#the autistic art of misreading people/their thoughts/their feelings/their intentions/etc

[autisticlee]

when you're autistic and you think people are being nice to you and maybe even like you.....but turns out you're wrong...

me in twitch chat: tries very hard to socialize for a few months and tried to make friends

everyone: is seemingly nice and sometimes responds to me

after a few months: everyone is complimenting each other and being extra nice to each other

me: thank you everyone for putting up with my weird autistic ass as I try my best! I know im.bad at people, but thanks for being so cool, nice, and welcoming to me! you're all great and I love you all!

everyone:

me: :)

everyone:

me: :(

turns out I misread everyone and everything and they don't actually like me or care about my existence or were being fake nice. the chat only ignored me and then changed the subject right after. why does this always happen....this is why I can never tell if I have friends or enemies, or if i'm just seen as the annoying child that won't leave.

"don't care what other people think about you" i'm always told. WELL ITS HARD TO NOT CARE IF PEOPLE THINK IM FRIEND OR FOE. I don't want to waste my time trying to talk to and be nice to and befriend people who dislike me no matter what I do 😭 I need to know what they think about me so I know how to correctly respond to them!!!

[olderthannetfic]

It might just be me, but a lot of tone indicators, especially the weirder ones that are harder to guess, come off like they're making fun of me for not being that great with tone.

-- same anon Like, I thought that was the point at first. When I first started seeing tone tags I thought people were mocking autistics for needing clarification. I thought the joke was "who needs someone to come out and tell them that "I like your art" is positive? Isn't it funny how weird and dumb autistic people are for misreading tone?"

I think they're often meant as either condescending white knighting (generally without the person realizing that's the tenor of their thoughts) or they're genuinely being used by autistic people... but in that "If only we sorted all the things into tidy boxes! No one would ever misunderstand again!" way.

Sadly, no amount of clarifying or putting things in little boxes will solve the fact that language is ambiguous.

People don't always know what tone they want to convey or what they're feeling in the first place. Even when they do know, if they write something very poorly and most people would agree it conveys some other tone, they don't get to go "No, I meant X and not Y!" and have everyone ignore what they actually wrote.

Sometimes, a level of ambiguity is intentional and desirable. I don't mean for the purpose of confusing autistic people on purpose like a troll. I mean that a level of ambiguity is part of art and part of how a lot of people communicate.

And sometimes, people just misread one. Maybe they're bad at reading comprehension. Maybe they haven't had their morning coffee. Maybe one wrote something poorly. Maybe it's just a culture clash. The reality is that somebody is going to misunderstand, and that's life.

I often see "This one hack will solve [interpersonal thing] forever!" and it's always nonsense. People and language are messy. The end.

--

For my money, "Only half joking", "genuine question", etc. are perfectly natural phrasings and can just be written out in conventional sentences. (And if a platform doesn't have a long enough post length for that, then it probably sucks anyway and is full of people misunderstanding each other and screaming at each other.) I don't mind "/sarcasm", but I don't think most of the "/" notation is useful, and I dislike "/" + abbreviation.

My least favorite is "/pos", and it's not even for the piece of shit/point of sale issue. The problem, to me, is that this tends to be used in contexts where the person is saying something obviously hostile and rude and then going "tee hee, you aren't allowed to read it negatively". The sentence needs a rephrase if it's supposed to be positive. No amount of tagging it is going to help.