this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2024
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Ask Autistic People

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A community for anyone to ask autistic people questions: non-autistic people to learn about the autistic experience and autistic people to get information or validation from their peers.

Instance description for federated visitors

Rules

  1. Follow instance rules
  2. Text-posts only
  3. Questions must be directed at autistic people
  4. If you are answering a question and are not autistic, please state so in your comment. Otherwise, it is presumed the respondent is autistic.

Keep in mind: Autistic people are a diverse group with diverse experiences and perspectives. Not one represents the entire community.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

I have a really hard time with this. It's like we're both speaking English, but it's not the same language. There's a lot of meaning that people make out of what I say. It's almost like everything I say is an implied message to them, so they have to figure out what I'm saying. It causes a lot of confusion and even displeasure if someone takes what I said as being an insult. Often times, I just stay quiet because I don't have the energy necessary to filter out every possible implication my message may have so that I am understood properly or I think that I will be misunderstood so bad, that it's better to stay quiet. And even when I do try to filter the message, it's clearly not authentic, so then I come off as definitely having an implication.

I knew a lady that told me the world was divided into healthy humans and hijackals (people that hijack relationships for their own needs), but they both look the same from the outside. I remember thinking that was so silly because clearly there are spectrums to human personalities. It's not one or the other. I remember thinking in my head that she sounded traumatized and could probably benefit from Dialectical Behavioral Therapy because she was splitting. However, in the 1.5 years since I spoke with that lady, everything she told me turned out to be 100% right. Every single thing. She was not wrong about anything. She had some incredible foresight. With that perspective, I developed my own model on neurodiversity. There are autistic/adhd people and there are normies. We look the same from the outside, but inside we're almost different species. So, if I naturally get along well with someone, then I assume they're autistic or adhd. If there is a lot of misunderstanding and clarifying, then they're normie.