Greenstorm's Journal

7. What are your sensory differences or challenges? What hypersensitivities and hyposensitivities do you have?

Vision:

It requires deliberate focus to "turn on" my eyes, if I'm thinking, listening to something, or otherwise distracted I'm not aware of visual input.

I have no "visual memory" so I can't look at a colour or shape and then a different colour or shape and tell you if they were the same. If I take a moment to abstractly describe the visual information ("teal blue" or "a square") I can compare that, though.

I'm very poor at recognising faces, and often can't follow movies because the actors look too similar.

Certain colours and intensities of light feel appropriate at certain times, and not at others. I've arranged the rooms in my house to have a very bright, daylight option and a dim, yellow option. Sometimes light is far too bright, or dim areas are difficult to think in, so I alter my environment as required. I find it hard to process visual information in spaces that are too dim, even if I can technically see alright.

Being in a dark room helps me relax

There are a specific few shades of colour that make me physically nauseous.

Scent:

I'm hypersensitive to scent.

Certain scents, or too many scents of certain categories (especially toiletries and other personal scents like laundry products, perfumes, and "room scent" devices) can cause intense pain, nausea, and overwhelm.

Taking transit late in the evening especially, I'll often have to get off the bus or train car and take fifteen or twenty minutes outside so I don't throw up. In this case the scent is probably compounded by the noise of vehicles and people, though I'm not sure.

I understand my environment significantly by scent; I ID many plants by scent including trees like cottonwoods, just by walking under them; I quickly learn to associate certain body scents with certain emotions in my partners; I can often tell the weather by a little bit of scent coming in through a cracked window; I know when it's time to flip or stir food from across the room in part by a change in scent. I used to always ask "what's that smell" but I have learned that often other people can't detect the scents I'm picking up on.

Sound:

I have trouble processing speech. Not only am I less likely to understand speech when there's background noise, but I also process speech more slowly than I do text.

Continuous exposure to noise often feels painful to me. Right now I am sitting in an office with central heating/cooling, and the sound of the air coming into the room through a duct is sitting at a 3 or 4 on the pain scale. I am in the office twice a week and have this reaction roughly once a week. In my home I use wood heat and baseboards, so this sort of low continuous noise from heating doesn't impact me. If the noise is more varied, such as the sound of a crowd when we're all outside, it often has less effect on me.

Sound and scent often combine to overwhelm me or cause me extra discomfort: in an unscented environment I can handle more noise; in a quiet environment the scent may bother me a little less.

Sometimes repetitive sounds are very soothing to me; I'll sometimes leave a song on repeat for a couple weeks and I quite enjoy that. I also like certain background noises, like the sound of my geese honking to each other. I distinguish here between repetitive and continuous.

I have some level of synesthesia, where certain sounds map as sensation in certain muscles or parts of my body.

Touch:

I am very, very sensitive to touch.

My skin is often disablingly reactive to stimulus. When I was younger it didn't occur to me that "the princess and the pea" was allegory; it is my daily experience. If a bit of sand or a crumb gets into my bed I get extremely uncomfortable and can't sleep. Certain clothing textures (too smooth; too cool; too compressive) or compression on any area of my body, often including waistbands or sock ankles, causes burning wriggling awful feelings.

From the time I was 3 at least I've had an aversion to wearing clothing because of my textural and compression issues. It's only as a significantly older adult, in my thirties, that I've found styles and fabrics that can recede into the background of my awareness such that I won't take them off at the earliest opportunity.

I enjoy a variety of textures, both in one meal and in general across cultural norms. I especially appreciate crunchy, slippery, slimy, gummy, and chewy textures and will seek them out. There are a couple textures I can't handle and will gag if forced to eat something that contains that texture (processed deli ham is one of the few). I find textures very stimmy, engaging, and relaxing.

I experience even everyday cold, either touching cold objects or being surrounded by cooler air, as pain.

Sometimes very light touches also feel very unpleasant. Deep touch, or very firm deep massage, is often enjoyable.

The foam from toothpaste in my mouth, even far forward in my mouth, is extremely aversive and I use significantly less than the suggested amount of toothpaste to avoid it. When I have had too much other sensory stimuli recently it will cause me to throw up, so I use other solutions for toothbrushing at those times.

Taste:

I'm definitely extra sensitive to taste.

