What I realized was that it isn’t that, as an Autistic person, I don’t pick up on subtle social cues. It’s that I pick up on them too clearly and two distinctly. What I pick up on is largely vying for dominance.

In so many encounters I find myself being degraded and gaslit and insulted and I look at the face of the person doing it and they look like they think they’re doing nothing wrong. That’s not true. They are doing something wrong.

I don’t come to conversations to dominate or discredit my partner in communication. I don’t come to conversations to win. I come to conversations in an attempt to grow and enhance and strengthen efforts to do good in the world. I find myself often alone in a room, full of people who do not have that in mind.

This just happened to me recently. I was with a group of people who I again assumed would be interested in communicating in good faith and I was wrong. I’m left with another experience of not just not being heard but having engaged in some kind of shadow play that was a waste of everyone’s time. It’s making me reconsider my plan to try to help families interact with the school district because it’s making it pretty obvious that it’s just gonna be an endless uphill battle like it was when I worked there. 

But that’s not the point of this post. And yes, I’m aware that I started a sentence with the word, but and I do not care.

My thought on this is that it’s not that we don’t understand social cues. It’s that we understand them all too well and those things distract us from our purpose. So much energy and time is wasted on ego.