Published on 12, July, 2020
I joined here around 5 months ago.
Since that time it's come to mean different things to me.
I think sharing experiences is invaluable but equally invaluable is the honesty I find here.
It's a place where we can talk about shared experience /our emotions/difficulties in a way that's impossible in the 'real' world - or at least if we speak about it there, it's unlikely to be understood.
It's a place to connect in a world where we often find connecting difficult.
I've received some PMs recently that have made me focus more on how very important this community can be to us as individuals.
Luna RIP called this her 'forum family'.
As a person who doesn't seek friendship (?or thinks she doesn't?), some surprising and valuable friendships have evolved from here for me.
How about you?
I agree with a lot of what you've written. I do have a blog where I write about some of the things we talk about here and I get empathetic responses, but my readers there are mostly allistic and don't always understand fully what I mean. I do also feel an "intersectionality" in my life, that my autistic identity intersects with my Jewish identity in ways that are hard to explain to someone who doesn't have both identities. I haven't really got a place to talk about that.
I don't know that I've made friends here, although I would like to. I do think I should start friending people here, but I'm scared of rejection or bothering people who aren't interested in being friends with me, particularly as one friend response I made got ignored (or, charitably, didn't sent properly or they had their own anxiety that stopped them responding).