NT Birds

I started to think of humans like birds.

Why do humans vocalize observations that everyone either already knows or doesn’t need to know? I’m autistic, and I’ve been trying to figure this out for a long time. 

A really obvious example is when someone attractive walks by. I used to drive Uber. A college bro would be in my car, see a girl, and immediately say to me, “she’s hot.” Like it would be a bonding experience. My immediate thoughts are always, sure ok, but why the fuck are you talking about this? What is the point? There’s very little room between their thoughts and their mouths and it was always so frustrating to me. And it wasn’t just guys, if I had a group of college girls and they were talking with each other they might say the same about a guy. 

Guys and girls are dumb hormone driven people, especially teens to college age, we agree right? Yes. So the novel thing in their environment is a hot guy or girl. They will vocalize that they like this hot person.

I understand why they are attracted. I get that, but why say anything at all about it? What are they really communicating? It’s worse when it’s directly to me.

I guess, they feel the need to vocalize a lot of their inner thoughts. Not just to share the knowledge, but to share their vibe or communicate something else.

I remember advice I was given that I tried, and failed, to implement a long time ago. The advice was to talk about random stuff you saw or interesting things in your environment, this was advice for dating, but it would work in other contexts too.

I now conclude this was a way of sharing or vibing with the person you were with. It was small moments, possibilities to establish connection.

It’s partially bonding, partially vibing. It’s partially just what’s on their mind and the novel thing in the environment that they feel the need to vocalize. But it’s why they need to vocalize it that is frustrating to me. Sometimes I don’t feel nonverbal, but damn do I feel near it. Because these spontaneous outbursts of verbal spewage just doesn’t strike me as the thing to do. Trying to understand neurotypicals, I don’t know why the bird analogy popped into my mind, it was just something that felt right, birds are just out there chirping back and forth.

And I have no idea what the point is. The actual birds, as far as i know, don’t have any real point for their chirping besides very basic communication (i am a healthy male, i am looking for a mate, i am warning about the large hawk nearby) maybe a little bit of it is “I feel good” and I feel the urge to go tweet tweet. But, is that really what humans are doing too? And why am I not doing it? If it’s something wrong with me – something I’ve tried to fix, then why does it feel like my way makes so much more sense? Why would I tell you who I find hot? Unless, I suppose, I was hoping you could help me get with them? 

I’m not trying to say that neurotypicals are animals and autistic people are not. We all are. It’s just we are certain types of animals I guess. The neurotypical animal finds the autistic strange and the autistic finds the neurotypical strange. Autistic people vocalize too of course, but it’s often more of a direct need to communicate and share knowledge, not just vocalizing for vocalizing sake.

However, as much thought as I’ve put into this, I still feel like I just don’t quite get it. But if I think of neurotypical people, the normies, as a different sort of species, it at least doesn’t bother me as much as it used to. It used to really get to me. And after many failed attempts at doing my version of this, I’ve let go of trying.