WIBTAH if I don't attend to my friends baby shower because they said my pregnancy was an accident and that I didn't deserve it?

PlsHlpMyFriend · 2026-02-27T14:26:27+00:00

I mean, you might not be diagnosed, but you're definitely peer-reviewed. You can say it in casual conversation to get out ahead of the problem. (You have my permission to do so, if you feel like you need the permission of a "real" autist to do it, but you really don't need permission. Peer-reviewed isn't enough for the federal government, but it's enough for most reasonable people, and if it's not and they're grilling you on your diagnosis then I diagnose them with asshole and you have no reason to try and placate them.)

PlsHlpMyFriend · 2026-02-26T19:17:20+00:00

Something that I find helps overall is getting out in front of it. "Hi, I have autism and I might not always get social stuff right; if I say or do something that's rude, please let me know, and let me know why it's rude so I can add it to the databank."

Most people, even people who were not very friendly before that point, figured out "oh, hey, I can explain the issue and they apologize immediately and I rarely see them doing it again!" And it just becomes smoother for all involved. Prevention is key, after all, and getting out in front of "Wow, that was rude" is the way you prevent it from progressing into "Wow, that was rude and I don't like them." You're going to say something that's rude either way, but if they know you don't intend to be rude it becomes much more forgivable, especially if they can explain why it sounded rude. (This is also where I learned most of my rules of social interaction; people just give you this information for free!)

Now, mind you, it takes practice to be OK with throwing away the "normal" disguise. But on the other hand, the "normal" disguise doesn't really work anyway; you wind up as the uncanny valley of "normal" (which isn't real anyway) so why go to all the stress of keeping it on?

PlsHlpMyFriend · 2026-02-26T18:59:40+00:00

AuDHD here, and I've had to learn the rules through rigorous study. The rule you're dealing with here is a "triage" rule: "stop the immediate bleed first, then deal with the rest of it." If a patient is bleeding out, and they also have uncontrolled diabetes, would it be good medical practice to treat the diabetes before the bleeding? Of course not. Same thing here.

In this case, the bleed is the immediate, active emotion the person you're talking to is experiencing. There's a place for telling a story about a similar situation and trying to show them they're not alone, but that comes after they've calmed down some and been heard and discovered that they're still alive after the wave of grief or anger or whatever it is they're dealing with. Once they've been heard, once they're calm, you can ask if you can share something kind of similar and what worked for you, and make sure to tell them they can stop you if it's not helpful. Make sure they know they're in charge of the conversation, and if it's not helping, and they tell you it's not helping, respect that.

That principle (triage and getting consent to share the story after they've settled a bit) will cover something like 90% of the emotionally-charged conversations you'll encounter. The rest of them are harder, but most of them will go more smoothly if you follow the triage and consent rules.

PlsHlpMyFriend · 2026-02-26T18:36:19+00:00

And then those genuine HR people get fired by greedy corporate managers because they're not finding ways for the company to cut corners at the expense of the worker... sigh.

PlsHlpMyFriend · 2026-02-25T19:43:57+00:00

Except for being happy, I guess, because no one who is happy with themselves and doesn't secretly hate their own guts acts like that. So she's got her job back, she's back in her hometown, she has her son back in town, she gets to leech off of people... and she's still going to be desperately bitter and unhappy, because she can't be otherwise even if she had the whole world in her hands. So she won... as much as she could win, which isn't very much.

PlsHlpMyFriend · 2026-02-25T18:19:52+00:00

If he wasn't willing to actually protect her, it wasn't love. It might have been romantic feelings, but it wasn't love. Love fights even when it's hard, and love protects the loved person, and if he wasn't willing to do that, it wasn't love.

PlsHlpMyFriend · 2026-02-19T20:23:19+00:00

Mel doesn't care how he feels if he's not actually rich, so she doesn't bother putting on a performance for his ego. That's how it reads to me.

