There's this perception on here among neurodivergent people that neurotypical social behaviour is all fake and arbitrary. That it's a cruel, baseless game played to "weed out" ND people or to cause pain and complicate things on purpose.
This is wrong. All of those social rules and nuances ARE communication. Sorry if this is rude but it's not the NTs' fault if things don't gel- the gap goes both ways. Just because communication doesn't make sense to you, doesn't mean it's random or purposeless. Remember this post?
Every interaction in an NT conversation has purpose, and communicates something, and I don't understand why nobody ever explains this to ND people. There's information on basic stuff like facial expressions, but never what any of it actually means.
Small talk about the weather isn't about the weather. It's about how nice it is to be around the people you're talking to, or feeling out their understanding of the world, or just saying that you're both present and people and you're being people together. It's not literal. The words are, but the broad scope isn't.
A conversation is not just an exchange of words, it's an exchange of acknowledgement, attention, and emotional understanding. Of course it confuses people when their part in that exchange is met with flat affect or unembelished words. It's like looking in a mirror and not seeing your reflection.
I get that you're "sorry if this is rude" but this post is still putting the entire onus of making up for the communication gap on ND people. It's like seeing someone struggling with English, maybe needing an interpreter, and telling them to just learn the language. That's why autism is considered a disability. Because it's prohibitively difficult or simply not possible to "just get" it.
We get told literally every day, all day, that *we* are the rude ones, have intentions assumed, etc., because we didn't pick up on a social cue that we simply never could. Imagine going though your life colorblind and being expected to just *try harder* to study colors to read low-contrast signs instead of just *having high contrast signs*.
*That* is why it's on NT people to make up more of the communication gap. Because we are already told, constantly, all the time, to just buck up and fix ourselves. And when we make fun of some of the things that are used to belittle us, things that it's *literally part of a disability to not get the way NT people do*, or ask people to maybe consider for one moment why we don't or can't reciprocate "appropriately," people come back with shit like this, telling us we didn't do enough. That we're mean or inhuman for not smiling enough or not making eye contact or not having the right answer to "what did you do over the weekend?"
But when *we* use social cues, or even explicitly say what we want from someone? Nobody ever listens. Nobody learns autistic social cues, and tells allistics that they're unnatural for not understanding that someone infodumping to them is indicative of trust and affection, or that when they ask you a question it's because they *really, genuinely* care about your actual answer, not just because they feel obligated to by a social script that you're trying to intuit, or, you know, that sometimes they bitch and moan about NTs and their social scripts as a way to let off steam from being expected to follow them all day, every day, without full access to understanding them. Nobody except other autistics.
Other human beings are not mirrors for you to oggle your own reflection in. We are not failures as humans for not filling that role properly.
#NT people wanna pretend we're victimizing them sooooo bad#Fully missing the mark on the parts that many of us actually have an issue with#Because it's not just us not getting them it's also them not getting us#But they just don't wanna do that effort and keep putting it on us instead while comparing us to objects
Prev tags for posterity. And now to the OP. Please understand I am using the hypothetical, generic "you", not talking about you personally but about the attitudes that I have to deal with. I don't know whether you are neurodivergent, or your exact situation, just giving some perspective because I know that many, many neurotypical people believe the same things.
Small talk about the weather isn't about the weather. It's about how nice it is to be around the people you're talking to,
Is it nice, though? Like, I get that this is the purpose of small talk, and sometimes I'm happy to engage in it. I don't speak for all autistic people (and we should be careful to avoid conflating all neurodivergence with autism) but the problem for me is that a significant portion of the small talk I have to engage in is either entirely for the benefit of a neurotypical person because Having A Conversation makes them feel good, but for me it's work, or neither party in the interaction actually wants to be around the other and have a conversation but we are mutually required by social convention to pretend to enjoy it even if it makes the interaction take longer.
The problem is that it is not nice to be around you if you try to force a "human connection" that is not pleasant for me, that actively drains my energy, and you either ignore my signals of discomfort or notice that I'm uncomfortable with this interaction but decide that what would really make me feel better is you asking me what I do on the weekends, and I hate that I am then obligated to either perform fake enjoyment of this or risk you getting offended if I tell you you're making things harder for me.
You know what else is often a "yes we're both present and being people together, it's nice being around you" gesture? Smiling. But, we've all seen the articles pointing out how obnoxious it is for women especially to get told to smile by random strangers or acquaintances, that it's infuriating when someone feels entitled to tell someone to perform emotional labor for them, and that sometimes you don't feel safe saying no because there's a risk of them becoming hostile if you refuse? That's how the cultural expectations around a lot of these rituals feel.
