Extremely resistant to social conditioning?

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Just like me. The reason I am extremely resistant is that those expectations aren't who I am. In being natural, being myself, I differ, and that has always been okay by me. I am strong willed and never let anyone push me into something I don't want.

Yeah I've been called stubborn and pigheaded too. Because I stick to being myself. But their sticking to what comes naturAL to them, that's not stubborn or pigheaded...

OK, over most of this past summer summer I would socialize only with my family except on Sundays, when my parents would cart me along to church. My parents would both go to work and then me and my brother would divide up computer time all day, except when he went off to his friends' house (which he did often) or invited his friend over (which he also did often). I felt a bit lonely after several months of this but not too bad, then I did a month-long volunteering thing with disabled children and after that ended I felt really lonely (I seem to build up a tolerance for solitude and breaking my solitude breaks my tolerance a bit).

Soon, I'll be going to university twice a week, and that should resolve my loneliness quite nicely. Meanwhile my brother is now at school so I'm alone all day (which I actually prefer because I get the computer to myself).

I'd say I do need friendships, but less acutely than most people. It's more of a dull ache than a gaping hole. And I do need alone time to recharge.

In terms of conformity, I think that's seperate from whether or not you feel lonely (though probably correlated). I have actually a phobia of conforming - I feel almost like I'm living among the Borg and have to assert my own identity to keep from being assimilated. When I see everyone doing the same thing at once I feel terrified (I spend the church sermons sitting alone in the basement of the church because seeing the congetation getting up at the same time and talking in unison really freaks me out).

Most of the time I don't even think about whether or not other people do what I'm doing. But when I realize a particular behavior is weird, I tend to cling to it instead of stopping it. I remember once my Mom and I gave a talk about how the 'war on autism' impacts the experience of raising an autistic child (mostly my Mom gave the talk, but we wrote it together and both of us answered questions). At one point my Mom started talking about the negative way that stimming is portrayed, and I became very conscious of the fact that I was twirling my hair (my most common stim). I felt like stopping doing it, and then something in me thought 'no, that would be conforming' so I kept on. (I didn't realize until someone told me that I'd actually intensified my hair-twirling during that bit.)

A friends dad calls him the

'vociferous malcontent'

These people need to be bred out of society....

that goes for me as well. as a kid i was even rebellious; fortunately, i was too smart not to see how dangerous this could become.

but eventually i came not to despise the existence of social conditioning in itself. just as there are conditions for me which render life infinitely more bearable, though idiosyncratic ones, i realize that it is as if all these others were one single being that sought to harmonize itself in the same way that i try to maintain my own environment. if i prefer silence, it prefers noise. if i choose my own path, it takes the path of the majority or least resistance. it doesn't, after all, require very much camouflage on my part; & in the place where i live, there isn't even hazard in slight nonconformity. sometimes i feel sad that the great social being cannot manage to preserve itself, over the long run, but will eventually fall apart--if it doesn't destroy all life on the planet first--: it's not aware of its actions like i am, nor of the farther reaches of causality. i say then, that i don't know where the social being came from, & maybe because it is so much larger than me, i am not in a good position to judge if this is part of its normal cycle, to be created & then to be destroyed, or part of an evolution into something that will become stable in time, one or more cycles hence.

i pretend at times that i can tell.