SCRIPTS

I don’t like the trope that social norms about conversation– things like small talk, and greeting and goodbye rituals, for instance– are objectively weird and confusing, unnecessarily convoluted things that we should want to live without.

SCRIPTS, you guys.

Social norms for conversation give people SCRIPTS for how to do different kinds of conversations.

Non-autistic people use scripts and learn by echoing too, they just have a larger vocabulary of them and sometimes more flexibility in the details. Yeah, they get weird when someone goes off of the script they were expecting, yeah, that’s sometimes really shitty to deal with, but we do the same thing.

It’s just so weird to me to see people criticize things like small talk as unimportant, because– what you’re saying is–

How dare people have an expectation for how an interaction is supposed to go, and be confused and upset when it doesn’t go that way, even though the details that went “wrong” aren’t really important.

I.e.

How dare people do something I do all the time. Something that is in fact kind of an autistic trait. Having trouble adjusting to unexpected things and sudden changes. Always following routines. SCRIPTS.

As much as I sometimes struggle to figure out what other people’s scripts are, what they expect from me socially, I would feel hypocritical criticizing them for having expectations and being confused when I don’t fit them.

The ones who start treating me like a child, like no one should be treated, when they notice that I’m not doing socialing right by their standards, I do criticize that. But that’s not always what’s happening. (And, to be honest, I seem to get a whole lot less of it since I finished high school.) There is willful ignorance and judgment out there, but there’s also mutual confusion and genuine desire to understand. There are even people who are intimidated by you, who are afraid of receiving your judgment when they misunderstand you.

I give you this dispatch from the land of people who are pretty good at reading typical body language and tones of voice: Store clerks are often nervous too. They’re under time pressure, it’s loud and noisy and distracting, they have a lot of scripts and information to remember, and all that may not affect them as much as it would you, but it still affects them. They’re scared of misunderstanding an order. They’re scared of having to ask for clarification and wasting time. They’re scared of getting yelled at by an angry customer or by their supervisor.

Their scripts help them deal, and when someone breaks script suddenly it throws them off. Generally speaking, they want to understand you and are scared of messing up.

This is probably the single most important thing I have realized about people and social interaction.

I know, believe me, I know how shitty it is to feel rejected and excluded from social things because you just can’t understand what other people are doing. And yet you’re thrown into the middle of it and expected to handle yourself, and it’s incredibly stressful and awful. I know.

My point is, being rejected is not an intrinsic characteristic of being brainweird, and being part of the in-group is not an intrinsic part of being NT/non-autistic/more socially aware. They, too, are vulnerable to this feeling. You, too, are capable of judging and rejecting people, and of making people feel uncertain and out of their depth because they don’t understand what’s going on.

Often it’s not the same.

Someone who has a lifetime of relatively easy social interaction, and of, y’know, not being constantly told that they’re bad at everything to do with people and every social awkwardness in their vicinity must be their fault, has a good foundation to deal with feeling rejected without being too hurt by it. And I think very few people get a worse burden of stereotypes and negative expectations in this area than autistic people do.

But other factors can sometimes make the balance of power more complicated than that (like when you are a customer and the other person is expected to not only take your order but make you happy) and being NT doesn’t necessarily guarantee people a lifetime of relatively easy social interaction. People come to social anxiety in a lot of different ways, and having it differently or not as bad as you isn’t the same as not having it at all.

This post has diverged a lot from where I was originally going with it.

Basically: other people benefit from their scripts too. Figuring out what kind of script someone is using helps both you and them.