My apologies for the long post; I originally wrote this to try to explain to my friends why I seemed so unsociable. I then thought that R/Aspergers would like a read, both for those interested in the condition and those who feel the same way:

Imagine that your friends have invited you out.

You look around at your purpose-built sanctuary; it's every touch, smell and taste familiar and undaunting to you and your hypersensitive nature. The soft lighting, the meticulous choice of fabric, wood, plastic and metal for the sake of feeling and sound, and the smells of such a place are all calm and comforting to you.

All this built specifically to house someone who's sensorium often tends to overwhelm them.

But...you've spent far too long here, and have developed a sort of cabin fever. so you acquiesce to their request. You leave your temple to tranquility behind and head into town on a busy saturday night, where your friends have invited you to a cinema outing to see a new release.

When you arrive, however, you are notified through text that the plans have changed; you are no longer going to the cinema; your friends bought tickets for the wrong bloody month. This disruption of the night's itinerary causes you almost physical pain; A sucker punch to the soul, as it were.

Instead, they invite you to a nearby place; Hollywood Bowl, a bowling alley chain. You've never been there before; already your gut starts to twist with anxiety, a common feeling when you start anything new.

The hours of mental prep work that would've allowed you to sit, in comfort, quietly with many other people and watch a film is now useless to you, and try as you might it can't be adapted to this environment; The place is swamped with people from young to old. Toddlers to old age pensions; a melting pot of the ages; unusual for a saturday night hangout. There must be over two hundred people here, all standing in one open room. The heat, and subsequent smell was overwhelming, but you've long since learnt to pull your attention away from certain senses and can happily do so for a limited time.

You had only prepared yourself for some light conversation before and after the movie, you hadn't prepared for anything else.

Quickly, you scan faces, trying to find your friends and putting together a roughshod battleplan to help deal with the probable events you may find yourself in, such as not finding them, finding them in an argument or running into someone, etc etc. At last, you find them.

Smack dab in the middle of a throng of people; sitting in a center booth.

They wave you over. One stands up like a beacon over the din of noise; no turning back now they've seen you. You saunter over, unable to hide your reluctance of getting into so close a proximity with so many people. Your willingness to socialise disappeared the moment your plans changed. The usual fare of pleasantries takes place; greetings, comments, updates on personal life. Your friends are already in a state of minor inebriation and continue to discuss matters you can't seem to draw your attention to as the place you find yourself in is so very loud. You let your mouth run on automatic, giving out the same idle small talk as everyone else here. You find your focus flitting about the room; you can hear about 20 voices but only coherently can you make out three local conversations.

You listen in (not like you have a choice; your focus isn't that controllable), and it's the usual stuff people always talk about when they get together. Relationships, annoyances, wishful thinking...the usual. You wonder why people keep repeating the same strand of conversation over and over again, as though expecting it to thread off in another direction, but this is a puzzle for another time. You observe the behavior of the three groups that make up this place's clientele; you have the teenager/college crowd; most of whom appear to be in the process of trying to get laid, with some halfway there already if the amount of snogging is any indication. A girl from this group catches you scanning around the room and gives a small smirk in your direction:

You begin formulating another plan in the event she walks over and attempts to talk; but you have no idea how to politely inform her that you are only interested in your own gender still remains a mystery to you. A man steps close to her, tracks her gaze back to you and gives you an aggressive, dominant stare. You immediately update your battleplan to account for emotional or physical violence, to either yourself or to her. She notices his presence, looks to him and drops her smirk, taking on a small, sad frown in it's place. This holds your interest only for a moment as you attempt to plot out the nature of their relationship from this short glance, hoping to improve your social skills all the while. Evidently they have a rather complicated relationship.

The other two groups are also rather strange; the middle-aged and elderly are also here, although in either very small groups or as couples. Most of them are gazing around the room as well, much to your bewilderment; best guess, they were looking out for the last group; The last is one of small, thoroughly noisy children playing amongst arcade machines far in advance of the machines you encountered in your childhood; whereas they would usually only be comparatively simple devices with toy rifles with infrared capabilities, these modern machines seemed capable of speech and gaze recognition as well as body tracking.

Your inner techie yearns to explore these machines you were denied in your youth, but your inner socialite, educated through laborious trial and embarrassing error, knows all too well this would be an intrusion on the children's play area; despite your technical intentions you know even approaching that area will gain you attention you cannot handle, and if directly quizzed, suspicions would only be raised. Plus your friends may not take kindly to you abandoning them in favor of mechanical distractions.

