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11:16pm August 15, 2014
Anonymous asked: Hey there, I can sort of relate to things not necessarily being 'wrong' even if they don't look 'normal' to others. Some people that know me seem to have gotten the idea that if I can look at them/look them in the eye, it means that I 'trust' them. Not necessarily. Sometimes when I *don't* look at someone, it is because I can trust them to not freak out and make a big deal over eye contact. I'm comfortable enough to not try to force it. Not quite the same as you mention, I know... --LW

Sorry I haven’t gotten to your asks, I have a huge backlog and was hospitalized recently and am dealing with my father dying and all this other stuff.  It’s not personal, to you or to anyone else I haven’t got to yet.  I have a lot of replies planned that I can’t seem to get to.  But you asked, elsewhere, so I’m explaining why I’m slow in replying to my huge askbox at the moment.

I remember when I first discovered that with a really good friend, we never looked at each other during conversations.  We could be lying down in totally different parts of her room, looking at different things, and all our best conversations worked like that.  We did do a lot of eye contact at other times, but that was when our relationship had gotten somewhat romantic, which is the only time I’m comfortable with long-term eye-gaze.  (I’ve heard other auties say similar, so maybe I’m not as weird as I sound there.)  

People misinterpret so much of what we do, it’s amazing any communication at all happens in either direction between autistics and nonautistics.  And I have a feeling it’s autistics doing most of the work.  Not because we’re better than them morally or something, but because we’re far more aware of the sheer size of our differences from them than they are aware of the size of their differences from us.

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