Image text: @agnieszkasshoes: "Part of what makes small talk so utterly debilitating for many of us who are neurodivergent is that having to smile and lie in answer to questions like, "how are you?" is exhausting to do even once, and society makes us do it countless times a day."
@LuckyHarmsGG: "It's not just the lie, it's the energy it takes to suppress the impulse to answer honestly, analyze whether the other person wants the truth, realize they almost certainly don't, and then have to make the DECISION to lie, every single time. Over and over. Decision fatigue is real"
@agnieszkasshoes: "Yes! The constant calculations are utterly exhausting - and all under the pressure of knowing that if you get it "wrong" you will be judged for it!"
My addition: For me, in addition to this, more specifically it's the energy to pull up that info and analyze how I am. Like I don't know the answer to that question and that's why it's so annoying. Now I need to analyze my day, decide what parts mean what to me and weigh the average basically, and then decide if that's appropriate to share/if the person really wants to hear the truth of that, then pull up my files of pre-prepared phrases for the question that fits most closely with the truth since not answering truthfully is close to impossible for me.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CvPSP-2xU4h/?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==
The "typical" person doesn't see 3 or 4 answers, they have prepared a few generic answers to those small questions, and anyone can do that. Unless you're really feeling different, and have enough intimacy with the asker to be honest, it's just a game of tic-tac-toe that anyone can learn.
How are you doing? Fine, how's life treating you?
Nice weather, eh? I've had better.
Etc.
Nobody is saying that neurodivergent people can't do small talk, it's that it is oftentimes a dreadful experience for them. You do understand the difference, yes?
It's a bit like telling someone genetically predisposed to disliking cilantro because it tastes like soap to "just eat cliantro... everyone can do it!"
Fine, but beware of getting on the "I was born this way and I can't change even if I wanted to" train. That's extremely harmful to your personal growth, because even if you were truly different genetically, it can be used as an excuse to not learn or change, even if you were capable of it.
This comment gets under my skin because in this community for autistic folks we have heard this kind of thinking our e-n-t-i-r-e lives and NT never ever ever ever understand just how much effort it takes for us to mask in order to fit in with their arbitrary ass rules that we consider hella dumb. I long for the day when a NT person comes into communities of autistic people and says, "wow, you know what, all this you're saying makes a lot of sense and this social protocol IS hella dumb and doesn't actually serve any valid purpose and I'm with you! I'm going to help out and join the movement to making society more accommodating to different brains preferred way to be, instead of assuming like everyone always does that the way society is is by definition the right and only way it should and could be." How about calls for personal growth that aren't ableist and full of unexplored privilege and ignorance about what masking actually does to us. Because I'll tell you right now that it is 100,000% devastating and the fact that many of us are keeping it together enough to survive is FUCKING MIRACULOUS and we honestly deserve monetary awards and rest and a fucking break.
Thank you for saying what I was trying to express and just couldn't. It hurts so much to be told "just act like 'normal' people so you don't seem to be 'disabled'". We're not disabled, just different!
❤️I swear we're gonna get this all sorted out. Maybe not in our lifetimes, but we're gonna help it get there. Just by having these conversations we're gonna make it happen
I'm disabled. I can barely deal with normal amounts of noise. Banning cars and ads would go a long way to making me less disabled, but unfortunately I just have a lower tolerance for attention violence, and we live in a society of frequent attention violence.
I understand what you mean. I'm also extremely noise sensitive and have to wear ear plugs pretty much all the time. Being outside is so exhausting.
That's part of what I was trying to say though. This world isn't made for us and barely anyone cares to make it easier. In a different world we wouldn't be disabled. We have different needs than NT people and it's the world that disables us, not our being different.
Did it occur to you that I could be a neurodivergent person too? Did you label me an enemy because I'm not getting on the "I can't help it, I have no choice" train?
I couldn't tell you I'm actually autistic to some degree because I've never been tested for that. I'm introverted, struggled with shyness most of my youth, and was very inept socially to add insult to injury. It has cost me a great deal to learn to improve those aspects of life, and I owe a great deal of it to my wonderful wife, who somehow reciprocated my affection when I was still emotionally stunted.
That's why I can speak from my own experience, and not trying to tell people here to "just walk it off". That being said, most of us are capable of growth and change, we can adapt. Yes, there are severely autistic/disadvantaged persons that can't, but I've seen too many others using the pretext of being different to assume they're autistic too (without a medical diagnosis) and are too hardcoded to change. What most functional people perceive as innate disadvantages is, at least in part, emotional immaturity. We focus on improving some aspect, study or expertise for example, but neglect others, like socializing, empathizing, or management of emotions. We grow unbalanced, and it's wrong to pretend we can't change without at least doing an honest try to change.
I don't know why I'm being so insistent here, probably because I've seen this attitude more in the younger generations, IRL, and it's not like something is making more people autistic, but making them less eager to examine and improve themselves. I've met autistic and mentally challenged people in my life, and they're truly limited in their capabilities, but highly functioning people claiming they're the same as them is bordering entitlement.
I think there's a lot in your comment to talk about and I certainly don't think you're wrong about a lot of things. I think if we were in person we could have an engaging evening of discussion that will be harder to do in this way online but I will try to expand just a little more.
Your comment made me think about something that's been brewing in my mind a lot recently but I'm not sure it's entirely fermented enough to put down into words yet.
It has to do with my reflection on interpersonal relationships with people who I suspect might be ND but are either closeted about it or perhaps don't even know themselves, people who have put a lot of work into analyzing social norms and applying those lessons in themselves so that they can pass as normal. I suspect these folks I'm thinking about are autistic in large part because of their rigid sense of social norms rules, and their clear anxiety when they see people eschewing those rules.
I was afforded a lot of freedom to be weird as a kid. I learned social rules for in the classroom quickly, but outside that I was very lucky with the kids that were around me. And since I loved school and learning so was missed for my ND I just grew up understanding myself as someone who was a weirdo but was accepted for that.
What this means in this context is that I find myself often triggering the above group of suspected ND folks who I think were probably not as lucky as me and who learned to be very rigid in applying social norms in order to be accepted. It smells of trauma, right? And how could it not be trauma. Being rejected as a kid is probably the most primitive danger we face outside of actually dying.
The point I'm getting at here is that I don't think you're wrong in a lot of ways but I think there has got to be a middle ground where yes we are learning the social norms and applying those lessons in order to provide the social lubrication to get along and succeed, but ALSO educating the world at large that Neurodivergence exists, is valid, and should be accommodated. I just really believe that the vast majority of the reason ND is not accommodated is because of unintentional ignorance.
So you clearly have had a lot of experiences with people who you felt were not trying hard enough to learn and apply the social rules. So that has shaped your perspective in this discussion.
I have had so many more experiences of the opposite where I have seen people living with intense anxiety constantly about their ability to fit in, and failure despite all their efforts. People who are killing themselves with stress, leading to burnout, depression, substance abuse, abusive relationships. All of this i see as a direct product of them never being given permission to be themselves, be different, advocate for their needs.
So I don't think we are actually at odds in this discussion and I think if we were able to talk in person we would find that out.
Thank you for your sensible response. I also think online forums make it harder to carry a complex conversation, because we're filling in missing context that comes with personal interaction. I don't doubt we could discuss our personal experiences in a constructive way, and learn from both sides, given a better medium.