Taste is a tremendous playground for me, and a channel for information. I train my palate and often try to deconstruct flavours to their individual components; this overlaps with my food and plant hobbies. I seek out unusual flavours (and tastes) and will subject myself repeatedly to tastes I don't enjoy because they're interesting. I will often notice subtle variations in flavour, and I use taste as a tool to understand the world (how alkaline something is; how ripe a seed is)

Taste can also be overwheming for me; I use children's toothpaste and avoid other "sharp" flavours outside of voluntary, controlled situations (so I may enjoy menthol in a pepperment candy in the right mood, but I can't handle it every evening when I brush my teeth).

Proprioception:

I consider myself to have an underdeveloped sense of proprioception.

I can't gauge force from my body well. I often pull too softly on doors or lids or other parts of my interactive environment, because I'm leaving a significant buffer so I don't break them.

I don't have a good sense of where my body is in space. I prefer to be touching a wall, a tree, or some other stable object around me as a reference point to be sure of where I am: whether I'm properly upright, whether I'm swaying on my feet or not. If I am standing and I close my eyes for a minute without having a hand on the wall and without having spent focus on placing myself in space, I am somewhat likely to stumble. On the other hand I really enjoy careful, deliberate placement of my body in space so I can study it, as in slower yoga.

The times my body feels least unpleasant are when my muscles have just been well-exercised (but not over-exercised) and have a pleasant ache so I can feel my entire body as present.

Pain:

I believe I respond differently to different kinds of pain than most people do: cold reads as pain to me, but a burn or a bruise can often feel like information rather than a real negative sensation. This plays out especially strongly in my BDSM interactions, where I enjoy experimenting with various traditionally-painful sensations as interesting information.

On the other hand, pain like continuous noise or cold, which other people don't seem to experience, I react very strongly to.

5. What is your experience with routine? How do you feel about changes and transitions? How do you react if someone alters your routine unexpectedly? Do you ask many questions if it is one of your interests? Do you regularly eat the same food or wear the same clothes?

I have tremendous emotional trouble with changes if I don’t know they are coming. Being able to anticipate them soothes this a great deal. This applies to both big changes like moves or relationship shifts and small changes like cancelling a visit or being given something different-than-expected to eat. I used to think my partners were neglectful or abusive because of the huge volume of pain and distress I felt when plans were altered, but I've since realized that is my own outsized reaction to changes. When I feel I have some control over the change of a plan, or know exactly how it's changing, I am far less distressed. So changing a plan ("I need to cancel tonight") is really difficult, but knowing why ("I'm not feeling like company and need to cancel tonight") and what happens to that plan after it disappears ("so let's skip this hangout" or "let's reschedule for next week") and especially being given some say in the change ("do you have a preference between rescheduling for this week and just doing it some other time") allows me to regulate (finally, after about 25 years of intensive practice). On the other hand I very much welcome the changes of the seasons, which I know will occur eventually, no one has any control over, but which are predictable and patterned. Note that I will react poorly to a change in planned activities even if the change is better for me-- if I was dreading a social event, but it was cancelled, I'd probably still need a bunch of time to recover from that shift instead of being able to smoothly enjoy the freedom of having that time to myself.

I cannot do a regular routine. When something happens weekly or daily it begins to feel like a demand, and both my mind and body act as though there is a physical force-field pushing me away from doing that thing even if I would like to do it. I have finally learned, after 30-plus years, to brush my teeth regularly if I don't think about it and do it as an auxiliary to the rest of my evening stuff (watering plants, dishwasher, watching youtube) but having written this I will definitely struggle the next couple days since those simultaneous activities "invisibilized" it and this writing makes it visible again. I struggle with the fact that work, classes, or social events happen regularly (as described extensively in the relationships section). However, I do like predictability and pattern, so knowing that I will see a partner on average two days a week, but keeping open which days those are, is extremely soothing to me. So I walk a delicate line between wanting some structure, but not enough structure to trigger demand avoidance or a meltdown if the structure breaks down unexpectedly.

I buy many copies of the same pairs of pants, shirts, socks etc at the same time so they’re all similar and I don’t need to think about buying them again and I know they’ll work for my body, I hate when my favourite cut of jeans is changed and I learned to sew so I don't need to accept changes to my favourite t-shirt pattern. However, I also keep a wide range of potential outfits as an aid to conveying a social persona, so that I can communicate with people who might wish to approach me depending on the situation (a slightly quirky outfit may inoculate people to my atypical social behaviour so they find it charming instead of shocking, where a very typical outfit may allow me to blend into the background). I did go through a period where I was unable to wear the same clothes, and had to sew a new outfit every day, but luckily that was short-lived.

