1 - Have a somewhat societally common and shared, but also very unique and specific to yourself/particular social group, way of understanding and projecting tone, microexpressions, vocabulary choices, speech cadence, etc, with many distinct or uncommon idiosyncrasies.
2 - Assume everyone else on the planet has essentially the exact same way of seeing and performing all this as you do.
3 - Confidently interperet social cues incorrectly considerably more often than Autists, but be blissfully unaware of this, pathologize and shame the idea of asking for clarity and communicating in a direct, precise, and less ambiguous way.
… Autistic people consciously learn, process and evaluate how social cues actually work, and Autistic people also very much like logically consistent things that are not contradictory… so they are more likely to either be very rigid with one way of understanding something, or to.ask questions to clarify things that are not actually clear, consistent, universal, precise.
It thus takes them longer to learn how to adaquetly perform all this, aka, Masking.
Neurotypicals on the other hand learn, process and evaluate and perform social cues much more unconsciously, and they are far more likely to just assume their interpretation is correct, that their projected behaviors convey exactly what they think they do… despite the fact that if you sit a bunch of them down, they will all describe significant differences between their ways of understanding and performing mannerisms.
Essentially, they’re bullshitting it, but there are more bullshitters than non bullshitters, so bullshitting is the norm.
The thing about having to consciously learn social cues and how to talk to people is that if you do it right and get good at it you can be REALLY, really good at it.
See my other wall of text reply to your other comment, lol, I could go on for days with anecdotes of esoteric bs I’ve seen NT men do to signal things to other men and women, I totally agree this isn’t a sex/gender thing, its a neurotype thing that manifests differently in different sexes/genders.
I tend to ignore terms like neurotypical and neurodiverse because I just view everyone as neurodiverse. And if everyone is neurodiverse, then nobody is neurodiverse. That just means to me that people are people. Some more insecure than others.
I also think that everyone is gay. Which means I personally don’t really view anyone as gay, just people doing normal people things no matter who they love. Some people just happen to be insecure as fuck about loving another person.
What I do see are a lot of insecure people attempting to set and enforce normal behaviour because they are afraid of being weird while ignoring the fact that being alive is the most weird and pointless experience ever.
Gotta have a little fun with the weird, pointlessness of existence, that’s what can make life beautiful and interesting :)
Well I disagree strongly with your unorthodox definitions of neurotypical, neurodiverse and gay…
But I do generally agree that a lot of people and social norms stem from insecurity, an inability or unwillingness to actually examine things in detail, with consistency, to hold your own self or group to the standards you hold others to.
We also seem to have the same absurdist take on reality and meaning, so laugh and dance and do backflips as you push that boulder up that hill, hahah!
I’ve had a lifetime of people labeling me as something and trying to enforce that label on me. When I eventually do something that sits outside of that label, those same people get angry at me for breaking the expectations that they set for me. Expectations that they never explicitly told me but assumed because of that label they placed on me.
As a result, I pushed back by “delabelling” myself, mostly. If I must label myself, I attempt to use the most broad term possible as to avoid cornering myself. Sometimes it’s too easy to use a label as a conversational shortcut.
As a personal result, I tend to avoid labeling others. In my mind that puts me on even level with the people around me. It avoids me talking to specific groups of people and allows others to participate in the discussion, no matter how those other people view or identify themselves.
I’ve watched how words, labels and categorizations have become weaponized and used to divide people. Which is absurdity. Words are ever evolving and dying so to me it seems pointless to allow words to strongly influence me.
These days I surround myself with people who are able to show me who they are over people who spend their energy telling me who they are. Real confidence doesn’t need to waste their time on only words. Those words should add to that person as a whole. That’s how I want to view another person.
Not trying to convince you to change your mind, I do see the value in using words or labels to find community, especially in times like these. I think you seem open to at least seeing where my unorthodox views come from.
Oh I totally get where you are coming from, I could have written a good deal of that myself.
I’d offer you a hug if I could.
I completely agree that labels, words for boxes we put people in… should as additive, in a good way, as possible, descriptors, not restrictors.
But I also believe they should be accurate, and thus, we unfortunately still do live in a society, and we thus to at least some extent have to keep playing this word game.
I view a term like Autist simply as a matter of fact classifier, and while I won’t force others to, I more or less use it as a self label, when it is relevant to some discussion.
My approach is ‘take the word back’ so that Autism Speaks and idiots who think the measles vaccine gave their kid Autism aren’t the only morons using such words, proclaiming to represent me… us.
We can speak for ourselves actually, we’re not all a bunch of invalid r-tards, and whether or not we like it, we are an extremely misunderstood and at risk minority group in much of the world… if we let others do all the talking, we shouldn’t be surprised that they continue to get a lot of things very wrong.
How to be a neurotypical:
1 - Have a somewhat societally common and shared, but also very unique and specific to yourself/particular social group, way of understanding and projecting tone, microexpressions, vocabulary choices, speech cadence, etc, with many distinct or uncommon idiosyncrasies.
