As an Autistic Person, I I Find Humans Confusing and Understand Non-Human Animals Better - I Speak Fluent Dog. Human? Still Learning.
Why Are Many Humans So Bad at Understanding the Creatures They Claim to Love?
Part of my Autistic experience is that for most of my life, it never occurred to me that I should pay attention to other human people's body language or facial expressions, so I never learned to decode them.
I assumed, falsely (for way too many years), that, because humans had words, people's words would tell me everything I needed to know about their motives (learning through painful experiences that people sometimes lie, cheat, manipulate, coerce, and will get mad at you when you don't pick up on unspoken cues that are never said out-loud), and I suffered because of that assumption.
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When I am scheduling this post, we have Forty Five Founding Members!
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Why did I need to learn to read human body language and "social cues"?
I didn't understand why humans couldn't just be direct and honest, so we could stop playing the silly guessing games.
NOTE: While many Autistic People struggle in this way, Not ALL Autistic People have this difficulty. There are Autistic People out there who can read human facial expressions and body language very well. It is "a spectrum" after all.
On the other hand, from my earliest years, I had a desire to understand and communicate with non-human animals, who didn't use words.
I was raised to believe that non-human creatures are brilliant, bright, and full of love, wisdom, and knowledge that many humans don't understand. I desperately wanted to know what they knew.
Early on, as an undiagnosed Autistic young person, I quickly realized one quality about non-human creatures:
Unlike human people, non-human animals would generally be kind to me as long as I treated them with compassion and respect. Humans, on the other hand, were (too often) not as kind to me, taking advantage of my kindness, and were less honest than animals were.
Due to my deep desire to connect with the creatures I've always loved, I spent many hours studying their movements and their non-verbal communication methods (without realizing it would have been helpful to do the same with human-animals).
Non-human animals convey a great deal without uttering a single word, and because they communicate without words, their body language is often less subtle than human body language.
A dog's entire body wiggles, radiating when joy flows out of them.
Cats (and others) often puff up, snarl, and flip their ears back (or stomp) when they're ticked off.
Predatory animals of many varieties often lower into a stance when they're hunting or about to pounce.
Nervous animals also exhibit specific tells that signal when fear or unease is present. However, humans, too often, work to hide what they're really feeling behind fake smiles and words that don't match their actions (especially the predatory ones).
I'm learning to decode humans in my 30s.
Since learning about my Autistic brain (about 9 years ago now), I've started paying more attention to human body language, facial expressions, and studying humans (similar to how I studied non-human people growing up).
I can look at a dog, cow, cat, bird, or even most wild species and know how that animal is feeling, and sometimes what they're thinking or about to do, easily, and without much thought, but people, on the other hand, I still struggle to decode.
In my recent years of studying human creatures, I've started to pick up on some of the common cues humans throw out, but people still confuse me more than animals do (though less than before).
Do any of my readers "speak" or understand non-human languages?
