this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2023
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Autism

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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==

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

since in most other languages people don't ask "how are you" would this problem exist in other languages?

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Reading these kind of things always makes me think to see a doctor.. that has been way too hard for way too long.. too late anyway I guess..

Now I see these interactions as functions: it's not inviduals acting in those cases, just society going on. I stopped thinking about the person asking and now I see them like a traffic light going red and green: not a problem.

Am I still weird? Yes. Is that my problem? No.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

@[email protected] The phrase "can't complain" referring to the fact that if I did, there would be consequences. I try to assume that if someone wants to know, they'll ask again when they hear a nonanswer, giving me more time to do the math.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

This is why my default response is now either “alive”, or in the case of “how’s it going?”, “it’s going”

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I’m not neurodivergent, but small talk is fundamentally a conversation with no other purpose than to maintain, build and express social relationships. There’s no substantive information being passed. So I guess it is a concentrated dose of some people’s worst nightmare

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