has gotten to hold since the pandemic began, and I know the room is full of people I’m familiar with. I know it. Coworkers of his, former students who have messaged me on Instagram, friends of his who have become friends of mine. I could squint through the crowd and spot a few halfway familiar eye sockets hovering over their own cloth protectors. I could. But I can’t. I should be able to, it’s a thing everybody can do, and I need to learn how, but I can’t, so I don’t.
I’m overwhelmed by the chaos of movement, the emotional torrent of other faces and bodies recognizing one another. I can’t tell when somebody recognizes me. It’s hard to anticipate who I will see and when, or to conjure how somebody’s real-life, masked visage differs from their social media face. It’s impossible to tell when somebody actually wants me to walk up to them, to start a conversation, and when they’re giving off every nonverbal cue imaginable that they hate my guts. In situations like these, every neutral signal reads as a negative one to me, a barbed warning to keep away. So I do.
I have a social algorithm that serves me well in small groups and one-on-one conversations. I can be charming and emotionally present, with eye contact that makes a person feel seen, even if it lingers a little too long. I can pull life details that I’ve gathered from social media out of my memory, and ask questions that feel carefully considered, because they have been. I can prepare for small-scale interactions, walk down different conversational pathways in my mind before the meetup begins.
But it’s so hard to run that algorithm when there’s this many variables. I don’t know how to behave under the light of so many eyes. So I’m frozen. And I stay sitting on a crate, intermittently looking at my phone and then gazing back up, into the morass of meaningless social data, staring at people but unable to see a thing.
…
I’m an Autistic person, but I didn’t find that out until I was in my late twenties. Before then, I just thought I was an antisocial, angry freak. My eyesight was perfectly fine but I could never recognize people when I was out in public. When friends called me up with impromptu invitations, I bristled and panicked, and looked for a reason to cancel. Laughter and screeches of joy made me enraged and desperate to escape. From all of this, I determined that I must be an evil person, fundamentally unlovable, and doomed to be uncomfortable around anyone but myself.
I didn’t want people to know the horrible truth about me, of course, so when I went out in the world, I wore various masks. There was the open, kind of vacant gaze of friendly receptivity. There was the screwed-together, pissed-off expression of the grumpy goth who wanted to be left alone. There was the head-lost-in-a-book daydreamer who didn’t see you coming, but is so glad you came and sat down by their side. I dispatched each of these as needed, morphing who I was as the situation required.
I mastered conversation by writing fiction and watching movies. I developed an air of breezy confidence while working retail, and competing on the debate team. Over time I became adept at feigning social comprehension through a mix of memorized scripts, rehearsed imitations, and carefully timed withdrawals.
That last bit was crucial. Withdrawal was my last resort, my savior when my other tricks failed me, or my energy to perform them ran out. Presenting as non-Autistic was exhausting. In large rooms filled with loud people there was just too much information to filter through and too many contingencies to account for. Plus everything was so noisy and bright. And all those eyes. So many eyes, all primed and ready to capture me in a moment of awkwardness, a shattering of kayfabe that might reveal I was actually the cruel and unlovable child I always knew myself deep down to be.
It was all too much to handle. So whenever a social event wore me out or started going sideways, I just disappeared. I ran away to a dark corner, fled from the space, or else I just retreated into the fog of my head.
…
There’s this memory that has never left me, a time when the difference between my social performance and social reality were thrown in the sharpest possible relief.
It happened during my senior year of high school, at a celebratory end-of-the-year dinner for the debate team. I was the graduating debate team captain, and it was my job to give my younger teammates a send-off in the form of a speech. I decided to write a living will of sorts, where I bequeathed to the underclassmen all my old binders, legal pads, pens, and staplers, each item paired with a piece of mocking advice.
“To Peter, I leave you the legal pad I used to take notes during competition,” I’d say, handing the item off with a serious mien. “Perhaps if you use it, you won’t forget what side you’re on during cross examination again.” Then Peter would go red in the face and laugh, and everyone would cackle at his expense, and I’d move on to the next subject of roasting.
I have to say, I absolutely killed this performance. Every single member of the debate team was given a moment in the spotlight, and an accurate yet not-too-brutal ribbing that brought my audience to their knees. Back then, my most frequently-worn mask was that of the sarcastic ball-buster, and it was a personality that I deployed quite effectively. My bitter sense of humor offered people a ready explanation for why I could be so distant and prickly, and a reason to like me despite that. This roast was really the zenith of that act.
When I was done with my speech, everyone stood up and applauded. For once I felt loveable, and like I belonged. And then the clapping ended. And the formal, pre-scheduled portion of the dinner came to a close. There were no more speeches, no awards to give out, and no structure. Just people moving about the restaurant freely, saying hello and mingling amongst themselves.
