As Soon as Possible
What my autism taught me about language, urgency, and the cost of taking words seriously
One of the ways my autism shows up in everyday life is in how I relate to language.
Words do not always arrive to me softened by social flexibility or cushioned by shared assumptions. I tend to meet them more directly than that. I hear what was said before I hear what was implied. I notice the actual language before I catch the cultural shrug that often surrounds it. Even now, after years of living and working in spaces where so much is communicated indirectly, I still have moments where I realize I have been responding to the words themselves while everyone else was responding to something else entirely.
When people talk about literal thinking, they often reduce it to the easiest examples. I have written before about those moments because they are real. Even when I know no one is literally running around with a fire extinguisher trying to “put out fires” or trying to “boil the ocean”, that does not automatically mean I understand what they actually mean. There is often a pause in me, sometimes quick and sometimes not, where my brain is trying to reconcile the words being said with the meaning hiding somewhere behind them.
Lately, though, I have been thinking about another side of my literal thinking, one that has shaped my life in corporate spaces in ways I did not fully understand until recently. Sometimes the issue is not that I fail to understand language. Sometimes the issue is that I understand the language exactly as it was given.
That realization came back to me not long ago in a conversation with a few leaders. Someone asked if I could get a report back to them ASAP, and for just a moment, I was stuck on the phrase. Not visibly. Outwardly, I did what I have always done. I nodded, accepted the task, and began mentally rearranging my priorities. But internally, I had a very different experience. I realized that after hearing that phrase throughout my entire career, I was not entirely sure I knew what people meant when they said it.
That may sound strange to some people because ASAP is one of those phrases that seems so common, so harmless, so universally understood that questioning it almost feels unnecessary. But when I stopped and really thought about it, I realized the phrase had never actually meant one thing in my life. Sometimes it came with a clear boundary. ASAP, but no later than next week. Sometimes it came with explicit prioritization. ASAP, this is your top priority over everything else. But plenty of times it was just dropped into the conversation as though its meaning was obvious to everyone in the room.
For most of my career, when someone said ASAP, I did not hear it as a flexible social signal. I heard it in the most literal sense possible. To me, it was not a vague expression. It was a real question. How soon is this possible?
And because that is how my mind works, I would solve for it.
I remember one example from earlier in my career with a clarity that still surprises me. I was asked to analyze a large data set and pull out the significant trends ASAP. I took the assignment seriously, but more than that, I took the phrase seriously. I looked at the size of the task, compared it to similar projects I had done before, and mentally worked through what would be required to do it well. Based on what I knew, the soonest possible turnaround was about six hours.
So I gave it six hours.
I worked through the evening and into the early morning. I slept very little. I completed the analysis, synthesized the key trends, built the report, and delivered it. At the time, I believed I had done exactly what was being asked of me. More than that, I thought I had done something good. I thought I was showing responsiveness, initiative, commitment, speed, and accuracy. I thought this was the kind of thing people noticed when deciding who could be counted on, who went above and beyond, and who was worthy of bigger opportunities.
That is not what happened.
What I remember instead is a room that did not meet me with amazement or gratitude, but with a kind of strange discomfort. I could feel bewilderment. I could feel irritation. I could feel that something about my response had gone wrong, though I did not understand why. One colleague called me a “show-off”, and I remember treating the comment playfully because I genuinely did not know what else to do with it. I did not understand the accusation. The work itself was not unusual. The report was not some grand performance. It was something we did all the time. So what, exactly, had made me a show off this time?
It has taken me decades to understand that moment.
When they said “ASAP”, I took the phrase literally. I did not hear it as a general mood. I did not hear it as corporate shorthand. I did not hear it as an emotional cue or a loose expression of interest. I heard it as language that should mean what it says. If the question was how soon the work could be completed with quality and accuracy, then six hours was the answer. Six hours was, to me, as soon as possible. And so I delivered it in six hours because that was what I believed had been asked of me.
What I understand now is that ASAP often has very little to do with actual possibility. It often functions more like a social placeholder, one that depends on context, hierarchy, tone, timing, and unspoken norms. Sometimes it means do it now. Sometimes it means move it up on your list. Sometimes it means I care about this, but I have not thought through the actual timeline. Sometimes it means when you can get to it. Sometimes it means I want urgency without having to define urgency. And because so much of corporate culture runs on phrases like that, the people who navigate it most easily are often the ones who know how to hear what was not actually said.
That has never come naturally to me.
And if I am being honest, this has never been only about autism.
