Social vs Nonsocial Aspies

Post Reply New Topic

I went through a phase of being very social, because I wanted friends and people were always criticising me for being too quiet. I lived in another country for a while, which gave me opportunity to 'reinvent myself' as it were - to become whoever I wanted. So I was very sociable there, and got away with my quirks because of being foreign - people put it down to me being an eccentric Brit! It was an interesting experience for me, experimenting with different ways of being.

I am a lot less social now. Partly because I find it harder to make friends in my own country, but partly because I've become a lot more self-aware over the years, and also a lot more accepting of myself as I am, and I realise I find socialising pretty exhausting. If I am invited to go out to night clubs with other students, I don't go, because I know I will find it a sensory nightmare. I make sure I have a lot of time alone, because I've realised I need that to function.

I'm not an aspie. (Language development too weird.) But as far as social stuff goes, I can be social, but I really can only take a little bit of it. So much so that an extremely social autistic person I know swears that I must be emotionally unhealthy because I am alone so much and she thinks that everyone gets lonely and depressed if they spend as much time alone as I do. (OTOH she's the sort of person who is lonely no matter what's going on or who she's with, and tries to fill that gap with people, people, and more people.) I rarely even leave my apartment because of both impairments unrelated to autism, and sensory overload on a level where it's not really safe for me to be out there because my only defense is to drop all understanding of my surroundings, which puts me in danger. (And I have no physical energy to push through that overload because of physical conditions. And right now I can't even go to the other side of my house because it's so fricking hot everywhere other than directly in front of my air conditioner. Gah. I got heat exhaustion just trying to repair my modem this week.)

And contrary to that person's beliefs, I'm actually happy this way. Much happier than if I were around people all the time. It's not that I don't like people or don't enjoy spending time with them. It's just that the unpleasantness usually outweighs the good parts. And since I already have support staff who come in and help me with things, I am already getting a huge amount of people time per day even if I don't socialize at all. (Even when I switch off high-level processing, they're still intrusive enough a presence to cause problems.) The only person I generally see otherwise is my neighbor.

But generally I like many people, but I can't spend time around them in the offline world (or even in the online world past a point) without real problems.

And I'm not usually the sort of person who gets depressed because I don't talk to anyone for awhile. Nor because I don't get out a lot, or most other restrictions on my activities. Happiness is the sort of thing that exists regardless of what I can or can't do. That just doesn't enter into it. (And during times of my life when I have been unhappy, access to people and activities didn't solve it.)

Sincerely, I tend to be non-sociable by most accounts though, I can be sociable in terms of everyday life and all but, beyond this I tend to eternally damned keep aloof or distant by most regards from having many upleasant realities shall we say.Still, I'm not some anger-driven hermit or such just, simply try not to be an annoying burden or bore to anyone in real life or online..