I have learned that when a transition occurs that I was not expecting, instead of melting down I can attempt to engage with curiosity. Asking many questions at this time helps me to stabilize and feel more secure in the change or transition, and it also buys me time to regulate before going on to do the thing that changed. In some ways the whole of my world is a single context, and a change to one part of the context "tears" that part out of context, and I need information and integration time to fit the new information into my whole.

As a small example of how I manage transitions, I have a partner with whom I talk on the phone often. We used to have a great deal of trouble ending the conversations, and I'd feel upset after the transition from talking with him to not-talking with him and be nonfunctional for up to an hour or two. I asked him to give me a heads up five minutes before the call would end, which he now does, and that allows me to anticipate the transition and therefore not to be upset by it. After several years of this, sometimes I can even end the conversation without a heads-up, because I know that if I'm struggling with the idea of ending the call, I can ask for the extra five minutes and he'll give it to me. However, if I were to have an extended conversation with someone else, the end of the call would probably still disregulate me.

Another example of how difficulty with transitions impacts my social life is in relationship visits. I often have a partner visit me for a weekend or a full week, since we mostly are long distance, and it takes me from one to three days to fully process the transition from someone being present to someone being far away once they arrive, and again after they leave. Knowing I'm going to struggle with the transition after they leave, I often have a day or two before they go where I also struggle. These struggles look like loss of executive function, inability to regulate emotions, feelings of distress, anxiety, and emotional pain. They exist regardless of whether I'd like to see the partner more than I currently see them-- it is the transition that I struggle with.

A transition with a choice is always easier on me then one without. I spend so much time and energy managing my reaction to demands that when a surprise demand is given to me it can harm those other coping stretegies and everything falls apart. If instead I am given a choice, I am faced with handling the transition but not so much an externally imposed demand.

I have certain flavours that I like regularly (a specific brand of hot pepper) but am unable to eat the same flavours and textures for more than one meal in a row or even sometimes for more than a couple bites in a row. I manage this by making food with lots of texture and flavour, and can get around it by drinking very bland meal drinks that don't register as having either flavour or texture. Eating an entire bowl of oatmeal without putting crunchy sugar or cool liquid milk in it is out of reach for me, for instance.

It's very difficult for me to transition my focus; if I'm engaged in an activity or thought and need to stop and engage in a different activity or thought I will be slow to do so, my memory won't work well, and I'll want to continue the thing I was doing previously. The exception is if one activity or thought naturally leads into another (thinking about red cedars -> thinking about the ice age, or latin names)

I'm not sure what is meant by "do you ask many questions if it is one of your interests"

- If a change in routine occurs I will ask many questions regardless of one of my interests, as described above
-If someone is going to give me any sort of answers about one of my interests, if it's in any way socially appropriate I will ask as many questions as possible about the shared interest, but that doesn't seem to fit into the general thrust of the rest of this question

Shoot, a bunch of these sub-questions got answered in the previous question.3. What differences in relationships do you experience?

Their examples include: 3a) How well have you managed relationships, particularly friendships, throughout your lifetime (as a child, teen, and currently)? 3b) Initiating conversations 3c) Taking things literally 3d) Conversational timing 3e) Reduced sharing of interests or emotions 3f) Interrupting 3g) Not liking to be touched 3h) Challenges with small talk 3i) Developing and maintaining friends or relationships 3j) Difficulty adjusting behaviour to social contexts 3k) Preferring solitary activity

3a) I think I've managed my relationships pretty well, but it's required a lot of very intensive energy and active management to review all the expected parts of relationships, figure out what's a good fit for me and retain those, jettison the parts that don't fit, and then find people who are a good match for what I want. I don't have many continuous enduring friendships though, they're generally full of long spaces without contact.

My romantic relationships don't look remotely like the relationships people from my culture have, to the point that they are not legally or socially acknowledged in most to many cases. I have multiple partners, I prefer a great deal of autonomy over what I do with my body and living space and finances, I don't tend to engage in standard relationship activities.

I manage any emotionally intimate relationships (close friends or romantic partners) very differently from most dominant culture people. I require clarity, and at this point in my life that means clarity either through verbal agreement or several rounds of repetitive behaviour, on which of the many different aspects of relationship I’ll be engaging in with folks (like, how often do we communicate, what method do we use to communicate, what topics are ok, who initiates and how do we stop initiating, will there be physical contact, will there be sex, what happens in edge cases, what happens when there’s strong emotion, how long-lasting will the connection be). In general I assume that any interaction, even a friendly interaction, is not “part of a friendship” unless a pattern of behaviour or verbal agreement has been established.

