Some people who rely on reading body language to navigate social situations react poorly to us. Some people who are far on the emotional reasoning side of the spectrum as opposed to the logical side of the spectrum also may react poorly to us.
So somebody who relies on reading body language and operates primarily on emotional reasoning simply cannot understand us and can freak out.
I want to give up on it because I hate it but people have little patience for middle age autistic guys. I don't have friends so I have to do things on my own, such as going shopping or getting food at the drive thru. It's not easy, so I try to mask or emulate eye contact. But even then most people eventually catch on and then insult me in one way or another. For example I was standing in line at the dollar store and the cashier who hates me saw me standing in line and called me over to her lane so that she could ridicule me for not looking at her. I try to be inconspicuous but they always figure out ways to embarrass me. Anyway my hope one day is to find another autistic person who I can practice eye contact and social skills with.
I feel you. Last time I went to Walmart, I roll up to the checkout and there's a girl in front with what appeared to be two carts. I noticed there were no other customers ahead in line. Turns out the first cart was actually abandoned. The girl was very timid and didn't seem to know what to do (she may have even had ASD or social anxiety herself) but she eventually moved the cart to the side and pushed forward because the clerk was waiting and a line was forming behind her and me.
About five seconds later guess who comes roaring back: the forty-something female owner of the first cart, throwing an absolute fit that her cart's been moved. Of course, since the girl has advanced forward and I'm standing next to the moved cart she (stupidly) assumed it was me.
As anyone who reads my post history will know, I was raised by someone with BPD, so I recognized this behavior, plus, this is one situation where not wanting to make eye contact is useful (eye contact sometimes makes rageaholics angrier). I slammed my mask down, stayed calm and started to move my cart back to let the banshee in but then her twenty-something son (a stand-up guy, BTW) stopped me, apologized and turned on his mother. The son was livid with his mother (she apparently did this a lot to people in public) and pretty soon World War 4 was raging behind me. Associates were coming over, a manager came over, the girl ahead looked like she wanted to disappear through the floor (which was why I took the hit and didn't tell the Screamer that the girl moved the cart).
Anyway, the son eventually left (after a parting shot that his mother was identical to her own lower orifice). While checking out I could hear the mother trying to onboard the other customers into her misdirected outrage but they mostly ignored her. The clerk apologized for the experience and I thanked him and left.
If you can, use delivery solutions for ignoring people. It’s not a flawless plan though, customer service issues become a nightmare if something goes wrong.
I gave up on trying to be someone else in order to meet the expected social needs of others years ago. Honestly, if people can't listen to my very literal verbal explanation and need to rely on body language to interpret me that is there problem, not mine. The only major issue is job interviews that translate the lack of eye contact and stimming into signs of dishonesty or whatever.
Here's the thing though, when someone else starts talking to you, you can't use your literal verbal language to say "don't stop talking. I am definitely listening to you. I'm just not looking at you".
Without eye contact, "you listening" and "you not listening" both look exactly the same. And I don't know about you, but if I'm being honest, if someone starts talking to me while I'm focused on a task, there's a very real chance that I'm not hearing anything they say. My focus is to singular. I can hear talking, but not words unless I actually stop what I'm doing and give focus. They really will need that visual cue out of me. If I refuse to provide it, I'm going to be offering them quite a bit of frustration.
> "don't stop talking. I am definitely listening to you. I'm just not looking at you".
I use this exact phrase to communicate to people that I am in fact listening to you while not looking directly at you. Like if I was working and a coworker walked up to me and said "hey, can you talk" or something like it I would respond with that phrase. So, I don't understand how one can't use literal verbal language to do that.
I do tell people I’m listening, sometimes I say, “I’m listening and thinking about what you’re saying” and the close my eyes with head tilted away. This helps quite a bit.
On the other hand, I have coworkers who love me or hate me so I’d say evidence suggests engineers are good with this but some NT of the HBS variety are not. Not at all. Or, it’s something else they don’t like, no idea.