(and yes, I am aware strangers trying to make small talk in inappropriate environments is annoying to many/most NT people as well)
Also yeah, like the previous reblog said, it's not like as an autistic person you can generally expect the effort you put into participating in social rituals that feel good to neurotypical people to make others happy to be reciprocated. Like, making small talk about the weather or some other random bullshit as a way to feel connected to the person you're talking to is not inherently different from trying to connect to someone by infodumping, but those aren't treated the same way.
or just saying that you're both present and people and you're being people together... ...It's like looking in a mirror and not seeing your reflection.
And this is the other crux of the problem. I don't think NT people consciously, intentionally do this, but how it feels in practice is that rituals like small talk are a shibboleth, a test of whether you're "being a person" correctly that I can be ostracized for failing, and in practice the cumulative effect of all these little rituals is weeding out neurodivergent people who don't have the skill or the energy to mask well enough (and these can also suck for people trying to navigate cultures that have different standards of etiquette for how to handle these interactions, as I think some of the notes have mentioned).
This is what I mean when I say so many of these rituals are fake bullshit: yes it's real communication, but you're asking questions you don't actually want an answer to and really it's a test of whether I'll tell you what you want to hear. That metaphor was really apt: you don't want to see me, you want to see your reflection, and when you don't see it, you stop seeing me as a person.
And not only is this language bordering on dehumanizing, but with all due respect: the fact that neurotypicals can complain about this with a straight face is a textbook example of abled people seeing it as a profound injustice that they have to occasionally briefly experience a disabled person's daily reality. Forgive me if I'm not sympathetic to your discomfort at having to interact with people whose natural way of communicating is foreign, difficult, and maybe a little unnerving: how the fuck do you think we feel? I do not have the privilege of being able to feel entitled to "see my reflection" in every person I interact with, and yes I have gotten used to understanding or at least being able to bullshit my way through neurotypical social conventions (both because of volume of interactions and because I am forced to to survive), but still: I have to live with this all the time, and society expects me to not only just shut up and deal with it but to devote a large amount of my mental resources to shielding you from having to experience it once, because society values your discomfort over mine.
Let's put it another way. Imagine if many aspects of your daily life that are necessary for survival required you to use a computer system that demanded a capcha response at random intervals to do just about anything. And it's often pain in the ass capchas, like word ones where the letters are so distorted it's hard to tell what they are without squinting at them for a while, or "select the squares with cars in them" ones where there are tons of squares with just a sliver and you have to guess if it wants you to count those or not. Sometimes you get a blue or gold dress puzzle. Sometimes you solve it correctly but the algorithm decides to fail you anyway because it decides the way you move your mouse is too robotic.
You have been locked out of accounts for failing these before. You have had job applications rejected because the capcha you had to solve before the interview thought you were a spambot, and didn't even tell you you failed until after the fact. Even if you get really good at consistently solving capchas, it would still be a pain in the ass. Now imagine most of the world doesn't see why this is a problem for you, and when you complain about it they just tell you the purpose of capchas and give you tips on how to solve them better.
There's this perception on here among neurodivergent people that neurotypical social behaviour is all fake and arbitrary. That it's a cruel, baseless game played to "weed out" ND people or to cause pain and complicate things on purpose.
This is wrong. All of those social rules and nuances ARE communication. Sorry if this is rude but it's not the NTs' fault if things don't gel- the gap goes both ways. Just because communication doesn't make sense to you, doesn't mean it's random or purposeless. Remember this post?
Every interaction in an NT conversation has purpose, and communicates something, and I don't understand why nobody ever explains this to ND people. There's information on basic stuff like facial expressions, but never what any of it actually means.
Small talk about the weather isn't about the weather. It's about how nice it is to be around the people you're talking to, or feeling out their understanding of the world, or just saying that you're both present and people and you're being people together. It's not literal. The words are, but the broad scope isn't.
A conversation is not just an exchange of words, it's an exchange of acknowledgement, attention, and emotional understanding. Of course it confuses people when their part in that exchange is met with flat affect or unembelished words. It's like looking in a mirror and not seeing your reflection.
I get that you're "sorry if this is rude" but this post is still putting the entire onus of making up for the communication gap on ND people. It's like seeing someone struggling with English, maybe needing an interpreter, and telling them to just learn the language. That's why autism is considered a disability. Because it's prohibitively difficult or simply not possible to "just get" it.
We get told literally every day, all day, that *we* are the rude ones, have intentions assumed, etc., because we didn't pick up on a social cue that we simply never could. Imagine going though your life colorblind and being expected to just *try harder* to study colors to read low-contrast signs instead of just *having high contrast signs*.