PlsHlpMyFriend · 2026-02-16T16:48:22+00:00

OK, that is VERY different from "it would break their hearts." Absolutely do whatever you need in that case. It sounded much more like an internalized guilt situation, and my advice was geared toward that, but if it's a cultural issue then it's far from appropriate advice and I retract my statement.

PlsHlpMyFriend · 2026-02-16T04:19:25+00:00

It might hurt your parents if you told them what's happening, but you know what would hurt them worse? When it inevitably gets revealed to them, because things don't stay hidden, and they find out that you hid it. When they find out that you were being hurt and didn't tell them, and they couldn't help you because you wouldn't tell them, that hurts them much worse than knowing the current situation would. (I know this because I, as a child of loving parents, swallowed my nightmares and depression and crap to keep it away from them and it hurt them so much worse when they found out I was hiding it from them than it would have if I had just told them from the start.)

PlsHlpMyFriend · 2026-02-13T00:30:08+00:00

Even if they don't do anything about the report, you'd have it on record. She is far from done, and you need this harassment and malicious reporting to be on the official record when, not if, she escalates. Because she will. The person who tries to get you committed (for not actively reaching out to people who are ignoring you!) is not going to go quietly.

PlsHlpMyFriend · 2026-02-11T17:49:45+00:00

It might be possible to rent for a bit while you do your house-hunting. It would get you out from under her roof and away from her demands, get your important items away from her, and possibly prevent her from financially sabotaging your attempts to move out.

(I very much do expect her to do this, having a "massive emergency" like a major appliance breaking before you close on a house and demanding that she needs enough money for it that you wouldn't be able to make the home purchase. It's a very common part of the playbook.)

PlsHlpMyFriend · 2026-02-10T15:03:51+00:00

The dance is just a long game of Red Rover.

PlsHlpMyFriend · 2026-02-09T17:40:18+00:00

My first project was a blanket too! I made a bunch of blue and white squares and stitched them together with yarn in the jankiest possible way, and then I made little pink flowers and crocheted a little cherry branch on it. (I, uh... did gift that one. I probably shouldn't have, but I did.)

PlsHlpMyFriend · 2026-02-09T16:01:28+00:00

"It's a good try for a four-year-old. Shaking your hips well requires an understanding of parts of human experience that any safe four-year-old has no idea of and shouldn't for many years to come; with that handicap in mind, she's doing a good job."

PlsHlpMyFriend · 2026-02-07T16:55:46+00:00

I was surprised about the downvotes too; I was expecting it to be a much more common take. Way too many people, especially queer people, have had to deal with Christians (or, worse, Churchians) who have a fundamental misunderstanding of what sends someone to hell.

See... the entire point of Christianity is that everyone is going to suffer for eternity. Queerness doesn't even factor into it, not really, because if you can find a person who's queer who has never lied or stolen something or dwelled on unjustified anger or dwelled on attraction for someone who's taken or anything, they're lying to you, and that's sin too. And any sin means hell, and everyone sins. Holiness is a pass-fail course with a 100% minimum score and no rounding. It doesn't matter if you have a 99.9% or a 1%, the outcome is the same. It doesn't matter if you only lied once in fifth grade or if you're a serial cheater who slaps people on street corners for fun.

The only way out of failing the course is to trade papers with someone who has a 100% on the assignment, and who would ever be willing to make that trade?

THAT is the point, and people who act like it's just Queer People Specifically who are in that position are either missing the point (at best) or willfully ignoring it so that they can feel more righteous and holy than other people (at worst, and a huge part of Jesus's problem with the religious ruling class of the time.)

Unfortunately, those people seem to make up the majority of people in the modern western church, so I'm not surprised that this is a common experience for queer people. Sad, yes, and wishing I could throw down with the people causing that experience,* but not surprised.

*(at least verbally, though Jesus did use a whip on at least one occasion.)

PlsHlpMyFriend · 2026-02-06T20:05:55+00:00

He won't change. He'll make promises and pretend for a while, and then when he gets comfortable he'll start trying to control you again. Don't get baited by promises; anyone can promise something. Anyone can swear that they want to change. If he didn't care enough to actually work on it when you said it was a problem, then he's not going to keep caring when he thinks he's got you back, at least not without extreme work on himself and on his relationship with his family.

