One of my pet peeves as a Certified AutistTM/person w ADHD/Medically Verified Crazy Person is like. When someone makes a point like, "x behavior can be bad sometimes" and some other person swoops in like "but that's a thing autistic ppl do!!!" like. Ok? Doesn't mean it's necessarily like. Good.

Autism isn't Better Person Disorder or anything. We're literally just different, not better or worse. We do some things better than some neurotypicals do, and they can do some other things better than we do. That's really it.

Saying like, "it's good to diversify your knowledge/experiences to become a well-rounded person" isn't an attack on the Autistic Community it's just a fact. It's like saying smth like "it's best to be direct and clear when communicating with people" to a neurotypical person. Is it hard sometimes? Yeah. But like. It's our responsibility as humans, even us autistic humans, to try and better ourselves. Just bc something is hard or simply doesn't come naturally bc of this, that or the other doesn't mean it's like. Impossible or going against our nature or whatever.

It also just feels so. Infantilizing. Like someone is patting my head going "it's okay if you only ever talk about Sonic the Hedgehog to people, if people don't want to listen to you infodump for two hours or get frustrated because they can't carry a conversation with you, they're just being ableist! You'll find other friends!" as if like, as humans all of us need to unlearn making conversations exclusively about us and our interests. Like genuinely one-sided conversation like that gets tiring for literally anyone if it goes on long enough.

Growth is hard! Learning is hard! But I feel like it's unreasonable to ask/expect neurotypical ppl to learn how to communicate with us without. Some kind of return. It feels self centered. Not to mention the fact that just. Most people are neurotypical (even if they're mentally ill) and so learning how to be at least passable in conversation/societyTM is. Really important.

This is sort of what I mean when I talk about people online using autism (or any other weirdbrain) as a shield. It almost acts as if neurotypical people are just naturally born Mature and autistic people are naturally born Immature and it's NTs responsibility like a parent to just be okay with and support any and all behavior autistic people (or some random's PERCEPTION of our behavior, I've said it before and I'll say it again that just bc you and all your friends are Fandom Autistics doesn't mean we all are) exhibit even if it's like. Bad and could be improved.

And are there things that NTs SHOULD get used to, support, etc that they don't? Of course! NTs should get used to and support stimming in public, people being harmlessly weird, someone needing more direct communication, etc. But it's straight up weird to be like "all NTs NEED to be okay with and engage with me exclusively relating to others via anime fanfiction" like of course if that's ur thing you should be treated with respect and human decency, but you also cant be surprised when people find it hard to get along with you. I feel like there was some sort of weird transformation from "if someone is being harmlessly weird that's not anyone else's problem and you should still treat them with respect" to "if anyone doesn't put up with any and all behavior x person does then that's ableism" like. Ur not entitled to friendship w people. Esp when this is applied on an individual level when it really is more of a Societal and Systemic issue. Person X not wanting to be friends with person Y isn't the issue, but the grander idea of like. Thinking that people who do/act like A shouldn't be interacted with/cannot form deep connections/etc is.