2 - Assume everyone else on the planet has essentially the exact same way of seeing and performing all this as you do.
3 - Confidently interperet social cues incorrectly considerably more often than Autists, but be blissfully unaware of this, pathologize and shame the idea of asking for clarity and communicating in a direct, precise, and less ambiguous way.
… Autistic people consciously learn, process and evaluate how social cues actually work, and Autistic people also very much like logically consistent things that are not contradictory… so they are more likely to either be very rigid with one way of understanding something, or to.ask questions to clarify things that are not actually clear, consistent, universal, precise.
It thus takes them longer to learn how to adaquetly perform all this, aka, Masking.
Neurotypicals on the other hand learn, process and evaluate and perform social cues much more unconsciously, and they are far more likely to just assume their interpretation is correct, that their projected behaviors convey exactly what they think they do… despite the fact that if you sit a bunch of them down, they will all describe significant differences between their ways of understanding and performing mannerisms.
Essentially, they’re bullshitting it, but there are more bullshitters than non bullshitters, so bullshitting is the norm.
The thing about having to consciously learn social cues and how to talk to people is that if you do it right and get good at it you can be REALLY, really good at it.
Is there a ‘we are not the same’ meme for skilled at masking autists, vs narcissistic sociopaths?
Make your dreams a reality.
I was just having some fun by pointing out that women aren’t the only mythical creature whose signals are hard to read.
I do agree with your last point thoroughly, bullshitters do be bullshittin’ it. A lot. Too much I would say.
See my other wall of text reply to your other comment, lol, I could go on for days with anecdotes of esoteric bs I’ve seen NT men do to signal things to other men and women, I totally agree this isn’t a sex/gender thing, its a neurotype thing that manifests differently in different sexes/genders.
I tend to ignore terms like neurotypical and neurodiverse because I just view everyone as neurodiverse. And if everyone is neurodiverse, then nobody is neurodiverse. That just means to me that people are people. Some more insecure than others.
I also think that everyone is gay. Which means I personally don’t really view anyone as gay, just people doing normal people things no matter who they love. Some people just happen to be insecure as fuck about loving another person.
What I do see are a lot of insecure people attempting to set and enforce normal behaviour because they are afraid of being weird while ignoring the fact that being alive is the most weird and pointless experience ever.
Gotta have a little fun with the weird, pointlessness of existence, that’s what can make life beautiful and interesting :)
Well I disagree strongly with your unorthodox definitions of neurotypical, neurodiverse and gay…
But I do generally agree that a lot of people and social norms stem from insecurity, an inability or unwillingness to actually examine things in detail, with consistency, to hold your own self or group to the standards you hold others to.
We also seem to have the same absurdist take on reality and meaning, so laugh and dance and do backflips as you push that boulder up that hill, hahah!
I’ve had a lifetime of people labeling me as something and trying to enforce that label on me. When I eventually do something that sits outside of that label, those same people get angry at me for breaking the expectations that they set for me. Expectations that they never explicitly told me but assumed because of that label they placed on me.
As a result, I pushed back by “delabelling” myself, mostly. If I must label myself, I attempt to use the most broad term possible as to avoid cornering myself. Sometimes it’s too easy to use a label as a conversational shortcut.
As a personal result, I tend to avoid labeling others. In my mind that puts me on even level with the people around me. It avoids me talking to specific groups of people and allows others to participate in the discussion, no matter how those other people view or identify themselves.
I’ve watched how words, labels and categorizations have become weaponized and used to divide people. Which is absurdity. Words are ever evolving and dying so to me it seems pointless to allow words to strongly influence me.
These days I surround myself with people who are able to show me who they are over people who spend their energy telling me who they are. Real confidence doesn’t need to waste their time on only words. Those words should add to that person as a whole. That’s how I want to view another person.
Not trying to convince you to change your mind, I do see the value in using words or labels to find community, especially in times like these. I think you seem open to at least seeing where my unorthodox views come from.
Oh I totally get where you are coming from, I could have written a good deal of that myself.
I’d offer you a hug if I could.
I completely agree that labels, words for boxes we put people in… should as additive, in a good way, as possible, descriptors, not restrictors.
But I also believe they should be accurate, and thus, we unfortunately still do live in a society, and we thus to at least some extent have to keep playing this word game.
I view a term like Autist simply as a matter of fact classifier, and while I won’t force others to, I more or less use it as a self label, when it is relevant to some discussion.
My approach is ‘take the word back’ so that Autism Speaks and idiots who think the measles vaccine gave their kid Autism aren’t the only morons using such words, proclaiming to represent me… us.
We can speak for ourselves actually, we’re not all a bunch of invalid r-tards, and whether or not we like it, we are an extremely misunderstood and at risk minority group in much of the world… if we let others do all the talking, we shouldn’t be surprised that they continue to get a lot of things very wrong.