I have a friend who I met while living in a different but semi-close city I enjoy spending time with, but I get the sense that they do not appreciate spending time with me as much as I do with them. I simply enjoy their company and appreciate that we can talk about similar things without me worrying about how I am being perceived lol

We were supposed to hangout but they canceled on me last minute. No worries, seems like it was important for them

I was thinking of saying the following: No problem! Maybe we can reconnect the next time I'm in the area, considering I have other folks up there I like to catch up with as well. happy holidays!

Is this an OK reply?

It was stuff about queer people with autism, but I was looking more for people's experience with juggling the autism experience with having an identity that sometimes depends on subtle cues, code switching, social etiquette, etc.

So, are there any reliable resources on exploring queerness while on the spectrum?

Or if you have experiences or insight, that'd be cool too.

This is something I'm only just recently coming to understand has been a lifelong source of interpersonal problems for me, and omfg it seems so fucking omnipresent.

Why does everyone get so mad when I ask why/how about something?!

I learned a few years ago that sometimes people feel judged by my questions (????!?!?), and so I've tried to super, ultra sugarcoat them. I've tried even harder since getting medicated for ADHD, because I have the mental space now to preface my carefully stated questions with assurances that I am only trying to understand, not indict.

It doesn't feel like it's getting me anywhere, and I'm starting to wonder if it's an unreasonable expectation? Is it silly to think that questioning motives or reasoning could ever be non-offensive? It doesn't bother me to explain my motives or reasoning - fuck, it's a fucking relief, please oh fuck let me explain - but I know I'm NotLikeOtherGirls™

This happens most when the person I'm asking has no good answer - it's like my asking "but why?" makes them realize there was no reasoning at all, which wasn't the smartest course, and then feel guilty about not thinking it through.

That is never what I expect to happen - I don't ask why if I think there's no reason. If I'm asking, it's not because I think you're stupid, it's because I think I'm stupid for not catching on. I respect you and your judgement, so if you're doing something that seems confusing to me, I assume there's a good reason that I just don't understand yet, and I really really want to understand!

I'm just hoping to get clued in. I genuinely keep thinking there is some reason for whatever confusing behavior or action. I am just asking so I can get on the same page.

The very act of asking is unfortunately not giving me any answers; it seems to be antagonizing instead. "I don't have a good reason and fuck you for making me admit it!" ???!?

Anybody relate?

What do?

This book is wild. I greatly recommend reading it if you're on the spectrum. A large part of my social life is occupied with finding plausible reasons underpinning peoples' behavior and this book is a rich source of them. My sole critique is that the book hits extremely hard the first few chapters and then the rest of the book is just ceaseless meandering through practices of various historical & contemporary cultures, but yeah - really that means you only need to read the first few chapters to get 90% of the benefit of the book.

I feel like a lot of the scenarios in this book could be put on some kind of final exam for autistic social interaction. Here's a sample: if you save somebody's life, they do not owe you a debt to be repaid as you might first assume; instead, you are responsible for them for the rest of their life. Why is this?

Sometimes you’re just out of your league

So I'm at this "luau" party at my brother's school, which we learned about from an email right? This is for 4-7th graders and the email doesn't say anything about being a drop off event or anything. I'm pulling in like 6:01 and it starts at 6, and there's a parade of cars leaving so I think oh shit I have the time wrong right? So I get there and pull up to the door to drop my brother off, he asks me, surprised, if I was just dropping him off, and I said "no I'm going to park and be right in". When I get inside there are kids sitting at a white folding table taking everyone's admission money and handing out leis, and a line of some 20 kids in floral shirts, no adults in sight. I pay and we go in, and I get like 5 sideways glances, one kid who is ostensibly DJing asks me who I am and what I'm doing there, and at the same time the school's art teacher walks up and asks me the same. Clearly I've triggered some alarm bells here or something. I shake his hand and explain that I'm (brother's name)'s brother and that I recognize him from the remote lessons he made during COVID lockdowns. He asks again what I'm doing there and "are you just going to hang out here or..?", and I said, confused, "I'm just here with my brother, where are all the big people? Ha ha"
"Oh looking away, jaw muscles flexing this was set up as more of a drop off pick up thing"
"Oh okay, uh I guess I'll go wait on the car, do you want my lei then?"
"You can just leave it on the table"

So I let my brother know I would be waiting in the car. Look like a dumbass in my floral print shirt and sunglasses and sandals walking back out.

