This is not so much about whether I'm unreasonable, since it's about what's wired into my system, as whether I'm just weird.
I've recently (about 8 months ago) moved to a new city and I'm going about the business of finding new networks. I have a job and although I work from home most of the week I still go into the office at least one day a week, and I get on fine with people there. I can go to U3A, or a boardgames group or a writers group or a book club, or to public lectures at the university, and I get chatting easily enough with people. I've even been told in the past that I'm a good mixer because I go up to anybody at a gathering whether a duchess or a dustman and chat to them just the same. But what I never seem able to do is to convert these contacts into friendships between events.
What I worry about is that I may come across as scary to people. I do have an ASD but it has only been formally diagnosed in later adulthood. As a child I was just "difficult" because these things weren't understood then. I was considered messy and lazy and uncooperative and generally wayward. Always being compared with my older sister who was studious, neat, methodical and well-behaved. I went to university why she didn't and she always resented that, I think. She has a point – we both changed schools at the critical ages of 11 and 16 and having worked towards a particular A-level programme she found that the new school couldn't offer it. But not my fault I think.
Somebody pointed out to me recently that when I get stressed or depressed I've always tended to escape by burying myself in learning stuff. I did my original degree, then an Open University degree in something completely different, and I recently did a Masters in something else again. I know quite a lot about a lot of things but I'm not really a master of everything. I'd say I was very well read, but I seem to like the kind of books others aren't keen on, just as I like to watch films but not the sort that others want to watch with me. I can be outspoken sometimes and I don't suffer fools, although I do try not to get into explosive situations in company (unlike me when I was much younger!) I'm a square peg, basically.
Socially I'm terrified that other people think I'm weird, that they find me scary, perhaps, and I'm afraid to make the move, to suggest coffee between events perhaps, because I might be rejected, or thought excessively pushy. So I bury myself in solitary stuff again and, yes, I get lonely sometimes. Oh yes, I ~hate~ and always have hated talking on the telephone, as part of my autism because I'm out of control of the real-time conversation. I'm fine on line because I'm in full control.
Does anybody else feel like this? Or am I the only one? Do I really come across as weird? Are there ways to get round it, do you think?
MAKE A SENTENCE GAME [FEB '26]
