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To socialise or not....

grendalsbane

Since realising that I was 'differently minded', over one and a half years ago, I have pretty much stripped everything away in order to start my life from scratch.

I am now at a point where I am feeling the need for human interaction outside of the only two people I spend time with at the moment (my daughter and dad).

But do I take the leap and enter the world that I never really saw eye to eye with anyway?

If I do, then do I mask and hope I don't get 'found out', which I have always done and it never works out. As it tends to led me to meltdowns where I can no longer keep the mask up. Or do I take the plunge and just be me, or at least as close to being me as I can manage.

I know I will never find people the traditional way, so I have been looking at groups to join on places like Meetup so as to at least give me a fighting chance. Yet, even this is difficult as so many of them are aimed at the usual audience who enjoy going to packed pubs playing live music and other such events that make me anxious just thinking about.

Maybe I am looking in the wrong places or expecting something that doesn't exist.

Maybe the time is not right for me to start looking for friends etc, if it makes me feel this way?

Sorry for waffling on.

  • in reply to Just some guy

    I think something like that could work for me. A way to socialise where it has a structure and rules. Thank you for the suggestion.

  • Maybe find something fun to do, that lets you choose the extent to which you engage with others?

    When I was working away from home (four nights a week for five years) I took up a new hobby: Social dancing. Sure, you have to spend three minutes in close physical proximity with a dance partner, but you don't have to talk to him/her and when the song ends, you walk away, choose whether to find another partner or just go outside to recover for a bit.

    The dance style I do (Modern Jive) has very structured class evenings and the whole social engagement side is sorted by a simple rule: Anybody can ask anybody to dance, and you always say, "yes". That means that you can always assume that person A asking person B to dance is doing so because they want a dance, and nothing else, whether that's actually true or not and whether you're person A, person B or just watching them both.

    Takes a lot of the "trying to understand what's going on" stress out of the equation and although a couple of times I've got home and thought, "Oh! She actually wanted more than a dance!" nobody got offended, nobody was upset and hey, at least I did give her a good dance.

    But that's just an example. Plenty of other hobbies and interests out there that involve selective social engagement and give you something fun to do anyway.

  • Hello Grendalsbane.

    Very difficult subject for me. My first post on this forum was an enquiry about social clubs for autistic people in my area. After some thought I realised that I am never going to be able to attend something like that. My profuse apologies to those wonderful people who wasted their time replying to my enquiry. 

    There must be some way to socialise where you just meet one or two people at a time perhaps for 15 or 20 minutes and then can scurry home and be alone again.  Smiley

  • in reply to .

    Thank you.

    It does seem like a good place here. I have been a member for a while now but tend to lurk in the background most of the time.

  • You’ll find a good community here. For me it’s become an antedote to offline communication. All positive