The Mirror

I recently told my team I was going to have to step back from managing. This took a while to get to, first I had to figure out what I want. A little background - where I work, you can (somewhat) freely move between manager and “individual contributor” (non-manager) somewhat as needed and as the team needs. There are some restrictions: if you are promoted on the manager ladder, you need to re-interview to flip back to IC, plus your overall manager or director needs to actually have room and need for you as an IC. The typical way to convert back is to find a new job elsewhere in the company. A lot of the senior engineers I work with did this - when I talk to them about managing, they have done it and have flipped back, most needed to join our team to make that happen. So I’m glad I could do this without leaving; as much as I complain about my work sometimes, I really do love my team and do not want to say goodbye.

That’s all on background. Somewhere in here, we should freeze-frame, record scratch and then have me say, “I guess I should explain how I got into this mess.” Because at times, it really did feel like a mess. At times I was being pulled forward into a role I was good at but also didn’t actually fully like. How does this happen? It’s at least partly: the mirror.

Autistic people mirror, it’s a way that we have worked out, a survival mechanism. When I’m in a one-on-one situation with someone, my gestures, emotions, and interactional cues will tend to reflect those of the person I’m talking to. This might have started as a conscious thing: I like to joke that I’m three birds pretending to be a person on a mission to investigate and understand how humans work. A natural thing to do there is: try to blend in. It isn’t conscious anymore. I do it and don’t notice it. In fact, I’d gotten so used to not noticing it that in my local Autism resource group at work when folks would talk about mirroring, I’d think “that’s not me - I’ll mask, and sometimes do a lot of other Autistic-classic behaviors, but I don’t mirror.” Nope. And worse: I seem to mirror emotions.

There’s another thing about Autistic people that a lot of Neurotypical people think: there’s a stereotype that we lack empathy. This might be based on how we talk, or how eye contact makes me feel uncomfortable. Hmm - I shifted from “we” to “me” there. I’m going to stay firmly situated in “me” when I talk about the experience of Actually Being Autistic as there are probably a lot more ways to be neuroAtypical than neurotypical, so I can really only talk about me. But I can also say what I’ve seen said about people like me, so: they say we lack empathy, but I sure as shootin’ do not lack it. Eye contact makes me feel uncomfortable because I have way too much empathy. I’m constantly thinking about, feeling, what I think other people feel. As much as I can’t speak for other people’s experience, I’m not claiming to be a mind reader - I don’t know what you’re feeling, all I know is what my brain is telling me you’re probably feeling. For me, mirroring is part of that empathy.

When I’m talking to someone who is mad about thing X at work, I get mad about it. When I talk to someone who is not mad about it, and thinks it’s just fine and reasonable, that’s how I feel too. When I talked to my original manager, and he wanted me to continue as a manager, to lean into that role I thought I did too. I said, “yeah, I want to go further here”. Whether or not I actually wanted that is actually pretty irrelevant - I am not sure if I did or not. What I know is, in the moment, my own feelings tend to get swamped by this mirroring. Because I was mirroring the (assumed) emotions and wants of my manager G, I am now in a state where I’m talking to E and T, and neither like the other much, and I have to say, “yeah, T really needs to talk to their manager about that because I agree” to E, and something similar to T. I’m not lying, it’s not hypocrisy. In each moment, I fully believe what I’m saying. It’s just that my beliefs about interpersonal relationships and emotional state can be so shifted by the people talking to me that I move back and forth between states without noticing.

This can feel a lot like drowning. I go back and forth between meetings, getting pulled under in everyone else’s needs and feelings and it’s oh so hard to figure out what I actually feel. What do I think about this? Is that all three of my birds thinking it, or is it just the bird that talks to people and the other two are down there waiting it out. I’m being there for other people, I’m not being there for me.

Going to Scotland helped a lot. I got out of that headspace, looked at things from the side, but it wasn’t until I got back and started talking to the stressed coworker who was leaving the team that I started thinking about leaving. If it weren’t for them, I’d maybe still be a manager, and sad, and maybe drowning in other people’s feelings. Talking to them, I almost just quit. I applied for all kinds of new jobs. I actually got pretty far in the interview process for a lot before I called it all off and talked to my manager about what I needed. What I need is: back to IC. There’s parts of management that I love. I’m surprisingly good at it, I hold so much context in my head I can meet with a dozen people a day and get everyone and everything aligned, and still write code or some docs on the side. But at the end of one of those dozen-meeting days I come home and am empty. Hollowed out, I can’t do anything but read books I’ve read before, play video games I’ve played before, through-watch Steven Universe for the fifth time.

It took a lot of thinking, and importantly (and I apologize to everyone for leaving them out of the loop here) thinking by myself. I didn’t want to pick up on what other people were thinking was right for me. I wanted to really do what I wanted. I want to feel my own feels again. Flipping back to IC doesn’t fix all of this - I’ll still have this kind of mirroring. It’s just that managing is mostly 1:1 conversations, probably twenty or thirty a week, never endingly pushing projects forward by lining humans up and aligning their work with the rest of the team’s. I’m so good at this because I submerge, because I can relate, because I’m a mirror.

It was that stressed coworker that was the breakthrough. The crack in the mirror that made me realize it wasn’t real Eric feeling that, but Eric reflecting back. Yeah, I wanted a change, but I didn’t want that change - I wanted to stay on the team, keep working with these amazing humans on a problem space I’m super-good at, but just stop being the manager. Once you see it you can’t unsee the crack. Maybe this will help in the future, but I’ve seen how I was so easily, chameleon-like shifting my emotions to match the people around me. Defensive coloration. Unconscious. Cautious about premature enlightenment, I will just say: I’m aware that this can happen and thinking about what comes next.