look I get it. I grew up autistic in a homogeneous community too. I have gotten enough parsing shock to immediately recall it decades later from:
- leetspeak
- SMS abbreviations
- phonetic spellings
- cutesy spellings
- phonetic noise interjections
- lack of commas
- lack of capitalization (!!!)
- middle English
- dialect English
- written Dutch that I mistook for English
- spoken Dutch that I mistook for English
- American English spoken by other white people who only speak American English, but with a regional accent I'm not used to
some of these really pissed me off for a while. some made me lament the state of education. (racistly, in quite a few cases.) and some, I immediately identified as my own mistake because that's just how someone habitually communicates; I'll just have to get used to it.
turns out that last thing got a lot easier with practice. which is good, because it should have been my reaction to all of them. they're all either things a person was raised with, or chosen cultural identity signifiers1, or both. autistic structure-comfort is a thing, and being raised without enough exposure to different modes of expression compounds it, and it sucks to sit through the shock of that, but we can learn and it stops hurting once we do and the fact we were unprepared is on our upbringing, not the people expressing themselves around us.
if it's too much at once, you probably should silence a few accounts so you can expose yourself more slowly. keep a list of them, so you can undo it later; I promise there aren't that many yinglets in your feed. because the alternative lies somewhere between "Oxford English only!" and, frankly, "therians are fake and their expression is a game they can play elsewhere." and I would rather be surrounded by scavs than cops.
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in before someone tries to whatabout hate speech