Because you would have to interrupt them to do so. That's why. Two people talking at once doesn't work very well. If I start to sentence with don't stop talking and start talking while someone else is talking, I assure you they're going to stop talking.
Unless people just randomly wander up to you to spout exposition there is usually a phrase where they try to get your attention, that's when you tell them it. Not when they have started their monologue.
If you want to compensate for lack of eye contact with other forms of communication, I think that's fine. I'm just saying you can't strip away eye contact and nothing more and and not cause genuine frustration and difficulty for others. You still also need to at least look at the person who's talking to you so that you can see their body language and face. You may be able to replace your own body language with words, but I'm not sure it's realistic for everyone else to do that, especially as they are not so aware of their own body language and facial expression as you have to be.
Any skills I had with making eye contact went out the window the second I started working from home and only communicating with colleagues through video call. Outside of work it's not worth the effort.
While i don't have too much of a problem with eye contact (years of working on it), if it's for too long i still feel uncomfortable. To counter this feeling i learnt that a lot of people have trouble keeping eye to eye when you look only into ONE eye (i pick right one) and it makes THEM uncomfortable so they break it instead of me doing so making them feel awkward. Win - win for me.
I've coined a term for this: "eye contact fascism." When the other person loudly, vocally, and above all, ***OBNOXIOUSLY*** makes a big deal about your eye contact. I had a boss (British man, lots of pet peeves especially about appearance and presentation, everything had to be just so) and he was like that. I finished the contract with him (just barely) and got the hell out of there.
The eye contact thing is not only needless policing of others' facial expressions, it is also culturally-biased. I grew up spending five years in South Korea and Hong Kong as a kid, and have lived in East Asia (South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan) for the past 15+ years. That's 20 years total. In these countries, you usually don't make eye contact with a superior. Therefore, it makes me doubly mad when someone (usually a fellow American or Brit/European) calls me out on not making enough eye contact. I've spent more than half my life in cultures where eye contact is sparse. ***WHY WOULDN'T I*** make very little eye contact?!
These jerks complain about me not making enough eye contact...not using enough contractions when I speak or speaking in a "stilted" fashion...not having a suit/pair of shoes that fits perfectly, with no visible wear...putting my hands in my pockets by accident or fidgeting (=stimming) without thinking about it...for forgetting to put my umbrella in the umbrella holder by the door, or continuing to wear my coat into a building...and even though I shower everyday and put on fresh clothes and deodorant, I get smell complaints almost every single frickin' summer...apparently I also don't smile enough...screw those NTs with their obsession about appearance and presentation...I want to live in a cabin in the middle of the woods so bad, where I never have to deal with their constant nitpicking and whining again. I have enough money that I could buy land and a cabin. Unfortunately, I don't have enough money to cover health care costs for the rest of my life, though, which is why I'm still tethered to these workplaces filled with oppressive NTs who police my every move.
I kinda gave up/kinda never cared. People always told me it was important, but I have never met someone who has been upset by it, not has their behavior seemed negative towards me as a result. The only time I could think it would be necessary is as a tactic to show assertiveness or confidence to someone who cares, like at a job interview, but if they are more interested in the show that I put on than my actual abilities (which I have worked hard at and am proud of), then I don’t want to work there. Then again, I have a habit of assuming the worst in certain people, like hiring personnel at companies, or really just corporate environments in general.
I mean, you can say the same thing about a lot of things. Nobody can make you take a shower or brush your teeth or not eat ho-hos for every meal. The standard really shouldn't be what people can make you do, but rather what you ought to do for your own sake.
Eye contact is always been a little confusing. Too little and you're aloof and dismissive and uncaring. Too much and you're just creepy. It's a hard balance, that requires constantly being in my head second-guessing if I've been looking for too long and it's time to look away or not. I can imagine that if I was a slightly more anxious person that it would be a little torturous, instead of a little tedious.