Your attention returns to what your friends are discussing; they are looking at other movies to watch at the Cinema and have settled on two choices; one is a romance/action film and the other is the story of a robot becoming human. Both seem boring, the second sounds cliche and a rehash of Short Circuit. In either case you weren't terribly willing to spend the £20 required to watch the film. In the case of the first especially, you would find the romance confusing as you knew from past experience you would not be able to recognise or understand many of the romantic actions and other subtext, so you feel you'd be left thoroughly bored for most of the film.

You make your excuses, and hope to slip away. The noise, as well as the repetitive and seemingly looped conversations are giving you a headache. Your friends know your habits and aren't nearly so willing to let you slip back into your sanctuary, so they try to form other plans to keep you involved. They attempt to enrol you in conversation, but your headache is getting painful, and worse still, you identify the signs of heavy stress on your mind. One of them buys you a drink; it tastes like someone poured coffee, orange juice and chocolate into a heavily used rubbish bin then served the resulting brew.

Great. Now even your tongue is overtaxed. The drink itself was fine, but the amount of stimulus is causing the senses of your body to go into overdrive. Everything is just too intense. Even the lights are getting brighter in here.

You wished you had just made your excuses the moment you learnt your plans had changed; but you know from experience that your friends don't really understand the sickening anxiety you feel, or the emotional upheaval you find yourself in as you try to quantify and follow everything that's happening around you, especially without any preparation as to how to deal with it.

You feel the charade begin to unravel and the mental prosthetics of your mind; built up from many experiences, starts to break down under the stress.

You try and formulate something, anything to say; but your mouth slips over itself; your brain, pulling at strings of thought, can't find a thread of conversation that won't end in two minutes with an awkward silence. Your lack of preparation for this sort of social event is evidently causing you problems. Normally you would have had two dozen conversations already planned out and you'd be reading, free-form, from a mentally prepared and rehearsed script; enough to get you through two to three hours of socialising. But without the hours put into such prep work; you stutter, slur and fall over this horrible, ad-libbed mess that so often happens when you try to articulate raw thought.

One of your friends turns to you and says "Heyyy! you should relax! Enjoy yourself! THIS" she said, pointing to the throng of flesh and blood which overwhelming smells badly of body odor, cheap deodorant and even cheaper booze, "is what life is all about! Revel in it!"

You look at her as though she has just suggested that wearing used nappies on your head is the latest in haute fashion. The tendrils of your attention now focussed completely on her; she is relaxed and carefree; you have no idea how this is possible. You go back to scanning around and watch two men attempting to court a a young lady. Watching them, you can't help but draw a comparison to this scene and the animal documentaries you saw the night before; you wonder what David Attenborough's narration might entail were this one of his works:

"And here we have the fabled homo sapien sapiens. The wise man. Here he is, attempting to court a female by a simple, but effective mating display. He slouches and draws out his chest whilst thrusting forward his sexual organs in an attempt to make himself seem more virile than his opponent."

You feel alienated from the others here; divorced from the throng of humanity surrounding you. It's noisy, smelly and there is too much stimulus. As a matter of fact, you find only stress and a growing sense of bewilderment at the repetitious nature of your fellow humans. You no longer feel able to even recognise them as human; just spinning, noisy things making too much of a racket for you to think clearly.

You feel like an alien visitor to this planet. Does your friend not realise that this is anything but relaxing?! Your focus is constantly grabbed away by anything you haven't already seen; you are constantly analysing your environment for threats and potential interactions whilst simultaneously attempting to formulate plans to deal with both. On top of that, you are attempting to filter out noise from signal and plan your next conversational move.

Of course, by the time you manage to plan that move, the window of conversational opportunity has already closed and you must await the next one, by which time whatever you wanted to say is already a page or more behind the conversation.

If you don't do any of this; you are screwed; your mind will go into instant retreat and shut down everything from expression and conversation to executive function. You can't just 'stop' planning. Every attempt at doing so has turned you into a zombie. You'll end up a barely functional mute; unable to speak as your thoughts don't translate well into words and you'll pay attention to nothing as huge parts of your sensorium will close down to protect itself from the massive amount of information you are attempting to sift through.

For those that have some trouble holding onto this; imagine being a biologist in a cage filled with lions, tigers, great apes and venomous snakes and it's mating season. You must actively work to avoid getting in the way of others; make only certain movements and hope and pray like hell nothing happens whilst you work. This is what socialising in a group is to you. Hard work that is unpleasant, with terrifying consequences if you screw up.

