Navigating without a road map

[maycontainthunder]

Being autistic feels like you're an operating system without everything needed to function installed. Somehow you have to build these programs as life crawls along.

People give you instructions but the pieces of software these need aren't there so the install fails.

Teachers back when I was at school would give me a handful of disjointed pieces and expect me to get from point A to B. I look down and see a yawning chasm too big to jump. Everyone else manages it just fine and somehow have made something that helps them with those disjointed pieces.

It feels like I'm an illiterate given a set of written instructions. Unfathomable, unsolvable... impossible.

Many model kit manufacturers create horrible instructions that make sense to them. They miss the crucial piece that is needed; to put a hand on the builder's shoulder 'it goes together like this' and show them.

Anyone who has ever built a Tamiya kit will understand what I mean. Instructions should create a 3D image that you can see. This is what Tamiya are really good at doing. Everything aligned in a logical step-by-step process that can be followed. This is exactly how many Autistic minds work.

In life the instructions seldom reach 2D.

I, like many others, have been left intellectually stunted because those teachers couldn't form that vital third dimension I needed. Without this failure is always guaranteed at least in my case.

 

[Outdated]

It feels like I'm an illiterate given a set of written instructions. Unfathomable, unsolvable... impossible.

I had the opposite problem, I understood written instructions far more quickly and easily than I understood my teachers, who I mostly found to be poorly educated and would give instructions that were misleading if not outright wrong.

It's like they were trying to teach me how to do things on a cheap Android tablet when I'm running an advanced desktop PC with Linux. They tried to teach me how to do things in a slow and clunky and inefficient way and tried to instill me with their own biases and fears, even telling outright lies to try and achieve that end.

To me proof of this laid in the way that they had to keep repeating the same lessons over and over again and very few kids seemed to learn anything from them, if the kids had learned there'd be no need to keep repeating the same lessons over and over ad nauseum except out of a sense of vindictive spite.

One lesson I struggled to learn was that it's considered rude to call out when they try to teach something wrong. Holding up your hand and yelling "That's wrong sir." doesn't make you any friends, and you should see what sort of reaction you get when you do that to a university lecturer. Being called up to the front of the class and successfully proving without doubt that he was wrong only made it worse.

To this day written instructions are still my best friend, I can't understand videos, I need the text. Understanding the text became a bit of a talent of mine and I became able to translate instructional text in to normal human language that the average mug in the street could understand. That was my real talent when doing the computer desktop help thing, I was able to explain things to people in ways that made sense to them.

 

[Shamar]

Being autistic feels like you're an operating system without everything needed to function installed. Somehow you have to build these programs as life crawls along.

People give you instructions but the pieces of software these need aren't there so the install fails.

Teachers back when I was at school would give me a handful of disjointed pieces and expect me to get from point A to B. I look down and see a yawning chasm too big to jump. Everyone else manages it just fine and somehow have made something that helps them with those disjointed pieces.

It feels like I'm an illiterate given a set of written instructions. Unfathomable, unsolvable... impossible.

Many model kit manufacturers create horrible instructions that make sense to them. They miss the crucial piece that is needed; to put a hand on the builder's shoulder 'it goes together like this' and show them.

Anyone who has ever built a Tamiya kit will understand what I mean. Instructions should create a 3D image that you can see. This is what Tamiya are really good at doing. Everything aligned in a logical step-by-step process that can be followed. This is exactly how many Autistic minds work.

In life the instructions seldom reach 2D.

I, like many others, have been left intellectually stunted because those teachers couldn't form that vital third dimension I needed. Without this failure is always guaranteed at least in my case.

Pretty much the story of my life. One example is math and computer instructors who seem to have the attitude that everybody already knows what they are teaching, and the class is nothing more than a review. This effect is not limited to just math and computers, but seems to be the most prevalent there.

 

[Rodafina]

Sometimes, I feel like I’m trying to get down a river in a canoe. But, the canoe is on fire, I lost my paddle, and there is whitewater ahead.

Guess it’s time to befriend the currents and learn how to float down the river. I probably won’t get to where everyone else is going, but I am confident that my journey has been and will be a great one.

Spoiler: I look to good teachers to learn.

 

[Outdated]

Just a side note about the thread title: Navigating without a road map

If you ever visit Australia do not trust GPS or Google Maps, both of them can lead you in to some very dangerous situations as a lot of the roads they mark do not exist. They're both reasonably accurate inside the cities but once you get out in to more rural areas they are so wrong as to be potentially lethal.

The problem comes from what we call Gazetted Roads, roads that have been planned by the government as possibly becoming necessary in the next few hundred years or so. Many of these roads will never be built, they are only marked as a future planning tool.

If travelling in Australia your best friend is the Google Maps Satellite View - ignore the map overlay and instead zoom right in close and see if there really is a road there or not, in many cases the satellite view will very clearly show you that there is no such road and that you're going to be trying to cut across farmer's fields, or through an impassable gorge, or in to empty desert sands.

 

[Paridas]

It’s like everyone else got the manual and you’re just handed a bunch of random parts. That feeling of “missing something” hits hard. I wish more people understood that some of us just need things shown differently - not because we’re slow, but because our brains work another way.

 

[WhitewaterWoman]

There’s no question that a huge percentage of whatever IQ I have was used to observe, process and calculate how to exist in a world totally foreign to me. It left me exhausted.

 

[Mary Terry]

Just a side note about the thread title: Navigating without a road map

If you ever visit Australia do not trust GPS or Google Maps, both of them can lead you in to some very dangerous situations as a lot of the roads they mark do not exist. They're both reasonably accurate inside the cities but once you get out in to more rural areas they are so wrong as to be potentially lethal.

The problem comes from what we call Gazetted Roads, roads that have been planned by the government as possibly becoming necessary in the next few hundred years or so. Many of these roads will never be built, they are only marked as a future planning tool.

If travelling in Australia your best friend is the Google Maps Satellite View - ignore the map overlay and instead zoom right in close and see if there really is a road there or not, in many cases the satellite view will very clearly show you that there is no such road and that you're going to be trying to cut across farmer's fields, or through an impassable gorge, or in to empty desert sands.

We have the same issue in the US, especially in the vast rural areas and in new urban subdivisions which have not yet been mapped.

 

[Shamar]

There’s no question that a huge percentage of whatever IQ I have was used to observe, process and calculate how to exist in a world totally foreign to me. It left me exhausted.

Exactly. I assumed the world was just as foreign to everybody else, and I couldn't figure out how they were doing so well with it. This is the main reason I am so upset about nobody noticing my autism sooner.