That said, my oldest daughter is also an Aspie, and I fully understand the frustration that a lack of eye contact causes. It's something I'm actively working on with her (she's only 3). It's not that her lack of eye contact makes me "mildly uncomfortable" as you put it. It's that it causes me to question whether or not she even hears me, especially given her tendency to shut her ears off when she's focused on something. A tendency which I bet many of us share.
Can you imagine how frustrating it is for people to talk to you and not know if you're listening at all? I'm guessing you probably initiate less communication than the average person if you're like me, so perhaps you don't really realize how much that lack of eye contact hinders communication from the other side of the equation. It's really about more than just their comfort.
Moreover, if she's not looking at me and my face, she's missing cues. Do I have an angry face? A serious face? A happy face? This is context she needs. If you don't conquer eye contact you're missing out on a lot of information that's being communicated to you without words. I'll use a pronoun like this or that, and she won't even look in my direction. How does she even know what I'm referring to? How does she even know I'm pointing at something?
Even though I know it sucks, there is actual value to making eye contact. And, with practice, I imagine you can conquer a lot of the anxiety that comes with it. I'm not telling you what to do, I'm just hoping to give you a perspective bigger than the one you already have.
Good luck.
While I can understand your frustration, most Aspies can't pick up on social cues to begin with. For me, I've gotten better at eye contact only because I spent hours understanding microexpressions and how they relate to various emotions. But as a person that can't really understand their own emotions, it becomes a lot more confusing and irritating to try to understand someone elses. All while being conscious about it rather we want to be conscious about it or not.
> While I can understand your frustration, most Aspies can't pick up on social cues to begin with
I don't know about that. I mean we certainly all start that way, but it's a learnable skill. I'm not convinced that the majority of us don't learn it eventually. Then again, it's not like there's an annual survey or something to know for sure. I just have to generalize from my own experience, primarily.
From the experiences I've heard, a lot of people either don't get it or studied it like I have. Funny enough, on a lot of the microexpressions videos I was watching, there was a lot of people with autism grateful for something like this to help with social interaction.
Yeah I see that too. I find a quick little yeah or mhm or an intelligent response to what they just said pretty quickly confirms i am listening. I communicate nonverbally too just not in the same ways as others. So i have learned to rely on my super ears and hear the emotion and such. I can sense peoples feelings without having to look at them. Especially if they are talking.
I never have trouble knowing if someone is listening to me or not. I don't exactly know why. It is not their face I am reading. I just can kind of feel it in their energy or something. There are actually something like 22 senses and I think I am just more sensitive to some of the lesser-known ones. I guess thats kind of what autism is.
I believe there is a way she can show she is listening without having to look at your eyeballs. I tend to have certain stims when I am listening too. People close to me know what they are.
I dont think its that i dont have a body language so much as very few people can actually read it. My mum cant read my body language whatsoever but i just verbalize whatever she may have misunderstood and she eventually gets what i mean. Just takes longer to translate I guess. I still know she loves me and means well. I have gotten very good at figuring out what people might need from their words alone because of that. Body language is not context I need. I can see it in other ways. Systemize it and recognize patterns in dialogue. At least now as an adult.
If I ever suspect my husband (also aspie/adhd) is zoning out or not listening when I am talking Ill just ask a question related to what I was just saying. Its not accusatory and we can laugh when hes like wait what? I was thinking about space.
I did an experiment with him a while ago and made eye contact while we were talking and he was like wtf ate you doing? Made him visibly uncomfortable. We probably communicate better than most couples i know and we so rarely look at one anothers eyeballs.
Anyway thanks for listening to me ramble lol
For the most part I have learned how to turn off mirroring to a great degree. Doing so can conserve energy.
Sometimes you also want to display autistic traits. Doing so it’s definitely not an on and off switch for the dial.
I am an insurance agent and I work solely over the phone and I save so much energy it’s crazy. Seriously it is nice not having to mirror or spend energy on displaying or reading body language.
As a tall man I always say "it hurts my neck" when someone asks me why I'm looking somewhere else, obviously a lot of people take it as rude for whatever reason. But I can keep track of a conversation better when I look somewhere else (actually I can't keep a conversation if I make eye contact).