In this completely open and unstructured social environment, I could not feel more trapped. My peers broke off into little groups and chatted, baking in one another’s casual, friendly warmth. I stood at the edge of the room, completely petrified. Everyone liked me as a performer, but what good was I to them now? They transformed from an appreciative audience with clear-cut expectations to a haze of unrecognizable and menacing figures. I could see no love there. I had no idea what to do. So after a few moments of standing ineptly at the podium, alone and invisible, I went off to find my mom and begged her to take us home.
In the parking lot outside the restaurant I started crying. I had never felt more childish and inept. I’d done everything right, kept everyone entertained, but that wasn’t enough to make up for my inability to engage. The moment the act was done, everything went fuzzy. And instead of pushing myself through the inscrutable fog, I just ran away.
That was the last time I ever saw most of my teammates.
…
When I was in my late twenties, I found out I was Autistic. It was a profound moment of reckoning, and it recast all my old memories in a new light. Moments of inexplicable rage were actually meltdowns from social and sensory overload. My hatred of spontaneous hangouts was caused by an intense need for predictability and recharge time. I fled busy spaces because I was overwhelmed and my energy was depleted, not because I was evil. And all my false selves had been attempts at camouflaging my social and emotional struggles.
I started reading up on Autism and meeting other Autistic people. It was then that I became friends with Taylor, a teenager with Autism, a rare chromosomal syndrome, seizures, and intellectual disabilities. Unlike me, Taylor has never been able to present as anything but Autistic. He can’t speak (though he can type on an iPad), and he didn’t learn to read until he was about twelve. Taylor needs an aid at his side constantly, to help him eat, toilet, and tie his shoes. Though most people would presume Taylor is far less “competent” than a highly verbal person like me, he actually has far more insight into his Autism than I do. He’s never been alienated from that side of himself.
One day a few months ago, I was chatting online with Taylor. He told me he was feeling lonely and wished he had friends to play with. I asked if there were any nice kids at his day care center that he might want to invite on a play date.
“I don’t know if there are nice kids,” he told me. “There’s too many blurry people at day care so I go away into Taylor World.”
“What do you mean there’s too many blurry people?”
“There’s all these other kids and they move move move and make noise and they’re scary and I don’t like them and they go blurry,” Taylor explained. “And I go away into Taylor World and only my daddy and mama and my aide can come into Taylor World and visit me.”
I had heard Taylor talk about people being blurry before. Whenever he went to larger family gatherings, he’d talk about there being “blurry cousins” whom he didn’t like being around. I had assumed that when he described someone as “blurry,” it meant he was suffering from a seizure or that his eyesight was failing him. But now I understood that’s not what he meant. When there were too many people around, especially too many unfamiliar people, Taylor couldn’t handle processing all of them. So he disassociated and went away into his head — into “Taylor World.” And people got blurry. And he could only recognize a handful of safe folks, like his mom and his dad.
Oh shit, I thought. What Taylor was describing was precisely what happened to me in new places and at crowded events. I stopped making eye contact. I couldn’t will myself to approach people or start a conversation. Everything became a stultifying haze. That was why I couldn’t recognize faces when I was out in public. That was why I suddenly had trouble reading nonverbal cues at parties and shows. That’s why I always felt like a frozen computer when I was trapped in a large group. Though I looked less stereotypically Autistic, I was exactly like Taylor — and I’d been retreating into Devon World all my life, too.
…
The world is slowly reopening, with fits and starts and spikes to COVID case numbers, and I’m finding it harder than ever to relate to people. After a year and a half of lockdown, my social skills have gone rusty, and my will to fake normality has eroded to almost nothing. I no longer know how to make cheerful, chirpy small talk. There are only large things left to talk about. It’s harder than ever to recognize people. Their bodies have changed, and their hair has grown out, and half their faces are hidden behind cloth. Masks make audio hard for me to process. I can’t tell who is talking, and if they are talking to me. With all this stress and uncertainty and all my coping skills drained, I find people go blurry more and more often. Or perhaps I just notice the blurriness more, now that it has a name.
I don’t want to spend the rest of my life hiding from others. I’m sick to death of withdrawal, and I want my panicking mind to stop blinking reality away. The pandemic was deeply revealing to me; I was disgusted by how similar my pre-lockdown life was to my forcibly quarantined one. I was already spending most of my time locked away from society. Once I had no choice but to remain isolate, I decided it wasn’t how I wanted my life to be. I cannot hide away forever, a social mask obscuring the fact I’ve disappeared into my head.
So I keep going out, as often as I can, no matter how much anxiety it causes me. I mill around street festivals and buy tickets for outdoor concerts. I roll up to pub trivia every week and claim a table on the edge of the room. I ask friends to accompany me to movies in the park, to the beach, to the bathhouse. I force myself into the crowd and I stand there, unmoored and socially blinded by the blur. I press my fingernails into my palm and dig my feet in the grass and try to will myself back into the world. Some day I will be present. Some day this will feel easy and natural like it does for everyone else. I’ll be able to see people. And everyone will finally see me.