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Autism rule (midwest.social)
submitted 7 months ago by lengau@midwest.social to c/196
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[-] sparkle@lemm.ee 15 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

When you have this problem communicating with everyone, you’re the problem.

Not really, when you're in the minority of course you're going to be outnumbered. But autistic people tend to have an easy time getting their point across to each other, compared to neurotypicals trying to have a mutual understanding. Neurotypicals tend to be very performative in conversation and don't really say things they actually intend to contribute to the conversation half the time (small talk is a form of this that has gone way too far). They're also usually evasive & implicitness-oriented, the cultural nuances/expectations/perceptions of the "right" and "wrong" way to convey something tend to get in the way of understanding very straightforward and mostly objective things. They're generally pretty condescending when you don't converse how they expect you to, and they judge a lot about your character, emotions, intentions, etc. based on how you speak, and will speak to you very differently based on outside factors. You can take 100 almost-strangers, and neurotypicals will speak in noticeably different ways with different amounts of honesty and indirection for each person in the otherwise same context.

Instead of just saying what they mean and listening to what you say, they throw in a bunch of random culture-dependent social cues and context irrelevant to the conversation that you're supposed to subconsciously/naturally pick up on to interpret their speech in a different way. And you're basically just supposed to guess whether something is socially significant indirection or not.

Neurotypicals basically just have the urge make simple conversation unnecessarily complex and care a lot about invisible or implied stuff affecting the conversation. It's not their fault of course, they were just born that way.

I don't have ASD but I can't keep count of the amount of times I will say something very plainly and the other person will try to find some hidden meaning in it or make egregious misinterpretations/false dichotomies based on a statement (basically the "i like pancakes" "so you hate waffles"? tweet), so I can relate. Autistic people are usually far more direct in conversations in my experience, and don't use nearly as much fluff/unnecessary performative conversation. Of course that's not to say Autistic people are just flat out better socially than neurotypicals, there are many things I personally find difficult to understand about friends with ASD that can make conversation hard (mainly people who have both ASD and ADHD though, not a fun combo for having conversations, getting ultra-fixated on random irrelevant stuff and just flat out omitting important things frequently even worse than neurotypicals do), it's just that they're usually very straightforward.

this post was submitted on 27 May 2024
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