Growing up undiagnosed autistic (my diagnosis was “developmental delays in fine motor skills”/dyspraxia and a referral that was never followed) I grew up being told implicitly and explicitly by adults and people my own age at home and at school again and again that I was a fundamentally abrasive, obnoxious, unlikable, socially incompetent, and all-around hatable person. That nobody liked me. That nobody wanted me to be in a room with them. Etc. etc. etc.
And I internalized that shit hard like I just accepted it as a fundament truth about myself that my charisma stat was 0.
And I remember in college assuming this was true but over time coming to make friends anyway and meeting people who were nice to me anyway or who actively sought out interactions with me or outright said they admired me. It was incredibly surreal and hard to process at first. But it was tempered by simultaneously gaining a reputation as a “controversial figure” or a “love them or hate them and no in between” type person.
At age 20 someone I knew as a teenager was cyber bullying a teenager on Facebook (who I’d known when they were a tween) and I intervened and told her to stop cyber bullying teenagers. She messaged me an incredibly familiar rant about how I’m fundamentally abrasive and awful and nobody likes me and I should know my place and shut up because everyone just wishes I’d go away.
But it just didn’t hit the same. I knew that I had friends. I knew that a lot of people genuinely liked me. Not everyone, sure, but I knew that there were still people who actively sought to live with me, actively sought to spent time with me, and explicitly told me that they liked me and valued me as a friend. Among college friends the adjectives of acquired were not “abrasive” and “obnoxious” but “good listener” and “helpful.”
And as I’ve grown older, more and more I’ve come to find myself surrounded by love and friendship. Getting surgery especially makes me think about the support network I’ve found myself in. The tenderness I’m given. The ways that people new and old clearly like me and enjoy my company. The way that I’ve found friends who and chosen family who love me. I’m sure as I’ve gotten older I’ve developed better social skills but I’ve also just grown more mature as have the people around me and I’ve learned how to find spaces where the kind of people I get along with tend to congregate.
I’m just very appreciative of all the love and support I receive and just in awe of how much things have changed. How wrong everyone was back then, in the long run. People like me for who I am and I don’t have to perform to achieve that either. And I like and love all those people too. I’m so grateful for them.
Like, compared to how I was at age 14, I definitely act differently. I think that’s true for most people. My social skills clearly developed slower and later than other people but I did eventually develop some sort of social skills. They’re different from the ones other people developed. They’re mine. And people seem to like them.