The social prosthetics you've built up; a variety of mental machinery and techniques over the years to help you cope is instead about three seconds away from catching on fire. Were you a computer, you'd be getting SYSTEM FAILURE messages in big, red, hollywood-style lettering. Random thoughts and vague flashbacks come to you in haphazard formation, unrequested. Your mind is overclocked and your brain is burning.

You note with annoyance that despite throwing yourself into some challenging, mind-bending stuff in the past, that simple socialisation feels considerably more difficult than any academic pursuit. You feel a shudder throughout your mind as the tools you've built to help you process collapse under the strain; such machinery grinding to a halt. You feel a growing sense that you need to get away. You need to escape.

Eventually, beset by ticks, a headache and pure exhaustion from both trying to participate in conversation and deal with the environment, you are released from your torment and you head back to your sanctuary.

The journey home is externally uneventful; but internally your mind, trying to keep up with demand no longer required; processes everything; analyzing and simulating and sampling everything it can see, hear, touch, smell and taste. Your thoughts focus on everything from the layout of the pavement to recreating the designs of passing cars to mapping out the local weather. You are overclocked, and you are burning out.

You find yourself wondering why people do this to themselves, but then you remember that most don't suffer as you do. To others, this is 'fun'. To you, this is a nightmare that you cannot avoid; so many expect you to attend such events and be glad of the opportunity and grow frustrated and impatient when you mention your reluctance.

Upon arrival, you immediately close the door, draw the curtains and embroil yourself in two books and one video game, playing and (re, and re, and re-reading them) for the next few days until you feel somewhat whole again and your mind takes on that calm, cool, mechanical feel. During this time, your sleep is minimal and you find yourself sweating with anxiety.

Congratulations. You've just survived a social encounter. Barely. Let's try again next month.

TLDR: Man goes to social occasion. Social occasion changes unexpectedly. Man is not prepared. Tools and techniques man uses to get through social events fail. Man suffers psychological exhaustion from attempting to ad-lib in new environment. Man spends the better part of a week recovering.

EDIT: Due to some folks getting the wrong idea; I've removed, rephrased and re-tuned parts of the text; it was never my wish to come over as some pretentious, superior arse as some have claimed I am. I simply struggle with these scenarios and tried my best to explain it.

Personally I'm more of a "Cool Ranch Autism"

What flavor are you?

Sorry for the confusing title, I'll explain further.

As a kid I was very mature and acted older than my age.

But as an adult I feel like I am still emotionally undeveloped and childish at times. I'm (mildly) afraid of public places, shy about relationships, and generally almost childish.

I'm not saying that that's a bad thing. In many ways I have a happier life because of it, but it's different from NTs to say the least.

Edit: on a the same topic I've found that I enjoy childish movies or anime more and more as I age.

I pass as NT pretty well. I have friends, filler conversations, and public stims so small most people won't notice. To the point where people have a hard time believing I'm autistic. But they don't see the hours of mental prep that goes into those filler conversations, the anticipation of people's approach, the constant all-encompassing self-awareness I use to seem normal. They don't see the mute, emotionless robot that the hours of interaction creates in me when Im alone in a dark room playing some strategy game under my favorite blanket while my mind rewinds the day to prepare for the next. They don't see the exhaustion at the end of the week, when I can barely control my facial expressions, near-tears as I realize that for the next two days I don't have to do anything or be anyone.

They don't see the superficiality of it all. The emptiness I feel so often when engaged, against my own nature, in one pointless conversation about the weather or another. They don't see me struggle to recognize who I am underneath all the hard-learned camouflaging I've shrouded myself in. They don't see me hold people at arms length because I fear that actual intimacy with who I am deep inside drives people away. They don't see the tears, the anger, the bitterness at being accepted only as a meager fascimile of myself. One which is so radically distended from the truth that it might as well be a different person.

Ever since the DSM lumped Asperger’s under the broader autism spectrum, I feel like the public perception has gone backwards.

Now, when people hear “autistic,” they assume I must be like their 5-year-old nephew who never talks, lines up toy trains, and needs full-time care. That stereotype dominates — and it erases the reality of people like me who can talk, study, work, but still struggle massively in ways that aren’t visible.

I reckon autism isn’t one neat thing. It’s a cluster of very different conditions and presentations that science hasn’t properly teased apart yet. Einstein’s autism would’ve looked different from Bill Gate’s, and mine looks different again.

