What’s the difference between being austistic and just being socially awkward?
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Autism could be boiled down to someone’s brain not processing inputs or outputs in the typical manner. It’s extremely broad as it can affect any function, and it can range from an imperceptible impairment to absolutely crippling. It can come with social awkwardness or anxiety…but the two are often unrelated.
That can look like many different things depending on the person; normal sensations can be completely overwhelming or muted, emotions may not process properly, resistance to adapt, extreme penchant for patterns or habits, and a few others. And each of those can range from nonexistent to extreme.
Sometimes that leads to general social anxiety simply because an autistic person experiences the world differently, not because autism causes one to be socially awkward. It’s hard to be “normal” when normal things are overwhelming. Imagine being “normal” when music does nothing for you, or the texture of cotton is like ‘nails on a chalkboard’ for you, or if every perfume is disgustingly pungent, or a grocery store is so loud that it makes you sick. Growing up with any of those drastically different quirks can lead to you being the weird kid, and therefore socially awkward. But the awkwardness comes from the society not accepting different experiences rather than the autism itself.
In other cases, autism can affect key social behaviors like communication or emotional processing. In those cases, yeah, autism is the thing causing social awkwardness.
It annoys me when articles or other media describe/portray autism as social-awkwardness, because that is only a common noticeable result rather than a symptom of the disease itself. Kinda like if someone were to describe diabetics as being fat, even though diabetes can happen to anyone and most obese people don’t have diabetes.
Take me for example. I’m sensitive to sounds and some textures. I cannot ignore sounds; I am forced to hear everything. Normally, it’s no big deal because one dominates, or they’re all really quiet. I wear earbuds to the grocery store because the cacophony of loud sounds can get overwhelming, twice to the point of me wanting to throw up. And I cannot stand my skin being sticky. If my hands are sticky, I quickly become so flustered that I can’t concentrate on anything except for feeling my sticky hands. Those aren’t normal ways of processing those senses. Talking with autistic people, they all have stuff like that, except mine are sitting at like a 0.5 out of 10.
Effectively, that kind of inability to process properly is what autism is. It often comes with social awkwardness, but they are two very separate things.
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