Mercurial?

Once upon a time, I worked for a state agency. There was a manager there whom I liked a great deal. During one of my final performance reviews with him before I departed to other things, he gave me a good review and then commented, "But you're so mercurial."

I'd maintained pretty well during the review, which was a good review, so maintaining was easy. But when he said that, I just about lost it. Mercurial?! I wanted to scream, putting proof to his words. You'd be mercurial, too, if your family were falling apart, if you were serving as a confidant to two people in the middle of a divorce who are among your closest relatives, if a close family member had tried to commit suicide several times in the previous months, if you yourself were going through an acrimonious divorce, if you yourself were in the midst of an enormous, risky career change. You'd be mercurial, too, if every phone call or email brought news that was either horrific or nauseating or the best thing you'd ever heard.

I didn't say all that. I just said that I had a lot going on and that things changed every day, meaning that my mood changed along with them.

Why am I telling you all of this, things that happened 18 years ago? Because in this world of autism and talk about mercury and understanding, the word mercurial has significance. No, I'm not actually talking about mercury the metal, although God knows that the mercury militia with their capacity to ramp it up to screeching in 60 nanoseconds qualify as mercurial. What got me thinking back to that experience was that I really did have excellent reasons for my swift changes in mood. There were very real things happening, things that took me high and then dragged me to the depths, sometimes within the space of minutes. My responses were completely rational. But my manager didn't understand my rapidly changing moods because he was ignorant of the very real triggers underlying them. All he saw were these "mercurial" behaviors. The effects of what was happening in my life at that time were so painful and stressful that I lost 30 pounds without even trying--that's how real they were. Not the best diet plan, that.

For autistic people, I suspect that the situation can be very much the same. To observers who aren't in the know, autistic behaviors can seem erratic, bizarre, unpredictable, irrational. No cause is evident. But I'd bet--I don't just bet, I know--that every single one of those behaviors has as real an underlying trigger as I had back in my "mercurial" days. And I'd bet that like me, a lot of autistic people won't or can't quite articulate everything that drives them or even clearly identify every trigger, not with the muddle of inputs coming at them all the time.

I don't limit it to autistic people or to myself, either. Have you had one of those encounters in which some random person, maybe in customer service, just seems pissed off at you? Or some asshole cuts you off in traffic, speeding their way to God knows where? I always try to remind myself that I do not know what is driving this behavior, but that I likely have nothing to do with it. Maybe their mother died yesterday. Maybe they just found out they have cancer. Maybe their child was just taken to the emergency room. Maybe what seems angry or jerky to me has a genuine underlying reason that I know nothing about.

Just something to remember as we make our way through the social connections of life. In the end, until we're dead, we're going to be mercurial at some point. In the end, the only person you can come close to understanding is You. Everyone else, autistic or not, is just a mercurial little mystery wrapped in an engima.