Othering

Have you ever seen a seagull yawn?

I’m considering using that as my opening small talk question because I never know what to say.

I’ve been thinking a lot about difference lately. I’ve never really felt like I fit in to things or know what feels comfortable. And if that’s how I feel about clothes, imagine how I feel around people. For the longest time I thought that part of meeting new people was to lead with the difference, to say something that would be interesting, a conversation starter. In other words, the opposite of small talk.

Does anyone like talking to strangers? I mean, the clue is in the name, surely. And why “stranger”? Isn’t it odd that an unfamiliar person is automatically a stranger? Wouldn’t it make more sense to call someone new a potential familiar, like how the latin name for dog is canis familiaris? Come to think of it, I get along much better with dogs than people. I guess that means my favourite kind of stranger is one I haven’t given a treat to yet.

So, picture this, young me trying to connect with others, starting a conversation with “I live in a castle”. Surprisingly, this was almost always poorly received. Even within my middle class school peer group, this was not “relatable”. The problem was made worse when my peers started going on school trips to my home. I know that sounds like a joke but it is in fact a true story.

Granted, castle bullying is a niche experience. And of course I don’t condone bullying. However, I could have perhaps accepted a more legitimate form of castle bullying. You know, when someone with a moat castle looks down on a moat-less one. Or where someone with a gravel estate driveway belittles the commoner with tarmac. I could get behind that form of castle bullying because it’s contextual and has some form of logic.

In my case, it turns out I wasn’t ever actually bullied for simply growing up in a castle. For example, not one of my peers ever bullied me because our swimming poll didn’t have any water in it. Rather it was a gateway into bullying me for things that were far more personal and devastating. Devastating because I was being bullied for things I had no control over, separate to the fact that I didn’t choose where I grew up. That bullying related to almost every single personal aspect of who and how I was.

I was locked in classrooms because I took too long to organise my things when the bell went. Parades of children followed behind me mimicking my awkward windmill legs when I ran. I was bullied for my intonation and tone of voice even after my parents helpfully decided to send me to elocution lessons so that I emerged with an even stranger RP English accent. They were doing this, to be clear, not to stop the original bullies, but because my mother felt that castle lifestyle didn’t go well with a potentially nascent Glaswegian accent. It might lead to people drawing the wrong conclusion when I asked would you like to come round my estate?

Pretty quickly I learned that I needed to apologise for these things that I could do nothing about but which warranted such obvious othering. However much I wished I could fit in, I rarely managed it. I began adopting certain strategies, not always knowingly. One of them was mimicking. Because Neighbours and Home and Away were popular shows at the time, I watched them obsessively. I studied the phrases, I listened to the way characters spoke. I mean doesn’t everyone who has school trips to their house ask the butler to put more shrimp on the barbie? I guess not.

I turned to new tactics, but really they weren’t that much different from my old ones. When I met new people, strange people, I still told them I grew up in a castle but my reason was different. It was now a form of test, to introduce the thing that I could be bullied about up front and then apologise for it as if to say, don’t worry, I’m in on the joke. Castle confession small talk turned into boarding school confession small talk. The subtext of “Sorry I’ve had different experiences” was actually “Sorry I am different”.

Anyway, small talk. It may now be obvious, but it’s another thing I don’t know how to do. I don’t understand what it is for, and even if I did I don’t see why it’s necessary to start a conversation by asking people questions that no-one wants to hear the answers to.

So, that means I need to concentrate to engage in small talk. I need to force myself to participate. I need a script to follow. I am not unaware of the irony. Small talk should be perfect for someone like me. Small talk tends to follow certain rules. The “How are You” script demands the required response, “Fine”, regardless of context. Bringing up the weather script has the rule of pointing out weather, and the response requires a weather reaction in which it is almost impossible to say a wrong thing. Rain can described in terms of men, cats and dogs, or any verb before the words “it down”.

You’d think that the rules should be comforting, it should allow me to feel like I fit in, like I am doing the right thing. But mostly it just makes me want to tear my hair out with boredom. I want to interrupt, say something inappropriate, or worse, be honest and declare how stupid this whole routine is. Why insist on asking people things you’re almost certainly either not going to care about or not know how to respond to? The “what do you do for a living” question might make sense if you are assessing that person for a financial loan but in most other contexts there is no reason to ask this. Small talk involves saying meaningless things to another person for the sake of making some noise. It’s conversational chewing gum. It makes no sense at all.

