I mean my daughter, Nita, will say to me, “How are you mum?” She won’t actually want to know really how I am and she is not particularly interested but she knows that is something that I like her to ask me. Or if I fall over and hurt myself or cut my finger, she will say, “Oh I am sorry, mum” because she has learnt that is the response. She doesn’t particularly feel it I don’t think. Or even particularly care if I have cut myself. But these are the cues that she has learnt to pick up from society. So she is really learning by some kind of observation not by osmosis, like we sort of pick it up as we go through our lives. They don’t do that. That bit of the brain that is to do with understanding those kind of things that go on in society is very faulty.

 

And she has become very adept but not adept enough to fool people for long. She says to me that when she is out in neurotypical or normal company, after about two hours, may be three hours, she has become utterly exhausted and all her ploys and tricks and schemes that she has worked out start to fall by the wayside, because she doesn’t have the energy.

 

Her brain, the intellectual part of her brain that makes these decisions is having to work so fast. Faster than you or I can ever understand. Here is a situation, I have twenty solutions, twenty things I could say, which one should I choose? And she is going through those twenty solutions, those twenty answers at the speed of lightning and picks one. If she is tired she may pick the wrong response and so that is when things start to fall apart and that is when people start to think, hang on, something is not quite right here. I can’t quite put my finger on it. I don’t know what it is but, I feel uncomfortable in this person’s presence. They are not like me. That is what others will say to her and then they back away and once they have backed away, they never return because people have made up their minds about her, which is why she leads a lonely life.