It has also been about being Black in corporate spaces.
Because when you are a Black autistic man in the workplace, people are not just responding to the work you produce. They are responding to you through layers of assumption about tone, pace, professionalism, effort, temperament, and intent. The same intensity that might read as initiative in someone else can read as too much in you. The same precision that might seem admirable in one person can feel rigid, showy, or uncomfortable in another. The same earnestness that might be rewarded in someone else can be read, in your body, as trying too hard, doing too much, or upsetting a rhythm no one ever explained.
That is what I could not yet name back then.
I thought I was being responsive. I thought I was being diligent. I thought I was showing that I could move quickly and still do strong work. What I did not understand was that my literal thinking was colliding with a culture built on ambiguity, and that collision was being interpreted through all the things people thought they knew about me before I ever opened my mouth. I was responding to the language as it was given, while other people were reacting to a set of social rules I had not been taught and to a version of me they had already decided how to read.
That is part of what makes corporate life so exhausting for me even now. It is not just that the language is often vague. It is the consequences of misunderstanding that vagueness is not evenly distributed. For some people, missing the cue becomes a funny little misunderstanding. For some of us, it becomes evidence of being off, too intense, not polished enough, not socially calibrated, not quite right.
And when you are both Black and autistic, that can become its own quiet kind of trap.
You are trying to understand the assignment, but you are also trying to understand the people. You are trying to determine whether a request is actually urgent or just spoken urgently. You are trying to figure out whether directness will be respected or resented. You are trying to understand how much effort counts as initiative and at what point that same effort starts making other people uncomfortable. You are trying to decode rules that no one says plainly, and when you get it wrong, it is rarely framed as a misunderstanding. It is framed as something about you.
That is why this memory has stayed with me for so long. It is not only because I misunderstood ASAP. It is because I spent years treating moments like that as personal failure instead of seeing them for what they often were. I was a literal thinker operating inside a culture that expects people to read between the lines, and I was being judged for taking language seriously. More than that, I was a Black autistic man taking language seriously in a space that had very little grace for either part of that reality.
Once I saw that, a lot of old moments started making more sense. The “show off” comment made more sense. The strange reaction made more sense. The feeling that I had somehow violated a norm no one had ever taken the time to teach me made more sense. Where I thought I was demonstrating precision, commitment, and care, others may have experienced me as out of sync, too eager, too exact, too fast, too intense. And because I was Black, those perceptions were never neutral. My pace was being read. My presence was being read. My effort was being read. Long before the quality of the work had any chance to speak on its own, I was already being interpreted.
That is one of the hardest things to explain to people who have never lived inside that kind of layering. My autism affects how I process language. My Blackness affects how other people process me. Those things are not separate in my life. They meet each other every day. They meet in meetings. They meet in emails. They meet in tone. They meet in how people explain things to me or fail to explain them at all. They meet in whether my sincerity is received as sincerity or as something more threatening, more performative, more off-putting.
These days, I am more aware of it, although aware does not mean untouched. I pause more often now. I ask clarifying questions about the timeline, scope, and priority. I try to make sure my understanding is aligned not just with the literal words being used, but with what the speaker may actually mean. I have learned, sometimes painfully, that in corporate spaces the official request and the real request are not always the same thing.
Still, I cannot help but think about how different so many moments in my career could have been if someone had met me with curiosity instead of contempt. If someone had simply asked how I was understanding the request. If someone had recognized that I was not trying to show off or make anyone look bad. I was doing what I thought had been asked of me. I was treating language like language. I was taking the work seriously. I was, in a very autistic way, trying to solve the problem exactly as it had been presented.
That, to me, is where inclusion actually lives.
It does not live in rewarding the people who are best at decoding ambiguity. It does not live in assuming that phrases everybody uses are therefore clear to everybody hearing them. And it certainly does not live in punishing someone for earnestly responding to the words that were actually said.
If you have someone in your orbit who exhibits these patterns, the inclusive thing to do is not to mock them, pathologize them, or quietly resent them for missing a cue you never explained. The inclusive thing to do is to connect with them. Clarify the timeline. Clarify the scope. Clarify the actual priority. Make sure there is a shared understanding of the language being used. Do not assume that because a phrase is common, it is clear. Do not assume that because a norm is unspoken, it is universal. Do not assume that what sounds flexible to you sounds anything like that to everyone else.
Some of us have spent entire careers trying to succeed in spaces where the words are never quite the words, and where taking them seriously can somehow make us the problem.