Healthy Connections
Everything Is True
Ada Hoffmann's author newsletter
As you go through your life you will meet people. There will be people and groups who drain your energy to be around, who you grit your teeth and force yourself to be nice to because that's how Social Interaction is supposed to work. And there will be people and groups who genuinely fill you back up. You'll sit with them and experience their presence and you'll glow. You'll feel better afterwards than you did before. You'll feel included. You'll feel seen. You'll feel fulfilled.
This is true for everyone, but as autistic people we can forget that it is true for us.
It's not always black and white. Some connections will be in between those two extremes. Sometimes a connection that normally fulfils you will feel off, just because someone’s having an off day. Sometimes a conflict will arise and it'll be challenging to hash things out until you can get back to that fulfilling place. Sometimes a little teeth-gritting is necessary, either in order to productively resolve a conflict like that, or to get used to a group and discern if it's the kind of group you can learn to feel safe in.
And it’s not an issue of morality, or of a group’s ideological correctness. Groups that are very energizing for one person might not meet a second person's needs at all. Some groups do exclude people thoughtlessly or enable harmful behavior, but just because other people need a different group doesn't necessarily mean that yours is bad. And if a group isn't working for you, it isn't necessary to come up with a reason why they're morally bad before you disengage. The fact that the connection isn't working for you is enough of a reason by itself.
But here's what I want to remind you, because lately I've been having to remember it a lot myself:
You deserve connections that fulfil you.
I think that when we are autistic (or otherwise different from the social norm), we can forget this.
Some of us have been explicitly taught, growing up, that gritting our teeth and forcing ourselves to behave as expected - for little or no reward, except for being able to say we did the expected amount of social interaction - is just how social interaction works. And if we don’t enjoy that process, then we’re “not very social.” Even if it’s said without judgment, it’s assumed to be an issue about us, and not an issue of our fit with our surroundings.
Some of us have been plopped into groups with people who don't have anything in common with us except that they're also autistic, or with pitying NTs who want to be our friends for charity - because everybody figured that was the best we could do.
"Social skills classes" often are only about how to outwardly behave in a way that pleases other people; they often don't include any lessons on how to tell if we feel socially fulfilled, listened to, accepted, or understood.
Those of us who didn't grow up hearing these lessons explicitly might still have implicitly absorbed, from the attitudes of the people around us, that we don't deserve to feel these things.
Or that we'll only deserve to feel them when we've done some nebulous, ill-defined amount of work to make ourselves worthy.
But the truth is that we all deserve connections that fulfil us.
Sometimes it takes time and work to find them. Sometimes it isn't obvious where to look for the people and groups that will feel this way to us. The looking takes time. Getting ready to do the looking, in and of itself, can take some scary self-work.
Sometimes we do have to work on ourselves before we can settle in to the groups that are right for us. Sometimes we have to learn to be vulnerable, or to set healthy boundaries, or to identify what we do and don't want in the first place. Sometimes we do, in fact, have to take a hard look in the mirror and learn to respect other people's boundaries. This is practical, skill-building work that we sometimes need to do before it's possible for us to have what we deserve.
But even when you still have more of this work to do, you are a human person; you deserve to acknowledge your feelings. You deserve to notice - without any moral judgment attached - what feeds you, what fulfils you, and what doesn't. You deserve to go looking for more of what feels like the right fit for you. And you deserve to set your schedule accordingly.