Somehow everyone else picked up on some social cue that I didn't, that it wasn't a family thing. It's like 8-13 year olds and I'm looking over the email and don't see anything suggesting it wasn't a family thing. I would get it if it was a highschool thing. It's 45 minutes drive here and 30 to town so I don't know what I was supposed to do in the interim anyway. I know others probably live closer but where is everyone else going? Sitting here watching a procession of cars drop their kids off with some money and pull away. Not one parent even walking their kids into the building. There have been at least twenty previous events here where everyone did stick around so what's different??

Am I just that fucking out of touch or what? At least fifty other parents/guardians etc somehow realized that it wasn't just unexpected but questionable that someone would go in with their kid/sibling or whatever.

I don't know what that shows about me. I had an ASD diagnosis when I was around 8 but most of the glaring symptoms have gone away. I still get a little hyperfocused on certain things but it isn't physically painful to touch play dough or grass or have my socks not perfectly straight and pulled up, or have sticky hands like it used to be, in fact it doesn't bother me one bit anymore (except that having sticky hands is gross, but not in the way where it's panic inducing). I'm not saying it "went away" or anything, but I certainly wouldn't catch a diagnosis now I don't think, in fact I think I'm generally more insightful about what people are thinking and feeling than most people are, but then something like this happens and I don't know, what's my deficiency that I apparently missed something which was clear as day to at least 50 other people? I don't know. I thought I was going to be sitting at a cafeteria table with 20 parents and guardians right now drinking disgusting punch out of a plastic cup. I'm looking at the email now trying to figure this out but I'm completely lost and apparently look like a creep or something. Our mother didn't get it either, she was planning to come too but couldn't.

I'm in my mid thirties and only now am I coming to terms with my neurodivergence. I'm one of the lucky people to have access to health care and the time to educate myself on the topics of neurodiversity and mental health.

And with all of that, I have only recently started to take notice of how my childhood experience affected my perception of people and how the world works.

I won't go into intense details for several reasons, but long-story short - my parents were deeply unwell and in forcing me to hide and overlook their mental health, I currently have to spend time trying to sort out what I now find acceptable, healthy, and loving.

Being on the spectrum and lacking the resources to navigate an allistic world was hard enough. I had to make an approximation of normal without having consistent practice with it.

I feel sad that I'm in my thirties and still seek out the approval of people I don't know. Especially when those people exist in spaces where it's not safe for them to know me, like online, or at bigoted in-person spaces.

I don't feel like I got a chance to make human mistakes and now that I'm on my own for the first time in my life, I lack the tools and connections to safely unlearn unhealthy behaviors and learn new healthy behaviors.

I know I'm not the only one, and I'm glad that this comm is around to meet and troubleshoot solutions.

Sometimes I feel like I don't understand a joke in a post and I'm afraid to lose the game of chicken, becoming the first person to ask if a person was serious.

Sometimes I'll check my comments for up votes to make sure I'm not being cruel to someone without knowing.

I was convinced I was cruel and carrying that belief has made me so vulnerable to manipulation. I've had to create a mask that convinces people that I'm in on the joke. That I know better and any mistake I make could conceivably be intentional. I can't feel vulnerable and I look at people as a collection of warnings and threats instead of human beings who might treat me like I'm human too. I have an exit plan on the off chance somebody sees through my mask, because that was the most dangerous thing in my childhood.

Already feeling out of touch with my body, I had to exist outside of myself to make sure that I didn't present any image that reflected poorly on my parents. Precious bandwidth dedicated to something I don't really even care about. My family was shitty and they should feel shitty, but I have my attention focused outward on how others see me. Because that's what they policed. I didn't get to pay attention to my inner world, the outer world, or the real ways the two interacted.

My heart goes out to any kid that's experienced trauma, but this is the way I experienced it - as part of a community underserved by an allistic society that prioritizes the aesthetics of a nuclear family.

But knowing all this, I can feel some comfort in the fact that I found a community here where I can share my experiences and contribute to a world that values and people like me.

Like, damn. I just realized all the ways it manifests itself in my life

-friends

-relationships

-food choices

-behavior choices

-media choices

All the fucking choices

I want a brain transplant

I don't mean to but I lost one of my best friends partially this way :(

It's hard to control sometimes

If I ever find someone who cares about communism/Unix/Plan 9/computer architecture (I see all these as deeply interconnected) as much as I do our power will be unstoppable

Edit: Thanks everyone for your replies and for sharing your experiences, it means a lot to me. I want to reply to everyone I just don't know what to say lol

Dont be a weird “pick-me” that dunks on neurodivergent people because you specifically can just eat whatever.