Because I'm not able to follow through on periodic or weekly commitments due to demand avoidance, I manage friendships through attending activities or group events where I'm not required to attend on a regular schedule (no demand to attend) and through situations where I'm in contact with people incidentally (volunteering, sometimes work).

As I child I played with the other weird kids. We were all weird together, so there was no one normal way to exist, which made a comfortable environment for me.

As a teen I hung out with the other weird kids. Friends were friends because of proximity, not really because of agreements.

3b) I have a lot of friends who are prone to feeling rejected if they need to initiate conversations. With those friends I’ll deliberately reach out to start conversations. These are folks I’ve known a long time, and I do this as a service to the friendship sometimes. I think sometimes these friendships are an ease to my demand avoidance: if someone considers that I've already rejected them because of their own psychological stuff, there's no demand to keep in contact, so I can keep in contact without that pressure. If someone expects me to initiate conversations regularly I have a lot more trouble.

I'm comfortable initiating conversations with friends if I feel they're interested or not busy, though I'm not great at the typical pleasantries before diving into conversation. One of the tools I use to manage my social relationships is to select friends who are compatible with my conversation style though, so they're not offended by how I initiate.

When I can't carefully select the people I'm relating with, such as at work, I have more trouble initiating conversation because I can't think of any overlapping areas of interest to discuss.

With new contacts I try to keep the number of conversational intitiations symmetrical, so if they start one then I’ll start one a little later. I don’t want to initiate too much or too little and this rule of thumb helps that; it also helps me notice how often they initiate and helps me create expectations around frequency of contact.

3c) I don't take sarcasm literally, but I do struggle with wanting the literal meaning of words to line up with a situation, especially with rules. Currently at work I'm struggling significantly with work hours, where I was told to "show up on time, don't be late, and you can't move your lunch hour or come in early and leave early" but people do that sort of thing all the time. When I asked about it I was told "you can't do it, but you can a little, but not much" and I could tell they were trying hard to unpack and provide the actual literal meaning of the hours for me but they were unable to do so. I would be much more comfortable if they could give me literal descriptions of what's ok, for instance "you can move your lunch hour by up to an hour once every two weeks, and don't be more than a total of twenty minutes late across a two week period" or some other metrics. Instead I want to take their "always be exactly on time" literally and I know I'm not supposed to, but don't know how to extrapolate the true meaning.

3d) I'm not sure what's meant my conversational timing; I prefer overlapping speech patterns where sometimes both people are talking at once. Talking over someone to agree or add nuance in these situations is not meant to indicate they should stop talking and let me talk, but instead is an encouragement for them to keep talking and a signal that I'm interested. I think this is cultural, though, from some of my Jewish background. It's not considered polite in many of my circles though and sometimes I just don't talk because I don't want people to feel like my overlapping style means I'm not interested (quite the opposite!)

In a group of many people I have trouble knowing when to speak up, and often feel like I don't know how to slide my contribution in. I also have trouble processing verbal speech, and so in a group verbal situation I often don't think of something to say until much later, when I'm perusing the extensive notes I need to take in order to both process and remember verbal situations.

3e) I don't understand what is meant by "reduced sharing of interests or emotions". I don't have many interests in common with people, or at least I don't approach my interests in a common way - for instance, I garden, but I garden to experiment with genetic or growing methodologies and not to grow a large pretty cabbage or rose. Sometimes I find people who are equally interested in something similar to an interest of mine and we have a very enjoyable time talking about it. Because I do not have a typical life plan, I do not talk about or have interest in: how much I hate my husband, the kids and their hockey games, my upcoming wedding, my friends' upcoming weddings, how trapped I feel in my marriage, how bad I feel now that my kids are grown up, and drinking. That feels like a significant reduced sharing of interests at my current workplace, though it hasn't in other, more carefully selected workplaces.

People do not care what my emotions are, and they do not approve when they know, so I do not share them widely with people except close friends. I have no way of knowing whether other people share their emotions with me more than they do with other people, because I have no way of figuring out their baseline.

