Dear neurotypical people,
For a long time I have tried giving you the benefit of the doubt. When some of my fellow robots had already given up on you, I still defended you all by saying “they just don’t know, man.” But I was wrong. Neurotypical people simply are simply not willing to help autistic people to communicate with them. That’s all on you, and I am no longer defending you for it.
Fellow autistic robots, tell me if this scenario is familiar to you. You are just living your best life and you observed something, and in a moment of delusion you think you should share your observation or give your opinion. It’s what the NT in the room would do. And they keep telling you that you’re “always quiet”. So you speak up, but to your shock people and gasp for air. You said the wrong thing and now the NT’s are offended.
If you’re a NT reading this, please know that we autistic people are smart people. Unlike what the normies think we aren’t empathy-ridden cold living rocks. We are self aware of our flaws and we know that we make communication mistakes (or at least y’all see it that way). Sometimes a thing that sounds right in our heads lands wrong when we verbalize them. Things get lost in translation. We have learned to accept this happens even though we don’t like it and often disagree that things could be read in the offensive way the normies interpreted it. But okay, it happened. We are willing to admit that.
What happens next, however, is the reason why we don’t like talking to a majority of neurotypicals that we don’t know that well, offline or online.
“You know what you said”
The autistic person isn’t happy with the outcome. Contrary to popular opinion they do care how they make people feel. The normie perception of us that we are rude all the time and don’t care, is simply wrong. But the damage is done, so we are trying to figure out what exactly we said wrong so we can avoid making the same mistake the next time. We want to learn and adapt, like a self-programming AI.
My fellow robots, you already know what happens next. But we’ll break it down for the NT’s in the back of the room.
The autistic person is hoping for an explanation so they can learn and adapt. They’re like an AI, constantly trying to reprogram itself to function better. And the only way to do that is by asking for more information. So they do ask, hoping for an answer, but instead they’re told that
“You know what you did wrong!”
Dear offended person, autistic people hate confrontation. Claiming they did it on purpose is childish at best. If they really knew they wouldn’t be asking questions – something many of us have grown a dislike for due to our collective experiences.
There is no “dishonest trolling” or “playing coy” going on. Only a minority of us has the bandwidth to play those games.
Another favorite is not explaining shit, and just repeating what everyone already knew.
“What you said was offensive !”
Thanks for nothing, genius. Your statement is too. We aren’t dumb, we could already tell that you were offended. We’d established that and are now at a point where we want to avoid that in the future. We want to learn, grow and adapt. There really are no alterior motives.
But the neurotypical person will typically refuse to elaborate further, mumbling something about “your own responsibility”, implying there’s a Google search like “Why was Karen McGucci offended yesterday when I said the one thing confused” or “how not to offend neurotypicals Karen talking about (topic”. Believe me, if that tool existed we’d be using it instead of interacting with what is probably the worst source of information for an autistic person.
“Nobody owns you an explanation” is the neurotypical 500 error. “I know these things but I refuse to tell you for reasons that I can’t display due to an error setting in my communication pattern.”
Neurotypical people refused to give us the benefit of the doubt. The NT lives in a world where they can’t understand someone could genuinely desire to adapt. They immediately have to jump to emotions, shortcut their brains, then tell us “Don’t feel emotion X, Y or Z!”. A little weird of them, but okay.
What is happening here is that they are projecting NT toxic treats of people that they might have bad experiences with on the autistic person, not considering that the autistic person has a completely different life experience and world view and “really wants to know”. Maybe they’ll tell off the autistic person for asking, though. They love ending the conversation by making the other party look like the bad guy.
Hell yes, we’re hostile
What follows for the robot is frustration. They didn’t want to offend anyone yet it happened. They are trying to understand why it happened but neurotypical people refuse to explain, “they just did”.
As a result, autistic people might voice that frustration. They are aware that the normie won’t like that either, but at that point they don’t really care anymore and are tired of dealing with neurotypical idiosyncrasies. The energy to mask simply isn’t there anymore and they rage quit the conversation.
Here’s where a deep flaw in the neurotypicals programming comes into play. Their brain appears to be uncapable of separating this event where the autistic person gives up and force quits the communication line from the event where the autistic person genuinely wasn’t trying to be rude or offensive. Their mental math then goes something like this
- 0 rudeness in initial event
- 1 rudeness when they’re tired of NT BS.
0 + 1 = 2 => Autistic people are always rude, didn’t you just see them react? The robot has been rude all along, they were right. What a glorious day for them.
So the robot person is understandable upset now. They did their best to learn, reach out and correct themselves and the only thing that they learned is that NT people can’t be trusted. They could have taken a shortcut by listening to other autistic people but we all like to give them the benefit of the doubt until some breaking point. As a result, communication lines collapse and the robot will come to the conclusion that talking to a neurotypical audience simply can’t be done.
Neurotypical people love to ask autistic people “why are you always so quiet”. You don’t realize it, but you ask us all the time. Truth be told, it’s because we don’t want to talk to you unless we have to.
The risk of communicating with you doesn’t outweigh the potential rewards. We are always willing to give the benefit of the doubt to individuals, but as a group? We’ve all collectively learned that you can’t be trusted. You don’t see us as equals and your inability to explain why something upsets you – something us autistic people are good at because we need that skill to survive – makes it hard to communicate with you. At some point, it will no longer be worth it for us to engage with you and the autistic person will retract to a safe space. This could be anything from a diary, online forums or Mastodon servers, or even Reddit. If we can’t speak safely amongst the general population, we will find a way.
Before you shrug your shoulders and think “your loss”… it’s really not. By shutting autistic people down you are giving up on some of the smartest, most creative people that exist. Simply because you’re not willing to help them get their message across. Because you chose to be offended and just yell “I am offended” instead of saying “When you say X, people will feel Y.” You didn’t have to give a long lecture. You just had to be clear and concise about what went wrong.
That’s also my tip for normies that do want to keep communication lines open. Give autistic people the benefit of the doubt. Explain why something could land poorly. Communicating these things clearly is a skill, and I understand that many neurotypicals haven’t developed that skill. We’ve been giving you the benefit of the doubt, but your credit with autistic people will expire eventually – if it hasn’t already happened.
aspergergarden 