as small as a world and as large as alone, kelpforestdweller: I feel like I’m trapped in...

2:34am July 12, 2014

I feel like I’m trapped in the space between my own autistic ways of communicating with and understanding people and the nonautistic expectations.

Lately I’ve made one of those sudden leaps in understanding, where I have realised all these complicated nuanced things about how nonautistic people relate to each other. And I can see all this indirect stuff going on that I couldn’t before. So sometimes I can use that new information to improve how I relate to people. To get better outcomes for everyone.

But sometimes it’s just information overload. I see all these subtleties and then I second guess. I’m not used to being aware of all these things so I don’t have the body of experience to trust my judgement about what I’m perceiving. And I almost wish I didn’t have access to some of this new indirect information.

With time and experience, I may learn to proces some of this new information in real time and make use of it. To improve my ability to meet nonautistic standards of skilfull communication & relationships. So it could prove useful. It’s exhausting though. I don’t want to use all my resources navigating human interaction. I want to find people (ACs or nonautistic or anyone else) willing to meet me halfway. Or more than halfway, even.

To do that, I have to figure out what my ways of interacting even are, underneath the layers of social conditioning and paint-by-numbers self-taught ‘social skills.’ So I’m practicing as best I can. Trying with the people I already know to communicate in ways that feel a little more natural to me, trying to ease up on the hypervigilance, trying to find others out there.