This doesn’t mean “I’m scared of vegetables” by the way, vegetables are fine, I just can’t have sensory-weird shit in general. Straight vegetables are easy, honestly.

That is all

I'm pretty new to the leftist online space and only recently discovered that I probably have asd but have known for a while that I have ADHD. You ever feel like your interest in communism is fleeting and/or a temporary hyperfixation? I know I do this alot where for a few months I'll find a topic and it's all I'll talk about or think about and then eventually it drops out of my consciousness permanently and I don't think about it ever again.

I don't want that to happen with communism or politics in general. I feel I have a moral reason to stick with this one but I fear it is out of my hands. Do you guys struggle with this too? I feel it would be easier to stick with it if I made it materially part of my life through volunteer action or party organization but there isn't much volunteer work where I live and there isn't a party presence either. How do y'all navigate this?

First off I want to say that I'm glad I'm autistic. 20-30 years of struggle & humiliation before developing decent enough social skills, but in return I get to be very good at computer. I would choose this again.

I want to write about a lesson I think I've learned about myself which might apply to you too, and I'm interested in what you think about it. It has to do with intentions and how we feel when we say something that makes someone else feel bad. This happened quite often growing up. I would say something insensitive, a person would get mad at me, and my immediate reaction was that I was blameless because I had good intentions but (due to the autism) it didn't come out right.

The hardest lesson I've had to learn is that this story isn't true. It's just 100% false. It relies on an incorrect belief that we possess full self-knowledge and don't need to learn about ourselves. You do need to learn about yourself. Your self is somebody who will become more known to you as you age and see how you react to different experiences. You will realize how mercurial & weird you can be. And you will realize you are not inherently, axiomatically, a good person with good intentions.

Autistic people are even worse at knowing what's going on inside themselves than others. The reality is you didn't necessarily have good intentions, and your rush to forgive yourself was to miss a moment of possible personal growth. Because you are fully capable of, intentionally, being an asshole.

Look, I know I already made a post about this here and it seems like I fixed it, but I kind of didn't. Someone on that post commented that I should just read with one eye closed and that should fix it, but I failed to mention that it just doesn't make sense... Mentally.

I'll read a sentence and it just won't make any sense to me. I can recall a time where this happened and it was a sentence along the lines of "She was taking out the trash." Or something like that, and I remember it just didn't make sense. I know I already said I don't think this is Dyslexia in the last post but I'm kind of starting to think it is.

I do this thing with numbers where say it'll be a number like 76 and I'll think it says 67. I'll read it as 67 and think of it as 67. This happens a lot and actually fucks up my math grade sometimes If I don't catch myself. I also have trouble pronouncing names or words as well which I believe is a trait of dyslexia.

I also do the following frequently:

Difficulty summarizing a story. Difficulty doing math word problems (hence, reversing numbers and thinking sentences don't make sense.)

I'm going off of a Mayo Clinic "Symptoms of Dyslexia" website in teens sooo.

But I'm not a doctor and I'm kind of iffy on self-diagnosing 'cause it's like.. Taboo I guess? Again I'm not even entirely sure it's Dyslexia.

Fellow Hexbearians,

I was thinking about how embarrassing it is to ask questions about things that seem obvious, so why not make a thread here? We can pool our understanding and clear up any misconceptions we picked up living in a world not built for neurodiverse people.

Ask questions about things you don't understand that might seem obvious. If there are things you do understand in someone else's question, please do so and help clear it up.

I ask that we ask and answer questions sincerely. This is a discussion about confusion and trying to understand. I think it would feel safer if we don't think we're being mocked or trolled.

I'll put a comment in the thread to get things rolling.

I know, two posts in one community in the span of 24 hours is a lot, perhaps irritating but I have a lot of problems.

You may not have seen my last post, but I have severe OCD and Depression.

I have trouble not touching people. Whether it's messing around with my brothers or just being touchy. I've had two people in the span of two days tell me to stop touching them and it's increasingly awkward and embarrassing. Ironically I myself hate being touched by anything or anyone and have haphephobia.

I need to stop fucking touching people. Does anybody else do this or know any ways to prevent it?

Again, I'm really sorry for posting twice in one day, it's rather odd.

Been trying to unmask for half a year+ now and it's difficult, numbingly depressing, and extremely damaging to my reputation (in places that do matter, not just pointless social status standing)

The end of the tunnel leads to a beautiful forest full of life and light though right?

