What you can do is amazing—I can’t do that at all. It’s fascinating how differently autism can impact folks.

One of the hardest things about being on the spectrum for me is difficultly “faking it” to get what I want / need. Like—if I’m truly mad at you, and I want you to change your behavior, it’s very difficult for me to hold back anger (and let’s be honest, maybe even tears?) and tell you with a clever joke about how I’d like those spreadsheets organized the way I asked for originally.

I’ll even know logically that you’re going to take this redirection better if it’s through some highly complex social dance, but I can’t do it. I’ve tried, and when I’ve tried, I’m so aggressively bad at it that it makes a situation worse.

I wish people were black-box input-output puzzles. I watch other people constantly, and it seems like that’s what’s occurring sometimes for others, but I basically fight my way through every delicate situation.

I feel like I say the correct words, but the results are just complete chaos.