I want to make friends with fellow Auties and Aspies

Hi James

I’m always open to friendship.

But my conversational skills are at preschooler level. So basically I find it hard to connect with anyone, autistic or not.

Hi James

I’m always open to friendship.

But my conversational skills are at preschooler level. So basically I find it hard to connect with anyone, autistic or not.

I would say, from the conversations that we’ve had Aurora, that your conversation skills are at a very advanced level. 

However, the majority of people, (including a lot of autistic people, because they often mimic the masses) speak or converse at a very base level. And this is not a criticism, not at all, not of us knows how to communicate until we learn how to and many people never learn. That’s just how it is right now.  

Most people don’t even ever really listen to what the other person is saying. They’re either thinking about what they’re going to do tonight or they’ve projecting their own thoughts and judgements of themselves onto others, or they’re thinking about what they’re going to say just as soon as the other person stops talking etc etc etc.

They’re mostly not present and not listening at all so their skills of conversation are pretty dire. I wouldn’t compare myself against the majority, if I were you, it’s not a good bench mark for conversational skills and for many autistic people, it takes a lot of effort to get that rubbish at conversing! Meaning, we seem to dislike that surface level type of, what we perceive as meaningless, conversation so we have to practice hard to become that shallow.

If we were to converse with people who understood us etc and we were talking about a topic of conversation that we loved and we felt safe, appreciated and valued etc we would have a great conversation ~ but they look nothing like typical nt type conversations. I adore the conversations I have with my autistic friends (off line), they’re so random, so ‘not’ two way and yet we don’t have arguments, we don’t think the other person is being rude or any of those other judgements that can often be thrown at us. 

I have found that most people don’t know how to listen and they don’t know how to have a conversation but if anybody tries to converse any differently to what they’re used to,  the other person is seen as difficult, rude, argumentative etc etc. 

I have found that this is how I come across to most nt people and even some autistic people on here. I’ve never been seen that way by the autistic people I’ve met in person, but on here, some take me the wrong way simply because I see the world differently to them and so like nt’s, they therefore think I must be intentionally rude or whatever and they hear what they want to hear and not what I say. 

But we are all the same. We have all had to learn how to converse etc and some of us do learn and some don’t. It doesn’t matter whether we do or we don’t. If we want to we will and if we don’t, we will get by anyway, one way or another. And regardless of how well I can converse with nt’s, I now choose not to (unless it is of benefit to me) because to me, life is too short to be going around explaining myself etc, I’d rather just be me and be around people who don’t need endless explanations etc.