Imagine that you wake up to find your mind has been transplanted into an artificial brain in an experimental robot body. It’s a work of pure genius, really. It looks absolutely real, you can see and hear and feel and taste and smell everything, and you can control everything the same way you would your normal body without even thinking about it. It’s a perfect copy, really – except for just one or two kinks they’re still working out of the system.
First of all, you have to test the controls. You tell the robot body to stand up straight, and you can feel that it’s straight, but when you stand in front of a mirror, you see that it’s not. Your shoulders are rolled forward just a little too much, and you’re hunched down a bit. At first you can’t reconcile what you see in the mirror with what you feel. Finally you start moving your body around randomly until the body in the mirror is standing up straight, like it should. But it doesn’t feel right at all. It feels like you’re leaning backwards, and you have to really stretch the artificial muscles to keep the shoulders back. It’s going to take a while to get used to that, and you might never manage it – it just takes so much of your concentration to keep it up.
Then you try walking, and it’s another disaster. The body in the mirror isn’t moving the way you intend at all. Yet another physical movement to train. And the more things you try, the more you realize – the controls are just not set right. Your only option if you don’t want to appear completely insane is to practice each and every bodily movement in front of a mirror for hours each day. It’s just not feasible, so for now you’ll have to accept that your body language and posture are going to look a bit weird.
As you’re experimenting with this, you discover another programming error: the sensitivity on the sensory input mechanisms is set way too high. The programmers forgot to take into account that a normal brain has a filtering mechanism that picks out what sensory input is important and sends that to your brain, discarding the rest. That’s why you can see a field instead of a million blades of grass, a wooden table instead of a mess of brown squiggles, and a car coming at you instead of a splotch of red that slowly changes size. These robot eyes take 100% of the details of the images they receive and pipe them directly into your digital brain without any filtering whatsoever, and the buffer for processing this information is way too small. As you look into that mirror trying to make your body move properly, you keep getting distracted by a swish of hair, a reflection from a window where cars are passing by, the smell of someone’s stale coffee, and the sound of footsteps in the next room.
To make matters worse, the volume and light meters are not even set properly. You’re getting all the sounds in the surrounding area at the same volume, and it’s impossible to distinguish the conversation in the next room from the questions the technician is asking you. As your buffer fills up, the lights in the room seem to get brighter, and the sound seems to get louder. You just can’t process it all.
Meanwhile, a technician is standing there with a clipboard trying to test your abilities. He asks you to stand up straight, look him in the eye, and answer a few simple “common sense” questions to test your logic circuits. The mere suggestion that you should accomplish all of these things at once in this clumsy excuse for a body is overwhelming and frustrating. You’re having a hard time even making out the words he’s saying over the sound of computers beeping and humming and cars passing outside. You start to tell him that you *are* standing up straight, but then remember that your body doesn’t move properly and have to break your eye contact and concentration to look back in that mirror and fix it, all the while trying (and failing) to pay attention to what that tech is saying. He, in turn, gets impatient and starts poking you with his pen to keep your attention, adding to the sensory overload. At long last, you can’t take it anymore. You squeeze your eyes shut, clamp your hands over your ears, and try to empty that buffer enough that you can at least manage a conversation.
But it’s no use. The environment is too stimulating, and the robot project is a failure. It would take years for you to even be able to manage all of this well enough to look someone in the eye and speak. It looks like they’ll scrap the project, junk the robot, and move on to other things.
And that’s a damn shame, because you had so many interesting things to say.
Now imagine that you’re stuck in that robot body for the rest of your life. And while you train and train and train, it never really gets any easier. Oh, and when you try to explain to others that you're only behaving weird because of this crazy robot experiment, they roll their eyes and call you a paranoid hypochondriac.
Background:
I’ve educated myself pretty well in the areas of social skills and body language. I’ve learned all the signals I can for when to enter a conversation, when to leave, when to stop talking, when the subject has been going on for too long. I’ve struggled to improve my posture and control my facial expressions, to be able to express the emotion I’m intending to those on the outside. One of the things I’ve had to accept, and am still coming to terms with, however, is that while I can always improve bit by bit, I will never be able to show the world who I really am inside.
I’ve tried time and time again to explain to others that I’m really not so strange. I’m not crazy or stupid or immature even that different. For the many years before I learned about my asperger syndrome, I could never understand why people didn’t like me. After all, I’m a very likeable person. I’m intelligent, funny, talented, kind-hearted, generous, honest, and caring. I always do my best to make other people happy and do the right thing. What’s not to like?
Then I finally learned that I lack “social skills” and unwittingly make other people uncomfortable. It was me, not them, that was the problem. The world is not full of as*holes: I’m just giving off all the wrong signals. My body and face do not look the way they seem to in my mind’s eye, and no matter how well I think I’ve learned the rules, I can never speak and act in an appropriate enough way for people to take me seriously. And no matter how well I train myself, I’ll never be able to process all the sensory input fast enough to keep up with the world. Even to those who know me well, I will always be, first and foremost, that strange girl who always acts inappropriately. And there will always be days when I have to hide in the closet until the flood of overstimulation slows to a manageable level.
I am not what you see. In fact, I really like who I am. I bet you would, too. But you can’t see who I am. You can only see the image I project, and I can never show you what’s inside. It’s not your fault any more than it is mine. But it’s such an intense feeling of loneliness, knowing that there is not now, nor will there ever be, any possible way for me to show people who I really am, how I really think, what I really see, and what I really have to offer. All I’ve ever really wanted is to make other people happy, and to feel loved. And I have so very many interesting things to share, if only I could figure out how.
04 Oct 2012, 2:36 pm
It's like feeling different all your life and one day you find out you're a Cylon and everything is making sense. If anyone gets what I'm talking about.
