Sense-making

My experience of making sense of the world as an autistic person and systems change maker.

The illogic of my logic

Writing this has tangled me somewhat in knots.

I keep tripping myself up on the seeming illogic of being able to make sense of complex and chaotic things while simultaneously finding it impossible to make sense of everyday interactions. At a rudimentary level of sense-making I am lost. At a conceptual level I thrive. I guess the latter is what draws me to the complexity of systems thinking and systems change.

Just the other day, in an unusually liberating moment of workplace unmasking, I declared that it was clear two senior people didn’t share a good working relationship. The person I was speaking to responded with a significant degree of surprise to confirm that I was correct. I think they had gone to some effort to not make the strain between these two individuals apparent. To me it was as clear as day, despite the fact I’ve never met one of these people and the other I’ve been in the same room as just once. I’ve also never seen them interact, which is not indicative of anything in and of itself. It was just obvious to me that there was tension between them.

An emerging theory

Reflecting on my colleague’s surprise and wondering at my own confidence in my reading of the situation, I have arrived at an emerging theory around my autistic experience. Perhaps because I’m hypervigilant (a response to autistic trauma), constantly using all of my senses to scan my environment and process copious amounts of input (often to the point of overwhelm), I have access to more data than other people.

Is it possible that my brain’s desire to analyse, spot patterns and systematise things gives me the ability to take in all of this data and make sense of a situation before others who don’t share the same sensory and cognitive strengths?

There are somethings I can see retrospectively, in the workplace scenario described above, that help me understand how I perceive and process things. I gather data through observation, find connections between things and subconsciously reverse-cycle through logic chains to make sense of a situation. I have a vague memory of a colleague slightly modulating their tone of voice when saying these two peoples’ names together. A distant recollection that there was a flicker of frustration in a colleague’s eyes when talking about them. A moment in time when I wondered at the disconnect between their two areas of work. Triangulating these data points, captured in the blink of an eye, made the reality of the situation very clear to me. Hence my confident declaration.

Do I always get it right? Does my sense-making square with others’ perceived reality? That’s a hard one to answer.

I mask so heavily that I rarely share my insights before I feel confident that others read a situation in the same way. This is a learned behaviour that is linked to a lifetime of feeling ‘wrong’ and inadvertently setting myself apart from others. Yet this safety mechanism means I’m also holding myself back to enable myself to ‘fit in’. What might it be like to share my perception of things earlier and with confidence in my autistic strengths? No doubt I won’t always hit the mark, but now feels like the right time to experiment with really trusting my capacity to rapidly make sense in complex contexts.

Leaning into my autistic experience

If I do lean into this sense-making ability, I do so to embrace my autistic strengths and not to create a binary of autistic v. allistic. Everyday I am painfully reminded that my brain is not better than that of a neurotypical person. Indeed, arriving at understanding and a place of sense-making before others do so, is often a lonely and alienating experience.

Nonetheless, if my experience of sensory overwhelm and chronic pain caused by a world where all input seems to be turned up to 11 has an upside, it’s that I get early access to making sense of some of life’s complexities.

I’ll take that as both a personal and professional win 💥

Interested in knowing more?

This is the final part in a series I wrote following on from my Basecamp journey with School of System Change. At the end of 2022 and early 2023 I published five other posts:

Intro: Unpacking the system of the self

Part I: Patterns

Part II: Complexity

Part III: Chaos

Part IV: Inclusivity

Each of these posts has explored an aspect of my autistic self that lends itself well to systems thinking. Feel free to share. This has been a painful labour of love, but I write in the hope of connecting with others.

You can also follow me on Medium as I continue to explore a range of other topics through the lens of my autistic experience. Subject to my availability of spoons I hope to start writing about my experience of being an autistic leader and manager.

Watch this space.