Tons of questions, and they all have the same answer?!

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There are so manys questions you get asked in your life and they all pretty much have the same answer.
For example:

How are you? The correct answer is: Good.
How is your summer going? Answer is: Its great.
Did you have a good week end? Answer is: Yes.
How is your family? Answer is: They are great.

Those are just a few. Those are the kinds of questions you should not always answer honestly. What if I hate my family, my week end sucked, my summer is no fun and Im not doing very well? If you tell people the honest truth and its not "Oh its all so great!" They look at you like your insane. But your not, your just an honest aspie. Being totally honest isnt always as good as its cracked up to be...

It took me a while to realise that when people said to 'be youself' and 'be honest' etc, they didn't actually mean it (or they didn't mean that it related to me with how 'myself' or 'honest' I could be).

The idea is to determine if the person is asking those questions out of politeness or if they are really asking those questions. If they're asking out of politness, answer out of politeness ("good/ great/ fine" etc) and tack on a reciprocal question ("you?"). It might seem stupid, but you'll have made a NT feel comfortable, and that's a score for you.

If they're really asking (e.g. they touch your arm/ deepen their tone of voice/ furrow their brow etc), then it depends on what kind of relationship you have with them as to how much you should really tell them.

I see it like a game - the objective is not to freak the NT out.

It's all part of the NT game that everyone is supposed to play. Saying what you really mean is frowned upon. Just put on your mask and pretend like everyone else, and lie, lie, lie. But don't get caught lying, or else you'll get lectured on how awful lying is, even though everyone else does it constantly. Certainly don't be honest, even when someone tells you to, because if you're honest and say that your day isn't going well, you'll be told to stop complaining and/or feeling sorry for yourself.

Oh yeah! I am in my early 50s and still have a problem with this, even though I know the drill. I still tend to take it literally at first, and then I have to figure out if they want the literal truth, or just the polite small talk answer. I do usually give the right answer, but I prefer the literal response because that's how my brain is wired. I guess it's kind of like we take in what others say, or socially cue, as though it's a foreign language, and then our brain has to perform a translation process on the input. This often leads to a time lag in our responses, and also to a less than perfect translation output on our part. It is very frustrating. Fortunately, I live alone and don't go out much any more, so I don't have to interact with the humans as much as I used to.

I love this topic.
I've been struggling with this my whole life & now I understand why!

Zel.