Journeys with Autism

I’ve been thinking lately about all the ways in which I’ve learned to navigate the world as an honest person. While being straightforward has cost me social points at various times in my life, it’s also engendered trust in friends and colleagues, and I value my honesty very highly. My biggest challenges have revolved around the mistaken assumption that other people are as honest as I am. In the world in which we live, too much trust can have negative consequences and, over the course of my life, I’ve figured out many ways to protect myself. Some strategies came to me very early on, and others became clear only after life had dealt me some harsh experiences. I’ll share my lessons learned.

1. A person who wants to separate me from my money is interested in my money first and in my welfare second (or third, or fourth, or fifth, or tenth, all the way down to not at all). Now, I realize that I’m overstating here, since a therapist, for instance, may care equally about me and about getting paid. Proven exceptions aside, I don’t think it does any harm to take the rule as axiomatic. I began living out this approach fairly early on, care of my father, who was quite suspicious of people’s motives when it came to money. As a result, I’ve never been scammed, not even as a very innocent and overwhelmed young woman. Getting older only makes me more cautious about money and, while I may be overly cautious at times, too much caution does no harm and is infinitely preferable to an overabundance of trust.

2. Reducing my attachment to material goods protects me against buying things that someone tells me I absolutely must have in order to be happy, strong, safe, attractive, or loved. I figured out this one pretty early on as well. I’m very fortunate that I am just as happy looking at beautiful things in a shop window as in my own home. Moreover, I must have been a scavenger in a past life, because most of what I own comes from thrift stores and free boxes. At my age, I have what I need, and frankly, I’m more concerned with a) keeping my living space free of clutter and b) saving as much money as possible for my daughter, stepchildren, and godson to inherit. As a result, I have an absolute aversion to anyone peddling objects of desire mislabeled as necessities. People who try are wasting their breath with me.

3. Trusting my intuition will never steer me wrong. I may not be able to use non-verbal cues to modulate a conversation, but my intuition about people is excellent. When an unsafe person walks into a room, I feel it viscerally. It’s an aspect of my acute sensitivity that I value highly. I have been in situations in which I knew a person was unsafe, but everyone else was oblivious. Months or years later, the person showed his true colors, and everyone ran around feeling betrayed, yelling, “How could we have known?” My only response was “How could you not have known?”

4. When something doesn’t add up, I move on. Along with my baseline intuition, I’ve learned to trust my perceptions when I’m faced with a person whose sales pitch or sad personal story just doesn’t seem to hold together. My logical mind comes in very handy here, because many folks rely on their charming personalities to put one over on people and aren’t paying much attention to the logical consistency of what they’re saying and doing. It always surprises me when someone tries to charm me, because my attention is nearly always focused on understanding the logic of what the person is saying, even when the logic is absent or faulty. As a result, I can usually pick out the hidden flaw, and I don’t just pass it off and try to forget about it. I pay attention to it.

5. I depend on what people do rather than on what they say. It’s taken me many, many years to learn this lesson. Words are cheap. Actions are telling. Although my first inclination is to believe what someone tells me (after all, doesn’t it just complicate things to lie?), I’ve realized that my impulse toward honesty is not an impulse that most people share, and I step back. Way, way back. So, when someone says, “Hey, let’s get together,” I don’t get all happy and excited about it until we actually get together. If someone says, “I really care about you,” I don’t get all warm and fuzzy about it until the person actually does something to show his or her care for me.

Until I figured out that words are only as good as the actions that back them up, I let my emotions get pulled all over the place by the things that other people wrote or said. As you can imagine, my life is much more serene these days.

© 2010 by Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg