I saw some snippet of a callout post for an autistic trans woman where they list social faux pas she committed, and I think we allistic people should all feel 100x more ashamed of not telling people in the moment how we feel about what they’re doing. I think its extremely evil and cruel to not only lie to an autistic person and blame them for it but also to feel justified shaming them for your behavior. And it’s currently the social norm to do that
Everytime we as allistic people sit and force a smile or sigh and act subtly grumpy or otherwise lie to an autistic person’s face about how we feel about what they did it is in fact Our Fault that we are enduring whatever the autistic person is daring to try and share with us. You can literally say something out loud directly. The literal structure of our social existence will always traumatize autistic people unless you can give a fuck enough to consider it isn’t their fault that you didn’t communicate with them
Even I couldn’t understand this until my wife was in tears because I had internalized the idea that it was her fault that people were uncomfortable in a conversation where no one told her they were uncomfortable and blamed her for it. Allistic people punish autistic people for so many Percieved slights, or even decide together afterward what exactly the slight was and then make their collective judgment behind the autistic persons back. Not only do we get the benefit of communicating nonverbally through obtuse social cues the autistic person can’t parce, we then get to say that we weren’t going behind their back because we all did those social cues they are too disabled to understand Right in front of them. No, what you did was choose to suppress your feelings and then reap the social benefits of being in on the discomfort.
this is literally why many autistic people genuinely worry that their friends secretly hate them, by the way. because many people in the past did.
god.
this is so painfully true.
and yet…
I feel where that behavior is coming from.
I am an autistic person who has gotten pretty damn skilled over the years at both reading these vague social cues and finding tactful ways around having to use them… but when I was younger, I used to have a lot of trouble picking up on them, and this caused no end of social turmoil.
But, back then, I was also not someone who took blunt criticism well.
I wanted to! I struggled to learn how to accept it! But in the moment, the emotions would just be too overwhelming for me. Usually I’d take it with initial shock and dumbfounded silent nodding– but then as the reality set in I’d eventually have either a devastated crying fit, or a tantrum, or both.
Which could have a sudden and frightening onset, and I can 100% see why people were too scared to trigger that in me, even if they knew that hiding it was only delaying and probably worsening the problem.
And what’s more, I grew up in a household where everyone else (except my mom, who’d learned to repress her emotions even more than normal just to survive there) was pretty much the same.
And, as I grew up, I learned that a fairly large number of people, in and out of my family– both autistic and otherwise– are that way. Prone to reacting in volatile, scary ways to any kind of direct criticism.
So I, too, a lot of the time, ended up too afraid to tell anyone honestly when I had a problem with them. Despite knowing that the silence wasn’t helping either. Same sort of feeling you get walking around with some horrible festering wound, knowing that it’s killing you slowly, knowing your only way to fix it is to cut off your own limb, but never quite brave enough to do that.
And realizing others probably felt the same about me.
In short, for a lot of my life, I was both someone who needed open and honest communication in order to figure out what was going on– and also someone who was both 1. too scared to do that to others, and 2. too scary for others to do it to me.
…It sucked.
And I am still not certain how much of this was autism-related and how much of it was fucking Minnesota-related.