*That* is why it's on NT people to make up more of the communication gap. Because we are already told, constantly, all the time, to just buck up and fix ourselves. And when we make fun of some of the things that are used to belittle us, things that it's *literally part of a disability to not get the way NT people do*, or ask people to maybe consider for one moment why we don't or can't reciprocate "appropriately," people come back with shit like this, telling us we didn't do enough. That we're mean or inhuman for not smiling enough or not making eye contact or not having the right answer to "what did you do over the weekend?"
But when *we* use social cues, or even explicitly say what we want from someone? Nobody ever listens. Nobody learns autistic social cues, and tells allistics that they're unnatural for not understanding that someone infodumping to them is indicative of trust and affection, or that when they ask you a question it's because they *really, genuinely* care about your actual answer, not just because they feel obligated to by a social script that you're trying to intuit, or, you know, that sometimes they bitch and moan about NTs and their social scripts as a way to let off steam from being expected to follow them all day, every day, without full access to understanding them. Nobody except other autistics.
Other human beings are not mirrors for you to oggle your own reflection in. We are not failures as humans for not filling that role properly.
#NT people wanna pretend we're victimizing them sooooo bad#Fully missing the mark on the parts that many of us actually have an issue with#Because it's not just us not getting them it's also them not getting us#But they just don't wanna do that effort and keep putting it on us instead while comparing us to objects
Prev tags for posterity. And now to the OP. Please understand I am using the hypothetical, generic "you", not talking about you personally but about the attitudes that I have to deal with. I don't know whether you are neurodivergent, or your exact situation, just giving some perspective because I know that many, many neurotypical people believe the same things.
Small talk about the weather isn't about the weather. It's about how nice it is to be around the people you're talking to,
Is it nice, though? Like, I get that this is the purpose of small talk, and sometimes I'm happy to engage in it. I don't speak for all autistic people (and we should be careful to avoid conflating all neurodivergence with autism) but the problem for me is that a significant portion of the small talk I have to engage in is either entirely for the benefit of a neurotypical person because Having A Conversation makes them feel good, but for me it's work, or neither party in the interaction actually wants to be around the other and have a conversation but we are mutually required by social convention to pretend to enjoy it even if it makes the interaction take longer.
The problem is that it is not nice to be around you if you try to force a "human connection" that is not pleasant for me, that actively drains my energy, and you either ignore my signals of discomfort or notice that I'm uncomfortable with this interaction but decide that what would really make me feel better is you asking me what I do on the weekends, and I hate that I am then obligated to either perform fake enjoyment of this or risk you getting offended if I tell you you're making things harder for me.
You know what else is often a "yes we're both present and being people together, it's nice being around you" gesture? Smiling. But, we've all seen the articles pointing out how obnoxious it is for women especially to get told to smile by random strangers or acquaintances, that it's infuriating when someone feels entitled to tell someone to perform emotional labor for them, and that sometimes you don't feel safe saying no because there's a risk of them becoming hostile if you refuse? That's how the cultural expectations around a lot of these rituals feel.
(and yes, I am aware strangers trying to make small talk in inappropriate environments is annoying to many/most NT people as well)
Also yeah, like the previous reblog said, it's not like as an autistic person you can generally expect the effort you put into participating in social rituals that feel good to neurotypical people to make others happy to be reciprocated. Like, making small talk about the weather or some other random bullshit as a way to feel connected to the person you're talking to is not inherently different from trying to connect to someone by infodumping, but those aren't treated the same way.
or just saying that you're both present and people and you're being people together... ...It's like looking in a mirror and not seeing your reflection.
And this is the other crux of the problem. I don't think NT people consciously, intentionally do this, but how it feels in practice is that rituals like small talk are a shibboleth, a test of whether you're "being a person" correctly that I can be ostracized for failing, and in practice the cumulative effect of all these little rituals is weeding out neurodivergent people who don't have the skill or the energy to mask well enough (and these can also suck for people trying to navigate cultures that have different standards of etiquette for how to handle these interactions, as I think some of the notes have mentioned).
This is what I mean when I say so many of these rituals are fake bullshit: yes it's real communication, but you're asking questions you don't actually want an answer to and really it's a test of whether I'll tell you what you want to hear. That metaphor was really apt: you don't want to see me, you want to see your reflection, and when you don't see it, you stop seeing me as a person.