By collapsing everything together, we’ve lost nuance. We’ve made it harder for outsiders to understand us, and harder for us to get recognition, research, and support tailored to our specific needs.

Was scrapping the Asperger’s label progress, or did it just make life harder for a lot of us?

Mood

I was autistic before too, but I didn't want anyone else to get their hopes up.

Fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you

Edit: I would like to draw the attention of several commenters to the word “unnecessarily” (adverb in a way that is avoidable; needlessly.) in the title.

I understand that your vehicle sounds like this because otherwise cars would hit you/ you can’t afford one that doesn’t/ your thingamajig that makes yours quiet got nicked. This post isn’t about you.

It has destroyed many potential friendships/relationships/job opportunities and will continue to do so for the rest of my life. If you’re reading this post, I just want to let you know that YOU are extremely amazing and strong for having to put up living with this.

It really sucks being stuck in an uncanny valley situation where we can appear almost normal in social situations, but never actually quite be normal. And the worst; it’s permanent. There’s no silver lining, no cure, it is permanent and fate sealing forever.

Being so aware, but so helpless to fix your situation for an entire lifetime is extremely painful. Suicide is not a solution to a temporary problem but since it’s permanent and unfixable, I don’t blame people for doing it. 33% of people with it attempt suicide sometime throughout their lifetime.

People argue that it’s some sort of gift because billionaires such as mark zuckerberg and elon musk have it but that’s just survivorship bias. The reality is it’s a painful empty existence for most of us.

The one shot i had at life is ruined all because of asperger’s and there’s nothing i can do about it. I don’t know how much longer I can take this

I just won an unpleasant court battle for the custody of my son.

Her strategy was very simple: I'm autistic. Therefore I have no empathy. Therefore I cannot care for a child.

I had to prove bit by bit that I was being a good father while she couldn't get her lazy NT ass off the couch.

Even her lawyer seemed surprised that she lost ("But he has Asperger Syndrome! Asperger's!").

Now that I'm finished crying I want to tell all of you: You are okay. Your AS doesn't make you any less valuable as a person.

[Edit: Thank you all for the encouragement and all the nice things you said! It means a lot to me.]

Interesting article, seen on r/science.

I’ve never really thought of myself as having burnout before but it really makes clearer episodes in my past.

It also helps me understand some behavior of my son, and how better to support him.

https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/aut.2019.0079

I don't mean this in a way to insult anyone so really sorry if anyone is offended, but I just want to get out how I feel.

I can't talk to most other autistic people. I've literally never met someone like me who's autistic but still pretty fun and chill. The other people with autism that I have met blurt out offensive comments constantly, are obnoxiously loud and unfunny and just honestly, cringey. I know that not all of us are like this but i am yet to meet anyone local who isn't.

Then there's trying to talk to NTs which we all know is just a minefield. I can get by talking to them if I heavily mask the whole time, but there's no way I can hold it up long enough for a friendship.

I feel like I'm destined to be lonely because I'm stuck somewhere in the middle of these two groups and not close enough to either in my way of thinking to fit in. I don't know. I feel like I've explained myself really badly here, but maybe somebody will relate.

The one where you say offensive things without knowing it and everyone ends up hating you and you don’t know why until you look back years later and you’re consumed by guilt but reaching out feels weird and forced and how would you even explain yourself? “My autism made me say that truly f*cked up thing without realizing how it would hurt people until now?” That would sound like you’re using your autism as a cover. And you wouldn’t want that. But at the same time, would you have said it if you fully understood social cues? No never.

The one where a simple gesture or lack of enthusiasm or slight change of tone in voice can give people the feeling you’re standoffish, rude, interested, angry at them. And you don’t even know you’re doing it. Sometimes you realize years later and there’s no way to salvage the friendship. Years later you realize you didn’t mean to seem self interested, that relating to someone and talking about your own experiences is “focusing on you.” Or that not making eye contact shows people you’re bored with them. That sounding irritable from being overloaded makes people think you’re a grumpy person. And most of the time you can’t fix it until the conversation has past.

Can we have a conversation about how it feels to be autistic and see these things happen? How it feels to know someone it happened to?

Willing to verify my identity as well as my brother’s to the mods. This has been so insane, especially as I myself am part of a police reform organization and have been a civil rights and mental health activist for years. It’s like I have to process this on three separate levels - the murder of my brother, the larger grief violence against autistic folk AS one of them, and then the police brutality side which I have stood in the face of cops and protested many times. I am so overwhelmed I can’t even sort through all the separate feelings and thoughts.

