For those that use them, that is.

Some of the anxiety over dealing with “different” people may be due to their perceived lack of “scripts”: what might they do, or say, or want? Does their absence mean mental illness? Autistic folks must belong to some category, NT folks would think - and then feel anxiety if the answer seemed to be “no”. Anxiety from lack of script-based routine is felt on both sides. In the movie “The Odd Couple”, an awkward silence was finally broken when someone said (apropos of nothing), “They say it may rain Friday...”

The thing about agreed-upon scripts is that they’ve already been tested and debugged - familiar roles communicated through the various media and other socializations. They could, in our more cynical moments, appear to some of us as the partially-digested food regurgitated by adult birds into the gullets of their eager young. As though, without this “social nourishment”, they would starve. (Is it starvation to be left alone with one’s own thoughts? That must be the intent of solitary confinement...)

Last revised: June 18, 2007
(c)2007 Dave Spicer
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