About the rules

Am I missing cues or do you think you're the only real person here?

A couple of weeks ago, my daughter decided we needed to watch The Traitors. None of us had seen any of it before, nor shown any particular inclination to, but we tend to have a regular low-stakes background-noise binge-watch on the go. So why not?

Of course, it’s a three-season exercise in stupidity and rage bait. Of course it is. But it also added fuel to a slow-burning theory of mine about the rules of social interaction.

In The Traitors, you’ll notice pretty much from the first group banishment that the word “evidence” variably means “hunch”, “an observation I had” and “a retrospective justification for why I don’t like you”. The rationale that follows also inevitably contradicts what the person before them just said, but everyone agrees with both.

It’s suspicious that you’re not saying any names. It’s interesting that you’re throwing names around. I find it weird that you’re so quiet. I find it troubling that you’re so loud. You looked down when I would have looked up. I thought that word that you used in a clearly throwaway fashion was telling. You’re choosing your words too carefully.

In an atmosphere of unfiltered, high octane paranoia, the only certainty is that if you can find a colourful enough flag to wave, everyone will follow it based on the most spurious logic imaginable. But for me it also revealed another nugget of clarity: everyone thinks that “the rules” and “what I would do” are the same thing.

I’ve spent a lot of my life feeling like in any given group of people, there’s a pane of glass between me and the rest. At school, it was like I’d been banned from subscribing to the newsletter about what to wear, what boys to like, what’s ‘rude’, what’s cool, what’s a normal interest, and what’s weird. (These days, there probably is a newsletter, in the form of the group chat everyone is in except you.)

After all, teenagers want nothing more in the world than to find their tribe and assimilate perfectly. Each one is practically crying out for their niche Borg. But they’re also constantly falling out, misunderstanding each other, and rewriting the rules of what’s acceptable, what’s enviable, and what’s social disaster. They’re viscerally longing for conformity while also dreading being seen as conformist. All while their brains are still growing and shaping around a world where conversation never switches off and public shaming is one wrong word away.

Being a teenager is basically a decade of psychological warfare. I would not do it again.

But The Traitors crew are all, more or less, adults (I’m 45, so 22 seems barely alive to me, but I’m told it’s technically grown up). And yet they’re still deciding what is and isn’t acceptable behaviour almost entirely on the basis of “what I would do”—even if they probably actually wouldn’t do that—with a sprinkling of “it seems to me”.

One faithful, Dan, made this exceptionally clear. Dan spoke openly about his autism and was also monumentally unfussed about colouring inside the lines—even if someone outright told him where the lines were and what colour crayon he should use. If it was illogical, he wasn’t playing along.

In the end, Dan was voted out not because most people who jotted down his name thought he was actually a traitor but because, as some outright admitted, the way he played the game made them uncomfortable. It was not so much that he did not understand the rules but that he saw them, thought they were stupid and refused to pretend to someone else’s satisfaction. In doing so, presumably, making the others itchy with awareness that some of the social lubrication we instinctively rely on dries to sticky nothingness pretty quickly.

Thinking about this, I recently told my therapist that the most triggering word in the English language for me is “huh?”, when accompanied by a look of mildly disgusted bafflement. “What feelings do you associate with that?” she asked. Fear, defensiveness, horror, panic, and rage, rage, rage.

Because I spend a lot of time in conversations trying to work out what might come across as rude, as making things about me, as too loud, as silly, as unfunny, as stupid, as irrelevant. I will still think about several weeks, months, or years later. I’m sure every neurotypical person has some memories that fuel their 3am worries, but probably not as many as the average neuro-oddity who’s experienced repeated patterns of revulsion and rejection. After putting in all this work—painstakingly taking the time to be as specific and accurate as I can be while performing a meticulously observed impression of being normal—knowing I’ve missed the mark is truly, embarrassingly, painful.

The difference, then, between your average neurotypical and your average neurowhoopdedoo seems not to actually be understanding the rules—because if the rules exist at all they’re subjective and made up on the fly. It’s that neurotypicals have much more confidence that whatever they think is the rule is the rule, and if they transgress they get over it pretty quickly. (Though, yes, I’m aware the Dans of this world potentially also don’t give a shit; I’ve decided he might be the exception that proves the rule I just made up.)

So—and this might be the heady cocktail of perimenopause talking—I’ve decided to take the same tactic. Yeah, sure, I can’t turn off the rejection sensitivity and witching hour dread, but I reckon I’ll still be better off for it. I will, from now on, assume that whatever I’m comfortable with is the right way of doing things, and play a game of chicken with my fellow man until they either fall in line or have to walk away and stop bothering me (anywhere but Britain they’d challenge me, but the stiff upper lip grants me an advantage here).

The rules are there are my rules. And anyone who doesn’t follow them is a traitor.