#The thing that unites the entire rat and rat-adj community is that they believe you when you say you don't understand something

[morlock-holmes]

I didn't say I think "dominant" culture values rational systems (and what dominant culture do you even mean), just that rationalism falls way short on its claims to do so. And I dunno, this is personal, but I can't agree that the subculture that told me "actually you should reframe your entire life around your scrupulosity" is much of an improvement, even if the bar is extremely low. Not when that subculture is full of all the kinds of social manipulation and cruelty it claims to be above.

I'm making very narrow claims that don't really have anything to do with what you're talking about here.

I have trouble communicating how much even high functioning autistic people have struggled with things that allistic people "just know", (a phrase I've heard again and again when interrogating allistic people).

Here's an example, which I believe I heard as a real life example although I can't recall where:

You have issues with the texture of clothing and there are only a few dress shirts you have that you can stand to wear. You have a sudden nose-bleed on one of your shirts and get blood all over the collar and down the front.

You launder the shirt but the blood stains have set in and are still very visible.

Should you wear that shirt to the office?

Most allistic people already know that the answer is, "almost certainly not."

An autistic person is likely to go through this process:

I have no idea if I should wear that shirt to the office or not, so let's figure it out.

Well, I have laundered the shirt so it is clean and sanitary, the stains are just visual blemishes.

All the social messages I've heard since I were a kid say that you can't judge a book by its cover and that looks don't matter, it's what's inside that counts.

And, I have a desk job, I wasn't hired to look a certain way, but rather to produce a certain kind of work, and wearing this comfortable shirt makes it easy for me to work without being distracted by uncomfortable clothes.

Therefore, logically, I can't imagine that anybody at the office will object to my wearing this shirt.

That last sentence is key, and I really want you to focus on it. You **aren't** thinking, "Well, maybe the button down drones at the office think this is a problem, but I know better than they do."

No, you aren't thinking that at all. You're thinking, "I put together the clues so I'm sure everyone at the office will feel the exact same way as I do"

And when they don't, it's a shock.

Now, I want you to further imagine that this is how you reason about other people and the world, but through some cosmic joke you've ended up at an employer where dressing right is incredibly important.

You'll get yelled at by your boss if you wear the wrong thing and your coworkers will turn on you. But there's no published dress code, you're just supposed to "just know" what an employee should wear.

But look at your reasoning above! You *don't* "just know" what the fashion is. Imagine you eventually say, to your boss and some coworkers, "I'm starting to get really stressed about not knowing what to wear to work, I really want to wear the right thing and be part of the team but I don't know how and I'm getting stressed out."

Immediately everybody turns on you. Your boss calls you into his office to ream you out. Your coworkers start a petition to fire you because you're obviously trying to undermine the valuable work culture that they have worked so hard to create. Concerned work friends pull you aside and go, "Jesus, are you crazy? We all stress out about what to wear but you never say it in public!"

Think about what that might feel like.

Now imagine you get fired and at your next job the boss is like, "Hey, the dress code is pretty important here, here's a list of what we expect. Sometimes some stuff is kind of on the edge so you won't know, but it's always fine to ask me if something is appropriate, and if you accidentally wear something that's on the wrong side that's fine, I'll let you know and we'll work on getting you some more appropriate stuff, but you won't get in trouble."

I want you to really think about what it would feel like, as an autistic person, to be at that second job after decades working at the first. To suddenly know you could ask questions or make mistakes at something that doesn't come easily to you after so much time in an environment where you're told that this stuff comes easily to everyone and people only *pretend* to be bad at it to get away with things.

What you're doing is coming in and going, "Well, that second job might be bad for other, unrelated reasons."

I will completely grant that, you're utterly correct. That second job might be terrible for a bunch of unrelated reasons.

But I'm never going back to that first job.