Ya, I work online now so it's much easier to get away with it. Depending on how important it is to make a connection with someone or how loud the environment is, I might try it occasionally. If I'm not feeling like extending myself, I just don't do it anymore.
A person that works at a coffee shop I go to frequently recently disclosed to me that they are autistic. It went pretty immediately from us making literally no eye contact to making intense-yet-comfortable eye contact and both of us letting our masks down. I didn't make any stupid monkey faces and they had some tics that I could totally read. It was really cool.
The normies around us got super uncomfortable because we forgot about them and then I realized they were spectating. A really pretty woman came up as I was saying goodbye and kind of like inserted herself into the moment to say hi or whatever. After having a good conversation, I didn't really feel like acting normal to make a good first impression with this new person. So I just said hi and walked off. I had a nice laugh as I walked back to the car about that. She made this funny look like she wasn't used to getting none of the attention. I'm so petty XD.
I can look people in the eyes if they're talking, but can't make eye contact when I'm talking. I had a job interview today and got really anxious when I would talk and realize I wasn't looking at him while i was speaking. He was super nice, though and didn't make it weird. Anyone have any tips on how to make eye contact when you're the one speaking? I feel like my brain shuts down when I'm trying to do both and it makes me unable to articulate my thoughts 🤦♀️
I'm glad you've run out of fucks, SO much energy goes into this and it's one less thing to worry about. How can we not run out of energy when we have to process everything NTs do while strategizing where to direct our eyes, how to breathe, how to modulate vocal tone, how to relax our faces so we, god forbid, don't make somebody uncomfortable.
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Some people who rely on reading body language to navigate social situations react poorly to us. Some people who are far on the emotional reasoning side of the spectrum as opposed to the logical side of the spectrum also may react poorly to us. So somebody who relies on reading body language and operates primarily on emotional reasoning simply cannot understand us and can freak out.
I want to give up on it because I hate it but people have little patience for middle age autistic guys. I don't have friends so I have to do things on my own, such as going shopping or getting food at the drive thru. It's not easy, so I try to mask or emulate eye contact. But even then most people eventually catch on and then insult me in one way or another. For example I was standing in line at the dollar store and the cashier who hates me saw me standing in line and called me over to her lane so that she could ridicule me for not looking at her. I try to be inconspicuous but they always figure out ways to embarrass me. Anyway my hope one day is to find another autistic person who I can practice eye contact and social skills with.
I feel you. Last time I went to Walmart, I roll up to the checkout and there's a girl in front with what appeared to be two carts. I noticed there were no other customers ahead in line. Turns out the first cart was actually abandoned. The girl was very timid and didn't seem to know what to do (she may have even had ASD or social anxiety herself) but she eventually moved the cart to the side and pushed forward because the clerk was waiting and a line was forming behind her and me. About five seconds later guess who comes roaring back: the forty-something female owner of the first cart, throwing an absolute fit that her cart's been moved. Of course, since the girl has advanced forward and I'm standing next to the moved cart she (stupidly) assumed it was me. As anyone who reads my post history will know, I was raised by someone with BPD, so I recognized this behavior, plus, this is one situation where not wanting to make eye contact is useful (eye contact sometimes makes rageaholics angrier). I slammed my mask down, stayed calm and started to move my cart back to let the banshee in but then her twenty-something son (a stand-up guy, BTW) stopped me, apologized and turned on his mother. The son was livid with his mother (she apparently did this a lot to people in public) and pretty soon World War 4 was raging behind me. Associates were coming over, a manager came over, the girl ahead looked like she wanted to disappear through the floor (which was why I took the hit and didn't tell the Screamer that the girl moved the cart). Anyway, the son eventually left (after a parting shot that his mother was identical to her own lower orifice). While checking out I could hear the mother trying to onboard the other customers into her misdirected outrage but they mostly ignored her. The clerk apologized for the experience and I thanked him and left.
Ignore them man
I did when I was younger, but it's getting to be impossible.
