Autism

• 2 Feburary, 2025
• Personal

Recently, after a personal situation got resolved, I got to thinking about my experiences being an autistic person. Specifically, my experience with people consistently attributing malice to me when I only meant well. I asked about this on Bluesky, to which I got a lot of autistic folk replying that yes, they experience it, too! And... wow, that's insane. It's both comforting and also really saddening that other autistic people commonly experience the very same thing I hate dealing with: people assuming the worst and making them out to be hurtful on purpose. It's pushed me to write about my own experiences, so that maybe someone out there will read it and feel seen.

Lets start with my history of being autistic. I was diagnosed in 2022, when I was 20. Beforehand, I had a strong feeling I was autistic but I couldn't get a confirmation. I brought it up with my therapist when I was 16, and she told me I was not, so I had left it at that. However, I had a lot of experiences that lined up perfectly with my autistic peers. One of the ones that didn't, however, was how often people would assume the worst of me. Even other autistic folk would do this.

One story takes place many years ago, I believe around 2018. I joined an UNDERTALE AU Discord server, and the server members and I talked about the characters. I joked saying one of the characters, Burgerpants, was an incel. For context, "incel" typically means a man who feels they deserve a woman in their life and feel like the world hates them for little reason. One user came in and told me that I was wrong, that this was insensitive and minimized the real hurt women go through via incels. As a woman, I felt upset, because my intention was not to make fun of the real harm women face every day. I simply wanted to make a joke about a character that I liked. In hindsight, Burgerpants isn't actually an incel, but I felt the statement calling him one was so absurd that it would be seen as goofy. Unfortunately, most users didn't really find it too goofy. The user that took a huge issue with it did eventually apologize to me and admitted it was their fault for reading so deep into it. Hell, later, they admitted they genuinely thought my kindness and my upset at the situation was me trying to be manipulative at first. Ironically, they're also autistic.

Another instance revolved around a few ex-friends of mine, but only two will be talked about here. One was explicitly autistic and the other was a form of neurodivergent. However, this requires a lot of context. Around 2019, I had a "carrd," which was a static website generator that people would use to create things similar to business cards or as a "get to know me" kind of page. Around this time, I was also trying my best to distance myself from ship discourse. It was very popular to partake in it on Twitter at the time, and I wanted to do my best to prevent people from comming to me in my private messages to tell me about the latest "proshipper." For context, "proship" used to mean that you think people are allowed to ship what they want and should not be harassed for it. Nowadays, it's been muddied to the point where people now think it means "problematic ship," which most people jump to mean pedophilic ships. However, people also took "problematic" to include unhealthy dynamics, small age gaps, and more. People would be harassed for shipping rivals together, for example, saying that "you're promoting abuse." As someone who was groomed with lolishota content (content of sexualized fictional minors) but had no problems with ships featuring truely consenting parties, I wanted nothing to do with ship discourse. A huge contention on Twitter at the time was proshippers saying "fiction does not affect reality." There's a lot of nuance to that kind of conversation most people aren't willing to have. Because of the amount of arguments I got myself into, I took action by putting a line on my carrd stating that while I feel fiction has the capacity to influence reality, it doesn't mean we should ban certain types of fiction. I had even put a disclaimer that I was groomed with lolishota content, as a way to prevent people from claiming I was defending pedophiles, which unfortunately was a common thing to accuse people of at the time. When I had a falling out with those two friends, one of them came into my messages to accuse me of defending pedophiles, claiming that I was using my trauma for pity points. It hurt me so deeply to be told that, especially by people who I told my story to about being groomed. Not only that, but I've had countless talks with them prior about how much I hate lolishota content, how much it pains me that people will excuse it under "it's fiction," and "fiction isn't real." I was told I was being manipulative and deceptive. We ended our conversation through me blocking them. Years later, other friends would tell me to just remove that part of my carrd, which I was admittedly a bit stubborn to. I eventually just ditched having a carrd at all and got into making a website.

One situation that I've briefely talked about in another journal was when a hate-circle comprising of my ex-friends was disbanded. One of the members featured someone I had called a friend for a decade, and they secretly were in the hate circle. They'd say horrible things about me. When a friend would explain my side of a situation, this person would say, "Oh, is that what they told you?" and imply I was being dishonest and manipulative. They'd claim I was hiding things, and tell a completely different story that didn't line up. When I was confronted with this story after the hate circle disbanded, I felt hurt by that friend of a decade. They commonly made me out to be malicious, when I had on multiple occasions vented to and around them about how much I wish people were just up front and honest with me. Ironically, this person, too, was autistic.

A lot of situations I end up in occur because of my poor wording. I've adapted to people refusing to be honest and upfront with me by reading deeply into what people say to me, and unfortunately, it hasn't been wrong once. I've been told I was being paranoid, that I was looking too deep into people's words, but when I'd confront them about the issue, my suspicions were nothing but right. A recent situation caused me to think about this pattern, and realize in my experience being autistic, this was incredibly common for me. It's what lead me to make that post on Bluesky, and I'm glad I did. It's made me realize that my experiences aren't isolated, that other people experience this just as much as I do. It's comforting to know I'm not alone, but it's so upsetting to see other autistic people go through the exact same situation. A lot of these issues would be avoided if people just simply asked what one means by what they said, or ask for their intentions. All of it would be prevented if from the get go, people talked. It makes me so sad that these experiences causes many folk like me to adapt to their surroundings by being hyper aware of themselves and how they interact with people. It's no way to live.