Although I didn’t realise it for many years, learning how to be with other people has been relatively hard for me, or at least not something that came as naturally as it might to a neurotypical person. It’s taken years of minutely studying people and how they behave together, the kind of body language, humour and various other methods of delivery they use, including what’s considered acceptable, polite, funny etc, to reach a place where I can be pretty sociable, given the right circumstances. All of this is information I would have mostly gathered in childhood and youth, by the end of which most of us have probably become somewhat set in our ways and, I would imagine (being autistic) I would have pretty-much signed off the book of what I felt was my best way of communicating with people whilst doing my darnedest to “be myself”. By my late teens, I think I was fairly confident around other people and able to hold my own, being authentically who I was, or so I thought, until the next couple of decades put me though my paces.

That last part about “being myself” is important because, looking back, I’ve had to work out how to marry all that social “learning” with all my own personal preferences such as directness and extremely frank and to-the-point honesty, including a tendency to “spill all” and to over-trust people, also to assume that they mean what they say they mean, without all the postulating, nuance and agenda that so often goes into things. Of course, we all know there are regional variances in social behaviour, language and delivery. Its only now, in the relatively new light of autism (since I didn’t know I was autistic for most of my life) that I am starting to make sense of some of the challenges I’ve had, more so in some places than others. Its certainly (strongly) informed my decision to make a move!

In Berkshire, where I have lived for 38 years now (which, to those who don’t know, is basically an add-on to London these days) I’ve been pretty handicapped socially since day one because the way people engage is very different to where I was raised and that’s played no small part in my struggles here. If I’m honest, though the place offers a lot of resources and life-style enhancements, all of that has still not been enough for me, clearly, because I’ve really not thrived here. Yes, materially we do OK and we have a good lifestyle on the surface but I’ve really struggled with the people and don’t have a lot of relationships (in fact barely any, baring casual acquaintances such as neighbours) to show for all my many years here as all my relationships are now elsewhere, either back where I grew up or made in other non-local contexts. Yes, I used to have a circle of friends here…but, conspicuously, none of them came from around here and all of them left!

So I think I’ve really struggled, partly because the people here are so different to back home “up north” (really, I am from the midlands but its a relative thing), though I only see that in hindsight, as its meant learning a whole new modus operandi in order for me to even begin engaging and, increasingly with age, and especially on top of chronic health challenges, I haven’t had the stamina to bend myself into appropriate shapes to try and “be” who other people here expect me to be according to some sort of social stereotype of “normal”.

Meanwhile, I’ve struggled to learn the party line here, communication style wise, partly because there isn’t one as most people here are all so different from each other; the only things they seem to have in common being a similarity of lifestyle…of working, commuting, watching TV, raising families… without any sort of marked cultural identity to any of it. Though I remember one or two people having a strong “Berkshire burr” more akin to its West Country origins when I first moved here, I haven’t heard it for years and even the accent is now just a sort of estuary London hybrid made up of all the many accents that have converged within a 40 mile radius of the capital. So I suspect there’s also a lack of a “regional style” to the way people engage because everyone here is so transient; many (like me) came from elsewhere, are here for convenience or work and are just passing through but it doesn’t give them an identifiable communication style, except (often) the less desirable features such as bruskness, competitiveness or a sort of self-depreciating and occasionally droll jadedness with everything. What they’ve ended up creating is a hybrid style that lacks coherence or even warmth, being forced out of necessity, not organically grown out of the soil of some local identity, shared history or sense of place.

Try as I might, all of that has proved extremely difficult for me to assimilate, having no real coherence I could “learn” to mirror back to them, so I’ve ended up feeling tongue-twisted in my own communication mode for far too many years. With one person, this or that “goes” and, with the next person, I find they are deeply offended or look at me as though I have grown an extra head so its been easier to shut up and pull back over the years; I am certainly, seldom, myself around anyone here because I have had to become too guarded and pristine.

