Being Autistic In The Philippines

On so many levels, it was an insane choice to move to the Philippines as an autistic person. I did it anyway.

There are some common challenges shared by many autistic people. Being a rather common person, I too struggle with these challenges.

Of course, the Philippines can be a sensory assault.

The Philippines is a tropical country so it is hot and humid. If I am outside and moving around or working, I constantly feel wet and sticky. I deeply dislike that feeling.

The Philippines is crowded. It’s a small country with a lot of people. People bump into me and brush past me on the sidewalk and in stores. I can struggle with people I know touching me, and having complete strangers touch me can be nearly overwhelming.

The Philippines is loud. Filipinos like it that way. If you go into a mall in America, there is quiet background music playing. In the mall here, that music is loud. If Filipinos have a party — and there is always a party! — they haul out enormous speaker towers to play music and sing karaoke, and there is only one acceptable volume setting; MAX! I know that people enjoy this loud music, but I don’t understand how. To me, it is physically painful.

The Philippines is chaotic. Driving in the Philippines is nothing like driving in the West. In the West, I treated driving as an exercise in rule following. Here, nobody follows the rules. It took a long time traveling as a passenger for me to develop a paradigm for driving that would suit me here: I treat driving as an advanced exercise in pattern matching. By carefully watching everyone around me on the road, I can recognize patterns and predict amazingly well what others are going to do. It is exhausting, though.

But the biggest challenge for me is communication. The Philippines, and much of Asia, is a high-context culture. According to Wikipedia:

“A high-context culture places emphasis on nonverbal cues, social roles, and shared experiences in communication, while a low-context culture prioritizes explicit verbal communication and direct statements. In high-context cultures, messages are often implicit and rely on understanding the background, relationships, and unspoken rules within a specific group.”

Now, in this comparison the United States, and indeed much of the West, is a low-context culture. But when comparing autistic people to neurotypical people, even in the West, neurotypicals are high-context and autistics are low-context. Autistics tend to process language literally, and struggle with figurative language and social context.

What all this means to me as an autistic living in the Philippines and trying to communicate with Filipinos, is that I am far to one extreme in communication style while Filipinos are far to the other extreme.

The only way I know to communicate is to say what I mean, as clearly as I can. I don’t mean more than the words I say, and I don’t mean less. But people in a high-context society do not speak this way. In fact, it is often considered rude to speak this way. You never say anything that might embarrass somebody publicly, for example.

So often, I end up feeling like the proverbial bull in a china shop, having made a simple statement and then feeling like I’ve insulted everybody involved. And, conversely, I often end a conversation and am left feeling that while I understood all the words that have been said to me, I somehow have missed the actual meaning of what they are trying to say.

I don’t know that there is a solution to this. I have learned a lot over my six decades of life in a neurotypical world, but I am autistic, not neurotypical. I do not think like a neurotypical and I do not communicate like a neurotypical, let alone a neurotypical from a high-context society.

In the end, Inday ends up bearing the burden of interpreting much of what is going on for me. She often saves me by coaching me on what things I can and can’t say. This is an unfair burden on her, and I wish she didn’t have to fill this role.

Eden will often defuse my frustration by smiling and saying “Sweetie, it’s the Philippines!” Indeed, it is the Philippines. I chose to come live here. There is so much to love about being here. Yes, it was a rather crazy choice for an autistic to make, but I made it. It keeps life interesting! Much worse than living what is at times a difficult life, would be living a boring life.