I think it’s Transactional

If you’ve had the joy of spending time with us autistic folk you would probably realise that we love our phones but we don’t love talking on them so much. We often laugh about that time the phone rang and I just stared at it. Yes, we do really love our phones and we use them a lot, just not for talking. We do the socials, the email, the photos, the text and all of the good things but not so much the talking.

You may wonder why this is so. It’s an interesting thing to me that this is actually very common for autistic folk, I mean it could almost be a diagnostic trait. Yet it’s not so much that we can’t use the phone but that it is not our preferred communication channel. Many of us prefer text/written forms. There are lots of things that go with that.

Written communication says what it says and there is no extraneous information to translate. There is no hidden curriculum. Even when it is shorthand txt type written communication we tend to do a better job of interpreting what is being communicated correctly.

And yet I can spend hours talking on the phone with loved ones, with friends. This doesn’t make it my preferred channel of communication, it doesn’t mean things have suddenly changed but it is quite interesting. Why is it that I can spend all this time talking on the phone in this way but when a call comes in on my phone it produces a response that has aspects of an anxiety response.

I have to use the phone as a part of my employment role all the time. Multiple times every day I have to engage in communications that are telephone voice-based communications. Often these encompass video conferencing as well which then adds the complexity of visual cues as well as audio cues added into the communication.

I do this every day. I don’t love it but I do it and generally manage to do it reasonably well. So why is it that when I am walking down the street, or sitting at home relaxing and my phone rings I want to run away from it. There must be something going on here.

I really think there is. I think it is that when the phone call is transactional from the start that it is more difficult. When I have to make communicational transactions with others over a phone call that this can be really quite difficult for me to manage. So what do I do, I avoid it.

Yet there are some calls I see come through that I rush to answer because they are people I value and people I want to spend that time with. I want to exchange thoughts, feelings ideas, joys, sadness, losses and gains. I want these conversations and even though it may not be the preferred method I am up for it and so answer those calls without hesitation.

Today at work I was involved in presenting some new information to a bunch of people who had dialled into a conference call. This is definitely not my preferred way to convey information. Put me on a stage to public speak in front of people and I’m fine, sit me in a small group discussion and I am fine, a face to face meeting to discuss and I will negotiate that with aplomb.

I believe I manage these situations where I have to do like I did today pretty well. I am even actually pretty good at it. But I do stress it is not preferred. As I said I do ok but I do have hiccups. If I lose my flow I get quite flustered. If I have to stop for something, be it a technical hitch then I can be all at sea.

Often in these situations I will need to take questions. In order to manage that I think and reflect on what the questions I may be asked and so I am ready with a response. It’s when questions come that I haven’t anticipated that I get flustered and flounder a bit. It is these times that I lose my train of thought and where I am and I feel my responses are not up to the quality or detail that they should be.

In short it is when the communication becomes transactional. It is when I need to start interpreting the unspoken cues and work out the tone and intent and all that hidden curriculum of communication. It is when I as an autistic have to apply my neurodivergent and wonderfully different self to the interpretation of largely neurotypical rules of communication. It is this transaction that is difficult not the communication itself.

It’s because it’s transactional…

Originally published at A Transtistic Life.