With great timeliness, the Neil Diamond classic song “I am…I said” came on this morning, about being stranded between two shores…where he now lives and where he originally came from…no longer feeling like he belongs, nor is he “heard”, in either place anymore. I can so relate:

“I am”… I said
To no one there
And no one heard at all
Not even the chair
“I am”… I cried
“I am”… said I
And I am lost and I can’t
Even say why
Leavin’ me lonely still

I’ve been feeling like that for the longest time, because when I go back home (where I still have family) I feel like I belong more and yet, apart from them, nobody knows me anymore. I left my life there, and all its familiarities (including the cultural ones) too long ago to stake a claim. Yet for all the years I’ve invested in Berkshire, I still don’t feel like I belong here either; perhaps because it wasn’t my original learning ground. Perhaps, being autistic, it was already too late for me to reassimilate by the time I moved here.

I’m sure none of this would present the same level of challenge if I wasn’t autistic; in fact, I wonder if a neurotypical person would give any of this a moment’s thought. I have; in fact I’ve given things like this a whole lot of thought across the course of my life, which now makes me realise what a strong feature of autism this constant need to observe, to study, to strive in order to assimilate, having to actively work hard to blend in, really is!

In fact, realising my autism has shed a whole lot of light on many decades of struggle and loneliness. Feeling a cultural misfit has played no small part, adding its weight to the pre-existent load of my neurological differences.

Returning home to where I was raised for more and more frequent visits has felt like experiencing a visceral sigh of relief each and every time I am back there and around people who, en masse, seem much more straightforward, significantly more open to engagement with strangers, far less-easily offended, almost universally without so much suspicion or insistence upon following certain rules of engagement before we can become acquaintances and also, resoundingly, much more likely to see the funny side. I feel like I relax as soon as I walk into my first shop or order my first cup of tea when I’m there and its noticeable how, in the space of a handful of days, I will quickly gather far more human engagement of the kind that is significantly life-affirming than I generally gather in a year or even half a decade back where I live. Once back in Berks I seem more autistic because I have learned to be much more guarded, to be wary of interactions, to remain extremely private and spatially aware, affording everyone a polite distance because that’s what they seem to insist upon unless you are given some discrete signal, which I am poor at recognising, that further intimacy is “allowed”. They are like chalk and cheese places, in my view.

People back home seem to connect as though by some sort of “wavelength” of friendliness as a default position, and without unnecessary frills, and it’s so refreshing. Is it because I am “from there” that I so easily tune into this frequency? Well yes, certainly, my husband (who isn’t) has to try a little harder, at least initially, but then he also relaxes more quickly because these people are much more “as you find them” than we are used to in Berks so it doesn’t take long to assimilate and fit in at all. So perhaps it was a gift for me, with my autism, to have been born there and maybe I “had it easier” because of this accident of circumstance, not appreciated until now, because I certainly didn’t notice I was abnormally different when I was at school; not in all the ways I would have expected to, armed with all the new-knowledge of my autism and how challenging some people’s childhoods were. I do think I had it somewhat easier being surrounded by people that took me, mostly, at face value and didn’t seem to exclude me every five minutes when I presented with some quirk or other. In fact, it was noticeably after I moved away that all my issues really began, which has made me wonder, rather belatedly, whether moving out of region was one of the most detrimental decisions I ever took, seen in the rear view mirror of now understanding my neurodoversity.

So yes, I think I crave being back home because the peopling style is much more familiar. It’s what I grew up with, how my family are, how it was at school, which was where I cut my teeth socially. Now we are taking steps to move back to the region, I recognise its signature “style” in all the the shops, in the estate agents, the serving staff, the people I contact for quotes, the health forum I am already part of (by far the friendliest I have ever belonged to). I know where I am amidst these people and it’s the nearest to being socially adept that I’m ever going to have in this lifetime.

Its a thought provoking topic because I’ve heard many autistic people say that they do better living in a completely foreign culture, such as abroad, where their communication differences don’t stand out like a sore thumb, or can be “explained away” by their foreignness or gaps in their language knowledge. They say they blend in better, feel less autistic so it works for them.

