I am not sure whether this is actually true, but I remember hearing decades ago that Richard Burton would never watch a performance of himself. I’m not sure why – perhaps it was because otherwise he would be constrained. Perhaps he preferred to be in the moment, like a stage actor.
And so, I’m not
sure why, and I’m not even sure whether this memory of something I recall
hearing while a child is accurate. But it’s been something I remember, because
it resonates, I think, with how I feel about my practice as someone who has
been ‘in the moment’ a lot – teaching, delivering papers…
I used to freeze
were I recorded, let alone filmed, and I do not feel comfortable speaking to
any group if a door is open. Then zoom-teaching came along with Covid, and recording
sessions because normalised pretty quickly. When I started teaching remotely
and running events that way, pressing the record button – and later watching things
back – became part of my practice. And I felt surprisingly okay with it, however
much watching an earlier version of me, if only from a short while earlier,
seemed strange.
I’ve had the
video recording of a remote talk I gave a few months ago on my autism-myth
project for a while but could not bring myself to look at it until recently - and
it’s okay! - although I do say ‘um’ a lot because I’m never reading a script
but talking in the moment – responding to the ‘room’. And one thing that helps
me feel a sense of ‘connect’, I find, is the chat facility.
 |
| Screenshot from zoom talk - an earlier one (likely in 2021 or early 2022) from the one mentioned in this posting |
I noticed
during lockdown that autistic people sometimes like zoom chat. For my part, I tend
to be pretty active there during any session I’ve joined – otherwise, I can’t
really process what I’m hearing. It’s a substitute for the feeling of ‘presence’
of in-person events, I think.
Anyway, as well
as reviewing the video, I have been looking at the saved zoom chat from during
the event including from where I asked participants, if they wanted, to
introduce themselves. Some participants shared their experiences of autism
including as autistic people and one participants said something that resonated
when they introduced themselves via the metaphor of being bilingual – that is
of speaking autism and speaking like a neurotypical person, coming I think,
from having been negotiating a neurotypical world as an autistic person who had
no idea that they were autistic – when then had no idea, until, I think, their
children’s diagnosis as autistic that they could be autistic when they didn’t
fit the images of autistic standardly put out.
I will develop
this later. But, writing about how far an autistic person ‘has’ autistic traits
has got me thinking about the ‘autism test’ which Simon Baron Cohen devised and
which, last time I looked, was available online. You answer a set of questions
by ticking four options ranging from ‘very’ one thing to ‘very not’ the same and
end up with a score that puts you in a category of very, to potentially, to not
autistic.
Has anyone
reading this taken this test? If so, how many times? I’ve taken it several
times, firstly years back, because I guess I had been buying into a view that autism,
as the ‘spectrum’ it was generally then seen as, could be pinned down, as
though each person could be found somewhere in a scale from ‘very’ to ‘not’.
Anyway, each
time I have done it, I have got a different score. So what does this mean? Does
this say something about the test, or about myself and how I connect with a
world I’m in or not in?
I always loved forcefields
as a child... they would figure from time to time on tv shows I’d watch – at least
this is how I remember it - and I’m increasingly finding the forcefield image a
helpful one to convey what it’s like to move in the world while feeling apart from
it.
Later, this Autism
Acceptance Week, I shall build on the thread that has been running though this
posting of being in/not in worlds by writing about a way of conceptualising what
it is to be autistic, and non-autistic. This is Double Empathy Theory.
More tomorrow…
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