#social differences

(+8 Other Social Snapshots in My Autistic Life)

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Screenshot of tweet from ellie middleton (user id: @/@elliemidds) here :

‘one part of being autistic that i never really see spoken about is the loneliness that comes with not being able to read social cues - always feeling out of the loop, like you’re missing something and as though you’re the one that’s kept out of an inside joke’

•••

PERSONAL EXPERIENCES:

Naturally a direct/straightforward person, regardless of how trained I am to be ‘pleasant’ in social events as I have been socialised as cis woman AND YET STILL being seen as rude when I forgot that my straightforwardness isn’t appreciated / can easily be misconstrued as conceited

Tried to approach people with humour, but is rarely received well and often fell sideway awkwardly compared to neuroconforming colleagues

Still miss any social cues expected in any occasions if they are not directly communicated or laid out before the event + easily become the cause of disappointment, misunderstanding and resentment in others (for being different and for wanting to do things differently).

This is a Medium Friend link, so everyone can read through without interference of a paywall.

As Yet Untitled Dystopia (Working title)

Jaz was in bed when they came, in that brink between sleep and awareness when a brain doesn’t really take in anything around it yet is still vaguely aware that things are happening.

The screams from downstairs yanked her back over the edge with a rush of adrenaline and the following sounds- things breaking, people shouting indistinctly- propelled her out of bed and down their wobbling staircase, where a body blocked her from her planned jump over the few bottom stairs and run to her parents. A body dressed in grey. A guard.

*

Several hundred years and a nuclear war into the future, the remainder of humanity lives on a technologically advanced city that floats in the middle of an ocean that's name has long since been forgotten.

People are divided (obviously) by a class system related to another new technology- chips that are placed into the brain at birth and are said to give incredibly powers if you can train enough. Unfortunately, only half of the chips give the owner this ability, the other half are pairs of those chips which are necessary to prevent brain damage in the one with the powers. Those with the power-giving chips are known as ‘powers’ and those with the other, as ‘balances’.

Each chip has a perfect pair and the powers cannot be unlocked until the partner is found; our main character, Jaz is a bisexual balance without her pair (yet), her best friend, Lily, only recently paired and Lily’s boyfriend having been paired for several years. 

A Stranger In A Foreign Land: Understanding the Autistic Experience

Autism is, at its core, a difference in processing.

It is a difference in how our brains process information as it comes in. Sensory information is processed differently in our brains which can lead to drastically different experiences of the world around us. We process emotion differently. Even social situations are processed differently by the autistic brain.

A common analogy used to explain…

If you feel comfortable telling people, go for it.  You might also find it helpful to point out or explain the ways in which you *do* communicate the things people think you aren’t communicating because you don’t do it in an allistic way.  (Example: “I’m often pretty bad at initiating conversation, even with people I really want to talk to, but if I’m making art for you or baking cookies for you that’s part of how I express friendship.”)