3f) (see conversational timing)

3g) Touching, like eye contact, is a tremendous, deep, and intense source of communication for me. Because it conveys so much information I only like to be touched by people I trust; the incoming volume of information means I can't process much else at the same time so I'm vulnerable to overwhelm and won't act normal, and the person I'm touching will know I react and interact differently than normal people. I struggle deeply with monogamous frameworks that indicate certain kinds of touch are ok and others are not. I operate from a consent-based touch framework, but when I’m trying to communicate or receive something by touch I don’t have the additional bandwidth to assess if it’s an acceptable monogamous type of touch or not or to remember other social rules around it other than what the person there with me wants to or is able to engage in.

3h) I learned small-talk when I worked in offices tending plants. I went into roughly a hundred personal office spaces a day, and at first I’d repeat what the person in the previous office had said to the person in the next office. Over time I learned the patterns of small-talk, what was acceptable and what wasn’t, and learned to see it as a signalling process by which people understood whether the other person was safe and interested in speaking more deeply or not. This was a deliberate skill I picked up, though it’s atrophied through disuse lately, and did not come naturally to me.

3i) Developing and maintaining friendships and relationships is tricky for me, because I'm not a good fit with most people in dominant culture. There are very few people I can befriend in a way where I can sharing my feelings and interests comfortably, with whom I can be mutually honest, and who I'm interested in knowing about their lives. I have developed the excellent tool of unmasking/speaking clearly about my interests, desires in interpersonal relationships, and my interest in other people (if I have interest there); this screens people because folks who are uninterested in me quickly wander away, while folks who are interested stay and know I'm interested because I have explicitly said so. So I might say "let's go home and take our clothes off" or "let's go home and snuggle" to someone when I am hanging out with someone and realize I'd like to share touch with them. This is clear, unambiguous, and I used to think it left more space for consent than just trying to hint about going somewhere more comfortable and then tugging around the edge of their shirt or something when we get there. The internet, and internet dating sites, are exceptionally good for clear communication about what I'd like in any kind of relationship, and they allow people who like my candour to opt in.

I really struggle with maintaining friendships. In a lot of ways it seems like I re-initiate friendships with the same people, with breaks in between, rather than "maintianing" them per se. When I'm speaking with someone regularly, their expectation that I'll continue to speak with them becomes a demand, and it becomes more and more difficult and uncomfortable to reach out. I mentioned some strategies above (being friends with people who don't believe I'll continue to be their friend) but as my friends do personal work and develop self-confidence that solution fails, as I still really like those people and want to be close with them but the sense of demand returns.

Maintaining internet friendships, with the ability for asynchronous communication, really helps reduce demands. So does a spontaneous in-person model where certain activities (say, dinner) can be but do not have to be shared on any given day.

Another workaround is to interact with people intensely for a period of time (a couple weeks to several months or even a year) and then have a long period of downtime without much contact, and then to have another period of intensity. I’ve structured my relationship style, solo polyamory, to accommodate this and most of my longstanding friends accept this style of relating from me.

3j) I do not like adjusting my behaviour to social contexts. It feels awkward, deceitful, and invisibilizing. I do it because I have to, and as little as possible.


3k) I like having conversations, as an activity and in alignment with my special interest of learning about people. My other activities are almost entirely solo. I would not enjoy my biggest activity, gardening, with someone else in a collaborative way. I do like showing people the results of my activities, so if someone comes to the farm I’ll take them on chores and show them around, but that’s not the same as collaboratively engaging in the process of making or doing things. I guess generally I don’t mind the role of instructor or learner, but true collaboration is rare and difficult for me for activities? I have one partner with whom I've worked hard to develop activity partnerships and we can now enjoy things like building a shed or cutting down mushroom logs together, but it took maybe four years of friction and active work to get to the point of being comfortable.

It's also tremendously difficult for me to do activities with someone else because of the way my demand avoidance functions. I can do activities solo because I can tell myself I'm getting up to do one thing and actually do something completely different, so I'll get up from the couch to plant bulbs but will actually rototill the garden instead. Doing an activity with another person precludes this; there's so much pressure from planning to do something in advance, then getting together to do it, that I can't actually do the thing at all in the moment. So even if I know people who share interests and we can get aligned on how something would work, someone else's presence almost entirely prevents me doing my activities.

I've found some work-arounds for this: when people come to visit I create a "menu" of activities or projects and we can choose spontaneously from them in the moment, then I can either "teach them how to do it" or "learn how they do it" instead of "doing the thing together" and that seems to help my demand avoidance, because I'm not actually doing the activity. But I still spend a lot more time than I'd like sitting with someone, maybe wanting to experiment with doing an activity with them, but unable to do so even if they suggest it.