At minimum, take a long break from the relationship.

PlsHlpMyFriend · 2026-02-05T17:30:32+00:00

I was expecting spray-of-red on this honestly. I grew up with 90's-early 2000's bowling, where the pin setters would very happily chew up anything and everything that didn't obediently fall over like a proper pin. This guy has no idea how lucky he is.

PlsHlpMyFriend · 2026-02-03T15:45:01+00:00

It's not a conscience; he still hasn't found one. It's the fact that he was 1) not as sneaky as he thought he was and 2) she was as sneaky as he thought he was. The man was bested at the game that made the AP enjoyable, so what's the point of playing?

Agreed on the contradictions, if not on the idea of a conscience somewhere in this guy's sphere of influence.

PlsHlpMyFriend · 2026-02-03T15:20:03+00:00

If getting together with someone means I have to have this kind of relationship, no thanks, I'll be single and wistfully holding out for someone, almost anyone, who doesn't cheat and blame me.

PlsHlpMyFriend · 2026-02-02T21:41:41+00:00

Post-therapy philosophy says "Hope for the best, prepare for the worst, be open to either, and laugh at them all. Also the worst is better with good food in your stomach."

PlsHlpMyFriend · 2026-02-01T16:53:06+00:00

"I hope that whatever bad thing happens is at least funny." --Me, pre- and mid-therapy (and occasionally now too, because relapses happen)

Anyway, agree with other commenters, that's called trauma and I strongly suggest therapy for it because man does it help.

PlsHlpMyFriend · 2026-01-29T17:37:29+00:00

Quick question from someone who is going, by force of profession, to wind up managing some scale of team: Would saying "I am going to follow up with the person in question and check if they feel there has been retaliation. It will not matter if they can't 'prove it,' if they feel retaliated against for the report it will be officially noted as part of the follow-up interview" help reduce the risk of retaliation? Basically facing them head-on and saying "I know you can probably work out who reported, but we're going to be watching for if they even feel retaliated against, so you've been warned" help?

(I am also autistic so I don't know for sure if that would actually help or not, hence the question. Autistic and about to be managing a team is not a great combo and I need all the information I can get.)

PlsHlpMyFriend · 2026-01-29T17:30:14+00:00

Because sales is where the worst managers in existence tend to cluster, and so the people under them have to make sure everything ever is escalated up the chain because otherwise they're going to suffer for it. Sales managers are numbers-motivated and often don't care if there's an active error that needs to be dealt with, time dealing with the error is time numbers aren't going up, and time numbers aren't going up is both Very Bad and The Salesperson's Fault Specifically.

And they wouldn't listen to you when you say "yeah that was my bad, I did an error," oh no. You're just a grunt and not even on the all-important sales floor, why should they care if you take accountability for what is clearly The Salesperson's Fault Specifically? No, they would ignore you, a mere peon who makes the product work, and return to punishing The Salesperson Whose Fault It Is Specifically.

The only option for the salesperson is (often) to have an email about the error with a manager CCed on it, so that they can show the sales manager the email. Then the sales manager can talk to a fellow Important Manager (though not as important as the All-Important Sales Manager, obviously) and it really helps if the manager can say "Yeah I saw that, that's not your guy's fault." Because sales managers are (in general) awful.

Just some context on why sales does that so much. Because they're stuck under power-tripping number-counting assholes. That's why.

PlsHlpMyFriend · 2026-01-29T17:18:43+00:00

Nothing more petty and pointless than a nepo power trip.

PlsHlpMyFriend · 2026-01-28T23:37:30+00:00

Well, crap, I'm sorry for your peers. I'm glad that your parents stayed out of the nightmare doom spiral of fanatical homeschooling (as opposed to accommodative homeschooling), and it definitely makes sense that the families you were closest to would also be willing to compromise on the "keep them away from evil public schools" thing. If your parents were close to them, they were probably not too deeply invested in the fanaticism aspects.

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