A Dream That's Worth Keeping

So the context for this is making people feel annoyed when you interact with them. This is something that’s pretty common with us neurodivergents. I'm not able to respond to this person due to the post settings but I still wanted to respond. They'll probably never see this but whatever.

I grew up annoying the shit out of everyone around me because I wasn't able to pick up on those cues. So I know what it's like. I know what it's like to want to never to speak ever because I'm annoying people. To this day I still annoy the shit out of people, I'm pretty sure. I'm the most active people in group chats that I am active in, I natter on about mundane crap, I say hello to people and I can't tell if they want to be alone or not. I initiate the majority of the social interaction in my life, and I genuinely can't tell if it's because I annoy the shit out of people, if people just don't care about me, or if they're happy to just receive and not initiate themselves. I haven't worked around my autism enough to be able to tell yet.

But ultimately, at the end of the day, "stop talking in public" is not the healthy answer. It's a self pitying one. It can feel like you're punishing people but it's not, because they're probably not going to notice at all.

I'm not saying get over yourself because it's not that easy and beating yourself up for not getting over it is actually going to make the problem worse, not better, but you're not going to learn to interact with people better by taking an unhealthy perspective like that. Furthermore, it never actually fixes your social problems because it prevents you from learning.

What helped me was to learn to sit with the discomfort of Being Annoying. A lot of us have RSD and experience intense emotions when we know we're Being Annoying, but for most people, when they feel annoyed, it's not a big fucking deal. I've been annoyed by other people and the feeling of being annoyed is not nearly as intense as the feeling of Being Annoying. When I thought about how I handle it when people annoy me, that helped a lot with my Being Annoying spirals because I realised that hey, it's not a big deal when I'm annoyed, so it's not a big deal when I'm Being Annoying either.

And what if it was a big deal? What if someone spiralled over me Being Annoying the same way I spiral when I'm Being Annoying? What if they absolutely hate my guts the way my spiral says they are? What if everything in my spiral is true about how the other person responds to this?

So I took a moment to think about that from the point of view of the worst person I'm afraid of ever meeting. Let's pretend someone else was Being Annoying and I absolutely hate their guts, the way I'm afraid they are when I'm spiralling over this: I think about it all day, for hours, about how much I hate this annoying-ass person. I think about it for days. Let's say my worst nightmare comes true and I go around behind this person's back absolutely blasting them to other people about how much I fucking hate this person and they all turn around and also hate this person and their life is ruined forever and nobody will ever be friends with them again.

And I quickly realised holy shit, that's fucking unhinged.

I'd never treat someone like that, why would I expect them to treat me the same way?

And that's the lie the spiral tells you. That everyone is unhinged, that everyone despises you, that everyone is exactly the horrible person you're scared of them being, and that they have nothing better to do than utterly rip you apart for hours, days or even weeks afterwards, and that you're a terrible person for putting them through having to deal with their own feelings.

I think at the end of the day what the next stage is is to stop giving as much of a fuck about protecting people from their own feelings of annoyance. Sometimes I go interact with someone knowing full well I'm about to annoy the shit out of them. Well, it's not my job to protect them from their own feelings, it's not my job to try to guess boundaries that haven't been expressed to me. If they're annoyed, that's their problem. If they snap their boundaries to me, whatever, now I know their boundaries and how they express it isn't my problem. They're allowed to feel annoyance, it's not banned, it's not illegal, they're allowed. I've got another data point and I'm a bit better at reading people now.

They're annoyed? Tough shit, they can cry me a river, build me a bridge and get over it. My job is to respect boundaries and cues as I pick up on them, or as they're communicated to me, so I've done my part. It's not my job to be likable, it's not my job to read their mind, and it's not my job to protect them from their own emotions. Because that's what held me back the most; the idea that negative emotions like annoyance and anger were toxic and it was my job to protect people from those emotions, and I was a Bad Person if I didn't. Nah. They're just emotions. They can live with theirs, and I'll live with mine.

And sometimes, yeah, I interact with another person that's like me and I think they're annoying. What happens? Nothing. My feelings aren't that important and I'm not two years old so I don't throw a tantrum and try to wreck their life for it.

At the end of the day, what someone thinks of me isn't my business, and what I think of them isn't theirs.