Perhaps I relied on this same theory in the early years “down south” but at some point it became exhausting to feel more different on top of my existing differences. Having to translate everything I wanted to say, from my innate way of communicating and thinking, into something socially acceptable and then, further, into yet another different social style to suit the region has been hard. Too many things that are important to me have been lost in translation. Far too many blank stares or misunderstandings conveyed through coolness have shut me down. My behaviours around people, down here, have become subtly post-traumatic, born out of way too many rejections and judgements hurled my way. I’ve had more social successes and meaningful conversations in random encounters visiting home, this last year, than I’ve had this last decade living here and become terribly lonely as a result. Where I currently live, I find myself strategising how best to convey myself to people, in advance, in a way that seldom even occurs to me where I come from, where just diving in isn’t ever fraught with so much peril, which is a telling thing.

Is all of this simply down to familiarity because we all know how us autistics love and rely upon familiarity? I guess we are our most avid learners when we are young children, thus the social style we grew up with is always going to be our strong suit, most especially when we are autistic and rely so very much on repetition in order to ingrain the social behaviours that aren’t so very innate to us. Having to relearn how to communicate, all over again, is going to leave us wrong-footed, perhaps also because it defies our sense of logic that human beings can be so very different according to where they live (but apparently they are). It blows my mind that there can be so many different variances of being human when, in my mind, we are all fundamentally one and the same, unified by pain, loss, love, joy, grief, gratitude and moments of ecstasy. How can we invent so many convolutions of communication that we still leave certain people feeling wrong-footed or excluded, left out in the cold because of innate differences? Its a perplexing world!

Also (I have found) people generally say what they think, and get away with it more often, the further north you go. It can be disconcerting to some to discover this…not to me, to whom it’s a blessed relief. Nor is it generally done vindictively, the way sudden directness can be delivered like an arrow hitting target further south, but often with genuine warmth and inclusiveness. “The more direct I am, the more I like you” it seems to say and, being autistic, I really get that. In fact, such behaviour is almost culturally autistic, as some cultures seem to be. For instance, I’m not the only one to find, say, Scandinavian culture more autistic than, say, French and perhaps the same goes for the north compared to the south, born out of differences in directness or logicalness and a relative lack of over-complications or frills; all of which may have originated from differences of race that have perpetuated in different locations…who knows.

Whatever its origins, I never really had a strong sense of place until I changed mine. From day one after I moved, I think I was considered rather blunt and plain speaking for the general “house” style down here, compared to back home where (at least I think) I was considered relatively normal in my delivery. Much was made, by other people, of my “northernness” down south and I became the brunt of various jokes for years, including jests made by bosses in various jobs (was I ever disadvantaged by this career-wise? It’s hard to say). I never felt such a misfit, growing up and even being the way I am neurologically, as I did when I arrived at uni in the south. When I went home for visits in my early twenties, it would feel like a welcome break from all the effort it took, down in Berkshire, to convey myself in a socially acceptable manner. So, in a way, my northern roots disguised my autism until I moved and began to struggle, subtly at first but then more and more with the passing years.

But then, paradoxically, moving to somewhere I am a misfit has (as well as making my autistic struggle more overt) also conspired to disguise my autism, even from me, because even I have been putting my apparent “oddness” down to never quite culturally belonging here. It stopped me from being more curious as to why I don’t fit in so it has, perhaps, taken me far longer to take my differences seriously; enough to notice my neurodoversity. My northernness became the scapegoat for moments of social clumsiness, for being sidelined without explanation, for feeling like I had a sign on my head cautioning people to treat me differently, often with suspicion, and most certainly exclude me into any inner sanctums that formed around the school gates and in various other social circumstances, no matter how helpful and friendly I tried to be. I let it get away with all that and never, until recently, learned to question the deeper roots of my differences.

In conclusion, for all the nearly 40 years I have lived here, I have never once felt like I belong here or like it is really home; it has remained an alien territory or, more accurately, me the alien living in it…which is interesting because I wonder if I will even feel so autistic a few months down the line of being back to the approximate region where I came from. Even if I do, will it matter so much or feel somehow familiar anyway, less stark, as though I am included more “just as I am”, even if my differences are out there in full view. Perhaps communication, in all its forms, including making (and keeping) friends will be easier from now on. Only time will tell but it’s certainly got me thinking about the impact of place and cultural familiarity, about various differences in communication style that aren’t just to do with neurodiversity and the impact all these factors can have, when combined, upon a person’s ability to cope with the day-to-day, their level of loneliness or their overall ability to thrive…all food for thought.