A Major Autistic Life-Lesson I Learned from Watching Love on the Spectrum

Love on the Spectrum (LotS), while it is still manipulated like all reality-TV, has helped me developed some major insight. I was watching the show, and after a few episodes, I said, “Finally, a show about normal people being normal.” Then, I started thinking that if the whole premise of the show is that it’s about not-normal people, what am I thinking? I had to think about it for a few days until I reached my conclusion.

My whole life, I thought that fiction and reality-TV and movies (known as TV for the rest of this post) were so weird. I would call it propaganda and population control. To me, it was a way to get the masses to all behave a certain way. It was never anything like what people are normally like. TV characters try to be cool, play social games with each other, be mean to the weak to appear strong, conform to trends, try their hardest to assimilate a prescribed standard of beauty, etc. There were good messages too, like be nice to each other, don’t overtly lie, have morals, here’s how you resolve disputes in a healthy mutual manner, etc. Still, it was not real-life. It was not how people naturally behaved. When I would interact with people and they started acting like people on TV, I would tell them that they are acting too much like the people on TV and could probably benefit from watching TV less. When asked by someone if I think that other people will like what they are planning on wearing, I have seriously responded with, “What...are you competing in a popularity contest like on TV? Who cares what other people think? Wear what you like.” People would be upset about this, but I was proud that I “helped them see that they were being inauthentic/brainwashed”. Despite my views of TV though, I still enjoyed it for its entertainment value, but I naturally gravitated towards science shows and documentaries.

What LotS helped me realize is that...No! TV is really how “normal” people are. NTs really behave like the shows on TV. Maybe they’re not exactly like TV depicts, but they are very similar. They have their hierarchies, manipulative games, implicit/indirect communication, popularity contests, confusions, morals, small talk...all that. In my example above, the person deciding on what to wear was in a popularity contest like on TV! I made the NT-cultural mistake of explicitly pointing it out, which they understandably considered rude. Overall though, through internal and external selection biases, my life was inadvertently designed to include autistic-friendly people, which behave differently from people on TV. Either my friends were autistic or behaved with me in an autistic-friendly manner. In my personal life, I saw that non-TV-people didn’t act like those on TV, so when someone would act like TV, I thought they were brainwashed rather than NT. The whole time, I was the “weird” one insisting that the world itself was “weird”. OMG. I’m cracking up! 😆

Like all of life's lessons, I'm still building on this, so I would appreciate any input or additions. Am I wrong? Did I make an illogical connections? Am I missing anything?

Also, has anyone else been through something similar?