I do like spending a lot of time alone or especially in parallel play with trusted people.

First attempt at question 1 of the autism screening, I don't think I did what they wanted cause there's not much specificity, it's all abstract, but I got something out. PDA is kicking up anyhow.

What they want in the answer
*3-4 memories or examples
*list which parts are relevant
*in the context of my culture, is the example behaviour different as compared to predominant neurotypes
*is the behaviour present across multiple contexts

1) What differences in social interactions do I experience?
Some examples they give: 1a) Do I prefer to interact in social situations with a purpose or a goal vs unstructured activities? 1b) Am I quiet and passive in conversations? Do I dominate conversations and feel a need to share at length? 1c) Do I share belongings, time, and space in relationships? 1d) Can I infer what another person expects in conversation? 1e) Can I assess the other person's motives with whom I am communicating? 1f) In my community, do I know the unspoken rules to follow in various settings such as work, school, home, social, church, etc?

1a) Structured social situations are tricky for me. Like nearly all answers to this, my answer is yes and no.

I don't like structured social situations as a general rule. I cannot tolerate competitive situations such as games, even “casual” card or physical games. I feel terrible if I lose or seem like I’m going to lose, and I’m smug and weird and feel a lot of uncomfortable body sensations if I win. This occurs even if no one is paying attention to who’s winning. Obviously this is very unusual in our hypercompetitive society where people will take sides and use competitive language over nearly anything.

On the other hand some structure can be useful to me. I enjoy taking on a role in social situations, usually I sit in the kitchen at parties and help people get tasty snacks or the drink they’re looking for. When my friends play board games I’ll cook and bring food out and top up drinks. Because I’m viewed as female this both makes me “good at” my gender role and gives me a role that doesn’t involve the competition of a game. It also lets me observe before socializing. I don't often have a lot of consistent company in these roles, so I'll say that's unusual and that most people in dominant society like a more active or foregrounded role.

In a social situation with new people, or people I haven’t socialized with extensively, I will always sit back and very quietly watch how people interact. In this way I learn what’s appropriate in a situation. At work I make plans to go out with another person in my position several times and watch them interacting with the public before I feel like it’s even possible (let alone comfortable) for me to interact with the public in that same role. Structured activity that I can tolerate is useful for providing something for everyone to do while I'm watching, so they don't notice or worry about my lack of interaction at the start. I know this is unusual, since people always remark on how quiet I am in the beginning. I get lots of surprised "wow, you seemed so quiet and now you're so fun" when I start engaging after having observed the rules for awhile.

1b) So following from the above, I'm quiet and passive in unknown or new situations. Once I know the rules of a situation, either through observation or familiarity with similar types of situations, and if and when I feel comfortable with the people involved, I can be pretty gregarious. I don't know whether I dominate conversations at that point or not; I think it depends on the person I'm talking to and their conversational style. I really enjoy overlapping conversational styles but try to dial it back when a conversational partner doesn't do well with interjections. I honestly don't know how this compares with dominant society, I get the sense they also tend to ramp up as they get to know people? But clearly not in the same way that I do, since people seem surprised by the transition.

1c) I prefer having my own home in relationships, and visiting with (multiple) partners in one of our homes, rather than navigating shared space. I like sharing time with people, especially engaging in parallel play, but I'm not often comfortable sharing important objects since my level of care for them is often either much higher or much lower than other people's. The physical setting for my ideal relationship would be a single common/shared room with each partner having a private but connected space for their own kitchen, projects, bathroom, bedroom(s) etc. This is obviously different than the standard nuclear single-partner family.

1d) Social interaction and relationships are a special interest of mine. I’ve done a lot of directed study to understand what people want from interpersonal interactions. I’ve learned to try and assess whether people want validation or whether they want a solution when they share something; I’ve learned that some people just want to talk something through and aren’t looking for input. These are hard-won lessons. When I'm in burnout, or low-energy, I am less able to tell what people want from an interaction. I have extreme difficulty figuring out what a masking autistic adult wants from an interaction. People are not good at knowing what I want from an interaction, autistic or neurotypical, so I'm not sure I consider being inaccurate in this to be atypical.

