sometimes I understand more about social things

Page 1 of 1 [ 3 posts ] 

kmb501
Blue Jay
Blue Jay

User avatar

Joined: 1 Jun 2015
Gender: Female
Posts: 98
Location: Texas

10 Aug 2022, 6:18 pm

There are times when I feel like I have stronger social insight than I usually do. For example, lately, I've been imagining miscommunication situations when I was younger and why people would have thought I was doing something that I wasn't really doing, such as talking using "big words" indicating a sense of self-importance or an exclusionary attitude. I remember when I was younger, I didn't do this at all. My attitude toward it all was something like "well, I don't really know if that's what they're thinking and it doesn't make any sense to make assumptions, so there's no reason to really adjust my behavior," but for some reason, that's not the way I think about it anymore. I'm very self-conscious about my behavior in social situations, not that I can do very much about it anyway, but it's still a change that I notice.

Changes like this bother me, because there's this little voice in my head that tells me that I'm not really autistic because I can do "x,y, and z" and I don't always have the "autistic mindset." Not being autistic might not bother me if the diagnosis didn't answer so many questions about why I struggled horribly with social situations as a child and teenager, but I've got trauma and emotional scars from simply not knowing how to communicate, from accidentally getting into fights with other children on the playground to allowing the girls to bully me in the changing room because I didn't understand certain common social norms. Plus, the autism diagnosis allows me to get help I otherwise might not be able to get.

Also, sometimes I daydream about being able to do something with this, of meeting a social coach who could help me overcome my problems and become the type of person to other people that I am to myself. It's probably just a fantasy, though.

I was thinking about writing a novel series with an autistic protagonist who always gets into trouble with her social communication, but I'm not sure I have enough insight into my own experience to make a believable balanced story that accurately portrays this condition and the horrors one can face when they themselves grow up not knowing what's wrong. As it stands, though, I write stories about people with these issues constantly. I just don't call it by name.



funeralxempire
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 27 Oct 2014
Age: 39
Gender: Non-binary
Posts: 25,184
Location: Right over your left shoulder

10 Aug 2022, 7:00 pm

I find I struggle to navigate my own social interactions but I can often make fairly accurate broad observations on how social interactions appear to operate.

At least one problem is that I can't do it all intuitively and there's too much to do intellectually without processing delays.


_________________
"If you stick a knife in my back 9 inches and pull it out 6 inches, there's no progress. If you pull it all the way out, that's not progress. The progress is healing the wound that the blow made... and they won't even admit the knife is there." Malcolm X
戦争ではなく戦争と戦う


SkinnedWolf
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 18 Mar 2022
Age: 25
Gender: Non-binary
Posts: 1,538
Location: China

11 Aug 2022, 12:40 pm

Those communication that I can observe enough samples won't bother me too much.
Often, simply avoiding the "behaviors that elicit a lot of rebuttal" that I have observed is enough to avoid most of the trouble.
If these patterns can be studied intensively, for example, they are stored on the network in written form, then it is hardly a problem for me.

But those more private, or more random, occasions and one-on-one conversations. Damn. I didn't even have enough attention to what I did.
It is a kind of content that I cannot intuitively know and systematically learn.
And their trial and error has a higher price, so that I cringe at them - although the impulse will start them.


_________________
With the help of translation software.

Cover your eyes, if you like. It will serve no purpose.

You might expect to be able to crush them in your hand, into wolf-bone fragments.
Dance with me, funeralxempire. Into night's circle we fly, until the fire enjoys us.