#obviously no shade to people who use it i'm just too autistic to figure the meaning out

[ghostfacetheballfondler]

hi can people who have a chosen person explain what that feels like? and how chosen person differs from favorite person? i am incredibly confused about what chp means and what attachment it's supposed to describe lol

[alexanderdanner]

On Phone Anxiety

Crossposting from Twitter: I've been thinking a lot about why phone calls are so hard for me, apart from the general social anxiety. Interestingly, it was reading threads of autistic people discussing their own communication challenges that helped me figure it out. I'll often hear autistic people use the refrain of "why don't people say what they mean?" Even about situations where, from my perspective, it looks like everyone *did* say what they meant. But a lot of this is about reading/not reading information from facial expressions.

Some people can't. They don't perceive information via that channel. I'm the opposite of that. I *need* information presented through facial expressions. When I'm talking to someone I can't see, I feel like half the conversation is hidden from me.

And I don't just mean subtle shading and nuance. Here is an actual exchange I had with my wife last week:

Me: Okay, I'm heading out!

B: [Facial expression]

Me: Oh, you're right, I should borrow your monthly T pass instead of running down my balance!

That is not exaggerated for effect. That is literally the exchange we had, and the level of information I routinely pull from facial expressions. Obviously, context matters. I knew whatever thought she was having pertained to my heading out the door for school. But still. Sometimes she relies on me to put her own thoughts into words for her because she's having trouble articulating them. She's just makes a series of facial expressions, while I repeat back to her verbally the thoughts/feelings I'm hearing via her expressions.

And this WORKS.

For me, the overall move toward video conferencing over phone calls has been THE BEST THING. I cannot begin to express the levels of anxiety that switching to video communication has alleviated for me. Conversely, this is yet another way that COVID masking has been awful for me*. I lose my ability to judge how people are responding to what I say, or to hear what they're not saying verbally. (Adding a whole new layer of stress to teaching especially.)

And I know someone is thinking, "but you can still see people's eyes, and the eyes are the window to the soul!" No. Eyes are the window to the optic nerve. The musculature of the jaw and lips carries the lion's share of expressive information.

Something else I have to be mindful of is my tendency to feel hurt or unvalued when other people don't intuit my feelings as readily as I intuit theirs. I have an instinctive, "well, aren't you listening to my face?!" response, which isn't really fair.

(None of this is to suggest that I'm claiming any kind of "lie detector" skill. On the contrary, this all presumes I'm seeing people's honest reactions. ((And my nature is to assume people are being honest.)) People who lie lie with their faces too, not just their words.)

I'm not sure if any of this connects directly to my ADHD, but I've noticed a number of other ADHD people saying similar things. So...maybe?

*KEEP MASKING ANYWAY