How I Focus — The Autistic Struggle

by Eric E. Cane

Much of my life has been subject to my needing to escape the sensory “abundance” I feel. While having a rich sensory experience can help build an internal world and fuel creative accuracy, there’s sometimes the bursting desire to run at top speed to get away from it all. To get away from the deep insistence of it.

In nature, there are breaks, very few straight lines and surfaces to rebound sound or ply the eyes with unchanging man-made glare and harshness. There’s an expanse with dendritic nooks and earthen crannies where I can slip into and disappear. Animals signaling their presence to other animals echo and reverberate naturally as opposed to the angular slap-rebound of metal doors closing, smelly cars screeching and roaring through any silence that might have been, people with varying intensities and insensitivity to those around them making their presence known regardless of what you are doing or trying to focus on.

Much has been talked about how some autistic people don’t pay attention or seem to have very diffuse interest in what another person is saying or are outright actively ignoring other people who are trying to talk to them.

If you have 5 rather large things (at a minimum) pressing into you like a pebble in your shoe — but all over your body and mind — and then someone’s voice rises out of that cacophony demanding even more of your attention, you have to gather what resources you have to give at least the minimum social response.

This is where an autistic person may stand out a bit. It seems that other humans tend to desire some kind of response from you indicating that you heard them and are actively willing to continue participating in engaging with them. Go figure :)

At this point, we then have to go through a catalog of appropriate reactionary facial expressions, body movements and other indicators for this particular scenario with this particular person in the particular environment in which we find ourselves. If we don’t know the person well, then we have already spent a lot of resources analyzing them — all the subtleties that even they might not be aware they are presenting.

And sometimes we get lost in the data, the minutia, and miss some really important cues (to them) and the conversation at hand.

It wouldn’t be that much of a problem, except that everyone is so very different in what they expect or require from you — and with what they are presenting. This is part of the fatigue we experience. Each person has all these natural nooks and crannies that we fall into analyzing or that are engaging us more than their words.

You have to remember that in addition to another person’s minutia, we have hitting us all the time an environmental insistence vying for attention. Sometimes, this is clawing at us and is louder or harsher than the person in front of us wanting to carry on some inferred, subtle-meaning minefield conversation.

So, how can we help tune in and focus?

It isn’t possible to throw a template on humanity and infer meaning from similar actions and the like — attempting to do this gets many of us in more trouble than we’d care to admit. The variables are just too many, and I’m not even referring to the surrounding environments of any social encounter. The latter just compounds what we have to deal with that the other person isn’t even aware to the degree many of us are.

Training the muscle of attention is one way to help, if for nothing other than trying to dim down the onslaught of competing stimuli hitting us.

The practice of working to deeply focus on, say, feeling the skin on the front of your face at the corner of your nose, how your left little toe feels in your shoe, how the shirt feels on your upper back at the corner of your armpit, how the breeze or wind currents flow over your neck, etc.

This type of exercise is also grounding. It can help you define where you end and the rest of the world begins. We sometimes lose ourselves in all that is around us. Grounding is important.

There are times when I’ve had conversations with people and have had to enact frequent, but quick checks of attention like that, so that I could focus better on someone’s speech and not be drawn away by the multitude of sensory data coming in from all angles.

Allistics (neurotypical individuals) may think that our looking at them is an indicator we are listening, but in truth, we may be deeply involved with how the inflection of each word they produce changes with how they are sitting or moving or how a person’s upper lip moves to each consonant or how the mild sheen of spittle gathers at the corner of their mouths while they speak.

You can see how we may get lost in what they are saying. If some people knew what actually is calling our attention when viewing their person, they may wish we didn’t look at them so insistently.

Seriously.

That’s why it’s often better for us to look away and de-focus or view something less interesting than all the data coming from someone speaking. This doesn’t help the other person think we are listening to them, but it truly does help us listen.

Maybe the more we let people know this, the more it will be understood that having us to look at another person doesn’t mean the same type of focus to us as it does to them.

Thank you for taking the time to read this. Please share it where you think it will do the most good, clap to let me know you like this type of writing, and comment if you have questions or want me to cover anything else.