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12:35pm August 31, 2014

I get really nervous around people I can’t read.

And sometimes I can’t even tell if the problem is if I can’t read them.

Like there’s this guy.  And every time I talk to him, it feels like he’s looking down on me in some way.  Sometimes he cuts me off and one time even yelled at me while cutting me off, telling me something like “You want me to listen to you?  Well you need to listen to me for now!”  (What I was trying to tell him at the time was life and death.  Literally.  But since I type to communicate it’s easy for people to talk over me.  And people often decide that whatever I’m going to say isn’t as important as whatever they want to say, even when what I have to say is seriously important.)

But he’s also done a lot of really ambiguous things that could stem from dislike or could not stem from dislike.

When I try to bring this up to other people, they often tell me that I’m totally wrong, that the guy just comes off wrong with some people, etc.  So then I get the idea that maybe he’s just hard for me to read.

But either way – it makes me incredibly anxious to be around this guy.  Sometimes I have to be around him though, I literally have no choice.  And it does not help at all that either I have trouble reading him, or other people have trouble reading him, or other people are telling me white lies to protect him, or something.

Because regardless of which one it is – it’s not knowing, that gets to me.  Like if I just knew that he was disrespectful and nasty to me, I could deal with that better than wondering if he’s disrespectful or if he’s just hard to read or if he just has bad social skills.  (I do get the impression that his social skills aren’t great, regardless of what else is going on.)

And it’s also very hard to be in a situation where everyone else wants there not to be a problem.  Because when people want there not to be a problem, then even if there is a problem, they pretend there isn’t.  So they tell me whatever it takes to get me to not think there’s a problem between me and this guy.  When, really, there may be a problem, and they may know it, but they don’t want me to be able to acknowledge it, so they may just tell me white lies to get me to think there’s no problem.

And all of these possibilities, whatever it is, it’s the sheer number of possibilities that is the problem.  I tend to think I’m pretty good at picking up hostility and ableism from people.  And I tend to think that this guy is hostile and ableist towards me.  But I don't know, and I don’t want to react as if he is, if he isn’t.  It’s very confusing.

(Oh, and about reading people:  I’m autistic.  This gives me very uneven people-reading skills.  On the one hand, I tend to pick up on people’s deeper emotions without even trying.  On the other hand, I tend to miss a lot of people’s more deliberate social cues.  So I can be picking up on things other people miss, and missing things everyone else can see.  And that makes these situations doubly confusing for everyone.)