My friends have been comforting but the conversations are missing the elements of what it feels like to BE autistic and going through this…and to KNOW my brother was killed directly as a result of his autism. I have more information than the public on what happened and I can’t talk about the details but can say with conviction this was a completely senseless and avoidable situation.

There’s just so much. I need to talk in a space where hard conversations are allowed. I can’t do that with family yet. I don’t even know where to start.

Cos it sure feels like it to me.

Having mild Aspergers (mild even within the range of Aspergers) seems to put you in a kind of social no man's land. You're "normal" enough so that you appear like everyone else on the surface but "autistic enough" so prevent really being able to integrate socially. "Normal enough" to understand what is expected of you, but "autistic enough" to never be able to reach that standard.

Most people you meet will treat you very slightly differently, in ways that seem innocuous but which over time add up to massively change the direction of your life for the worse. You'll be ignored, mocked, overruled and rejected for things without any obvious explanation. You'll seem to have a very limited ability to make friends or have control over your social life. Sometimes it can be so subtle that you wonder if you're imagining it or if the same thing happens to everyone else. (These examples are from my life as you may have guessed.)

You would think that being "mildly autistic" would mean that the impact on your life is mild, especially compared to more obvious forms of Aspergers. But in my experience nothing could be further from the truth. It seems that being in just the right range of Aspergers will condemn you to a life of misery, loneliness, depression, confusion and frustration that would be avoided if you were not autistic at all OR more obviously autistic.

I could be wrong about this of course. Maybe I'm attributing to Aspergers other stuff that is treatable, like depression. Maybe the social skills I require can be learned and I just need to try harder. But right now I feel like I'm fighting a losing battle with my own brain. I'm 28, turning 29 and despite years of masking and trying to figure people out and improve my social skills, it's like Im stuck in this purgatory that I can never escape from. I'm at a particularly low ebb at the moment, hence the depressing rant.

Anyway I just wanted to get that off my chest. Any thoughts are welcome.

Me: walks into a loud and crowded room

Me: oh right

Anyone else feel like they were far more mature than other similarly aged kids growing up. But now as an adult still feel at heart quite childish and giddy. Almost like we matured quicker to a point then just stopped.

"Stop using your lower body paralysis as an excuse, you should be able to climb up these stairs!"

"Stop using your diabetes as an excuse, you should be able to naturally produce insulin!"

"Stop using your blindness as an excuse, you should be able to see what I'm showing you!"

At my high school, there was a group of teen who were the “nice girls and boys with morals and values”. The boys and girls who support BLM and Pride, the boys and girls who participate in the best buddies program for kids with down syndrome, low functioning autism, other visible disabilities, are the known do gooders and are in a female empowerment cult. If someone dare insult someone with VISIBLE autism or any other neurological disability, theyd be the first up their ass with the “YOURE A HORRIBLE PERSON” “THEY CANT HELP THEY HAVE DISABILITIES” “YOURE HEARTLESS, JUST BECAUSE YOU COMMUNICATE DIFFERENTLY THAN THEM DOESNT MEAN THEYRE LESS THAN YOU” “YOURE SUCH AN IGNORANT ASSHOLE”.

But then... there’s the “weird kid” who has high functioning autism or ADHD or mental health issues or take longer time in academics... and the SAME group of people going rah rah acceptance, is the people not letting the social outcasts sit at their lunch table, thinking that people with ASD, ADHD, etc bring the bullying on themselves because they are weird and awkward and always making everyone else “uncomfortable”, are exclusive, give bitch face when an autistic person talks about their unacceptable special interest, call us loser and slow, laughs and agrees when other people say “yo that kid has school shooter vibes”.

WHAT. THE. FUCK. This shit actually makes me so mad!!! The people who are SUPPOSED to be all woke and shit are contributing to the problem of why we get so stereotyped. If this group’s main reputation is to spread awareness and acceptance on oppressed judged and misunderstood groups of people, and they are openly judging people like us, that makes everyone else think it’s okay too. Like do these “educated” individuals actually know that the sweet inncocent non verbal autistic boy from best buddies who always has an aid with him are on the same spectrum as the “annoying obnoxious weird” kid who stims and hums and loves pokemon and is an outcast??? LIKE THE NICE KIDS ARE MEAN TO US!!! AND I HATE IT!!!

CAN ANYONE ELSE RELATE TO THIS OR IS IT JUST ME!!!