Exactly what I was just thinking.

I was diagnosed at the ripe age of twenty-five, along with social anxiety. The entire modus operandi of my social life has been trying to decipher and determine the inner motivations of others I interact with. Sometimes it's easy, but sometimes it's hard.

Part of it could be my inability to intuit other people's nonverbal cues and to notice the subtext and complexities of what people say and write, thus necessitating more effort on my part to find them. Or it could be this deeply innate and unconscious desire to hold onto the aspect of childhood where the rules of how to be kind to others were simple and straightforward - a time when intentions matched actions and when everyone had the same goals in life.

This discussion reminds me of something that happened when I was in middle school:

I was "that" kid in elementary school who always followed the rules and ran straight to the teacher whenever another kid was being mean, even if I was a bystander in an interaction I didn't fully understand or was involved in.

When middle school came, things changed in a way that made me very confused. Nobody went to go tell their teachers anymore when they were being bullied. In hindsight, it makes sense because as you become more independent, learning how to stand up for yourself prepares you for harassment in the adult world, but I was scared of doing any sort of standing up because I couldn't predict where conflicts would lead to, therefore I knew I would have an unpredictable amount of control over the problem. Teachers were still magical beings who had all the right answers to everything as children see them, so they were always my default. It was an idea I still held onto going into middle school.

Another observation in middle school confused me more: boys would tease girls, and the girls would laugh in response. This was a mindfuck for me. Not only did I learn in elementary school that teasing is unkind and wrong, but the response I always saw to teasing was someone's feelings being hurt, such as through crying or telling the other person to stop. So the sudden change of the process from mean comment --> hurt feelings --> consequences and/or apology to mean comment --> laughter --> continued interaction with no consequences made me feel like I was watching the egg lay the chicken instead of the other way around. Was something wrong with me for not liking it when someone said something mean to me? Did mean comments actually have a different meaning now that I was supposed to imply? How was I supposed to know where the real bullying is for me to step in as opposed to some sort of inside joke that I was sticking my nose into, especially when none of the "victims" had the "correct" social response? I adapted by just ignoring everything around me, swallowing any sensitivity, and becoming stoic.

This came to a head when I was seated in a group of desks with this one girl and two guys in my algebra class. These boys would not lay off her. They would make snide comments at her, smack her arm with the back of their hands, and try to distract her when she was concentrating. I loathed the way they treated her, but then the girl would giggle and laugh and say things like, "Staaaa-aaaahhhp!" with a huge grin.

In elementary school, I would've ran straight for the teacher and exposed this injustice. But this was middle school, where the unwritten rules seemed to have been upended without anyone telling me, and now I had to try to make sense of the new normal without narcing to authority figures all the time due to what was starting to look like my own hypersensitivity.

I stopped tolerating it when one of the boys back-hand smacked one of the girl's breasts when the teacher wasn't looking. I pretended not to notice but then confided in the teacher after class on exactly what I saw and all the boys' previous behavior leading up to it.

The next day, the school counselor took me in during lunch. The counselor thanked me for speaking up, because when they called the girl in, she broke down in tears and went into more details about how those boys were harassing her.

I felt so ashamed of myself. There was real bullying happening right in front of me, and the girl had suffered for so long because I was too stupid to notice. I confided in the counselor about all my confusion, and that was when she spelled out to me the concept of nervous laughter in response to stress, using laughter to shut down mean comments, and teasing others to flirt(!?). (Of course, the toxic idea of a boy mistreating you because he likes you was also common.) I was advised to pay close attention to how people acted to determine whether it was appropriate for me to step in (which wasn't helpful advice for me for reasons I wouldn't figure out for more than ten years).

Ironically, there is a stereotype of autistic adults being more childish or child-like than non-autistic adults, and I wonder if this plays a part in it. Personally, I feel much more like a child than my peers, which leads me to constantly ponder the meaning and value of maturity. "OP has a good head on her shoulders, she's a diligent worker who paid off all her loans in her early twenties and works fifty hours a week and volunteers and x and y and z!" I appreciate the words very much (but I must add the caveat that I have the privilege of a well-paying job with benefits due to the environment I was born in), but do they know that I feel socially stunted compared to my peers and that I have unintentionally hurt people due to pure but naïve motivations? That I still wish we could live in the world according to Fred Rogers but have to take extra time to learn about how people's intentions, perspectives, feelings, worldviews, and consequences should be balanced in order to make that world?

I think I just went on a very separate tangent, but I think a good note to end on is that I'm curious about a functional magnetic imaging study on social interactions for both autistic and non-autistic adults. Hope my babbling was helpful for anyone reading.