And not only is this language bordering on dehumanizing, but with all due respect: the fact that neurotypicals can complain about this with a straight face is a textbook example of abled people seeing it as a profound injustice that they have to occasionally briefly experience a disabled person's daily reality. Forgive me if I'm not sympathetic to your discomfort at having to interact with people whose natural way of communicating is foreign, difficult, and maybe a little unnerving: how the fuck do you think we feel? I do not have the privilege of being able to feel entitled to "see my reflection" in every person I interact with, and yes I have gotten used to understanding or at least being able to bullshit my way through neurotypical social conventions (both because of volume of interactions and because I am forced to to survive), but still: I have to live with this all the time, and society expects me to not only just shut up and deal with it but to devote a large amount of my mental resources to shielding you from having to experience it once, because society values your discomfort over mine.
Let's put it another way. Imagine if many aspects of your daily life that are necessary for survival required you to use a computer system that demanded a capcha response at random intervals to do just about anything. And it's often pain in the ass capchas, like word ones where the letters are so distorted it's hard to tell what they are without squinting at them for a while, or "select the squares with cars in them" ones where there are tons of squares with just a sliver and you have to guess if it wants you to count those or not. Sometimes you get a blue or gold dress puzzle. Sometimes you solve it correctly but the algorithm decides to fail you anyway because it decides the way you move your mouse is too robotic.
You have been locked out of accounts for failing these before. You have had job applications rejected because the capcha you had to solve before the interview thought you were a spambot, and didn't even tell you you failed until after the fact. Even if you get really good at consistently solving capchas, it would still be a pain in the ass. Now imagine most of the world doesn't see why this is a problem for you, and when you complain about it they just tell you the purpose of capchas and give you tips on how to solve them better.
i love the scene post DR where robin comes to talk to law and he just doesnt say anything it's so funny it makes me cry
featuring robin chan Understanding
This has better practical effects than a marvel movie.
THE CORRUPTION BEGINS WITH THE MOUTH,
THE TONGUE, THE WANTING
THE FIRST POEM IN THE WORLD
IS I WANT TO EAT
While Luffy is training with Rayleigh, he sometimes goes to sit on the beach or the cliff edge during downtime, and just gazes out at the sea.
One time, during a break of a rather hard training session, he sits there and thinks about his crew. Wherever they are. He thinks about Ace...and suddenly he just feels all that weight again.
He couldn't save any of them. Because he wasn't strong enough.
His body trembles and something stings at his eyes. He refuses to cry in front of Rayleigh, but when he's on his own, he'll let a few tears fall as he thinks about his crew and his brother, and how he could not stop what happened to them.
"It's so hard...what if I can't get stronger? WHAT IF I CAN'T SAVE THEM!?" he yells at the wind.
He shudders, tears rolling down his face, while the waves crash below him.
Then, after a while, the breeze lifts. It rises up the cliff edge until it rolls over the top and around Luffy.
And then it embraces him.
It coils around him, pressing his arms against his sides. It ruffles through his hair, brushing loose strands out of his face. It is warm and comforting on his skin until he stops shaking.
There is nothing you cannot do, a light, yet deep voice whispers in his ear, laced in the breeze. He breathes deep and his lungs fill with a crisp air smelling of sea salt and seaweed. His eyes become dry as the wind blows away his tears.
It's okay.
He feels a calm envelope him.
Keep going, the wind says. You will become one of the strongest yet. Keep going.
The breeze rises up to the trees and then falls back down again, brushing the top of his head and pressing into his cheek like a soft hand. It rolls back over the water and spreads out to the sea.
Luffy stares at the ocean, both eyes and mind now clear, and he waits for Rayleigh to come fetch him.
deal with the devil
fun fact: Boston Museum of Science calls their evening lecture series “SubSpace”, which would be a totally innocuous math term except for the fact that, to make sure you know these lectures are higher-level and not aimed at their usual audience (kids), they chose to subtitle it “SubSpace: Adult Experiences”
😶
me at the SubSpace wearing a leash and "free use" written on my tits in sharpie: wow I never knew Riemannian manifolds were so interesting
You know the Grimm version of Snow White makes more sense than most versions if only because in that version Snow White was like 7 years old.
Like imagine you find a 7 year old in the woods and she’s like my mom is gonna kill me because I’m prettier than her and she’s not kidding. You know this queen is that sort of person. So you and your roommates adopt the kid and tell her don’t talk to strangers. And she keeps talking to strangers and getting poison combs stuck in her hair and whatnot.
Like yeah that’s kinda stupid but also she’s seven. She likes apples.
Also imagine it from the hunter’s perspective. The queen tells you this bitch is prettier than me I need you to take her out in the woods and kill her. And then you see who you’re supposed to kill and it’s a 2nd grader. Like how are you supposed to react to that sort of situation? Kill a human child? No. Because you’re not a brainless evil minion you’re just some guy dealing with a cartoonishly evil monarch. Of course you let her go.