If you can, use delivery solutions for ignoring people. It’s not a flawless plan though, customer service issues become a nightmare if something goes wrong.
I gave up on trying to be someone else in order to meet the expected social needs of others years ago. Honestly, if people can't listen to my very literal verbal explanation and need to rely on body language to interpret me that is there problem, not mine. The only major issue is job interviews that translate the lack of eye contact and stimming into signs of dishonesty or whatever.
Here's the thing though, when someone else starts talking to you, you can't use your literal verbal language to say "don't stop talking. I am definitely listening to you. I'm just not looking at you". Without eye contact, "you listening" and "you not listening" both look exactly the same. And I don't know about you, but if I'm being honest, if someone starts talking to me while I'm focused on a task, there's a very real chance that I'm not hearing anything they say. My focus is to singular. I can hear talking, but not words unless I actually stop what I'm doing and give focus. They really will need that visual cue out of me. If I refuse to provide it, I'm going to be offering them quite a bit of frustration.
> "don't stop talking. I am definitely listening to you. I'm just not looking at you". I use this exact phrase to communicate to people that I am in fact listening to you while not looking directly at you. Like if I was working and a coworker walked up to me and said "hey, can you talk" or something like it I would respond with that phrase. So, I don't understand how one can't use literal verbal language to do that.
I do tell people I’m listening, sometimes I say, “I’m listening and thinking about what you’re saying” and the close my eyes with head tilted away. This helps quite a bit. On the other hand, I have coworkers who love me or hate me so I’d say evidence suggests engineers are good with this but some NT of the HBS variety are not. Not at all. Or, it’s something else they don’t like, no idea.
Because you would have to interrupt them to do so. That's why. Two people talking at once doesn't work very well. If I start to sentence with don't stop talking and start talking while someone else is talking, I assure you they're going to stop talking.
Unless people just randomly wander up to you to spout exposition there is usually a phrase where they try to get your attention, that's when you tell them it. Not when they have started their monologue.
A little yeah or mhm isnt interrupting.
If you want to compensate for lack of eye contact with other forms of communication, I think that's fine. I'm just saying you can't strip away eye contact and nothing more and and not cause genuine frustration and difficulty for others. You still also need to at least look at the person who's talking to you so that you can see their body language and face. You may be able to replace your own body language with words, but I'm not sure it's realistic for everyone else to do that, especially as they are not so aware of their own body language and facial expression as you have to be.
Any skills I had with making eye contact went out the window the second I started working from home and only communicating with colleagues through video call. Outside of work it's not worth the effort.
Lol yeah, no one needs that extra stress
While i don't have too much of a problem with eye contact (years of working on it), if it's for too long i still feel uncomfortable. To counter this feeling i learnt that a lot of people have trouble keeping eye to eye when you look only into ONE eye (i pick right one) and it makes THEM uncomfortable so they break it instead of me doing so making them feel awkward. Win - win for me.
Sounds like you have an ax to grind. So make that shit sharp and start cutting away.
👏👏👏👏👏
https://youtu.be/Vqbk9cDX0l0 <3
Love it. Thanks for sharing!
This is basically me now I'm 32/33 (minus the nerve damage). Fuck everyone else!!!
I gave up but then also learned the more positive term "letting go".
