I think a lot of autistic taking-things-literally goes under the radar because what the diagnostic tests and shit ask about is not what that generally looks like in an adult and often not in kids either and much more importantly it’s not what generally actually causes problems in real life instead of being irritating for caretakers or funny to bullies or easy to diagnose
I have absolutely no issues understanding metaphors or idioms. When someone says their heart is on their sleeve they mean they’re emotionally expressive and openly display their feelings, not that they have a chunk of cardiac tissue on their shirt. I very rarely have issues with sarcasm. I sometimes have issues telling when someone who’s said something mean is about to say “just kidding”, but tbh I think that’s more on them than me.
BUT
My grandmother asked me “Do you know when the trash was taken out last?” and I said “I think Eliot took it out yesterday” and a few hours later she yelled at me for “not taking out the trash when I asked you to” and I was like???? You didn’t ask me????
I dread filling out forms and am crap at filling out diagnostic tests or personality quizzes because there are always questions I don’t know the exact answers to (how am I supposed to know what day I got dental surgery seven years ago?) or don’t understand exactly what they’re asking or the wording’s unclear and they could mean this or the wording says this but I’m pretty sure what they actually meant was this and should I answer what they said or what they meant, and how does everyone else just whip through the form when surely they can’t know all the answers either? Does everyone else remember the day they got dental surgery seven years ago?
I get tangled up by bureaucracy because the rules on the website say that for this you need that and for that you need the other and for the other you need something else for which you need the first thing, and I go in circles for hours or days or weeks or months or years because their stated rules say there is no way to get what I need, and when I talk to somebody else they’re like “just call them?” and I’m like “how could that help? the rules say that what I’m trying to do is impossible”
And all of that? That’s how “taking things literally” ACTUALLY affects your life as an adult. It’s not “haha you think ‘getting under your skin’ means parasites”. It’s “you have real difficulty functioning in the world because everyone else is conveying things through implication and assuming that you know that rules are flexible and questions are approximate and you’re supposed to lie on job applications, and you don’t”.
This.
Plus of course the fact that non-autistic people do not actually have a consistently agreed-upon set of rules for how literally you’re supposed to take things in every situation. There are some common rules that are mostly agreed on, but there are also ones that a roomful of neurotypicals can argue about for hours.
The biggest lie they told you when they were trying to “teach you to understand the social rules” is that there ARE “the” social rules.
There are social expectations, and some are common and some are not, and sometimes what people expect can depend on things like how old they are, what state and city and neighborhood they come from, what job they have, what job their parents had, or any of endless other things.
And some of them will still be 100% convinced that THEIR social rules are THE social rules and everyone else who doesn’t obey them is an asshole.
And yeah, a lot of people who have “good social skills” have a strong skill at this, in particular– gauging what sort of Rulebook another person is probably playing by, and therefore what that person is likely to expect.
And even with this skill, they don’t always guess right. Because people are fuckin’ complicated.
And there sure as hell is NOT the mythical One True Rule Book that they told you about in special-ed class when you were an autistic problem-child who was just assumed by default to be wrong about every social thing.
Or maybe that’s just me.
Still true though.