Here's what I've noticed:
1. I do not know when to enter a conversation. True, many time I just give up or say nothing.
2. People have commented all of my life that I look mad, that I squint my eyes, or that I lack facial expression and/or am extremely difficult, if not impossible, to read.
Yes. My sight is also not great so I tend to squint andI also frown when I am concentrating. I told someone once that I was really very straight forward and easy tounderstand and they told me I was deep as the ocean. I still don't agree.
3. My tone of voice does not always correspond with the situation.
hmmm yes and I sometimes make this happen. I will change tone to get the point across. Just because very few people really know what is going on in my head.
4. I am likely to begin a conversation right in the middle of what I have spent twenty minutes contemplating in my head; therefore, interrupting the current topic of conversation.
yes this really confuses people. i am not even aware of doing it sometimes.
5. I am infamous for one-liners. When I was in graduate school and at after-parties (after authors came to town to read from their novels we would have a party hosting them) I would stand in one spot and people would come up to me, I'd say a one-liner, and then they would go away. I'd observe the interactions of the other people and wonder why I could never achieve that level of interaction. Sometimes it made me feel lonely.
Lonliness is a very bad feeling. When trying to explain myself to my children, I tell them that I can not stand to be in a room full of people and to have the awful pain of lonliness. I would rather stay alone in the first place. This is the dominant feeling in my life these days.
6. When people find out I have autism they sometimes do not seem to care what I think, yes, but these are really ignorant people.
there are plenty of them around.
7. People have also discredited my opinion until they find out I am "so called" formally educated, then suddenly they start talking to me like I matter. This feels insulting.
Yes I agree with this also. they then expect me to be a walking library.
8. I cannot tell when people are joking, yet I have perfected the skill of keeping a straight face and freaking other people out with my own jokes. Then people cannot understand how I can do this, but not know that they are joking. It's called "mind blindness".
I am not good with jokes.
And there's probably more that I'll think of, but these are a few things.
I don't try to socialize too much any more. It usually goes ok the first time, but soon I feel isolated again and don't have much to say for fear of that awful feeling that will soon creep up on me--that feeling that I did something really wrong or that feeling of intense confusion or that feeling of something I don't know how to identify because the feeling is too complex for me to label based on my understanding of feelings.
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"Gord Brody: Look, dad
your last statement is very apt actually. A few years ago I had been off work for sometime after I lost my sight in one eye. My post was funded by the local government and it was due to be renewed.
the day I returned to work I was told I would have to do a presentation on my work for the department. I had 3 days to prepare. I ended up being in the office at 5.30 am to get all the information ready for the meeting.
I knew what was likely to happen to the support I was supposed to get from my manager. I wentthrough the presentation alone with no support, not tomy own department but to 5 different departments that were interested in my work. the air conditioning and the lights were faulty, and I became more and more distressed, as well as coping with the loss of vision.
At the end I feltlike I had personally offended everyone in the room. I left and broke down in total distress.
I had actually gained and extension of my funding for double the period I was aiming for and I was congratulated by each one of them. i had to meet one of them a few days laterto collect some data and discuss some cases. Even then I was in tears quietly as I arrived at the office, because I still believed I had offended this woman somehow.
