Too autistic for neurotypicals, too neurotypically masked for autistic people most days

My entire life

I felt this until I surrounded myself with almost exclusively neruodivergent friends

Big mood

Everything Ive ever done felt like a larp

When you walk as a group, little conversations and pairs will form naturally, chatting and joking along the way. I will very often walk by myself, either pacing too slow or too fast, nobody joining me. Sometimes it feels like an escort ques, where you just don't have the correct walking speed button.

On the other hand, I'll find and love you other weird fucks easily at a party, bouncing erratically around from place to place or telling me for thirty minutes about your favorite type of algae when I asked what you did today. Just gotta get invited to a party sometime again...

Uh yeah. For 46 years.

Should I get tested?

Yes, in the end, all the groups that worked for me, where just only NDs. This kept repeating throughout the years. I don't "jive" with neurotypicals at all, and once I realized this, it made it easy to stop worrying about it.

I ended up accidentally selecting a group of queer and neurodivergent friends by accident before I knew I was either of those things. But in college right found it really, really hard to fit in with my neurotypical housemates, until one with ADHD moved in. I never felt like I was on the same level as the neurotypicals, because they aren't exhausted just by being alive and doing tasks

I'm kinda old at this point. I see 'friends' in two categories, people I see as a sort of extended family, and friends of location/convenience. The first category tends to be entirely queer socialists, whereas the rest are friends of friends, coworkers, most cishets, etc. Generally the second category of friend is very unreliable and not very useful to be around, but they do help pass the time in boring situations, basically.

It's important as you grow older to focus on friends that materially help you and show up when you need them and sideline the others imo. Working with homeless people makes me realize how many queer people dont have friends that will help them in their time of need.

I eventually found all the proper circles, but for a while I only felt normal in kink scenes where my weirdness was more tolerable.

I mean, I've lost a lot of friends over the past couple years and kicked a few myself, so now it's back to stage one.

after i got dumped ive felt this 10 fold because she is a core part of the friend group (as am i) and i just cant cope seeing her

oh all the time...always feels like im just there and an addon to the hang out. on top of all of that one of my real life friends, a person i've known for 15+ years, always complains that he has to drive 30 min to get to my apartment (i dont have a car). it pisses me off. i'm always the last to be invited, even though i suggest stuff doing stuff all the time. guess who didn't know people were playing commander mtg together until today?

i've been on the internet for a long time too and i've been in so many online communities and i've had the exact same problem, i'm just in the fringe, i'm just there. i know people who met online and started dating, are now married, or they have no problem driving or flying to visit each other (which makes my friend who complains about 30 min drives to my apartment come off so much worse). in my communities i try to suggest stuff. play a game together, i started a monthly movie club in a discord i was already in (its so casual, its just watch 1 movie and talk about it) but no one shows up. i was watching my friends twitch channel, and there were so many people talking in his chat, all from old MMO guilds, from guilds that havent been active in years, all people he cultivated and grouped together.

the irony is that i think i'm not an introverted person at all, i love being around people, i've just never fit in somewhere. itd be easier to cope with all this if i had something else going on in my life, but i dont so i just spiral every few weeks or days now. i've got too much time to think about everything, and i only think of the worst stuff

Yeah, but all the groups I feel like I'm being subtly excluded from are neurodivergent. Some of it is my own trauma, but also some of it is because a lot of people don't know how to end a sentence in the middle of a conversation.

Yes, all my life. Even on any sort of social media, including here. I have long ago stopped trying to "get in" which used to feel pretty soulcrushing when I was younger. I stick to my neurospicy immediate family and partner now

At work, hobbies etc. I am always seemingly very well liked, but they don't allow me into their actual thing, not all the way in at least. If I leave or stop going to something, nobody ever asks where I went. I had a workout center I went to for almost ten years with several women who I always chatted with before and after the classes, they had intimate little parties and stuff, I was never invited to those. But they were always very friendly with me. So it's odd.

At work my co-workers had a party that they did invite me to and I went. Then they made plans there for going together to a march a few months later which I never got a message on, went to the march with my partner and saw the group there who happily all said hello, but had decided to not include me or invite me. So it keeps happening.

Before I understood I am neurospicy I always just thought that I must feel somehow hard to approach or am just different somehow, sometimes I thought I am somehow broken. These days I get it, sort of. But it still feels very lonely at times and I have no real friends to turn to because of it. The few I had growing up have all been scattered into the winds and it is what it is.

I haven't had a single friend group that I was centered on, since middle school.

That's okay. I have lots of friends and not all of them are really in groups, and I'm way more concerned about what we can do together than I am about fitting in adequately. By this point I assume most people's social lives are shot to shit, and even if that's not true, I think it's a healthy assumption for me to hold.

I just moved to another country and I feel this so hard 😭

I had to "break up" with my long-time circle of friends over this kind of behavior. We had known each other for over 10 years, but the last few years of our "friendship" I had been increasingly flaked on, until I had started to develop anxiety any time I even thought of trying to make plans, because I knew how it'd feel like pulling teeth. Once I started identifying patterns like, I suggest plans on x date > they counter with x date + 1 month > 1 month later comes, everyone is "too busy" (but not too busy to have made plans amongst themselves during the same time) as well as several other obvious and embarrassing signs of being excluded, I just stopped trying and effectively "quiet quit" the friend group.

One particularly egregious example, the last event of theirs I was invited to, a small condo housewarming party of ~10 people, I quickly took notice of how they'd systematically move the group away from me, one or two individuals at a time, to a new spot any time I joined the conversation, until I was left alone, and this process repeated a few times until I gave up and scrolled on my phone alone on the couch, until my friend's girlfriend apparently took pity on me enough to strike up a short convo (which was genuinely kind of her), but aside from that brief gesture I left a short while later feeling pretty dejected and quietly humiliated. Why invite someone to a gathering if you have no intention of talking to them? Why treat someone like that and then also still try to maintain any kind of friendship??

A whole six months of radio silence after the "quiet quitting," one of them finally texts me asking if I wanted to "catch up" over lunch. I turned him down and (admittedly not so kindly) explained why, which was met by him pulling in 2 other "friends" to dogpile and gaslight me over how they were just "really busy" all the time, and how I should have tried talking to them about it because they had "no idea." When I offered multiple examples of how they had systematically ignored and excluded me, they'd just circle back to the "we were soooo busy" and "had no idea" excuses, like broken records. Except for one of the friends, who just gave sort of a meek "I hear you, if you don't want to talk to us anymore I will respect that," which felt more like an admission that he didn't care enough to keep me around than anything else. After a while of , I just blocked the two that kept arguing in circles. The rest of the "core" group (all people I had known for years btw) just simply never talked to me again.

Months later from that, I happened to reconnect with a couple of friends (both of whom I wouldn't be surprised if they were also on the spectrum) that were mutuals with the above mentioned friend group (but also never super close to them), and they shared similar experiences of being excluded and feeling gaslit by the same individuals. So, at least I got some closure that it wasn't "just me." But, goddamn, it felt really shitty to learn that some otherwise apparently-well-adjusted neurotypicals like to keep us around just to be set pieces for their larger gatherings or some shit.

Suffice to say, I have lots of problems trusting and forming any kind of bonds with most neurotypicals, and tend to keep my distance from them nowadays. I still don't fully understand why they behave the way they do around me, but at least I've come to realize and accept that it's something wrong with them, not me.