Edit: A few people have interpreted the title as serious, so I wanna clarify that it was meant as a sarcastic joke about how little sense the neurotypical world makes to me, but it is still legitimately me asking for help understanding said neurotypical world.
Was having a conversation with a friend today about why I seem unapproachable to people online. Apparently it’s for 2 reasons.
One is that I say “K.” all the time, as a short way of saying okay. She pointed out that most people find this rude and offensive. This kinda baffled me, because like why? She explained that like, if somebody were to give a long emotional speech and I just responded “K.” that would be offensive. That confounds me. So it’s rude in one context, and neurotypicals have decided to be offended by it in all contexts? But the reason it’s rude is what confuses me more. Apparently it’s considered lazy because you could have just typed out the word, but like, that applies to all text speech and nobody’s mad about people shortening those words.
But it got more confusing when she explained the second reason, which is that I end all of my sentences with proper punctuation, which she said “makes people feel like I’m done with the conversation and not interested.” But just a second ago improper grammar was rude, and now proper grammar is rude instead.
It baffles me. You can’t just use proper or improper grammar. Use too much improper grammar and you’re lazy and rude. Use too little and you’re also rude. But you can’t just use any improper grammar, you have to use the very specific subset of improper grammar that’s been deemed acceptable and not lazy (even though it’s exactly as lazy as what they do consider lazy.)
To be clear, I’m not bitter, and I’m definitely gonna adjust my behavior to hopefully seem a little less rude to people. I think that’s just a nice thing to do. I just find the neurotypical mind utterly fascinating. I don’t think they even realize how many contradictions exist in the social rules they all so easily accept.
Huh, I’ve never heard of that. It must make things extra hard for you. What’s the name of that disorder?
The disorder is schizoaffective, but the inability to express emotions isn’t usually a big feature of it. It comes with psychosis. Usually, antipsychotics are all it takes to trigger your brain to start expressing emotions again, but I can’t take a high enough dose to do that without serious side effects, so I instead deal with minor psychosis symptoms, like having to remind myself constantly that no, the order of my songs when I hit shuffle is not a secret message telling me the future, and also the fact that I can’t express any physical emotions unless they’re very strong. It also shows in my tone of voice, which is a consistent, flat, unchanging tone that I try to vary randomly just so people don’t tune out my voice.
That sounds hard. But it seems like you’ve got a good understanding of yourself, and that’s huge! It’s clear that you’ve put a ton of work into all this and have achieved real accomplishments. I give you a massive virtual high five!!!