That said, I don't understand how people in any context fluidly discuss situations where they don't agree, or how people check to be sure they're using the same basic assumptions when they're discussing a topic. My base assumption in a conversation is that my facts and assumptions will not be the same as the other people involved at least some of the time, and so I'll often point out these (often implied) differences as the conversation goes on, in order to either accept them as assumptions or to get in alignment. I'm often viewed as confrontational, disagreeable, aggressive, or defensive when I'm trying to get in alignment and it takes a tremendous amount of extra words, leaving out things that seem important, and emotional reassurance when I'm not talking with someone who already agrees with everything I am saying. I really enjoy when I have differences of opinion with people, I think it's really neat to delve into those differences, to understand the how and why of someone else's thought as compared to mine, but if that's something dominant society every does with each other I have not yet learned how to do it fluently or well. This often makes me feel isolated and shut down, since I have to pretend to think like other people in order to not offend them. I know my tone in particular contributes to this, but I think it's more all-encompassing than that. (I had this written down as "difficulty adjusting for social/emotional receipt of information).

I did a lot of reading on things like nonviolent communication when I was young, trying to figure this stuff out, but even clear statements of fact limited to myself ("I don't believe in God" "I don't understand how they come up with that answer") don't seem to work well so I've more or less given up on that lately, especially in recent burnout.

1e) I generally think I can assess people’s motivations, and I can predict behaviour ok, but my assessments don’t line up with what other people say their motivations are. When I tell people what I think their motivations are, they’re often surprised but think I’m right. So I don't assess people's motivations to be the same as they or a neurotypical society might assess their motivations to be (I couldn't tell you what someone thinks their motivations are). So while I'm not aligned with dominant society on this one I think I'm pretty good at it. Lately I've been burnt out, and just haven't cared enough to direct energy into it, but I always try to hold to the precautionary principle: assume that people are, at least consciously, acting from best intentions and probably just misstepping or having a bad day if they impact me negatively. Most people are not thinking about other people as having a true full internal life, so they don't make decisions on that basis.

1f) Do I know the unspoken rules to follow? Not without study. As mentioned, I observe awhile before I interact and that helps me pick up rules. In many workplaces I've been able to ask for clarification of rules and receive them. I have been having extended difficulty picking up on the unspoken rules at my current workplace because I can't get people to explicate them ("don't flex your hours, it's against the rules. But you can flex them sometimes, just not too much. But you really shouldn't" (spoken) but "don't talk about flexing your hours, and people shouldn't know, but it's ok to hint at it sometimes, but don't talk about it to certain people, and don't really say you do, and don't count on it, and don't do it in a patterned way" (unspoken). In places with a set of explicit spoken rules that contradicts a set of unspoken rules I often feel guilty, I can't settle into my context and interact comfortably, and my moral sense feels abraded so I avoid those kinds of places when I can. I like social situations such as kink events where rules are made explicit, though I need the underlying reasoning behind the rules in order to respect them.

In general rules without good reasons feel like a demand I tend to push back against.

Because I need to intellectually understand the rules of a particular social situation before I can comfortably engage in it, initiating conversations without the correct script for the situation is particularly challenging for me. When someone is already interacting with me I can pick up their expectations on the fly, but approaching someone to initiate a conversation is the time when I have the least information about how the interaction is supposed to flow, so it's the hardest.

There are some very general rules of engagement I work to maintain. At work or during presentations or during important relationship talks I'll make up a short, point-form agenda to keep me on track and will take notes so I can remember what we spoke of (I tend to lose memory in intense or emotional situations). So this is some self-support I've created to maintain the one conversation/one topic unspoken rule.

1g) Finally I have to mention what I believe to be my PDA response. When there is an expectation or pressure of some kind (demand) placed on me to do something, I have a strong internal counter-response which often prevents me from doing that thing, even if it something I would like to do. That can be something as simple as "we agreed to go for a walk, let's go now" which then causes a physical and mental wall to go up against doing that thing. I have many work-arounds; in the case of the walk I might reduce the pressure by saying "Actually, I need to go to the bathroom" and so I'm not actually doing the thing required, but then the bathroom is in the hallway by the shoes so when I come out I can put on my shoes, go outside, and therefore have kind of snuck past my own mind to do the thing without the impossible "having to do something, thinking about having to do it, then doing it" sequence. This especially strongly influences my ability to do very structured activities or to obey any seemingly arbitrary rules. Unspoken rules are especially hard for my demand avoidance, since there is a demand to figure the rule out, a demand to obey it, and a demand to not talk about it all at once -- triply difficult compared to a simple rule that I understand is in place because it has a desirable consequence or outcome. Taking a role is easier, I have guidelines to follow to present my role but I can self-direct within those guidelines, which doesn't trigger my resistance.

