The butterfly does not look back at the caterpillar in shame, ...

... just as you should not look back at your past in shame. Your past was part of your own transformation. – Anthony Gucciardi

The kind reader may please not laugh: I have been convinced all my life that I am an excellent communicator. After my long time in Japan, I was also convinced that the topic of intercultural communication was exactly my thing.

When I was diagnosed with autism a year ago and the topic of communication was highlighted as crucial, I was shocked. My niece did know how to explain to me that on the one hand I actually communicate excellently... but on the other hand somehow not.

My therapist was also puzzled at first when she read this passage in the diagnosis, and said that it couldn't be, I would communicate excellently... nine months later we both understand better, not to say quite exactly, that it is the communication after all... (I think. She is still enthusiastic about my excellent communication - but finds me "sometimes mysterious", which is again a question of communication, isn't it).

I can narrate and describe and explain things vividly, and especially the latter in a way that has always inspired even some teachers, especially in Japan. And why? Because I have such a completely different approach (to thinking). A completely different logic, or kind of logic. How often have I explained something, and not only on the subject of language, that the other person looked at me in amazement and said, for example, "I wouldn't have dreamed of this kind of explanation - but, yes, you're right!"

I haven't quite understood that myself (yet?), only that it has something to do with directness and "subtle codes". Meaning, there are situations and circumstances in which one has to speak differently than, for example, in a lecture.

I always communicate as if I were giving a lecture. In my family, this has also led to me always being described and teased as a "absent-minded professor." Others have perceived me as precocious, nosey, and just plain arrogant and called me that. I haven't really understood yet that many people don't like it when you base your speaking on well-founded knowledge and don't just babble superficially. My father has always felt attacked and challenged, and SO many other men also... with the women it is somewhat different, but also there many react again and again with displeasure.

Grandma Rosa loved to listen to me and she did not hide her enthusiasm and admiration: "Why, child! What all you know! You must study and go into politics!" Was one of her reactions.

In politics, however, I would be eaten alive, and I knew that even as a young woman.

Anyway, I thought that everything to do with communication was "my thing". Intercultural communication, corporate communication, PR…

Only now, in retrospect, do I realize that this is not "my thing," quite the opposite. Part of PR is something I can't do at all: distort things. Embellishing. Not to say: lying.

And if I were really the not excellent, but skillful communication genius - I would have found customers and clients in no time and really put myself on my feet quickly.

And that's exactly what didn't happen. I went from one networking event to the next, where I made quite interesting and promising contacts, but potential customers and clients did not materialize, despite the fact that many were very enthusiastic about my linguistic and intercultural insights.

Looking back, it's clear to me: companies are looking for a very specific type of communication that I can't offer. A communication like in politics: full of promises and distortions, wriggling out of responsibility and glossing over things…

And I can't do that. That is something that repels me like the wrong end of a magnet.

It disgusts me - if I see through it! Which is also not always the case!…

But this form of communication is something that is not only very widespread - it is the main form of communication. People, no matter from which society or culture, communicate not to share facts, but to clarify, confirm, question social bonds and connections, the women in their way, and the men in theirs. At most 10-20% of communication is about the actual issue ("There's a big herd of buffalo coming from the east!"). As soon as this fact is established and a few individuals are assigned to observe the movement of the buffalo herd, people's communication revolves around the social structure, for the event "hunting" itself, as well as everything around it.

And here I am missing the corresponding pages in the manual "Being Human".

And that's what corporate communication, PR, intercultural communication is all about... not about pure skill with words, not about being able to explain things…

… but about the social structure, and this is a closed book for me, which was made abundantly clear to me while living in Amma's ashram, even though I didn't understand it at the time.

And curiously I learned this fact about human communication in a workshop of the Webgrrls in Munich, still in the early 2000 years! And intellectually I understood it exactly, and also the fact that I just don't do that at all... And still it took over 15 years until it clicked!…