The shifting baseline of social skills
Even in English, every conversation feels like I’m speaking a foreign language. Whenever someone talks to me, I have to consciously direct myself — ‘Remember to make eye contact with them, but not hold it too long, remember to smile’. If they’re telling me something interesting, or sad, I do actually feel interested or sympathetic, but I have to put in the effort to make the noises of interest or sympathy to express those feelings. I try to focus on what they’re saying, but if I want to join in the conversation, I have to scan it for a gap, like a chink in an enemy army’s defences, and I usually miss it. I constantly, instinctively want to flap my hands, and have to hold them still. If I do get the chance to speak, I run through every sentence in my head before I speak. It’s as if I’m translating it into another language, but what I’m doing is double-checking it — is there any possibility that this could sound weird, or offensive? Is it normal? If it’s not normal, I don’t say it, allowing an awkward silence to fall instead.
When I was a child, I wanted to fit in with and play with other children but didn’t know how. I hovered on the edges of each group, unable to join the conversation quickly enough or say the right thing, unable to understand their games. I escaped into obsessively reading books. The stories were more colourful and exciting than real life, and no one worried about what to say there — characters spoke in satisfying conversations that told you who they were, and what they felt about each other, and what was happening in the story.
I was referred for an autism assessment. The terminology used in my medical records, which I accessed as an adult, was Asperger’s syndrome, but this is no longer used as a diagnosis. The medical notes also include the paediatrician’s verdict that I had a ‘discrepant profile’ — some Asperger’s syndromes, but no diagnosis.
Like many girls with autism, I did not receive a diagnosis until adulthood, by which time I’d spent years worrying about what was wrong with me and not knowing why. I made a complaint about the failure to diagnose me as a child to the NHS trust. They arranged a meeting with the paediatrician. She said that, although I hadn’t received a formal diagnosis, I had received additional social skills training — something I had no memory of.
The entire concept of social skills training is bizarre. Contrary to stereotypes of autistic people, I’ve never seen Star Trek and don’t know much about it, but I’m aware that it contains a race of cyborgs called the Borg who share a collective hive mind. Sometimes it feels to me like everyone around me is like the Borg — they all seem to understand each other in ways I don’t, automatically picking up on each other’s thoughts, knowing what to say and what not to say, and how to deepen your relationship with someone from stilted conversation to a friendship, or a romantic relationship. Social skills training is an artificial attempt to teach people things that are, to most humans, instinctive. I have no idea when or how I was taught social skills, but it doesn’t seem to have had any effect.
I have one vague memory of being summoned to my primary school’s special needs classroom, and being given a booklet to read with a story in it and being asked questions about the story. I knew the children who were bad at reading had extra practice in the classroom — this would be children with dyslexia, although I didn’t know it at the time — so I assumed I was failing too and that was what I was being tested on. It made me sad, because I’d thought reading and writing were the only things I was good at and could feel confident about. I don’t remember the actual story in the booklet. I remember, very vividly, a sign on the special needs classroom wall with a drawing of a cat with one blue and one brown eye and its pointed teeth stained brown. Written next to it was “Blue/Brown Eyes And Unusual Teeth Can Be Beautiful”. It fascinated me while I was meant to be reading the booklet, and every time in my life I’ve had to spell the word beautiful, I’ve remembered that mnemonic. That was the only useful thing I’ve learned that day. I suppose it’s possible that if the story was about children interacting with each other and making friends, testing my understanding of it was a way of testing my social skills, but the teacher who came up with that (there was a smiley lady who was the special skills teacher at my primary school and also the Brown Owl in the local Brownie troop, which I unsuccessfully attended — was it her?) had precisely the wrong approach — I read stories because I could understand social situations in fiction in a way I couldn’t in reality, so my knowledge of one did not match my knowledge of the other.
In 1995, fisheries scientist Daniel Pauly coined the term “shifting baseline syndrome” to describe the way that scientists assess a healthy fish population as the population they saw at the start of their careers. They ignore how that population has declined from previous levels and accept dwindling levels of fish as normal. The concept of shifting baseline syndrome occurs across ecology, as we fail to remember the levels of wildlife we used to have in the natural world and see a lack of living things as normal. But it also occurs across society — things that would once be unimaginable quickly become the unremarkable background of our lives.
When the covid pandemic began in 2020, our baselines shifted in so many ways. So much of normal life died off, as face-to-face and work social interactions were replaced with video calls. In March 2020, I found it bizarre to be so cut off from the grief of others around me. I completely understood being terrified of coronavirus if you were medically high risk, or had a loved one who was, or worrying about losing your livelihood because of the lockdown. But it genuinely baffled me that people were sad they were no longer talking to people they didn’t live with every day. As far as I was concerned, social distancing meant I was spared a lot of artificial and uncomfortable conversations. Of course, the pandemic was terrible and I didn’t want it to happen — but as long as I avoided the virus itself, it didn’t have a negative impact on my life.
Three and a half years on, the ‘new normal’ has thoroughly set in. Offices have embraced remote working, and many social groups have died away as a result of covid. Increasingly more and more of our communications are through screens.
Talking to people on video calls feels even more unnatural than talking to them in person — you can’t make eye contact, because when you’re staring at their eyes on your screen, they’re not actually looking at you. They usually don’t notice my attempts at smiling or looking interested. I have even less of a clue than usual what impression I’m making on them. It’s almost impossible to suppress the urge to flap my hands — known as ‘stimming’, a familiar trait with autistic people — when I’m talking to people on a video call and not in person. Whatever that Borg-like connection is, it doesn’t develop through a laptop screen.
This week, I was on a video meeting at work. I’m in a team of four. Three of us are supposed to come into the office once a week for an ‘anchor day’, while the fourth works from home full time, but on this day, only my manager and I were in the office. We sat next to each other, but we wore headsets and stared at our screens, holding the meeting with the other two via video call. The headsets the company gave us aren’t suited to an office environment and constantly pick up the chatter and noise in the office, which annoys the others on the call. So I have to keep myself muted at all times. Sometimes I think of things I want to say, but there’s no possibility of casually joining the conversation, even if I knew how.
When I had to unmute myself to say something, I found that my manager’s headset next to me was picking up my voice, so I could hear my own echo through my headphones.
If I was trying to say “It’s due next week”, the conversation went like this.
Me: “It’s due -”
My voice on the video call: “It’s — ”
Me: “Er — ”
MVOTVD: “Due -”
Me (my voice slowing): “Ne-ext -”
MVOTVD: “Er — ”
In the end my manager told me to mute myself at all times and speak so that her headset would pick up my voice. So in a typical conversation in my work day, I’ve now silenced myself in order to talk to people who aren’t in the same room as me.
The world has changed so much in the past twenty years. Many of the things adults tried to teach me about it when I was a child, or told me I needed to know, are obsolete. Increasingly, that includes social skills. While in many ways the world has become more alien, more divided, more unjust and more precarious, we should look for ways new technology can make things fairer and more accessible, and remote working can be one of them — if work can be done as well from home as the office, remote working makes jobs more accessible for disabled people and parents, and removes the need for stressful and costly commutes.
But although I may never have found social situations natural or comfortable, I know it would be a bad thing if our connection with each other is lost forever. As the baselines of daily social interaction shift, how do we forge those connections in this new world? And how can those of us who were behind on social skills in the old one even try?
