Processing social interactions

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I don’t know if this has anything to do with autism or not, but I wondered if anyone else experiences this.

I find social interactions difficult, but not just difficult in the moment, their effects seem to go on and on. I feel as if I am made of some kind of soft clay and each time I interact with someone they make a kind of impression into the surface of me that won’t go away. I don’t want them to. Hours, days, weeks even years later the things they said and did or that I said and did remain there and I can’t get rid of them. It can be something very insignificant, like a short exchange with a person I meet at the school gates or in a shop. Does anyone else experience this or something similar? I want to find a way to process these interactions so they go away and leave me alone, but I can’t seem to figure out how. I wish I could just be left alone and people didn’t expect me to talk to them all the time

Interesting. I have the opposite issue- I mostly forget the person and the convo after I walk away. But then again it's probably because I don't care enough to remember. Maybe you are (too) invested in these conversations?
Don't ever be afraid to excuse yourself from an interaction you don't want to experience. You're not someone's trained monkey.

To have the opposite problem would be a nice break for me!

I think it perhaps comes from a fear of other people and my tendency to over analyse that which I am afraid of. I don’t want to be rude to people, but I struggle with knowing what they want or what they will do next. I fear my intentions are not the same as theirs, but I can’t tell what theirs are. I just wish I could let go of the experiences instead of having them stuck to me.

I can be like that sometimes too.

One tip that a counsellor gave me (and I was already doing, so I knew it helps) was to write down problems. It doesn't have to be an essay, or pages and pages of stuff, just bullet points will probably do.

What is the problem
How is it bothering me
What can I do about it

You can either keep the papers safe in a box file somewhere, or you can tear them up and throw them away. It is the act of writing things down that can get problems out of your system.

Thanks for the tip about writing. I’ll try that and see if it helps.

JD12345 I have had almost exactly that experience before with someone needing directions. I found added to the general repeating I also had the worry that the person may take the wrong route as I didn’t explain it well and be unreasonably angry about it. That was probably about twenty years ago, but it’s still there! At least I now live several hundred miles from that place, so I’m not likely to run into the person again. (I hadn’t thought specifically about that encounter for some time though till I read your reply).