why is it so hard?

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Forcing myself through this work routine day in, day out. It's not so much the work, but more the communication/social aspect. Is it unrealistic to imagine being able to just be myself, relax my brain and destress in social situations and be attentive and responsive to my environment, the tasks at hand and other people?

Why do i still feel like a little kid at a grown-up gathering?

I keep hearing people say that I'm doing fine, what i feel is normal and everybody feels this way. So then, why do i feel like i'm the only one internally screaming every second of every day? Why can't i reflect on the outside my honesty and level of understanding?

Why can't i, just for once, actually feel like I know what i'm doing?

Maybe you are just expecting it to make more sense than it does. Social life is sort of like the Brownian motion of tiny objects. The force fields are emotions, which interact in complex ways, but as long as you are still in the tank and not being urged to the evaporation zone, chances are that that you have been conditioned into appropriate responses. People live with really inaccurate ideas about each other, so there's nothing close to perfection in Human relations except what works due to a happy circumstance.

I limit myself to 16 hours work a week (out of the house) in a social environment as anything more means I have no life as all the time I am not working I am recovering in order to work again. I also picked a job where the social elements were on the very simple side, I'm a shop assistant on the tills. It's tiring being 'ON' like that but I avoid all those deeper work relationships which have been a huge problem for me because to work I have to have a 'work' me, but then people think that is me and try to deepen that relationship and then get frustrated with me. If I was myself I wouldn't get the job.

It sounds like you might be working too many hours for you. Do you spend all of your time not working, recovering?

It's what it feels like. But i can't afford to go part time, I have bills to pay. And the fact that I do do it, gives everyone else the illusion that I'm doing just fine when in reality, i really feel like i'm not.

I'm being thrown into a new project at work and at the minute I'm getting different people hitting me up with all kinds of information and details on how to do things, how they want it, what they expect me to do ect. I feel completely underqualified and maybe i could understand the task i'm required of if my brain would alert me to when i need to ask questions and such! Instead, i sit and ponder this and that quietly in the back of my mind and don't even realise i need to raise it as a question until i've auto piloted the answer 'yeah thats fine' several hundred times when i don't even know what i'm saying fine to!!

Bash my head against a wall sometimes

That has got me into hot water at work more times than I can count. I would sometimes find myself thinking; "did I just have a conversation with my colleague or not? Maybe I'm just thinking of some time yesterday, or last week?" I sometimes wish that I could delete my cache of "soundbites" to force me into thinking about what I'm going to say - but then, the struggle to switch in and out of "conversation mode" would be constantly eating into my attention for the job at hand.

Oh yikes. Is that typical of Aspergers? I'm in the exact same position. Same hours, same job, same problems. I thought I was an NT who just struggles with people. Maybe I am. I know what you mean though.

With regards to the OP, I think a lot of NT's might feel like they don't know what they're doing but I'm not sure that the severity would be the same as what you describe. On another note, with all the petty bickering that goes on in my workplace I sometimes feel like a grown-up at a little kid gathering.

I used to work part-time and I had a job where I could work in my own autistic "bubble". I could do it independently, not having to talk to colleagues if I didn't want to. I came in the office, started doing my thing, and went back home. I talked to colleagues, we had some fun, but it was limited (in space, and time). No drinks for me after work, no Xmas parties, no team-building crap etc. My job was clearly defined with well structured tasks.

Then things changed and it was all about "projects" (that word has no meaning to me), team-work, dynamics, out-of-your-comfort-zone, visibility, etc.

I got fired within one year.

I had a very similar experience in my last job. I started out working assembling electronics - my own small work area, and high-concentration work, so there was very little chatting by colleagues while working. When I moved to the R & D department, I was overjoyed to begin with - it was the first time I got a promotion in any job (most have never lasted long enough, anyway.)

But the promotion turned out to be a bad thing very quickly - too many simultaneous projects, each with a different team leader expecting priority; breaking off for team meetings all the time; being expected to do "team building" socialising during breaktimes/meal-times, etc. My executive function and social impairments meant that I just couldn't handle this. Even the technical abilities which won me the promotion suffered - the constant task switching meant that I could never get into the "hyper-focus zone" that makes me good at them.

@jon85
Just wondering (and, of course, fine if you would rather not say) - what kind of work do you do? Do you think you would enjoy the work itself if the social aspects were absent? The experience written above taught me a very valuable lesson about what jobs match my traits better - particularly that a job which superficially suits my traits or special interests is actually not always as appropriate as many would have me believe (a common trope of "helping autistic people into work" advice). There's part of me which is very glad that my programming is now a "special interest" again rather than a source of endless anxiety.

I'm an ecommerce assistant. It's not too bad, I work in the same office as the IT team and it's often just me and the IT manager who prefers to work in silence too. But when I'm expected to make calls and do meetings with other departments for this project they've set me on... it just gets too much. I'd much rather them just give me instructions written down and leave me to it, maybe check up on me once or twice a day because i'm more likely to seek help if they seek me out. If i'm stuck on anything I have a bad habit of trying to work it out myself, struggling and leaving it to a point where i would have struggled far too long that it would be embarrassing by that point to ask for help.

I don't expect to be in ecommerce forever. In fact i'm currently trying to focus on a new direction, something that i have a personal passion for and working out if it's do-able.

I have often struggled with that problem too, in life in general as much as work related tasks. In part, it's because I like learning new things so much, but a lot of it is just trying to avoid initiating social contact or for fear that I will look like a fool. I also feel as if I can't judge whether something is "right" unless I develop a deep understanding of what "right" is from general principles - someone else giving an unqualified "yeah or nay" doesn't satisfy my need to know "why". This often goes in hand with my perfectionism - my line manager in a previous job was forever warning me against missing deadlines because I couldn't resist spending a lot of time researching different approaches and "gold-plating" things, as he put it.