Edit: A few people have interpreted the title as serious, so I wanna clarify that it was meant as a sarcastic joke about how little sense the neurotypical world makes to me, but it is still legitimately me asking for help understanding said neurotypical world.
Was having a conversation with a friend today about why I seem unapproachable to people online. Apparently it’s for 2 reasons.
One is that I say “K.” all the time, as a short way of saying okay. She pointed out that most people find this rude and offensive. This kinda baffled me, because like why? She explained that like, if somebody were to give a long emotional speech and I just responded “K.” that would be offensive. That confounds me. So it’s rude in one context, and neurotypicals have decided to be offended by it in all contexts? But the reason it’s rude is what confuses me more. Apparently it’s considered lazy because you could have just typed out the word, but like, that applies to all text speech and nobody’s mad about people shortening those words.
But it got more confusing when she explained the second reason, which is that I end all of my sentences with proper punctuation, which she said “makes people feel like I’m done with the conversation and not interested.” But just a second ago improper grammar was rude, and now proper grammar is rude instead.
It baffles me. You can’t just use proper or improper grammar. Use too much improper grammar and you’re lazy and rude. Use too little and you’re also rude. But you can’t just use any improper grammar, you have to use the very specific subset of improper grammar that’s been deemed acceptable and not lazy (even though it’s exactly as lazy as what they do consider lazy.)
To be clear, I’m not bitter, and I’m definitely gonna adjust my behavior to hopefully seem a little less rude to people. I think that’s just a nice thing to do. I just find the neurotypical mind utterly fascinating. I don’t think they even realize how many contradictions exist in the social rules they all so easily accept.
K
Your friend is at least partially misinforming you. It’s fine to write k instead of ok in almost all situations. But either of them can be rude if the other person would expect more emotive words. For example here’s when k is fine:
Them: Bring my pen when you come into the other room
You: k
And here’s where k is not fine:
Them: Wanna go grab some drinks tonight at 8?
You: k
That’s rude. They would want to hear you actually be interested in their invitation. Like saying “great” or “I’m in” or whatever.
…Ooooh. I think that’s what she was trying to tell me actually and I just completely misunderstood. That second example is a type of situation I used it a lot in. I didn’t realize people needed to know how interested I was. I thought they just needed a quick confirmation.
Often people are looking for some sort of validation, even when it’s not obvious.
If they say “I can’t join you in the bar today, I have too much work to catch up on”, “K.” is not a good answer. Several aspects needs to be addressed, ideally:
- That’s too bad
- Next time
- Commentary on the state of work: Keep your head above water/your boss is such a jerk/we’ll make up for it after your deadline on Thursday/whatever, depending on the situation and your relationship.
Basically, it’s a way to show that you care about what they’re telling you. It can be a bit exhausting at times.
K
I hope I won’t be too long on the topic. This is an historical question.
Why it’s like this, why are NTs deciding for us? It began in the Renaissance period with René Descartes. He was a philosophe and saw the human body as a machine. He wrote about this vision of the human. Each organ, muscle, bones are a piece of the machine. He did a direct comparison between the human and the material.
Later in the first half of the 19th century, an astronomer, and statistician had the idea to use statistics for human. Prior, statistic were in majority an instrument used for astronomy. Adolphe Quételet studied Scottish soldiers to make statistics of the human. He went further and did not only statistics on the body. He did statistics about injuries, body, and a lot more. With all of this, Quételet invented the average person. Without statistics, you can’t have an average person. This idea is important for the following. It’s also the key idea at the beginning of eugenic.
Someone was very interested in this topic. At the point, he coined the word “eugenic” itself. Francis Galton was the half-cousin of Charles Darwin. He came from a wealthy family and really like the work of his half-cousin on evolution. But, Galton wanted to apply it to society. He was also inspired by the concept of the average person of Quételet. Galton diverges of both of his predecessors. For Galton, the average person was not the person in the middle. No, it was the person at the bottom. There is a shift down compared to Quételet.
The poorer, the people without education, disabled, slaves, race shouldn’t be considered with Galton. There were just this average for the one able to work and earn what they need to survive. The others were not even at the bottom of the social ladder.
People with education, wealthy people, were of course at the top of this ladder. Galton also believed in birth control based on the assumption of the categorization of the human. Wealthy should reproduce as their genetic was better.
On this base, Galton developed a lot of theories that we still use nowadays, and in particular in psychology and psychiatry. But, his ideas in pathology survived.
More general, some of his ideas and theories are still around. Eugenic was very popular at the beginning of the 20th century – Galton began his work at the second half of the 19th century. People founded during this time eugenic society, university cursus, etc.
