Saerdna posted:

I kind of summarized my reading and thinking in this

Autism is:

1. atypical cognitive development combined with
2. person/environment mismatch, which
3. leads to social and practical problems
4. that are not understood by the majority population
5. and consequently punished


The social:

When I see non-autistics interacting, it seems to me that they mostly interact through manipulating an imagined medium. Which I think of as "the social". I don't see or feel the social, I can only observe it indirectly.

A highly developed sense of this social medium, and ability to manipulate it, is prototypical of "normal development". When autistic adults don't sense or manipulate it, this indicates to non-autistics that they're deficient in some way.

I think I can pretend to sense and manipulate the social medium. But I don't think I can actually sense and manipulate it. It will be acting. I think this is an important disctinction, and an important reason why learning to act "normal" can be so harmful.

This also helps to explain why eye contact be so uncomfortable. Without the social medium it's too intimate for most situations.

I first started thinking about this when I noticed that groups of non-autistics would often kind of float from topic to topic like butterflies, just touching one thing and then fluttering away. It's incomprehensible to me.

I thought this might be two things:

1. They score very low on monotropism, and don't get "stuck" on any/most topics.
2. They're not really talking about these topics, but instead co-operatively constructing and manipulating the "social" medium.