about scripts
I’m writing this post rather than writing a lengthy Twitter thread, fragments of which would be shareable out of context, and the whole of which would probably be much less coherent. There’s been a lot of chat over the past month about scripts — the kind you use when you have to broach something difficult and you’re not sure how to do it. The catalyst is embedded below, just in case you missed it (I envy you your life and your choices) or you need a refresher on what everybody is yelling about this week.
A quick glance into the replies will show that responses have been mixed. A quick glance at your timeline will show that the original tweet has morphed into a really easy joke.
It’s going to sound disingenuous when I’m literally in an anthology of writing about autism (coming in spring, watch this space), but I actually don’t talk all that much about being autistic. My diagnostic history is complicated and it’s hard to feel as though I have a seat at that table. More than that, it’s extremely easy to get hung up on the ways in which my autism makes me… well, inconvenient. I burn out easily on human interaction, which makes me pretty unreliable as a partner or friend. I put so much effort into seeming neurotypical in professional settings — which is itself a response to being mistreated in previous jobs for my autism — that in personal settings I miss cues, or I say careless things, the second I stop paying close and careful attention. I fixate. I find it hard to be in crowded public spaces. I become history’s shittiest control freak the second you put me in an airport. And a lifetime of being treated like an inconvenience for these things — which I try to control, because the people I spend time with deserve that from me, but which I physically cannot always keep a lid on under pressure — has made me abjectly fucking horrible at setting a boundary.
(It’s not the only factor. Nothing is ever the only factor. But it’s major.)
The hallmark of a sociopath.
The thing is that you have to exist in the world. It is a matter of my continued survival as someone who can participate in human life to be able to say that no, I can’t talk right now; or no, I can’t stay late tonight; or no, I need you to stop trying to hug me when you say hello. But equally, I’ve witnessed enough petty internet bullshit, all of which has found its way ill-advisedly onto some kind of public record, to know that it’s smart to think carefully about how you phrase your shit. I’m not trying to bend over backwards to the point where my spine breaks in half. I’m also not trying to be berated at length for being a bad friend, or for being insufficiently nice, or for not using the exact unwritten-rule language that’s considered acceptable this week when I ask for a little breathing space.
Hence scripts. And I’m not alone; it’s not even just fellow autism havers. Captain Awkward, a screenwriter turned advice blogger, has had massive success in laying out clear, coherent how-to guides for her readers, explicitly drawing on her experience of screenwriting to do so — and at the professional end of things, Ask a Manager provides (much looser, but nevertheless) ways to approach common workplace problems with colleagues, supervisors, and HR. You could make a case for any given advice column, honestly, and I know for a fact that there are people out there grousing at the principle of scripts who at least read Dear Prudence.
If the Fabello script tweets seem clunky, that’s because you’re not meant to say them verbatim (you fools; you clowns; you amateurs). By Fabello’s own admission, they’re templates, and you’re meant to use them as guiding principles rather than reel them off verbatim to your unhappy friends. Equally, though — sit with your knee-jerk misgivings about sounding ‘robotic’ or ‘unnatural,’ because that’s how a lot of my fellow autism-havers genuinely speak. I’ve been in appointments with medical professionals, trying to set out the extent of my mental health difficulties, and been told that I’m not convincing because I don’t sound distressed — and I’ve been in a position to work on communicating the way I’m expected to communicate. What hope for everybody else?
I’ve seen people calling the scripts everything from selfish to sociopathic. I’m over it. Sure, not all of them are good — there was one about initiating sexting that made my eyeballs crawl right back into my brain stem, and another one about how to share difficult information that simply didn’t understand how anxiety works. But I’m going to defend the principle of them anyway, because I need them. You probably didn’t notice me using them with you, the last time we talked. And if your bad-faith assumption, on hearing that, is that I was using them to mask my inherent contempt for interpersonal relationships… right. Sure. Because people who don’t care about friendship or partnership put this much effort and care into negotiating everyone’s needs and limitations, all the time.
If you think that people, neurodivergent or otherwise, having useful tools for boundary-setting is a bad or cruel thing, then I question your respect for boundaries — not only in these cases, but more generally. I challenge you to listen, to reflect, and to prove me wrong. And that’s all I have to say about that.