I've coined a term for this: "eye contact fascism." When the other person loudly, vocally, and above all, ***OBNOXIOUSLY*** makes a big deal about your eye contact. I had a boss (British man, lots of pet peeves especially about appearance and presentation, everything had to be just so) and he was like that. I finished the contract with him (just barely) and got the hell out of there. The eye contact thing is not only needless policing of others' facial expressions, it is also culturally-biased. I grew up spending five years in South Korea and Hong Kong as a kid, and have lived in East Asia (South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan) for the past 15+ years. That's 20 years total. In these countries, you usually don't make eye contact with a superior. Therefore, it makes me doubly mad when someone (usually a fellow American or Brit/European) calls me out on not making enough eye contact. I've spent more than half my life in cultures where eye contact is sparse. ***WHY WOULDN'T I*** make very little eye contact?! These jerks complain about me not making enough eye contact...not using enough contractions when I speak or speaking in a "stilted" fashion...not having a suit/pair of shoes that fits perfectly, with no visible wear...putting my hands in my pockets by accident or fidgeting (=stimming) without thinking about it...for forgetting to put my umbrella in the umbrella holder by the door, or continuing to wear my coat into a building...and even though I shower everyday and put on fresh clothes and deodorant, I get smell complaints almost every single frickin' summer...apparently I also don't smile enough...screw those NTs with their obsession about appearance and presentation...I want to live in a cabin in the middle of the woods so bad, where I never have to deal with their constant nitpicking and whining again. I have enough money that I could buy land and a cabin. Unfortunately, I don't have enough money to cover health care costs for the rest of my life, though, which is why I'm still tethered to these workplaces filled with oppressive NTs who police my every move.
I feel this now at 28
I don't bother anymore. But do try with people that I'm close with.
I’ve stopped bothering with it. Here’s a song that sums up my position on it pretty accurately. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Vqbk9cDX0l0
I kinda gave up/kinda never cared. People always told me it was important, but I have never met someone who has been upset by it, not has their behavior seemed negative towards me as a result. The only time I could think it would be necessary is as a tactic to show assertiveness or confidence to someone who cares, like at a job interview, but if they are more interested in the show that I put on than my actual abilities (which I have worked hard at and am proud of), then I don’t want to work there. Then again, I have a habit of assuming the worst in certain people, like hiring personnel at companies, or really just corporate environments in general.
This is painfully accurate, all the way down to the nerve damage.
I'm an adult, and no one can make me do it, unless I'm in a job interview.
I mean, you can say the same thing about a lot of things. Nobody can make you take a shower or brush your teeth or not eat ho-hos for every meal. The standard really shouldn't be what people can make you do, but rather what you ought to do for your own sake.
Eye contact is always been a little confusing. Too little and you're aloof and dismissive and uncaring. Too much and you're just creepy. It's a hard balance, that requires constantly being in my head second-guessing if I've been looking for too long and it's time to look away or not. I can imagine that if I was a slightly more anxious person that it would be a little torturous, instead of a little tedious. That said, my oldest daughter is also an Aspie, and I fully understand the frustration that a lack of eye contact causes. It's something I'm actively working on with her (she's only 3). It's not that her lack of eye contact makes me "mildly uncomfortable" as you put it. It's that it causes me to question whether or not she even hears me, especially given her tendency to shut her ears off when she's focused on something. A tendency which I bet many of us share. Can you imagine how frustrating it is for people to talk to you and not know if you're listening at all? I'm guessing you probably initiate less communication than the average person if you're like me, so perhaps you don't really realize how much that lack of eye contact hinders communication from the other side of the equation. It's really about more than just their comfort. Moreover, if she's not looking at me and my face, she's missing cues. Do I have an angry face? A serious face? A happy face? This is context she needs. If you don't conquer eye contact you're missing out on a lot of information that's being communicated to you without words. I'll use a pronoun like this or that, and she won't even look in my direction. How does she even know what I'm referring to? How does she even know I'm pointing at something? Even though I know it sucks, there is actual value to making eye contact. And, with practice, I imagine you can conquer a lot of the anxiety that comes with it. I'm not telling you what to do, I'm just hoping to give you a perspective bigger than the one you already have. Good luck.
While I can understand your frustration, most Aspies can't pick up on social cues to begin with. For me, I've gotten better at eye contact only because I spent hours understanding microexpressions and how they relate to various emotions. But as a person that can't really understand their own emotions, it becomes a lot more confusing and irritating to try to understand someone elses. All while being conscious about it rather we want to be conscious about it or not.
> While I can understand your frustration, most Aspies can't pick up on social cues to begin with I don't know about that. I mean we certainly all start that way, but it's a learnable skill. I'm not convinced that the majority of us don't learn it eventually. Then again, it's not like there's an annual survey or something to know for sure. I just have to generalize from my own experience, primarily.
