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Anyway, right after that we were talking about her new neighbor’s incessantly barking dog and when I said well yeah, sounds like you have an interpersonal neighbor feud thing with her but it’s not a moral or criminal failing on her part to have a barky dog in a city and maybe it would help to go introduce yourself and have a conversation about it and BAM! she’s accusing me of invalidating her feelings and saying things I never said and even tried to explicitly disclaim first but nope, her pride came first and it took many minutes for her to understand and accept my apology for the miscommunication and that by offering a perspective on her problems (and a solution she didn’t like) I was not dismissing them but in fact engaging with them

And she’s proudly ND/ADHD so this proves it’s *not* “NT vs ND comm styles” but something more subtle

(and I have lots more theories about these subtleties, stay tuned )

2/

@neuralex
I've noticed the same thing here and in part, at least, I feel that it is trauma related for autistics. Most of them seem to be escapees from the toxity of twitter and seem to have this hair trigger attack first, maybe ask questions later, response to anything they even suspect is negative about them. So whilst for NT's it is about whether they percieve you as being status affirming or attacking and that does more often than not down to communication differences. For us it is far more to do with how raw and vulnerable we have been made to feel and how, as you said, thin or thick skinned they are about it.

@Pathfinder

yeah, “hurt people hurt people” is a universal rule and context collapse is social media’s fatal flaw (perhaps a flaw that earlier cultures solved by enforcing conformity to arbitrary hierarchy-based protocols in formal settings — which if confirmed would be a real ironic kick in the pants to those of us who aspire for a more egalitarian open and diverse society and who also need all rules explained and especially hate arbitrary and unfair ones )

@neuralex
Formal, strict and rules driven language, as opposed to looser more contextual language, was definitely a thing. In fact many cultures literally had different and unconnected languages for the two settings. Think high and low languages. But I think the main difference in the past that would have mitigated against anxiety, whether status or trauma, induced attack instincts, would have been familiarity. Smaller communities means status is far more open and obvious. NTs wouldn't have as been as prone to going on the elaborate and heavily coded linguistic fishing trips to gauge respective status, that we're so prone to falling a foul of and autistics would have had far more confidence in their place and purpose and any possible reactions to them.

@tanquist

wow, that's... disturbing but also kind of sweet that he was self-aware enough to play "catch and release" and teach you... like one of those TV psycho killers who help the cops catch other psycho killers