When is it my turn to speak?

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I find "speaking in turn" relies more on popularity and acceptance than protocol.

People who others want to listen to can blather on about how they had burnt toast for breakfast, but if you want to comment on how you just found a cure for HIV, everyone responds with a "oh, that's nice" and resumes talking about burnt toast for breakfast.

At least, that's how it feels to me.

I tend to avoid conversations with my parents for this reason.

"YOU JUST INTERRUPTED YOUR FATHER."
"She always does that. She's awful. She's so rude. She just interrupts everyone."
Me: *sitting in silence, once again deemed a horrible person* thinking "I'm sitting right here."

But if I try to say anything they'll just turn on me and say all the things to me that they just said to each other where I could hear them. How I'm just a horrible rude person who never learned any manners.

Anything more than a one on one conversation and I get lost in the flow, unable to ever find a place to speak. Somehow I learned the rules of conversation but have never learned to implement them and being screamed at gets old fast.

When I think about this topic, I wonder why it's Aspies who are are so often portrayed as socially inept and self-interested. It seem to me that the average group conversation is essentially elitist and competitive, as if the participants don't give a damn about including others, or it's never occurred to them that it's good manners to do so. I've met the occasional (presumably) NT who does the inclusion thing - one guy was having a conversation with a couple of others, and when I stood on the touchline he noticed and used eye contact to nonverbally welcome me into the group. He didn't know me either, he was just like that. And sometimes people in groups have said things like "TD told me a good joke about that the other day" and then they get me to repeat my words to the group. Such behaviour makes a big difference to me, and I think it's a sad indictment of people in general that it's such a rare thing. I've been known to emulate it myself, though these days I rarely even approach groups for conversation because they're usually so crap at being inclusive.