Ok first off, pm me if you want to talk more about “my way” (don’t teally know another way) of dealing with it.
Next, do you tell people you’re an aspie?
I don’t. I hide it well. Granted I didn’t even know up until about 6 months ago, I thought I was just socially awkward. Set aside the wife/kids/job cause all that CAN happen. I felt the same way exactly, and my wife worked with me and made the first moves and fell in love with me. I tried pushing her away, but she just wouldn’t go. Now we both understand what I am and she is patient and loving and I couldn’t be happier.
Now I hide my hfa really well. No temper tantrums at work, and try to ignore things that drive my ocd crazy. People think I’m just like them just with a lot of weird routines and ocd, and I’m goofy. My defense mechanism is just making dirty, inappropriate and immature jokes and surprisingly, people almost always laugh. I just be weird and don’t care and people like it. I also took as many college classes on psychology and body language as I could. That was a huge help. I learn more from watching people than listening to them. Especially with others.
When I started my new job, I’d listen to my coworkers talk amongst eachother and look for patterns or topics that I was able to talk to them about. People love to talk about themselves or what they like. For example some of my coworkers talked about guns, I’m into guns, or cars, etc. things with a lot of different types/styles/sizes/etc, give room for a lot of conversation. Whenever I’m in doubt, I like to go with dogs. It’s only let me down once. Almost everyone loves dogs or has something positive to speak of on the subject.
I’ve learned to interact with people the way I learn how to fix cars/houses/etc. I watch and learn. People actually think I’m very funny and always tell me how witty I am and I’m sittin there like “no dude I’m autistic”. But they’ll never know.
If I can do it, you can too!!!
I also found it helpful to expirament with people I’d never see again. Like going to a gas station (I only go to one cause that’s how I am, so I’d intentionally go to ones that I knew I was never coming back to) and talking to whoever is behind the counter. Make it short and sweet and pay close attention to what you say or talk about and their responses.
I also would talk to women this way, kinda how I learned how to interact with women. I’d go into a gas station or store or whatever and compliment her. But not just hey “you’re hot” or “hey you got a great body”, I would compliment things that others would look right passed. Tell her she has a beautiful smile, or really nice eyes, or gorgeous hair etc. but maintain eye contact when you do it, and break eye contact for a few seconds to glance around the store so you’re not staring. And always smile when you do.
I hope this helps. Pm me more if you want to talk more about this or need advice. To me, this is kinda like practice to build confidence so you can talk to your neighbors. Who knows, they could end up becoming your friends.