If you google “medium talk” then yes, you are going to come across a lot of people selling conversations with dead people. Personally, because I struggle to make sense of a lot of things people say, the idea of talking to a living person interpreting a dead one from the netherworld is not for me. However the kind of medium talk I mean is a form of conversation that is similar but different to “small talk”. Jesse Singal in The Cut said that it is “To nudge a conversation briefly toward the darker side of things [..] to force both participants to get real for a second, to actually engage with someone despite the fleeting nature of the exchange”.

Medium talk, as I see it, is not small talk because even though you are having a potentially fleeting conversation with a stranger, you are asking them something you actually care about. You’re introducing something outside the script, you’re offering a fact or a question to get a real answer rather than a stock response.

Come to think if it, asking someone if they have ever seen a seagull yawn is medium talk. It’s medium talk because it’s not conventional. It’s medium talk because depending on how the conversation goes, I may or may not follow up with the fact that the term “seagull” doesn’t actually mean anything – a “gull” is the correct generic description. I could then go on to reveal to my stranger that gulls like a variety of different foods and are actually quite intelligent. I read, for example, that gulls who want to eat a tasty worm are known to tap on the ground to imitate rain when it’s dry, so as to encourage the worms to surface. I know this because I have acquired a herring gull who has trained me to feed them by tapping incessantly at my open glass door until I relent. Although I can’t determine the gender of my herring gull I have named her Karen, because she is really quite demanding. And that is the kind of conversation I would be invested in having.

Earlier this year, I found out, later in life, that I am autistic. I am still working out my reaction to this. There may have been some clues in what I’ve said above but for me, it was genuinely quite surprising.

It was surprising because I am not in fact an upper middle class white 8 year old boy who likes trains. It was surprising because I am not, like my older uncle, non-verbal and living in assisted living accommodation.

I’m still cycling through reactions. One of my best friends has only been able to consistently give his (non-professional, non-medically qualified) opinion that I’m not autistic, I just had a sheltered childhood. This initially felt (and still feels) quite hurtful. It also didn’t make much sense to me. Having considered it further, I think the reason he has this opinion is that to him, being autistic can mean that you don’t know how to relate to other people, but that also if you haven’t been around enough “normal” people you don’t know how to be like them. On reflection, although it’s tempting to dismiss it out of hand, there is something in that that is partly true to my experience.

When I was 17 I was forced in to learning to drive and following three dangerous failed attempts at passing I left it a number of years before returning to lessons. It was one of the first times in my life where I experienced not being able to do something without much effort. The whole process of driving was completely overwhelming. There was so much to pay attention to all at once. There was endless stimuli and behaviours to monitor. Even if you learned all the rules, you learned that the rules didn’t always follow their own logic. Knowing that you were in a 30 mph area didn’t in fact mean that you had to drive at 30 mph all the time, speeding up to a red traffic light or junction at exactly 30 mph. These things had to be explained to me by one of my first three, increasingly frustrated, driving instructors.

When I finally returned to driving, at the age of 25 I had absorbed some of these rules which were not rules. I had some miles under my belt so to speak. I went to do a taster lesson with one guy who barked orders at me from the passenger seat and chained smoked out his window the entire lesson. When I was picked up by my mother, she enquired how it went. I explained that when I booked the lesson and turned up in person, I had used my name, Katy. Despite this, throughout our time together he had not called me by my name. Curious as to why, I mentioned this to my mother. “Yes, the lesson went well”, I said. “However he called me Paul the whole time and I’m not sure why”. I was confused because not only had I told him my name, I was clearly not the correct gender presentation to warrant being named Paul. My mother started at me quizzically for a beat and then said, Katy do you think he might in fact have been calling you “pal”?

So yes, one point to my best friend I suppose.

In the main though, notwithstanding my cycling responses to being autistic, I have begun the process of reframing some of my old tactics. With hindsight, it now makes perfect sense why I struggled so much to fit in, why my peers othered me and seemed to have some sixth sense of my difference in a way that was never known to me. This time around though, I am not going to apologise. Having a label to understand myself with is both a burden and an asset. I am different. I want to be liked but I don’t want to do that at the sake of trying to make myself more like you. I think I’m getting better at leading with the difference and testing you as a result. So the next time you see me there is every chance the first thing I ask you is whether you have ever seen a seagull yawn.