tlbodine:

grison-in-space:

bread-tab:

she-waves-at-cats:

I think it needs to become common knowledge that “inability to read social cues” can show up as overcompensating.

You don’t know how much misbehaviour is allowed, so you become the perfect child who never tests rules.

You don’t know if someone is irritated with you, so you’ll be extra generous and self-effacing.

You don’t know how much is expected of you at work so you’ll kill yourself in a minimum-wage job and not notice that nobody else is working like this.

“Hardworking and quiet” should be as much of an autism red flag as “ignores rules and doesn’t know when to stop talking”. Or why don’t we just start using words to communicate so i can stop tracking everybody’s eyebrow twitches, that would be great.

Sometimes (though not nearly as often) you get subtypes of this where overcompensating even grows into a special interest. I’m looking at you, autistic actors, psychologists, etiquette experts, interculturalists, anthropologists, sociologists, hospitality gurus, fiction writers, philosophers… All you bemused scholars of humanity.

“Ah, this doesn’t apply to me… after years of intense study, I can reliably read most social cues!”

When you spend all day in a performance where you are so incredibly Normal and Socially Skilled and then collapse into a nonverbal puddle as soon as you get home, that’s an autism.

…

Also. “Not picking up on social cues” is a frame of the situation which looks in from the outside, where “social cues” are a mundane, obvious facet of reality.

As an internal experience, it feels more like: “Most other human beings are weird and unpredictable, especially in groups. They seem to have shared sets of secret rules and nearly imperceptible ways of communicating which lead to erratic, disturbing behavior.”

In addition: if you notice that your ability to parse and respond to social cues suddenly goes to absolute shit when you are tired or distracted… you might be looking at hypervigilant social compensation. like a swan gliding through a pond full of sailboats. sure, you might actually be more maneuverable and faster than the sailboats in some circumstances, but boy howdy are those little feets paddling underneath the surface..

….oh.

(via thesweetpianowritingdownmylife)