I feel the requirement to agree or to fit into a homogenous group to be a demand which I cannot accept easily. Neurotypical or autistic, people seem to like to be with a group of other people who give the illusion of being the same as them, who only present their similar faces, and within such a group I feel trapped, invisible, constrained, and simultaneously like an impostor and angry at the group for eliding the rest of themselves in order to project homogeneity. As such, I do best in explicitly heterogenous groups (so I'll do well in a group that welcomes ldbtq+ people to include a wide range of perspectives and experiences, but not one only for women and nonbinary people, for example).

My demand avoidance is a tremendous tool in my own personal growth, where my own motivations and needs can feel like demands. The demand avoidance gives me energy to look at myself and assess whether I'd like to keep certain thought patterns or whether I will use tools to try and shift them, whether I can find a deeper interpretation of a need and meet it in a different way, etc.

A tremendous amount of my relationship structure comes from avoiding demands; even when someone needs something very reasonable from me like a schedule, when it becomes a true need my avoidance kicks in and I won't do it. Therefore my relationships must feel optional to me, chosen again every day, and separate spaces really help with that. Constant overlapping spaces introduce demands on every moment of my behaviour: to be kind, to be thoughtful, to constrain my actions, to be tidy and not dive into a giant project in the middle of the livingroom, to eat meals at normal times several times a day, etc. With that much demand I get completely shut down and often can't move much or talk or make eye contact with the person doing the (unconscious and reasonable!) demanding. Monogamy is a demand I can't tolerate.

Setting a particular time and date to do something with someone is always a strong demand, and very difficult to follow through on for me. This makes it challenging for me to socialize with people, since the two methods of socializing are either setting a date in advance (which is a demand for me) or spontaneously getting together (which is a last-minute schedule change for me). I have several work-arounds for this, including socializing at a multi-person event held by someone else that I don't need to commit to in advance but can rough in on my calendar and make a choice to attend on the day of; setting a range of dates ("let's see how we're feeling Thursday, and if that doesn't work we'll do Friday") and realistically just scheduling to see individual people once every year or two so they don't come to expect (demand) my presence, and I can manage the amount of energy required to force past my demand avoidance once every couple years usually. Most people seem to be able to schedule frequent, routine social events without too much trouble, so I feel very different in this regard. A recurring weekly commitment is hardest for me, and seems to be easiest for other folks.


Future categories to help me maintain scope: Nonverbal differences; relationship differences; repetitive speech, motor movement, or organization of objects, differences in routine, changes, transitions, questions about special interests, and samefood or same clothes, difference in intensity and scope of interests and perfectionism, sensory hypo or hyper, masking, meltdown shutdown overwhelm

Unrelated/later thoughts:

What is the difference between social differences and relationship differences? Maybe relationships are repeated, patterned social situations with one particular person where social refers to how I interact with the pattern of a group.

Is organizing objects physically in the same conceptual space as making spreadsheets to organize things by their physical or conceptual qualities, such as seeds by planting to harvest date, or roses by colour and height?

I cannot figure out graphic/nontextual UIs to save my life

Is samefood and same clothes in the same conceptual space as other same sensory experiences?

Stimming: dancing, pacing, swinging, running (treadmill) or other heavy muscle use/exercise, singing, repeating words (first syllable, almost like a stutter?)

Rigidity: I do best with forewarning of transitions, eg Josh's "need to stop talking in 5 minutes" on a phone call rather than saying goodbye, react poorly to plans changing even if it's better for me.

I don't like the unknown so I'll do a flyby of an area on google streetview or go to just watch the first time, so I don't need to act/behave in a new situation but can just spend my energy absorbing the new situation, does this count as rigidity/routine? I actually quite enjoy exploring spontaneity but only if there are no required outcomes. Maybe I need one of: a realistic plan, a routine, or control in any situation.

My sensory stuff is proprioception/feeling where my body is in space (low, aided by swinging) and my internal feeling of my body "being ok" (hypersensitive? often feel sick, tired, muscles ache, etc). Also don't process and hear sound at the same time. Scent is hard on my body. Cool/pressure is hard on my body, as is cold which reads as pain, so I stay away from cool fabrics that don't feel "warm" and I try to keep warm. I have synethesia between proprioception and music. Don't do background noise filtration. Touch will often sound like pain.

Support in initiating conversation

Alien/fuck you story

Unicorn from outer space story