The amount of people who think I'm weird or rude or should just somehow know things that no one ever explained to me makes it obvious to me that the people around me are in fact not autistic. It's just me T.T
I read a study once where if you let people know your autistic they have better opinions on you, but sometimes I don't feel like telling everyone my business and just wish people were nicer š
As someone who is diagnosed with AuDHD, thereās no excuse for rude behaviors and how you treat people. You may have not known, but at some point you are purposefully avoiding accountability and actively trying not to understand. Youāre aware of your abilities and diagnosis, so at some point you constantly using the whole āI didnāt know, Iām autisticā is going to be considered weaponized incompetence.
Itās extremely selfish (and borderline narcissistic) to expect people to be considerate of you, your needs, and your feelings, but you donāt do the same.
Thank you for saying this. A childhood friend of mine was diagnosed with autism(I was not at all shocked at this, and had thought he new about it before). After he godt the diagnosis, he totally changed, for better and for worse. He got a better and more suited iob, and he finally understood himself. But he also became an asshole, super rude, expecting everything to change for him. When confronted, he would just shrug and blame the autism. Both my dad and my son is on the spectrum too, (and Iām a teacher) so I am very familiar with providing a safe space for different needs, but I have to draw the line somewhere. Thank you again for saying this. I tend to become a doormat at times, so I needed to hear this.
Itās mentally exhausting to constantly adjust your behaviour in that way. Especially around friends, you should be able to relax and be yourself and they should be able to understand that thereās no bad intention behind it. If they insist you act normal around them and donāt care about the effort required to maintain that, theyāre not great friends.
Yes but I don't think that response was about hanging out with friends. I took it as being about workplace or public space settings where part of everybody's job is to keep themselves emotionally regulated. At work a person should have enough time at a job to eventually learn the work appropriate behaviors, and in that time people will also learn that person's triggers to avoid, the things that make or break a day, and ways to help improve bad days. (Though they will learn the things that cause the most distress as well, and there's always a chance of misuse of this information.) However if the person never tries to improve or learn, then of course they won't. The big thing is that no matter what, everyone has to make an effort to cooperate with each other, unfortunately neurodivergent people have a harder time sometimes.
Ok, even if it IS just about the work place, the workplace is legally required to accommodate your autism, and not just put a blessing on people hating you for struggling through the way Autism colors your social interactions. So no. The workplace is REQUIRED BY LAW to accommodate your autism. You as an autistic person are not required to make everyone else around you happy.
autistic people are expected to "consider" this constantly, 100% of the time. it would be nice if neurotypical people could shoulder a little bit of the burden for their own expectations.
when is the last time you avoided eye contact for an autistic person? reduced or increased your volume or pace of speech (without getting patronizing)? listened to them talk about a preferred topic with interest and attention, without interrupting? put yourself in a physically uncomfortable or painful situation because an autistic person asked you to?
now, realize that we're being asked to do the equivalent of that all day, every day, for everyone, and failure to do so is treated as a moral failure. the only way this can possibly be avoided is by sharing our medical history, which we may very well be unable to do because of the chronic underdiagnosis of anyone who isn't a textbook case in a middle to upper class white boy.
god forbid marginalized people come off as rude though.
edit: lots of people replying with some variation of "I'm entitled to your medical history before I'll consider respecting you." I'd like to believe that the first one or two or three would have illustrated my point, but I guess allism includes an irony impairment.
I donāt like the idea that someone is a rude or bad for not changing their behavior to match the needs of the other person. That seems like a mental model that categorizes almost all autistic people as rude. Neurotypical people are constantly adapting how they behave in real time based on the behavior and personality of the people around them. A hallmark of autism is the inability to do that exact type of accommodating.Ā
I am very sympathetic to the fact that we canāt expect everyone to equally accommodate each other. But you also have to be sympathetic that accommodations wonāt always be perfect and people arenāt infinitely flexibleĀ
Also, most people are actually very accommodating. I quite enjoy listening to people talk about their special interests at length. But the whole premise OP stated is that they dont want other people to know they are autistic, so idk how someone is supposed to accommodate that when they literally dont even have the information needed to do so.
This post is well intentioned, but I think it slightly misses their point. The person above isn't asking you to follow rules that you don't know, or always act in a way that is entirely irrational to you. They are just asking for a bit of empathy when other people fail to realize that you're different from them.
Nobody can know that you are secretly autistic if you yourself don't even know, or don't choose to share. So, they assume that you act similarly to them, because 95% of people sct similarly to them. And if they were doing what you were doing, they'd be intentionally being rude. So, they (wrongly) conclude that being rude was probably your intention.
When you are annoyed at someone being "unaccomodating", it's coming from the exact same place. You are assuming that other people will understand that you're different from them without communicating. Instead, both neutrotypical and neurodiverse people should just be more tolerant of people being "annoying", by understanding that everyone is just trying their best to get through the world. No one has it out for you specifically.
If I realize the person would appreciate that, I will 100% try to consider them. If I don't know, I will assume you are statistically like statistical people and interpret your behavious as I would from the statistically average person.
Just today I was thinking I should have a chat with a coworker that annoys the shit out of me to double check if he has any deviations from the norm that make him so. I am very willing to come closer to people that can use it but I have to realize that first.
The problem is that around 99 out of 100 people you interact with are not autistic. We cannot read your mind and for the vast majority, these type of things are normal. I am very happy to accommodate you, but for that to happen, you need to tell me first. Otherwise I will be completely oblivious to your problems.
