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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I appreciate your candor and self-awareness. I'm going to relate an experience I had with someone like you, in the spirit of honesty.

I had a friend some years ago who was the same age you are now. She engage in a host of behaviors that were, yes, annoying, but also sometimes hurtful and unkind. She was later diagnosed with ADHD and I think in retrospect some of her behaviors were due to ADHD.

She likely perceived me as being like the people you describe -- letting things built up until I exploded at her. But I didn't let anything build up. I told her about the behaviors that bothered me as they came up. She didn't hear me. For instance, she had a habit of telling lies or half truths a lot. I would call her on this and ask for explanations ("That doesn't make sense. You told me last week you didn't know that person and now you are calling them your close friend. Do you know them or not?"). Her response would be to lie more, to lash out at me, and to avoid the conversation.

She also was very skilled at evading accountability for her behavior (I assume a skill honed over 30+ years) and she would engage in manipulative behavior in order to get out of things. This would include claiming she could not remember things that had happened recently, claiming that certain behavior was a joke, or even suddenly claiming she didn't know me very well, that we were merely acquaintances and not fairly close friends of several years. She would say this behavior was the result of her ADHD. That may or may not be true, but it's also gaslighting.

It should be obvious by now that my friendship with this person did not last, and it ended pretty terrible actually. But at no point did I lie to her or let her behavior slide. In fact, I think I was one of the very rare people in her life who called her on some of her bad behavior, and I think it's possible her experience with me led her to her ADHD diagnosis. But I think she would describe her experience with me much the way you describe yours with others -- she'd claim I didn't say anything until I "blew up" at her with a laundry list of complaints. It's not true. She chose not to listen to me when I politely and kindly raised issues with her along the way, and when I got tired of being ignored and dismissed, I did "blow up" because by then I was upset not just about the lies and other annoying behaviors, but also at her manipulations and evasions when I tried to address these things with her.

Sharing this with you in case there might be something here you see in yourself. It can be easy to blame others for conflict, but of you are having the same conflict with people over and over, it's possible that you are the one creating a dynamic where it seems like people are being polite but then blowing up. Do you listen to people when they politely tell you that your behavior has been hurtful, annoying, or inconsiderate? Or do you only listen once they get Big Mad and blow up?[/quote]

I’m OP and that’s a fair assessment. Honestly speaking, my behaviors were likely more annoying and less hurtful. I do think my parents and sisters tried to warn me about my annoying and off-putting behaviors and I probably should have listened to them more, but would have taken it more seriously if I had heard it from others. With college roommates, it was definitely a boiled-over situation since they mentioned behaviors that I had no idea about. I also think that people were generally more likely to look for reasons to exclude people rather than be accommodating towards non-NT people. The thing with the autism spectrum is that we tend not to pick up on social cues and subtleties like “reading the room”, for example being invited to a party and not reading the room, then never being invited back to the party again with no explanation. The issue wasn’t that I told racist or insensitive jokes or something, it was more probably that I went on and on about some interest of mine and probably annoyed people. Again, I get that this isn’t their responsibility, but it would have helped if someone said “hey, you’ve been talking a lot about X, and we’re not really feeling it. How about we talk about something else?” Rather than just write me off as some weirdo and never invite me out again. I know I’m not entitled to it, but a second chance would have helped.

Therapy helps, but it’s expensive, and it doesn’t bring back all those years I could have built relationships by “reading the room” better. [/quote]

You are not wrong by stating that these things would have been helpful to you, OP.

But I do think you might need to examine your expectations of others with the same lens as you are examining your own actions.

By that I mean, you seem to be aware that not being NT, you didn’t get the same cues that others would get by simply “reading the room”—and you would have preferred that they just TELL you “hey let’s talk about something else”
…but you may forget or not realize that, in the same way that you just didn’t know to read the room… NT folks may have no idea that you *wouldnt* have this ability/innate understanding. So it’s not that they were deliberately not telling you. It’s that they didn’t know you NEEDED to be told.
Because most NT people communicate with non-verbal cues that other NTs just pick up on to help adjust their behaviors without calling it out.
I know, it doesn’t seem fair that there is this hidden language or secret code that no one let you in on (I mean that figuratively—but I’m sure it feels literal)

But just know that most NTs are not actually conscious of the code OR of the fact that there are those who don’t innately know how to operate within it.
One example is—If someone in a group is talking too loudly, a subtle cue might be that others lower their voices to even more of a whisper to get that person to speak softer.—-or they might exchange awkward glances or apologetic looks to those outside the conversation circle and the person speaking would pick up on that as a sign that their speech is garnering embarrassment or unwanted attention and quickly adjust the volume to see if that fixed the cues. But rarely will someone “Shush” the speaker or say “whoa please don’t speak so loudly!” Because that can be perceived as aggressive or rude. But I’d imagine as a ND person, you might prefer that someone just say “larla…volume” or whatever.

The point is though, being NT comes with the same blinders as being ND with regard to living life through the other persons lens—it’s just in reverse.
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