I think one of the most helpful things for me has been changing the internal dialog that has been nailed into me since i was young—“you’re not enough,” “you lazy #%^*,” and a whole slew of things repeating in my mind when i disappoint others, am misunderstood, or can’t seem to handle/understand something that seems so basic to others.
Genuine encouragement that validates where you are right now (without any pressure to perform or do better) is i think one of the most powerful tools for us with ASD. Sadly, because of the social/career ladders and the way our society operates, a lot of us don’t have that encouraging voice on the outside to help us out. Many of the voices in our lives have misunderstood us and assumed our intentions were malicious when the reality was we just think and act on another level than others do.
If you are able to put yourself in an environment or with others that understand you and encourage you, do whatever you can to do so. If you are unable to do that right now, do what you can to practice changing all the negative words that play on repeat in our heads and beat us down.
Think about it—if you want a flower to grow, you aren’t just gonna beat it into submission and yell at it to do better, right? You give it food, water, and sun. You have to give it time and treat it kindly and gently. It’s the same way with a young kid who’s trying to learn how to walk.
The reality is, we have all given it our best effort even if it doesn’t show on the outside. That deserves to be noticed, uplifted, and appreciated. And i think when you do so, when you allow yourself moments to simply exist the way you are, you’ll finally see yourself start to grow in ways you never thought possible.
The stigma against double texting is an insecure schoolgirl affectation. Don’t worry about it.
Personally I detest chain-texts (a whole bunch of short messages in quick succession, like 8-10 or so) because a) I get the impression the writer didn’t want to bother organizing his thoughts before communicating, and expects me to do it for him and b) it makes my phone vibrate/beep a lot and it’s just distracting. But that is not what’s going on here. It’s just two texts with complete sentences.
TLDR: you’re fine, texting etiquette-wise. Double texting is not really a thing.
I prefer chain texts when I am engaging in a conversation. It feels more like natural conversation. As a sentence is out of my brain, the recipient has it. Sometimes the thoughts are fully organized, there's just a linebreak between them, and it's just a formatting distinction. But there are differences between "sending a text message to relay information" and "having a conversation via SMS"
The obnoxious part is the constant vibrate/beep per incoming message, but Android has a "minimum time between notification sounds" config option though, I imagine Apple does too, so that has never really bothered me either.
Online dating is incredibly superficial. It also has its own challenges and requires the right skills. Send more then "hey" but don't send a wall of text. You also want to say something that shows you read their profile without just simply regurgitating it.
I’m a school bus driver. The short bus doesn’t mean anything. Some routes just don’t have that many kids and/or go through places where a larger bus wouldn’t be practical. I actually just got switched to a short bus because I was driving a large bus downtown to pick up 15 kids. Like.. no.
That makes sense. Still, in my case, I think it was the autistic bus because even though we only had 4 kids in there, the bus driver had an assistant with him that would basically babysit us. They were pretty strict with rules, and we weren't even allowed to talk to each other sometimes. The larger bus that picked up kids from the same neighborhood and had 20+ students in it did not have an assistant. Their rules were also much more relaxed.
Kindness mostly. The kid mostly just liked to ask me my opinion on the most mundane things. Sometimes he’d try to block other kids from getting on the bus and I had to be firm about that, but as long as I told him whether I like peanut butter better than jam we were pals.
Man, being around my age, I am surprised your classmates didn't make it painfully clear you were on the short bus because they thought you were "intellectually challenged", and not because of "overflow".
I realized I was similarly getting manipulated and teased in my late teens. Looking back, I think alot of it was down to me missing/misinterpreting social signals and trying to fit in. I was usually aware of what was going on but didn't know how to extricate myself in a way that wouldn't bring further ridicule.
Once I became aware of the pattern, I stopped talking to and approaching people. I keep to myself and generally approach social situations from a respectful but hostile and mistrustful position until proven otherwise. I'm trying to break this habit but its difficult after living it for so long.
I get that, like when you're being made fun of, and you become aware of it, but you don't know what to do about it so you just try to make it so obvious in the hopes it will make the bullies self reflect and stop (which they don't)
I found my SO on Instagram. She seemed interesting so I sent her a message to which she replied to even though she gets a ton of messages like that. It's just that the bar is so low that if you spend even 5 minutes writing it you'll probably stand out quite a bit. I only contacted two women and both replied. This was like 8 years ago though so I'm not sure how much things have changed.
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