Post #102 - Trying To Work Out Peoples' Motives

Being the huge Aspie I am, I often struggle with trying to work out what people actually want from me.  I know that that sounds bizarre, but meeting, maintaining and quite frankly, keeping friends is an almost impossible feat for me.  I just cannot work out the signals.  I also write in an increasingly blunt way, with no heed for others' feelings.

One of my main issues surrounds my increasing inability to support friends with Mental Health (MH) issues.  As an Aspie, my empathy (EQ) score is really low and I just cannot do it.  I have had some awful experiences in the past with people (usually with MH conditions) getting too close and literally trying to take over my life.  As soon as I think that history is beginning to repeat itself then I'll push things to facilitate a permanent split.  It's an odd thing to do, I agree, but it's the only thing that I feel safe doing. I don't wish to upset my current home situation, that's for sure.  My son Master Logic, now he's nearing puberty, is becoming more difficult and demanding by the day.

I know that, at this time of writing, that I really should be doing more with my life and I totally agree.  I have seriously been considering a return to full-time work, but regular readers of this blog will be aware what happened to me back in September 2016 and I have no wish to repeat this.  Office jobs and working with people generally makes me very unwell indeed and I lost count of the amount of times I went AWOL from jobs - I was threatened with dismissal on more than one occasion.  I just cannot cope.

I'm taking on various freelance projects at the moment, which I enjoy and I'm soon to taking over some of the communications work for my local branch of the National Autistic Society and hope to expand that as much as I possibly can.  I am intelligent and as such, need an outlet.  It doesn't really help that I was made redundant though; don't get me wrong, it was the right thing to do, but I'm so much better than this, but I cannot be - it's a dichotomy.

Post #73: Taking A Break From Facebook

Yes, I'm the first person to say that I lack empathy, but I really cannot help it.  I like to assist others, but not when it's detrimental to my own (often fragile) wellbeing.  Fair enough: so what's sparked this off then?  Well, it's nothing specific, but a bit of a build up of a number of issues ...

In my experience, which is limited in certain ways, blokes tend to talk at you more than to you.  I mean, as an Autistic woman I tend to befriend neurotypical men more than any other group of people, but it does come with its own issues; self-absorption is one of them.  You may advise me to cut off, which I often do - Facebook Messenger messages are often left unread and not replied to and yes, I've even managed to turn off the 'dings' and the stupid face icon functionality. That said, sometimes something more dramatic is required and this afternoon I've deactivated my Facebook account.  I feel better already - I mean, I've deactivated it a few times before and even if I haven't, I've made a thing of removing the Facebook app from my smartphone and tablet.  I usually last about a week, but even seven days counts as a digital detox in my opinion.  I'm still retaining Twitter and Instagram though as I find those much more impersonal and quite frankly, more fun.