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credburn posted:Eye contact sucks and I hate it. I practice really hard at maintaining it during conversation, but sometimes my focus is so centered on that that I lose track of what the other person is saying. The more anxious I am, the harder it is. When I make eye contact, I feel like I'm suddenly on a perfectly even.... what is the word? It's like the person I'm speaking with and myself are exactly equal in terms of social position, mutual respect, all that. And it's like a secret battle of attrition. Each second I feel weaker and weaker, and smaller, like I'm being judged, and I feel like my ability to think creatively or maintain an awareness of my surroundings diminishes. I have to give up eye contact briefly to reset myself, and try to pretend like I'm not being overwhelmed by judgment and criticism.  It's shocking to read something that describes my feelings so well. I hate eye contact, and I also hate that by not making it I'm hurting a fair few people or making them uncomfortable, and it's part of the reason why being around people who don't know I'm on the spectrum is so unspeakably awful. It's a real barrier to one on one interaction for me, and I can't make or meet with friends unless we're in a group of three or more so someone can take the pressure off me from time to time.
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Oct 13, 2019 00:22
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turd in my singlet posted:The thing about the autism "spectrum" is that it isn't like a linear gradient of "autistic/not autistic", it's a collection of traits that can be more or less present in basically any combination and people who share the same traits may experience them very differently. "If you've met one autistic person, you've met one autistic person" is a common phrase I've seen in the community, which means that the experience of autism isn't really generalizable beyond a tendency towards certain traits. It's this for me. I get turbo focused on whatever task I'm doing and switching causes stress Because I am ill at ease with uncertainty I also tend to get into these thought spirals in which I try to envision every possible negative outcome of a new development so that I'm prepared for the worst that could happen. It's extremely time- and energy-consuming and makes it difficult to bring my focus onto the new task. Meds helped a lot with making these less anxiety-laced but there's no getting rid of them, now I just cooly examine the eight thousand possible pitfalls of having to unexpectedly go to the grocery store for a lemon on a busy Saturday during a pandemic. Unstructured time at work makes me vibrate with distress
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Mar 9, 2021 15:20
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