Lately, I’ve been having numerous discussions on the topics of social interaction and communication at training home. This has led me to be kind of frustrated several times. For one thing, Renee (my coach) gave me some plan on how to prepare for a discussion, which was meant as a way of preparing for the discussion with the student counsellor. It didn’t make much sense for me, all sounding rather logical but I couldn’t apply it at all. Eventually I ended up preparing the discussion with another staff folk and it ended up going all well, which, unfortunately, isn’t to be attributed to my good communication skills but to the student counsellor’s good knowledge of needed accommodations.
In the next week, which was two weeks ago, I had two officially scheduled discussions with staff folks, apart from my weekly discussion with my coach. They both were meant rather informally and embarrassed me, not so much cause of my own feelings about them, but cause of my perception of what others might think. After all, the scheduling of such discussions only highlights my social ineptness, and I feel embarrassed about that, cause what person whose only disability is blindness, is so socially awkward like me? Both discussions didn’t get anywhere and ended in my getting totally “locked up inside”, giving me “flashbacks” (put between quotation marks cause I don’t mean the serious psychological connotations) from tenth grade, when this was happening to me once or twice a week on average. I remember a question from my tutor in September, 2003: if I only got like that when I was having discussions with him? Well, no, even though when discussions are more serious (and hence, less informal), the feeling is much worse and it’s harder fo rme to get out of such a position. But I get in this state to a greater or lesser extent whenever I have to initiate social interaction.
This statement connotes shyness, and I’m everything but shy, cause shyness connotes fear of making a fool of oneself, which I don’t have in casual interaction.
That’s one reason why I want to differentiate between passivity and “locked up inside” feelings. The former is just that, a lack of initiative in social situations, while the latter is something much more complicated that I find hard to understand. An in-between form occurs when I have to interact, but cannot. This is what was apparent in the scheduled discussions - I had to interact, cause it was on my schedule, but I couldn’t -, but also, less obviously, on some occasions when people offer me assistance or, for example, when I called a fitness centre I plan to go for exercise, a couple of weeks ago: it is a mixture of not knowing what (exactly) to say, which often leads me to be passive, and feeling kept from saying what I know I want to say.
Passiveness is not shyness. Passiveness, as I mean it, is a lack of initiative, and, in my experience, this has nothing to do with being shy. It can, for some people, have to do with it, but it doesn’t have to. I am not shy or passive once I’ve gotten into some political debate, for example, or even when you ask me about stuff like my schooling or my family. A discussion with Mar, one of the staff members, this morning, highlighted this real good: I may not’ve seemed rather socially skilled when we discussed these things, cause our conversation was pretty one-sided - in that I didn’t ask about Mar’s point of view -, and this may also connote passiveness, but I like to think of it more as a lack of reciprocity than as a lack of initiative, and it is most certainly not passive, cause someone may get real active in a discussion with it getting real one-sided at once, ie. when the person talks about himself all the time, and it is something I might do at times, too.
I do have a problem taking the initiative, I most certainly do. Forget about going up to someone and starting a conversation. I never, ever do that, and I consider it more of a problem than the pretty basic skill of introducing myself, which folks say I have a problem with. I don’t spontaneously introduce myself. I always do when someone comes up to me. That may be one reason why I didn’t recognize it as a problem when Renee asked me if I was good at that. I said I would do that, but I wouldn’t cause I wouldn’t go up to someone new (or when I’m myself new, like when I first came here) and introduce myself. But I may confuse the two things, as was happening with Mar first being here since I started my training (she doesn’t work very often): I didn’t initially come up to her and introduce myself, and consequently we didn’t get to introduce ourselves to each other, cause she had long gotten to know my name and the fact that people wanted me to learn to introduce myself, so she decided it was my turn. However, whenever Mar would be having a discussion with someone I knew, or theoretically maybe even someone I didn’t know, I would be eager to jump in and make comments, again, without introing myself. So in one way it’s assuming that when you jump into discussions, you know each other, or have at least met once - it does happen that people start conversing without knowing each other’s names, like on public transportation or in doctor’s waiting rooms, but oftentimes when you’re going to meet each other more often, it is assumed that you will first introduce yourselves and then get into discussions, or that, upon jumping into a discussion (which I’m way too good at), you’re going to intro yourself, which is something I pretty much skip on such occasions. And theoretically, here, it could’ve happened that we were sitting on the dinner table on my first day and having a conversation without any other client knowing my name or my knowing theirs. That is yet another difference between taking the initiative to start a conversation and taking the initiative to introduce yourself.
All of these, however, in my view, are varying manifestations of the same sort of “category” - it’s all about initiative-taking, which in my case is very poor. One may address the topics separately, or list them separately on plans, as happened to the adapted plan for having a conversation that Renee wrote last week, but when you were to make a list of social skills, as in tenth grade, they could be listed underthe same heading. Then, I might not understand and so one might make sub-statements like, under the heading of initiative-taking in conversations, stuff like introducing yourself, starting a conversation, etc.
This all, however, and the issue of reciprocity, are pretty different from the “locked up inside” issue, that was highlighted pretty much last week, and also to an extent today. Even though each of these issues first got highlighted at around the same time and has mostly been highlighted by the same people, I’ve always seen them separately and continue to do so. The deficits in social skills, for so far as they are objectively noticeable as deficits of initiative-taking, reciprocity etc., are not comparable to the behaviours that have no underlying skills deficit, let alone from the feelings they result from. There’s still a lot of grey area, or situations in which both play a role. Asking for assistance on the street is among those: I’ve noticed it’s quite difficult to get a person’s attention when you cannot make eye contact, but once I’d noticed that it was possible, there were still my feelings about asking for help that complicated the situation. Another example would be the issue of walking routes with training home staff lately - when I found I knew the route but the staff found I still had to improve my mobility skills (both of which were true): I was rather curt in stating my views - a skills deficit -, but they were feelings that were in a way troubling, that motivated me to react this way.
The initiative-taking issue, in itself, can be seen as both. Usually it annoys me when people see it as a psychological thing, cause it seems to deny my actual skills deficits. But all of these paradigms go along the lines of: I never had any friends and so it got me to withdraw, assuming no-one wants to befriend me anyway. This is partly true, but I do have skills deficits. No matter what was first - my skills deficits or something causing my trouble -, I’ve had problems in social situations for over ten years at least, and even in those ten years, a lot of skills deficit can develop, if it weren’t there before already.
The opposite also happens, assuming that all my difficulties are skills deficits, rather than performance deficits, and if they were performance deficits, they’d inevitably be due to unwillingness. This, however, is less harmful where behaviours that I can, sometimes with difficulty, execute by “just remembering” are concerned, cause all it leads to is unnecessary explanation of skills, and the subsequent expectation that I’ll perform the skill, will also help me improve my behaviour.
What to do when the performance deficit is more complex, like with the “locked up inside” issue? It is a performance deficit, in that I know exactly what to say but won’t/can’t say it, and yet “reminders”haven’t gotten me over it. I’m the only one who can get over it, of course, and that goes for this issue even more than for all my other deficits. It’s difficult, in that it makes me feel rather bad when I am not succeeding at overcoming this issue, which so far I rarely can. It sometime smakes me feel as if, not only am I the only one who can get over this problem, but it’s sort of an obligation to others cause after all, who was feeling sad about not having much social contact? Then go ahead and make that contact, huh? And not responding when someone asks you a question, is about the curtest one can be.