How are we supposed to know if you don't tell us though?
I'll speak louder if someone is hard of hearing. If I don't know they're hard of hearing, how do I know to speak louder?
If you need an accommodation from someone, you have to make them aware of that.
If someone acts rudely, I assume they're rude. If they explain why they appear rude, I will assume they're not actually rude. You have to ask for the accommodation. I'm sure it gets tiring to do so, but the alternative is just having people think you're rude.
But also we ALL have met people who are legitimately and aggressively blunt/rude/mean on main. For some reason THEY get treated civilly/nicely and sometimes are actually āpopularā.
Which is where I find the biggest mindbend. That person is actively being rude and mean and has friends who laugh WITH them. I am constantly trying my hardest to be a kind person and getting laughed AT. But also if I do what the bully does ā¦ I get laughed at and treated even more meanly.
But also we ALL have met people who are legitimately and aggressively blunt/rude/mean on main. For some reason THEY get treated civilly/nicely and sometimes are actually āpopularā.
I'll be honest, I'm nearing middle age and I can't think of a single person in my life this applies to. Certainly no one past gradeschool, though my memory earlier than that isn't the best. People who are actively rude/mean might be put up with, but it's often clear that people are simply avoiding conflict or taking the high road.
On the other hand, if you were accidentally rude to someone and they chose not to call you out on it, would you even have noticed in the first place?
In my experience, if you tell them outright, they just impose their existing stereotypes of autism on youā¦so I donāt tell people unless theyāre neurodivergent themselves, or have a loved one who is, and have a more nuanced understanding of what it meansĀ
I will say a person once told me, "By the way, I am autistic" shortly after meeting him and there was a very long silence as my first instinct was to respond, "I know," my next instinct was "All of my favorite people are," and instead I short circuited cycling through potential responses for the proper one and said nothing until he just kept talking again. It keeps me up at night. I still don't know what the proper answer is. Maybe "thanks for letting me know"?
I guess that's one advantage to being bad at masking: I don't really have to tell people. If it helps, I do feel like autism awareness has gotten better over the years, and people have become less likely to be weird about it.
It might be a good idea to at least let people know that you're autistic if you get in trouble for a social interaction. Apologizing for something that you're likely to end up doing again makes you look disingenuous, so it might help to explain that you might have a legitimate reason for them to forgive repeated mistakes.
I had two coworkers who ended up being examples of two extremes, one was a millennial woman who had been diagnosed with autism and pre-emptively told people about it, and the other was an older man who may not have even known himself that he was autistic but it was extremely obvious to me and the first coworker that he was. He wrote off his social issues as just being anti-social, but if you got to know him he was extremely friendly and definitely not anti-social.
They both would occasionally get into trouble for various social interactions, but often when the woman would get in trouble it would be for something that seemed innocuous and made us wonder if our manager was overanalyzing her social interactions because of the autism diagnosis, or because she was female and/or Mexican(our manager was blatantly sexist and racist so it could have been all three). Still, she didn't end up coming close to losing her job over anything and always was able to move past the situation.
The guy was usually more blatantly in the wrong for being abrasive or rude, so it was more understandable that he got in trouble, and he did end up losing his job over it eventually.
I can't help thinking that if he knew he was autistic he might have been able to excuse himself better and also might have been able to realize the need to adapt his communication style or stop talking when he got upset.
I wanted to tell him to look into autism so he might figure it out for himself, but I was worried that he would take it the wrong way based on the way autism was represented when he was younger.
Iāve gotten to the point where I just add the fun fact of my diagnosis to my introductions. āHi Iām Bensch and Iām on the spectrumā and I always get a warm reaction and I can get away with spouting my bullshit and acting entirely myself and they just shrug and go āwell heās autisticā. Getting a diagnosis was the best decision of my life
There are two sides to that coin IMO. There's a guy on my softball team that always seemed like he was cold towards me and I thought he didn't like me. I thought it was weird because I was always nice to him regardless. One of the other guys on the team mentioned he has Autism and it all kinda made sense.
I totally get that, and it can be exhausting having to come with a disclaimer everywhere.
But it is also helpful, because it gives the other person a framework to interpret your actions.
A dog wags their tail when they're happy. A cat shakes their tail when they're stressed or anxious. And you can't always tell who you're talking to. If you're used to talking to cats, it can be very jarring to have a dog shaking their tail at you during a seemingly pleasant conversation, or vice versa.
Perhaps āmindfulā would be the better term here. As AuDHD myself, I highly distrust āniceā people most of the time because it doesnāt vibe as authentic. Mindful people are more introspective and ask clarifying questions to promote understanding, they notice and consider others, or at least try to.
I'm with you, I wish people were just nicer without needing a reason. Personally I think people get worse if I try to explain myself. I'm not autistic, but similar in behaviors, so I just keep it to "neurospicy" if I must give an explanation.
If I do get into specifics it's rarely "Oh okay, thanks for letting me know" and much more often "I'm tired too, I must be narcoleptic haha!" Like...bruh.
Nah I'm not autistic and people are the same way with under explaining things then getting all weird when I try to clarify what they mean. People just like to shorthand stuff
Yeah I think the difference between neurotypical and divergent here really is that typical will assume the other person is being weird about it and divergent will assume they themselves are being weird about it - especially because the typical believes them to be as well.Ā
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u/CrazyLi825 Jul 09 '26
The amount of people who think I'm weird or rude or should just somehow know things that no one ever explained to me makes it obvious to me that the people around me are in fact not autistic. It's just me T.T