Eyes, Lies & Credibility

I once had a sociology professor who said "People who are shifty-eyed & avoid eye contact when talking to you are always lying or hiding something.  Always."  🤦🏻‍♀

You have no idea how much I wanted to raise my hand & ask the asshole 1.) where he got his degree  2.) if he'd like to know where he could shove his degree, and thirdly, if he'd ever met an autistic person.  But I needed to not get kicked out of college so, as always, I kept my mouth shut & turned that rage inward.  Hah.  But seriously.  I've found that his ignorant belief seems to be pretty universal even if people don't say it out loud.  Hell, maybe they don't realize they have this prejudice themselves.  I've been accused of lying when I 100% am NOT in too many situations to count as well as just not being taken seriously on subjects I know more about than if a typical person had studied them for a decade (which ain't very many, but the fact remains).  It sucks royally.  😓 

Tulips & Truth

There's a belief that autists are "incapable" of lying and this varies, but for me it's pretty close to true.  I came to this realization as a 16-year-old when my dad asked "What the hell's growing in that pot out there?"  I stuttered and spat out in the most indignant tone I could muster: "Psssh, tulips. Why?"  The pot contained maybe 5 inches of soil & wouldn't fit one tulip bulb, let alone multiple.  I guess I envisioned tulips starting as SEEDS rather than bulbs.  He got up and stormed out of the room and my mom informed me of my mistake.  Needless to say, my cannabis plant never made it past the vegetative stage & I made a pact with myself at that moment that lying just ain't worth it.  I have a terrible poker face & can't think on my feet at all, but you can bet that if I somehow manage to fool you in the moment I'll mess it up later by forgetting the details of the lie.  Big, important details.  Losing the trust of people--even ones I don't really know/care about--just isn't worth it...  especially when I come out looking so stupid in the end.  😬

Yet despite lying LESS than other people on average, I'm stuck with all this skepticism, doubt & second-guessing; a credibility problem without a lying problem.  If only people knew how much it hurts to be accused of something you didn't do when you've never given them a (real) reason to not trust you, maybe they'd think twice about it.  Maybe not because people suck.  While the sociology professor was a dick, at least he said the quiet part out loud, something I wish more people would do:  cut the crap & tell me where I'm fucking up & what I should be doing instead.  I prefer the ugly truth to a pretty lie, thanks.  It's hard to follow rules you don't know exist and, while my intuition is pretty damn strong, I'm no Dionne Warwick.  Reading minds is exhausting.  Also:  Generalizing with words like "always," "never," "all," "every" and the like just doesn't tend to work with something as complex as human behavior... a factoid you'd expect a human behavior expert to know.  😒

Indeed, other things may be happening in this scenario:  The "liar" may not be lying at all, they may just find you creepy or your insistence on eye contact too intense & intrusive.  The eyes are the only part of the brain that's visible from the outside (well, the retinas specifically) so surely you can grasp why having someone stare a hole through them might be a bit overwhelming for some people--autistic or not.  It's not so much that I can't make eye contact but that I can't maintain it & keep a train of thought at the same time.  Some days are better than others & it's harder with some people than others.  Don't fucking ask me why but it has nothing to do with lying.  So I've learned to fake it over the years using a number of techniques from blurring my vision completely while looking in the direction of someone's eyes to focusing on some other adjacent part of their face, like their forehead or cheek.  Just a ridiculous little autistic "life hack" I've had to institute to avoid being treated like a human impersonator.  One of many.  👽

While giving people the benefit of the doubt is retarded, you should probably gather more evidence than "they seemed twitchy & had poor eye contact" before labeling someone a sketchy untrustworthy con artist. Some of us are just naturally twitchy & shifty-eyed.  (God forbid I ever end up in a police station after a major crime I didn't commit.  "Let me talk to my attorney" will be my ONLY statement if I can conjure the wherewithal to summon it forth from my lips in a moment of terror).  TL;DR - Everybody isn't you & thus your foolproof interrogation tactics are bullshit.  You probably had your mind up beforehand anyway.   Oh, and using body language to try & detect deception is bullshit anyway.  The entire "field" is pseudoscience.  🤷🏼‍♀

Another thing I suck at:  keeping secrets.  But I'm proud to say that ability is getting better as we speak.  Or DON'T speak, as it were.  🤐