With WWII, eugenic fall in disgrace. People working in the field made a shift in their career. They went to psychology, psychiatry, philosophy, sociology, anthropology…
In the 50s and later in the 60s and 70s, a new movement emerged with anti-psychiatry. In this ideology, you will find many points of view. They had and have in common that we should not intern people that aren’t the average person, in other words the norm. Yes, the average person of Galton became a norm. If people are disabled, they don’t produce anything and aren’t included in the norm. They interned these unproductive people. Some went against it.
But, in one side of anti-psychiatry, you had people who think that people with psyachiatric issues were faking it. The idea is that people are lazy and invented their illness, condition, difference to do nothing. These people in anti-psychiatry wanted to close the asylums, so people will have to work. Spoiler alert: It didn’t work, and people ended on the street or in jail.
But, all these people thinking people were lazy were in the normal at least. This scheme continued to today, and we end with NTs in charge of deciding…
I can only recommend the read of the book “Empire of Normality; Neurodiversity and Capitalism”, by Robert Chapman.
K can give the impression that you don’t care and don’t want to be bothered with it. The effort in your response is expected to be proportional to the effort it took to write the message to you.
If someone write a long personal message to you, and all you responds is K, then it gives the impression that you might not even read the message. Why even bother next time?
Proper grammar in informal settings is a difficult one, but this is my theory:
It might give the impression of mismatch in vibes. There’s a difference in informal speak and formal speak, and participants in a conversation are expected to be in the same wavelength. An extreme example, but it’s like when everybody is dressed casually at a social gathering, but you decide to show up in a three piece suit.
They are not in charge. It’s just that autistic people sometimes take non-critically not even what they are told, but the situation and the emotion as something normal, because that other person is more social and knows how it is.
The rules are different for every tone, discourse, context, etc. Adjusting for one of them won’t do much good even.
You won’t ever lift the weight of adjusting yourself for such expectations well enough. Putting more trust in your own perception of what’s rude and what isn’t is the only way to deal with it.
I mean, probably a therapist would say that. Still ask your therapist and not Lemmy.
I mean, probably a therapist would say that. Still ask your therapist and not Lemmy.
The funny part is I asked here specifically because I was directed to by a psychiatrist. They thought the best people to ask would be other people with autism who’ve already learned better how to interact because they’ll understand what I need to hear better.
She also told me to consult the friend mentioned in my post, which is how that conversation started.
The reason I’m trying so hard to understand is because I keep having mental health crises over my inability to communicate and the fact that I have a habit of making people really mad and not knowing why or what I did to cause it. Being not only an outcast but having everyone hate me and not just imagining that is very stressful.
Trusting myself to know what’s rude doesn’t work. I piss people off extremely easily and don’t even notice I did until they’re refusing to speak to me.I have the same problem.
When a conflict arises, just tell them what you think about it and that they are assholes both for deciding to be offended without asking you and for thinking that their idea of being nice is the only right one. Be more aggressive and open about what you think both when behaving like you do and when evaluating their response and opinions on that. And don’t ask, beg or otherwise put yourself in a dependent\lower position.
Some of those people will get pissed off even more, because they were consciously abusing this, to be honest. Like with bullying at school, liking it that you’re “wrong” and they are “normal”. And if you feel yourself cut off, that succeeded and they are fine with it, and if you don’t, they really won’t like it. Expect mischief and cowardly shit behind your back from such.
But some will understand you better and won’t make that mistake further. Well, after a few such aggressive actions, because it’s not easy to understand immediately. These are much more numerous than you’d think.
Never try to track your own reactions, “mistakes” and correct for those. You’ll get overloaded with depressive thoughts and indecisiveness.
Those people are smart enough to understand what is what. Some of them will if given better context, which I called aggressive. And some of them are consciously attacking you because they can.
As far as I understand, people generally assume I’m being rude and dismissive, but they don’t tell me that, they just kinda stop talking. Then they go and ask my friend why I’m like that, where she explains to them that I’m not being rude, I just have difficulty communicating, at which point they usually accept that, but still don’t talk to me much because I’m just too difficult to get close to. Or at least they think I am, because they don’t realize I’m enjoying their company because I don’t express it, because I just assume they’d know because I’m paying attention to them.
That’s what I’m working on. Showing people that I’m genuinely enjoying their company, that when they ask me questions I’m happy to answer, and so on. So it’s not so much a problem of people not being willing to adapt to me, but the fact that they as much as me don’t know how to adapt, so I need to meet them in the middle.but the fact that they as much as me don’t know how to adapt, so I need to meet them in the middle.
That may be true, but many times you’ll find out that the other side considers only meeting at their side the polite behavior. Because they’re “normal”.
Because it’s not that hard to meet in the middle, just remembering that people are different does that.
I’m aware, and thanks for the advice. I’ve experienced a little of this already since I’ve been applying the advice I’ve gotten here. Luckily, so far, most have been willing to put some effort in now that I’ve shown I’m willing to as well. It’s easy enough to just not talk to the people who won’t, because they’re already not trying.
