What better way to start the New Year than to read an unedited piece from one of The Daniel Jordan Fiddle Foundation’s admired advocates,  Amazon best-selling author Kerry Magro. Kerry’s new book, “Autism and Falling in Love” tells the story of how he was non-verbal as a child to overcoming the odds to become a national speaker and finding a relationship as an adult. You can learn more about Kerry and his book here.

The Difficulties of ‘Mind Blindness’ in Individuals with Autism

by Kerry Magro

One of the better movies I’ve seen about autism in relationships was the 2009 film “Adam” featuring Hugh Dancy and Rose Byrne. In the movie, Hugh Dancy plays a 29-year-old with Aspergers Syndrome who just lost his father and has to transition to now living by himself for the first time. While in this process he also finds a romantic relationship with a new girl (Rose Byrne) who has just moved into his building.

I had a chance to watch this movie again this weekend and it brought up a lot of different emotions for me. My new book “Autism and Falling in Love” is just coming out this week and in the book I discuss a great deal of the same topics that this movie does. One in particular they emphasize on is “mind blindness.” Mind blindness as Hugh Dancy’s character portrays to his girlfriend is the inability to understand what someone else is thinking. As a 26-year-old adult with autism myself, having this movie out there to discuss this specific challenge some face is very refreshing.

In my book I discuss how mind blindness had made for several difficult scenarios for me in relationships. The inability to express empathy and to do this, to “put myself in the shoes of another,” limited my understanding of others, and made it difficult to develop anything but basic friendships/relationships. People are very complex and reading them—not only from a relationship standpoint but to advance in life, whether it’s through school, employment, on a professional level, is a necessary skill.

Further, there are different names for this theory including “Tunnel Vision.” This has led to not only people I’ve been in relationships with but some of my peers to believe that I’m self-centered, and that regardless of what I’m doing, it’s about me and everyone else has to live with it (which is it farthest from the truth because I feel passionately about other people’s feelings).

On the other hand, these experiences glaringly pointed out, that although I have raised the awareness of what autism is, and put a face on what someone with autism looks like, many people have no clue of what it entails or how it manifests or affects many in our community. I’ve never used my disability as a scapegoat for whatever tendencies I have gone through but what do you do?

This is how I felt in one of my past relationships. I didn’t understand to what extent things were going wrong. What was worse is, when I was told what had gone wrong, I didn’t get the opportunity to try and fix things. Although I start seeking help within an hour of learning what had gone wrong, I couldn’t make things right for us and that has given me one of the bigger lessons I’ve ever had to learn.

What I can share with the people reading this blog when it comes to mind blindness and also autism is simple. Follow my own advice… Autism is never a disability unless you let it become one. I take criticism as an indication of what I could work on to become stronger as a person, but in this situation where I haven’t been able to understand… I’ve just never felt so blind.