This happens sporadically. I have severe OCD and Depression, and I'm uncertain if it has anything to do with my mental illness. I've suspected I have Dyslexia for a long time, perhaps since I was eleven years old.

I'll read a sentence, and it just won't fucking make sense. At all. I'm not sure as to why, I'll keep re-reading it but it just won't make sense whatsoever. This happens a lot when I'm reading or studying. It'll be an immensely simple sentence, but it just won't make sense, sometimes I'll stop what I'm doing because it gets so goddamn frustrating.

This happens with numbers as well. I'll look at a number say, 76. And I genuinely think it says 67. I don't know what this is. If anybody sympathizes, I'd love to discuss it.

Rumor says it went viral on TikTok, now some of the neurodivergent YouTubers I follow are mentioning it, so I thought I'd try it out. I expected a high score but not quite that high.

My review of the test is the same as every other I've seen: hot damn, these questions are significantly more relatable and easily understood than any of the other tests' questions.

Get your score here.

Hey, so I'm trying to work on organizing my life and to do so, I'm looking for specific apps. Preferably free. I'll include helpful apps that have worked for me in the past. If you have any suggested programs/apps that have helped you, I'd appreciate knowing about those too.

Apps I'm already using to great effect:

• Obsidian: A great note taking app that's faster than Google Docs and isn't run by Google. You can pay $10 monthly to have sync between several different devices, but it's not necessary if you're just trying to make quick checklists or journal entries.

• Spreeder: You can copy/paste any amount of text and have it play back at your desired speed. If scrolling through a doc/PDF/ebook, this can be a nice alternative that breaks down text. I don't lose my place when I read and it's easy to adjust. Sucks that premium costs though.

• NewPipe: Just a good YouTube alt that lets you play videos in the background free.

(I'll add more as I think on them)

So far, I'm looking for:

• Calendar: A calendar program that lets me go to specific dates in the past to mark events. Ideally, I'd like to go back to a date in 2010, see what day of the week it is, mark it, and then update events as I find more bits of my personal history. Even better if I can then zoom out and see by month or year the events that happened in a given period of time.

• Voice-to-Text: Any inexpensive program that could reliably transcribe what I'm saying into readable text. I think there are paid programs, but if there are good programs out there that are easy to edit/revise by hand or just navigate in general, awesome.

• Anything Budgeting: I'm really bad with money sometimes want to keep better track of my finances without paying a subscription or putting my banking info at risk.

• Self-Care: Is there something you use to implement self-care into your daily schedule to avoid burnout? I tried the free trial of Calm and was very much not calm when they overdrafted my account without warning.

Anyway, that's really about all I'm looking for now, but as I said, if you have anything you use for free/cheap to help organize your life, I'd love to know about it

And maybe we could make a pinned post later with what we put together?

My boss's girlfriend just came up to me and gave me a heads up that my boss would throw a strop about some bags of clothes being left in reception to be picked up tomorrow, with the classic gem of "you can see how it looks untidy, can't you?"

No, I can't. I walk in and I see an office block that's a hub of activity and facilitates it's tenants. A place for meetings where staff are happy to help with requests, or an office where you don't have to fight with the landlords (because that's ultimately what we are) to get small concessions. A place that cares more about improving the community (which as a social enterprise is our purpose) than minor appearances. I'd probably think it was untidy if it was in the way for days on end, but the bags are gonna be back against the wall, behind the reception desk, for less than 12 hours.

What is it with people valuing things being out of sight? There's a pragmatic element to general neatness, making it easier to clean, getting hazards out of the way, and looking nicer, but I don't understand people throwing a fit because things are temporary less neat.

Anyway I moved the bags all of 5 metres into a meeting room next to reception. See if he whines about them making a mess of a room that isn't being used until the middle of next week.

so this whole thing is ridiculous obviously, but there a part about it that I think needs more focus

This is quite literally a fascist ethnostate using neurodivergence as a cudgel to enact suppression of speech. Just like other historical examples, right-wing forces will use able-ism to their advantage whenever it suits their needs.

I thought it was worth highlighting how this plushie is a tool for ND folks, and Israel's govt is happy to make that into a dog whistle regardless of how much that ultimately harms ND folks in various ways if it can make a prominent critic look bad.

Like even within long term waiting there are huge differences with what I do depending on exactly how much time I have.

Basically being left out of the group but for life 😀