Dear Laure,

it makes me happy that you’re giving the book a try! I can’t even imagine that it wouldn’t help at least a little.

Okay, I might have made changing sound a little too simple. The ability to build new routines is always a double-edged sword: even if steps forward go fast, steps into any direction, backward, sideways, nowhere, are also fast. To harness the power of such change is a quest for balance and meaning, for guideposts to direct your thoughts toward.

There is always the pull of local optima, those states of mind and life that are just close and easy enough to move (back) to. Without conscious self-control, everyone drifts into one of these and stays there until a stronger force of change comes by. This is why a single event is unlikely to change your whole reality; if one moves in a random walk of random directions all the time, but one point pulls a little bit, its vicinity is where one ends up.

Not so with changes that are deeply meaningful to yourself. Gaining a new perspective, for example, can create a whole new pull to a different way to go about things. It’s not something you try and maybe fail at, it’s a realization. There’s a huge difference between trying to get on the good side of certain people by trying to be nice and embracing kindness and openness to others as a part of the self you want to be. Do you see how one of these two contains the word “try”, while to the other, such a word wouldn’t even apply?

I’m not saying there’s no trial and error in life, just that having a guiding concept, a greater perspective, can be really helpful.

I wish you all the best!
Vandroiy

Laure, please remember that your thoughts shape who you are and what paths to change you can see! I’ve been lurking this forum for a while, but this thread made me register; I’m just too much at odds with some of the things said.

Okay, I’m certainly not in your shoes, sorry if I’m imposing my view. But every now and then, I come across autism tests or checklists – and get labeled autistic. I told a few friends about this, and most of them didn’t believe these results. It made me wonder if peoples’ image of autism is what actually makes autists similar to each other.

What IS autism? In most places, this thread included, it’s described simply as a syndrome: strangely correlated symptoms. Someone is bad at social stuff, doing crazy things over and over, blah, we’ve heard it. But those are results, not causes, and from what I know they aren’t at all inevitable outcomes.

Here is what I believe: autism is a strong tendency to reinforce routines, both of thought and of action. Sadly, this tendency makes it easy to trap oneself in cyclic routines or thoughts, but that’s just a result of certain situations or states of mind, and not at all set in stone.

In other words, I think it might be the OPPOSITE of stuff like this:

The truth is, I cannot change what I am. My walls are permanent and I did not make them. I don’t have the freedom that others do. People can choose not to communicate with others, I physically cannot. It is in my code not too, it is something I was born with.

I’ve just finished reading Shawn Achor’s excellent guide “The Happiness Advantage”, which references among many things the scientific observation of people with a “growth mindset”, as compared to the immutable mindset the above quote shows. The statistics leave little room for doubt: people who believe they have the power to change themselves tend to achieve great change, while those who believe they can’t change create a self-fulfilling prophecy. And this isn’t some little detail, but one of the best predictors of future success and happiness.

Now couple this with the routine-strengthening take on autism. If an autist’s primary trait is to build habits and tendencies with minimal effort, then the things you do, say, and even only think are what shapes your future personality! One tiny start in the right direction, and your atypically focused mind might loop over it until it has built a whole new perspective! But think of a path that leads nowhere, and this too will occupy your mind as long as you will it.

If you want to make friends, just find a small, nice thing to say or do for others, and consciously do it. You can start with just one little thing a day. If the way your autism feels is any similar to what makes me score as “autistic” on various scales and tests, your mind will start thinking about the smallest detail you focus on, and in mere days carve a new path in your mind, faster and deeper than a normal person could hope for. You just need to find the important changes to make and kick-start the process, by consciously taking the first step and building routines you would like your future self to have.

If you ask me, it’s great to have a covertly autistic mind. It gives a level of self-control that many people have to pay for, in sweat and tears, as they try to make a change. Yes, it is also easy to fall into mental traps and make strange mistakes, and I’ve paid for my own share of insanity. But why in the world would you see it only as a disability, with an unhappy and secluded life as the only possible outcome?

PS: If this fails to convince you, you might still want to read “The Happiness Advantage”. It brings a whole new perspective on how to change yourself.

• This reply was modified 8 years ago by Georg.
• This reply was modified 8 years ago by Georg.