April 29th: Let's talk about relationships, both platonic and romantic. How are your relationships with your family (parents/siblings/etc)? Are they generally supportive and understanding of you as an autistic person? If you have (non-autistic) siblings, do you feel as though you were treated differently from them growing up or even now? What about friends? Is making friends something you find hard or easy? How does being autistic affect your friendships? Are you now or have you ever been in a romantic relationship? Have your partners been understanding of your needs as an autistic person? In what ways does being autistic affect your relationship?
I'm gonna break up this question into sections so I can keep track of what I have/haven't answered yet.
How are your relationships with your family (parents/siblings/etc)? Are they generally supportive and understanding of you as an autistic person?
I don't interact with much of my extended family for reasons that aren't related to autism, so I haven't actually told that many of them. The only relatives that know are my parents and my aunt (my dad's sister). Both my dad and my aunt are AuDHD I'm pretty sure. My aunt agrees fully and is currently trying to get a diagnosis, and my dad thinks the autism part at least makes sense but doesn't feel a need to do anything about it.
I've never had any issues with my aunt. She's always been one of the easiest people for me to hang out with. When I was growing up she was never mean to me or scolded me for not being able to do certain things or having weird, random things that set me off. She just did what she could to help. She also let me infodump at her for several consecutive hours one time a few years ago, and then got so interested in what I was talking about that she sat down with me and we watched a ton of videos related to the same topic as well. I've never met a more deeply curious and open minded person. She's even among the few people who ask me questions about movies I like or music I listen to, just because she's interested. I've also never had a problem with her misreading my emotions or intentions, and she makes me laugh a lot.
I used to have some problems with my dad, and still do to some extent, but I think he kinda logicked his way into being more understanding. What I mean by that is he used to be really rigid about when and how I had to do things, and viewed me doing anything outside of that as attempting to challenge his authority. But eventually he realized that wasn't working and switched tactics, and the new tactic is actually having heartfelt conversations with me 😭. Nowadays he'll do something, then a few hours to a few days later ask me how I feel about it, and adjust from there. He's also always deeply understood my not wanting excessive attention, so he never pushed me to talk to people or be in clubs at school or anything like that, but if I decided I wanted to do those things he'd help me.
I talked a fair bit about my mom in one of the earliest prompts, because she's the neurotypical person I spend the most time with. I'll try not to repeat myself too much, but I constantly feel like I have to put my masking skills into overdrive when I'm around her, because any little thing I'll do will get read as a sign I don't like her. I take too long to respond to something she says, I don't look happy enough in any given context, I don't participate enough in social situations (she's gotten better about this one), I have a meltdown, etc, she's mad about it. She'll also swear she knows how I'm feeling, even if I flat out tell her she's wrong. And I end up having to apologize for things I didn't even do. She's also made disparaging comments about how invested I get in things (my special interests), how I get upset by things she doesn't notice or think are that significant (sensory things), and that she thinks I act more helpless/clueless than I am. When I was still navigating getting an autism diagnosis, she started saying things like "I hope you don't get too obsessed with this," and something about how I was doing fine before, so the only reason I'd want to get a diagnosis was if I wanted an excuse to stop doing things (she also separately complained about how little I did around the house, especially considering I wasn't in school and was barely working at all. I don't know exactly what she thought I was doing that I wanted to get out of).
What about friends? Is making friends something you find hard or easy?
Making friends is really hard. I mostly made friends by accident by being in proximity to people for several hours a day, five days a week, for several consecutive years. Eventually I would get used to some people's presence and start talking to them, and we'd be friends until we weren't forced into each other's proximity anymore.
The one friend I have now, I met and exclusively speak to online. We first started talking to each other because he made a post on a forum saying "I need friends, I listen to these three bands, if you also need friends and listen to these three bands then message me about them," which in hindsight is the most autistic thing imaginable. I liked all three, and I messaged him and we started talking about them. We mostly spoke about music for a few months and kinda branched out to other things from there.
This, I've realized, is the only reliable way I can make friends. Having a shared task or interest that takes up all our time together until I get to know them well enough to calm down a little bit and just start yapping about whatever. But doing that requires me to find someone who shares an interest with me, so :(
How does being autistic affect your friendships?
Just physically talking to people is hard. Finding a topic I can somewhat successfully maintain a conversation about is even harder. And the maintenance of constantly thinking of things to do, and when, and for how long is a nightmare. That's where most of my attempts at a friendship crumble, because I'm putting in all the work to actually figure out the logistics of us hanging out, and I get burnt out. Though maybe the people who never try to help me make plans didn't really like me in the first place.
Also! People take it personally when I say I'm too tired, stressed etc to hang out with them at certain times or frequencies. A lot of people have this kinda "if you liked me, you'd always want to be near me," mentality, which I can't relate to.
That's another great thing about the friend I have: it was established very early on that he might forget to respond when I message him, so if it's been a day or two I can just say the same thing again. I also adopted a rapid fire kind of texting style, where each sentence is its own message, so he's getting 3 reminders that I said something instead of one. I don't forget so much as I don't feel like talking or can't type for a period of time, but he shows me the same courtesy of just assuming I was too busy/stressed to answer and not ignoring him. We can go several days without talking and it's not a problem. Sometimes we'll say something like "having a hard time, probably won't text for a while" and the other person will just wait it out. It's literally so easy for us to communicate with each other it's actually mind-blowing.
And I don't have siblings or romantic partners, so I guess that's it for this one.