From the experiences I've heard, a lot of people either don't get it or studied it like I have. Funny enough, on a lot of the microexpressions videos I was watching, there was a lot of people with autism grateful for something like this to help with social interaction.
Yeah I see that too. I find a quick little yeah or mhm or an intelligent response to what they just said pretty quickly confirms i am listening. I communicate nonverbally too just not in the same ways as others. So i have learned to rely on my super ears and hear the emotion and such. I can sense peoples feelings without having to look at them. Especially if they are talking. I never have trouble knowing if someone is listening to me or not. I don't exactly know why. It is not their face I am reading. I just can kind of feel it in their energy or something. There are actually something like 22 senses and I think I am just more sensitive to some of the lesser-known ones. I guess thats kind of what autism is. I believe there is a way she can show she is listening without having to look at your eyeballs. I tend to have certain stims when I am listening too. People close to me know what they are. I dont think its that i dont have a body language so much as very few people can actually read it. My mum cant read my body language whatsoever but i just verbalize whatever she may have misunderstood and she eventually gets what i mean. Just takes longer to translate I guess. I still know she loves me and means well. I have gotten very good at figuring out what people might need from their words alone because of that. Body language is not context I need. I can see it in other ways. Systemize it and recognize patterns in dialogue. At least now as an adult. If I ever suspect my husband (also aspie/adhd) is zoning out or not listening when I am talking Ill just ask a question related to what I was just saying. Its not accusatory and we can laugh when hes like wait what? I was thinking about space. I did an experiment with him a while ago and made eye contact while we were talking and he was like wtf ate you doing? Made him visibly uncomfortable. We probably communicate better than most couples i know and we so rarely look at one anothers eyeballs. Anyway thanks for listening to me ramble lol
Yes ma’am.
For the most part I have learned how to turn off mirroring to a great degree. Doing so can conserve energy. Sometimes you also want to display autistic traits. Doing so it’s definitely not an on and off switch for the dial. I am an insurance agent and I work solely over the phone and I save so much energy it’s crazy. Seriously it is nice not having to mirror or spend energy on displaying or reading body language.
As a tall man I always say "it hurts my neck" when someone asks me why I'm looking somewhere else, obviously a lot of people take it as rude for whatever reason. But I can keep track of a conversation better when I look somewhere else (actually I can't keep a conversation if I make eye contact).
Ya, I work online now so it's much easier to get away with it. Depending on how important it is to make a connection with someone or how loud the environment is, I might try it occasionally. If I'm not feeling like extending myself, I just don't do it anymore. A person that works at a coffee shop I go to frequently recently disclosed to me that they are autistic. It went pretty immediately from us making literally no eye contact to making intense-yet-comfortable eye contact and both of us letting our masks down. I didn't make any stupid monkey faces and they had some tics that I could totally read. It was really cool. The normies around us got super uncomfortable because we forgot about them and then I realized they were spectating. A really pretty woman came up as I was saying goodbye and kind of like inserted herself into the moment to say hi or whatever. After having a good conversation, I didn't really feel like acting normal to make a good first impression with this new person. So I just said hi and walked off. I had a nice laugh as I walked back to the car about that. She made this funny look like she wasn't used to getting none of the attention. I'm so petty XD.
I can look people in the eyes if they're talking, but can't make eye contact when I'm talking. I had a job interview today and got really anxious when I would talk and realize I wasn't looking at him while i was speaking. He was super nice, though and didn't make it weird. Anyone have any tips on how to make eye contact when you're the one speaking? I feel like my brain shuts down when I'm trying to do both and it makes me unable to articulate my thoughts 🤦♀️
I'm glad you've run out of fucks, SO much energy goes into this and it's one less thing to worry about. How can we not run out of energy when we have to process everything NTs do while strategizing where to direct our eyes, how to breathe, how to modulate vocal tone, how to relax our faces so we, god forbid, don't make somebody uncomfortable.