Bad look for the Prince of course. Even if she did age while she was in that glass case. He saw a dead woman and just decided to keep her. And once she stopped being dead he was like we’re married now
He did cause the evil queen to dance to death in red hot shoes though. That was kinda cool.
With the acknowledgement that I'm grasping at straws, is it ever directly confirmed that the Prince wasn't also 7?
See, I think that still works.
You are the guardsman assigned to protect the eight-year-old Prince. You are currently in the middle of the forest because he absolutely had his heart set on "going hunting", and the royal second-grader should definitely not be traipsing around the woods on his own. You let him go a little on ahead and he comes running back talking about how there's a dead girl in the clearing and there's no-one else around and he wants to take her home because she's really pretty, Hans, and she's all alone!
You let him drag you to said clearing and okay, that is one angelic-looking dead child alright, and on the one hand the quality of her clothes and the craftsmanship on the coffin (who builds a see-through coffin?) speak to potential Consequences if you simply carry her off, but also for the amount of vines that have grown on the coffin she looks extraordinarily un-decayed, so you should probably get the court alchemist's opinion on that, and there's no way he's going to come all the way out here in his embroidered velvet curly-shoes. And also this kid is technically assigned by God as your natural superior, or something.
So fine. You hoist the coffin onto your shoulder (it's not like the Prince can do it. He's eight.) and head back toward the castle, Prince chattering blithely all the way. And then you turn your ankle on a rock and suddenly there's a thump and a cough and a lot of shouting from inside the coffin and you have now become a key player in a tense political incident with the next kingdom over.
You should probably ask for a raise.
WAIT NO THIS IS GLORIOUS
You know the Grimm version of Snow White makes more sense than most versions if only because in that version Snow White was like 7 years old.
Like imagine you find a 7 year old in the woods and she’s like my mom is gonna kill me because I’m prettier than her and she’s not kidding. You know this queen is that sort of person. So you and your roommates adopt the kid and tell her don’t talk to strangers. And she keeps talking to strangers and getting poison combs stuck in her hair and whatnot.
Like yeah that’s kinda stupid but also she’s seven. She likes apples.
Also imagine it from the hunter’s perspective. The queen tells you this bitch is prettier than me I need you to take her out in the woods and kill her. And then you see who you’re supposed to kill and it’s a 2nd grader. Like how are you supposed to react to that sort of situation? Kill a human child? No. Because you’re not a brainless evil minion you’re just some guy dealing with a cartoonishly evil monarch. Of course you let her go.
Bad look for the Prince of course. Even if she did age while she was in that glass case. He saw a dead woman and just decided to keep her. And once she stopped being dead he was like we’re married now
He did cause the evil queen to dance to death in red hot shoes though. That was kinda cool.
With the acknowledgement that I'm grasping at straws, is it ever directly confirmed that the Prince wasn't also 7?
See, I think that still works.
You are the guardsman assigned to protect the eight-year-old Prince. You are currently in the middle of the forest because he absolutely had his heart set on "going hunting", and the royal second-grader should definitely not be traipsing around the woods on his own. You let him go a little on ahead and he comes running back talking about how there's a dead girl in the clearing and there's no-one else around and he wants to take her home because she's really pretty, Hans, and she's all alone!
You let him drag you to said clearing and okay, that is one angelic-looking dead child alright, and on the one hand the quality of her clothes and the craftsmanship on the coffin (who builds a see-through coffin?) speak to potential Consequences if you simply carry her off, but also for the amount of vines that have grown on the coffin she looks extraordinarily un-decayed, so you should probably get the court alchemist's opinion on that, and there's no way he's going to come all the way out here in his embroidered velvet curly-shoes. And also this kid is technically assigned by God as your natural superior, or something.
So fine. You hoist the coffin onto your shoulder (it's not like the Prince can do it. He's eight.) and head back toward the castle, Prince chattering blithely all the way. And then you turn your ankle on a rock and suddenly there's a thump and a cough and a lot of shouting from inside the coffin and you have now become a key player in a tense political incident with the next kingdom over.
You should probably ask for a raise.
WAIT NO THIS IS GLORIOUS
Do you actually care about transmascs or do you just like slapping top scars on fictional twinks and talking about boy pussy
Do you actually care about transfems or do you just like talking about girl cock and throwing around performative 'yass queen's and call people 'mommy' on their transition timelines
Do you actually care about nonbinary people or do you just like talking about 'they/them pussy' and drawing skinny white fem-leaning androgynous people and calling them 'nonbinary'
Controversial take if I've ever heard one
