Stillness

Many autistic people are said to have non-expressive faces, awkward or non-apparent body language, or a mismatch between their words, and their facial expressions or body language.

My diagnostic report has a reference to my face being relatively non-expressive; that during the interviews I “made only sporadic eye contact and exhibited minimal change in facial expression”.  I found this rather shocking; not the comment about eye contact, obviously, but the comment about my facial expressions, as my own internal sense of these, both during my assessment interviews, and in ordinary life, is that my face is rather animated.  (Perhaps I’d make a better poker player than I give myself credit for, eh?)

However, it seems that my face is not the only thing that has a stillness to it that others notice.  Soon after my diagnosis, my mother mentioned my being autistic to a friend of hers.  She said that her friend had been rather unsurprised and indeed had already thought that I might be, based on something she had seen many years before. 

What was it she had noticed?  She had seen me help lead singing at a Christian conference and noted how still I had stood when on stage.  The irony here is that I would have been actively standing still, so my movements would not be distracting to others in the way that I have found the movements of other singing leaders be distracting for me.