An occasional post on ways I’ve tried to convince myself I’m normal (and failed).
How old were you before you learned to tell the time?
I was thirteen. It was a source of enormous embarrassment to me, and had digital watches been invented earlier, I’d probably have switched to one of them and never bothered to learn the other way.
Even now I cannot explain what was so hard. My brain simply wouldn’t take it in; I couldn’t remember which hand was for which bit, and how could they both point at the same thing and mean something? A complete mystery.
Telling the time was important at school. The class of nine-year-olds was the one that had the responsibility of ringing the bell that ended each lesson. I loved that bell. It was huge, golden bronze and shiny, and I could tell that standing in the playground, setting free that commanding sound, made you feel like the most important person in the school.
Except you were only allowed to ring the bell if you passed the test that showed you could tell the time.
And so, week after week I watched one person after another ring that beautiful bell, until everyone in the class except me had done so.
Several years later, in a school where the bell was a nasty electronic thing, set off by a timer, I finally learned to tell the time. I don’t know how I managed it, or even exactly when it happened. I started wearing a watch (a digital one!), and I could read the clock on the classroom wall, too. But there was no sense of victory, just a creeping shame that it had taken so long, embarrassment at all the tricks I had used to hide my inability.
I only remembered it recently, when I was out bush with friends, and none of us were wearing a watch. A small competition ensued, to see who could most closely predict the correct time. Eventually an ipod was produced, to verify the winner.
It was me. The others were wrong by nearly an hour each way.
And I felt no sense of surprise, because I’ve had an accurate time-sense for years. It was only later, when I tried to figure out how it had started, that I remembered all of this. I had to know the time, because I couldn’t read it. I had to be able to estimate how long it was since the last moment associated with a known time, and calculate forward. I had to know each day when it got light, and when the sun set. How long it took to drive to school, and how long the bus journey home. Every one was a point in the day from which I could calculate forward or back.
So many things I had done to conceal my failure. And I wonder now, was it autism? I was certainly smart enough that I should have been able to manage it, and yet I couldn’t. So I throw the question out there – does anyone else recognise this?
Lyssa and Me 
I think I have an indirect match. I didn’t have trouble telling time exactly, but I might have something from the same underlying problem but expressing differently because of understood ways we are different. Like I think if words were my numbers I couldn’t tell time or would have great trouble.
Let me explain. I can only talk when my mind is certain modes; I have lots of communication difficulties when I try to talk at the same time as various other cognitive tasks. The most glaring is when I’m thinking about time in any way. If I think about time, I suddenly have a 30 word vocabulary or so, it used to be worse. But I can hold numbers in my head; not the words for numbers but the numbers themselves. If I think in words, I have little to no intuitive concept of time. Grammatical tenses confuse me a lot. I’ve finally broken down and started using a visual schedule like they use with nonverbal kids.
So when I tell time I have to convert to wordless numbers and then switch modes to convert numbers to words. I learned to do this fast because numbers are among my more natural means of translating between thought modes. But if I didn’t have the number translation, I doubt I could.
I took the longest time to learn AM and PM. I finally got it only by associating the meanings with the physical shapes of the letters, slanted left edge means morning.
If I try to force myself to think in words while looking at a clock I can remember words about what the hands mean but have a confusion that feels like yours sounds trying to understand how these things could signify what they do. It’s hard to comprehend that the hands are distinguished by how they change not really by their length. They are recognized by their length but there identity is in how they change. I can remember this in words because I already know it. But I can’t remember how the hands move because I can’t conceive of a movement different from the syntax I’m forcing my brain into.
Does that make any sense? Do you see a translation of yourself in any of that? I suppose it’s possible that we have unrelated problems telling time; that would be sort of disappointing. It would be really exciting if we figured this out together though.
/special interest monologue
There’s certainly some overlap; I also had that feeling the hands should change in length, and sometimes I thought they did, which added to my confusion.
Now I suspect I simply carry a series of images in my head for five past, ten past, quarter past and so on. I frequently misread the hour, especially when I’m distracted and lose the sense of how long has passed since the last ‘known’ time.
Essentially I’ve learned it now through countless repetitions. I’ve also spent a lot of time simply staring at clocks and watching the hands move, until I was comfortable with the idea.
That sounds a lot like how I learned to read facial expressions. Somebody should catalog various common spontaneous coping strategies. That seems like something that could be useful both theoretically and practically.
In some ways I think that’s what the growing number of autie blogs are doing – enabling us to speak up about these odd things without (too much) embarrassment, and seeing which of them are common to many of us.
I’m starting to think of it as letters of the alphabet, eg 26 autistic traits or modalities, from A-Z. Eventually we can work out how common each one is, i.e. 70% of autistics have trait K.
An individual could have BSIR as strong traits, AWPCX as moderate traits, and QLZO as minor traits.
If we work some of this out for ourselves as a community, it might also prevent some researchers taking such damaging ownership of certain research areas.
It’s also really useful to read about other people who have similar traits that it’s so hard to explain to NTs, so I have some way of thinking about and categorizing difficulties as an alternative to the stigmatized interpretations society gives us. I know that’s why I look so hard for similarities and get so excited when I find one. It was never any fun being the only one.