Friends and contacts and them not noticing your diagnosis

Post Reply New Topic

Hi

Here I am with another question

How many of you have friends and or social contacts?

I have Autism/Asperger, at least according to the latest diagnoses (it has previously been OCD and social anxiety) but I can laugh and function with friends. They don’t notice anything. Some of them don’t even know about my diagnosis. But I can’t keep it up for too long. But it’s not like I am suffering or something at the time but I do get tired afterwards.

So do you recognize that?

I can relate to this. My friends/social contacts don’t know about my OCD or autism, and I am generally able to function around people, even when I have excruciating anxiety. I kind of just push myself to do it even when I feel bad, because I know it is good for me and I usually feel better afterwards anyway.

Yes, post-socialising exhaustion is very familiar to me.

It sounds like you might be expending a lot of energy to "pass as normal", which in my experience can become so ingrained that there is almost no awareness of doing it. If the process of learning it begins early in life, it is easy to accept it as normality, to think that others must use the same kind of "processing" inside their heads, and that the tiredness is just a more extreme version of the "battery drain" that most introverted people experience from socialising.

What makes it so tiring is to be using brain power to consciously do things which most non-autistic people can rely on their sub-conscious to do with hardly any effort. That could include; reading non-verbal communication, directing your focus and filtering out background distractions, analysing other people's social interactions, and I'm sure many more. The end result can be almost indistinguishable to an outside observer, but the amount of effort involved on your part would be much higher.

So, I wonder, do you feel that socialising takes quite a lot of concentration? ("Relative to what?" you may ask. Which is exactly what makes it so tricky to tell for sure.) Or maybe you are aware of some of the "analysis" that I mentioned above?

It's better to hide in plain sight.
Life is more stress free that way.