Published on 12, July, 2020
I am yet to be diagnosed and really struggling with all the faux pas I've probably committed over the years. I have extreme social anxiety, but when actually committed to a conversation I open up far too much and living in a small community its just making me not want to go out at all.
I've tried masking for years but truth is I just don't have the energy to mask or keep friendships going. I'm panicking a lot and feel at odds with the world. I feel too much! I feel like a fraud as I have no diagnosis, I feel like I will lose the plot if I'm diagnosed and be even worse if I remain undiagnosed. I am sick of hearing were all on the spectrum it just doesn't help me at all I don't understand the world or the people in it and want to hide away or be mute.
I don't have any answers no one takes me seriously so I don't feel like I can talk about it.
I think you are depresed, We all say embarring things I cringe at some of the things I said or did half a centuary ago. Thats life. everybody does it. With todays technology everybody losing the ability to communicate face to face, it will become more common the upside the Recipient of the comment will be just as affected and not take any notice., I have just had to think back to 72 years ago to what I said to my mother now dead about her new Hair do and still cringe at the offence I caused, and wish I had not said it.I said what any 7 year old boy would have said at a change in your mothers appearance not knowing a compliment was sought.
Myadvice Think about what you like doing Make a list and chose and do it, until you getfed up. when you have found something else.
Thank you I do need to get proactive yes I am very depressed at the moment
NAS38972 said:Thats life. everybody does it.
This is no more useful than the "everybody is on the spectrum" response that the OP has already said they're fed up with. As someone I very much respect on another forum often says; "autism isn't about the what, it's about the why."
That a non-autistic person's social intuition sometimes fails is not surprising; intuition is a shortcut which enables fast social reactions, but this speed entails a certain amount of inaccuracy - which is sometimes regrettable, but easily accepted as just the kind of lapses experienced by most people from time to time.
For many autistic people, that intuitive response is simply not there, and has to be compensated for with an awful lot of conscious analysis. Being stumped for answers to social brain-teasers isn't a matter of random errors for us; it is our default state, against which we are constantly battling. The surprise is not that we sometimes make the same kind of errors, but that our constant, fatiguing vigilance is often able to reduce them to a level which causes people to be casually dismissive of our inner struggle. It is this difference, the ever-present need for hyper-vigilance, and an inability to resolve the issues even with the benefit of hindsight, which leads to the kind of persistent social anxiety described by the OP.
Simply comparing observable behaviours without considering the thought processes which cause them is one of the biggest problems with the understanding of autism, in my opinion. It is correct that there is no autistic behaviour which "everybody" doesn't also do "sometimes" - even the more extreme behaviours such as melt-downs and dissociation. However, there is a big difference between occasional lapses of intuition and the systemic errors of a developmental condition (which is where the expertise of a professional diagnostic team can be crucial.)