Sorry for the extra delayed response. The more in-depth comments take me a bit to process. Not only that, I also had a thorough response typed out that I accidentally lost when I clicked on something. 🤦

Dw :) i get that. And that is super annoying when it happens.

I’m happy for you! I’m working on getting there. I’ve been keeping notes of my experiences with people to become more aware of my interactions with them over longer time spans and my associated emotions.

Now that’s certainly an interesting idea. Generally for me I’m quite hypersensitive to if someone makes me feel like shit often (in particular, I will remember certain types of Red Flag events or behaviour forever, like they are burned into my memory), so I have less of an issue with needing to do this.

I’ve not considered doing that as a general thing though, even if I do spend time analysing my own thought patterns while with other people so I do do that a bit by simple coincidence ^.

I wasn’t aware I was autistic until early this year. Beforehand, I just thought I was broken or a shit human in social situations. Still, I experience the same thing, except that when I would ask for time alone or to for someone to stop overwhelming me and they didn’t stop, I would lose my cool and become directly insulting by pointing out their lack of respect, consideration, and boundaries. I wouldn’t do it with the intention to insult them, but I would not hold back on what I saw as purposeful behaviors to trigger my reaction. Now, I’ve been doing much better at keeping people like that out of my life. Finding out I am autistic has been one of the most helpful points of my life.

People who actually respect your own needs and boundaries rather than just ignoring them are great :)

For me I find the most important thing is finding people who understand sensory overload. As long there isn’t more than one conversation going on around me (too many people talking at once is very stressful), the main thing for me is overload from light/noise/smell/heat (especially heat) etc.

When its with aother autistic people (or neurotypical people who actually try to get it) I usually find conversations the opposite of overloading as long as I’ve not reached a threshold of general sensory overload or stress and emotional frustration from poor coordination/planning/predictability/cohesion in terms of what to do or where to go.

Often for me it can be more just being physically around other people who I feel comfortable with even if I feel too exhausted or overloaded to talk/do language ^., for me I will endure quite bad sensory overload to be around people I like even if I don’t talk very much/become much less verbal… though that’s more sensory overload, but other types that are rarer for me, like emotional overload, are a bit different.

But yeah for sure being around people who don’t set off these kinds of things and don’t ignore things like overload is great (it’s one of the things I find other autistic people are good about when socialising with… if you say you’re experiencing sensory overload they often will understand, and I have found that they can sometimes tell when I am experiencing that and vice-versa ;p, and ask if I am doing ok etc.)

I haven’t gotten anywhere near building that social circle, but it’s motivating to know that it’s possible.

Yes, it is great :)

Yes! Not only have I stopped trying to mask, I’m finding it hard to mask now that I’ve taken off the mask. It’s weird, but I really like it.

Yeah, I know other people who’ve done this. I could never mask effectively but trying to do so made me feel… empty. In a horrible way. I couldn’t re-mask or re-try-to-mask to any significant degree now even if I wanted to (and the way it feels… nope. Even just the minor scripts I still use sometimes feel wrong and un-genuine and dissociatey a lot).

Deconstructing the mask - or the poor attenpt at one, in my case - has been amazing for my mental health at least. It’s good, for me, to feel like myself.

I think that’s really cool 😎 I bet you’re an interesting person that can hold meaningful and insightful conversations.

I enjoy doing it, and thanks ;p. The main thing is I like to understand why I believe and feel and act like what I do, make my own views more consistent.

I do have lots of strong philosophical and political viewpoints because of it though, it can cause some fun and spicy conversations sometimes ;3

One of the suggestions we received from the community was to develop a wiki-style page for our community. While the mods have started working on a glossary, we can’t gotten anywhere near building a wiki. If you’re interested, maybe you can helps out out with a wiki. We can create a shared Google Docs (or other system that’s FOSS) to build one. It’s completely fine if you don’t want to. We get it. It’s a lot of work.

I don’t mind contributing to a wiki, though I’m not in a position to create one from scratch rn (I have already got a lot of projects, some FOSS stuff, technology stuff, etc.) but if you want technical advice and information on how to set something up I can compile information and take questions, I just wouldn’t be able to actually administrate it.

If you want FOSS collab tools, https://cryptpad.fr/ is pretty decent last I checked.