A joke headline did the rounds this week. Something like: “So they’re autistic — doesn’t mean they get to be rude.” A gag. Satire. Nobody actually ran it.
Didn’t need to. I’ve been living the unprinted version for years.
Direct. Blunt. Intense. Too much. Hard work. Also — somehow, in the same breath from different people — shy. Not contradictions anyone noticed giving me. Just verdicts, stacked up over time, that never once agreed with each other. Too much in this room. Not enough in that one. There was never a standard. There was just whatever the room wanted from me that day, handed back to me as if it were a fact about who I am.
You can’t build a self out of that. You try anyway. What you end up with is stitched together from other people’s inconsistent reactions to you, not from anything you actually know to be true.
And here’s the part nobody warns you about: the confusion doesn’t stay outside you. It gets in. After enough years of the same note, you stop being able to tell where their read on you ends and your own understanding begins.
Worse — you might have misread their reaction too. So the whole thing is damage built on a misreading, of a miscommunication, of a difference that nobody ever actually named out loud.
Because social cues aren’t native language for a neurodivergent brain. They’re learned late, learned hard, full of gaps and false friends and moments where the translation just doesn’t land. You can feel that something happened without being able to decode what it was. Pattern recognition without comprehension.
And when you can’t decode it, you fill the blank. The default filler, after enough repetitions, is always the same: I did something wrong.
Not because it’s true. Because it’s the shape of the story you’ve already been handed.
I spent years thinking I was just difficult. Not the version people say to hurt you — the quiet 3am version, where you actually wonder if you’re built wrong. Whether everyone else got issued a part you didn’t. Whether the gap between what you meant and what landed is yours to carry, yours to fix.
I was masking before I had the word for it. Softening. Editing. Rehearsing sentences before they left my mouth, padding them with nothing that added meaning, just cushioning. Swapping precision for something easier to swallow. I never fit the trends, never ran with the popular crowd, and honestly — I like pushing on things that make people uncomfortable, not to be a jerk, but because that’s where the actual thinking starts. Still: translating myself down into a register a room could take without flinching was never really me.
And it costs. More than people clock. What’s left at the end of a day of translating yourself isn’t ordinary tired. It’s a specific kind of empty that a night’s sleep doesn’t touch — because you spent the day converting yourself into everyone else’s language, instead of the reverse.
The baseline assumption sitting underneath all that translating? That you’re the deficient one. That you’re the one who needs fixing before you’re fit for company. That’s the quiet cruelty of it.
What reads to other people as rude is sometimes just off. Unplaceable. That specific unease people feel around someone who doesn’t slot into a category they recognize. Nobody thinks hard about it. It just registers, and settles, and becomes a verdict nobody bothered to check.
The bluntness. The answer with no cushioning on it. Not because the feeling behind it wasn’t there — because the fuel for performing the softer version ran out somewhere around 2pm.
And when I can’t read the room, I sometimes just — leave. No idea I’ve upset anyone. Not even a flicker.
So which is it. Am I rude, or am I just running different hardware?
Who wrote the rulebook here. Whose baseline are we measuring against — and was it ever built with my brain in mind, or just built by whoever felt entitled to decide what counts as correct?
Because “suck it up” cuts both directions. If something felt off to you, there’s a phone in your pocket. A text costs thirty seconds. “Hey — you good? Felt like something shifted.” That single message would tell you more than any silent verdict you’ve already reached.
Assuming the worst costs the assumer nothing. Actually checking costs you the comfort of not having to.
But the assumption doesn’t stay put. It bleeds into the next conversation. Things get shorter. Cooler. You feel the shift even when you can’t name the cause — because pattern-sensing was never the part that failed.
So you carry the wrongness with no information to close it out. Something happened. No idea what. The pattern insists it was you.
For an ADHD brain, that file doesn’t sit quietly waiting. It resurfaces. Uninvited, mid-day, mid-something-else. And when RSD is part of the wiring, every resurfacing comes back at full strength — not a gentle reminder, a flood, same intensity as the original hit.
That’s not anxiety over nothing. That’s a nervous system trying to close a loop it was never given the data to close.
And the longer it stays open, the more it proves the story already sitting in your head.
It was me. It’s always me.
Here’s the actual damage, though — not what other people get wrong about you, but what you start believing about yourself once you’ve heard it enough times. You can push back on someone else’s read. It’s much harder to push back on your own. Once you’ve absorbed enough feedback that your signal is faulty, you start thinking the instrument itself needs replacing, instead of questioning whether the room was ever calibrated for you at all.
The instrument was fine.
The room was tuned to a different frequency, and somebody told you the retuning was your job.
That’s not rudeness. That’s a nervous system doing exactly what it’s built to do, in a space that was never built for it.
I’m still working out which parts are my voice, and which parts are just the echo of everyone who once told me my voice was wrong.
Some days I can tell the difference. Some days I genuinely can’t.
That’s not a confession. It’s just where things stand.
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