How I stopped, then started, looking people in the eye

by Helen Said, Autistic advocate

When I was about 8 or 9 years old, I began teaching myself to make eye contact while speaking to people. Before that, when someone spoke to me, especially if it was someone outside the family, I used to turn away and not look at them.

Today, avoiding eye contact would be recognised as a likely sign of Autism, but nothing was known about neurodivergence in the 1960s, when I was in primary school. 

Nobody forced me to start looking people in the eye. In fact I don't recall anyone having commented about the fact that I didn't make eye contact. Contrary to what some Autistic friends say, I wasn't "masking" or on the defensive about my different manner. I just knew I was very shy and I didn't like feeling that way. I noticed that other people seemed to find conversation and making friends easier than I did and I wanted to be able to talk to people more easily. I noticed that other people made eye contact when they spoke to each other, and I thought it would be helpful to do the same, so I started looking people in the eye when they spoke to me.

At first it was terrifying. I felt like a hunted animal when someone's eyes locked onto mine. I would look away in panic after a few seconds, but I kept trying. Eventually eye contact became habitual. It did make conversation easier as I had hoped. I felt proud of my accomplishment. It helped me learn that I could achieve anything with persistence and it made my life happier and easier.

This isn't what you hear from many Autistic advocates. Many Autistic advocates believe that if an Autistic child doesn't make eye contact then this is meant to be, that they should stay that way all their lives, and trying to change is "ABA" or "masking" and a risk to their mental health. This could well be true for other Autistics but my own experience is quite different and I have thought long and hard about the reasons why. 

Thinking back to my very early years, there were big changes in my life between the ages of 2 and a half and 4 and a half which profoundly affected me. My family were Greek speaking refugees from Egypt, living in England, when I was born. When I was a toddler, my older sister began primary school, not knowing any English. She was very upset by not being able to communicate with other kids, so my family switched to speaking English at home to help us both learn the language. So, just as I was learning to talk, my mother tongue was switched from Greek to English. 

When I was 3, I remember my parents repeatedly telling me, "Helen! We are going to Austra-a-a-alia! It is a very very long way away!" I thought about things that were a very long long way away, trying to understand what my parents were saying to me, and I thought about being turfed out of my pusher and made to walk long tiring distances. I was convinced we were going to walk to Australia, without my pusher, and I remember going all quiet and tense whenever my parents mentioned the journey. 

The migrant ship journey took a month, a very long time for a 4 year old. I had no concept of international travel and I thought we were living on that ship. The whole family was in a cabin together, there was constant contact with all my family members, then suddenly we were all split up. Three carloads of relatives met us at Station Pier and took us to their homes, my mum and I were in a car with my aunt, my mum's sister, and of course they had a lot to talk about. But I couldn't understand this; I had no idea who this strange lady was! I can still remember clinging onto my mum while this strange, grinning lady with dyed orange hair and a black velvet coat, sitting in the front seat, turned around and talked to us non-stop. I didn't know where my sister, dad or grandmother were. (They were in other relatives' cars but didn't join us until nightfall.)

Suddenly, we were all living in my aunt's house and my mum recalls that I was overly attached to her by this stage. At my aunt's house, people were again speaking Greek, a language which, by then, I had all but forgotten. I can still remember the shock and sadness when my mum started working in Australia and the long hours I would wait for her to come home, while being looked after by my grandmother. 

Then suddenly things changed again. When my parents came home from work, we would walk around the corner to a wooden house frame amongst the weeds and paddocks of early West Altona, and my parents would point to a patch of mud under the house frame and say, "Look, Helen! This is going to be our lounge room!" And I didn't think I was going to like sitting on a couch in all that mud, so again I was quite panicked about what was going to happen to us in the future.

At my aunt's house, and again when we moved to our new house, I remained confused about stairs. In England, all houses had stairs, and I couldn't imagine that these houses didn't have them. I knew adults had their secrets and I was convinced this was one of them. They weren't telling me where the stairs were but I was determined to find them, so I kept looking. I would wonder from room to room, with this uneasy feeling that something was not right about these houses. Then just as I was adapting to life in the new home, when I was 4 and a half years old, I was suddenly taken to school by my mother and left there amongst strangers. It was the first time I had been left anywhere without another family member present and I buried myself in joining together sticks and blocks and Cuisonnaire Rods (coloured maths blocks).

Like many migrant families, my family liked maths and my Dad and I were especially good at it. Both Dad and Uncle gave us lots of practice counting on our fingers from the earliest age. They would stretch out their hands and count their fingers and my sister, cousin and I would copy them. I would see their hands and mine. I would see their fingers and mine. I would see their arms and mine, their legs and mine, their eyes and.... where were mine? 

For some reason, when I was about 4 or 5, I was very bothered about the fact that I couldn't see my own eyes. I used to go and check in the mirror, quite regularly, and I would see that I did in fact have eyes like everybody else. But somehow I kept doubting it. Perhaps it was because I had become convinced, at a very impressionable stage, about the impermanence of things that I couldn't see at that very moment: the houses that changed and changed again, the stairs that disappeared, the family members who were all together at one stage then suddenly not, the languages that changed back and forth. So seeing my eyes occasionally in the mirror wasn't enough, because maybe they wouldn't be there next time I checked. 

This is the first time I have put all these memories together as a coherent whole. It's quite amusing to think about how my little mind worked.

I remember at about the time I started school, studying people's eyes, noticing the iris and pupil and wondering if mine were the same. So I must have been making eye contact much of the time before I started school. But one day, when I was about 4 or 5, and someone looked at me, I suddenly thought about my eyes not looking like theirs, or perhaps not even being there. I panicked at the thought that they would notice, so I looked away. I remember thinking that this was the safest thing to do, so that other people wouldn't see my eyes (or lack of). By early primary school, I was avoiding eye contact with almost everyone outside the family.

Perhaps, because of my Autism, I was more introspective and less observant than most 4 year olds, and this, together with the move to Australia, brought on this panic about eye contact. I believe that, while avoiding eye contact is often an inborn Autistic trait, in my case it wasn't inborn. 

I know I naturally have atypical eye contact and always will have. That is definitely inborn. I look around all over the place when I am trying to remember something or conceptualise something. I am fine with that and everybody else should be too. I am a deep thinker and not a multi-tasker, so I cannot always maintain social connectedness through eye contact while, at the same time, searching for the right words to say. As an Autistic, I have a panorama of thoughts and I unconsciously sweep across these with my eyes during deep conversation. It's part of Autism acceptance for both myself and others to be comfortable with these differences.  

I definitely do not believe in forcing eye contact or other changes onto Autistics. I do support Autistics becoming more aware of whether difficult life experiences have influenced the expression of their Autistic traits, and addressing anything that they feel is disadvantageous, that isn't really part of their true selves. In my own case, I believe my migration experiences exacerbated my inborn atypical eye contact and turned me into someone who avoided eye contact altogether. The effort I made at age 8 or 9, to look people in the eye, was therefore not caused by masking - it was in fact a desire to return to being the way I was born, the person who I was meant to be.