What’s the difference between being austistic and just being socially awkward?
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I am autistic and not socially awkward at all.
Autism is having a brain that works differently than non-autistic people.
It makes me love routines, hyper-fixate on things I find interesting, gives me an amazing memory, makes me care very little about maintaining friendships.
It also makes me hyper-empathy to the point I can’t shut out other peoples emotions and cry easily.
Also I get very overwhelmed by sensory stimuli because I cannot shut things out, hearing two conversations at once are always processed together, lights can seem way too bright, etc.
I also excel at pattern recognition and see threads linking things together than non-autistic people never seem to be aware of.
I also do not gesture or alter my tone of voice much at all. I speak very seriously and I never really move my face or my hands while speaking.
There are many aspects and everyone is different with it.
Autism is a way of being, social anxiety is a condition brought about by trauma or a chemical imbalance in the brain, which can be treated with medication or therapy.
Autism cannot be “treated” in the same way because it is who we are.
But we can learn something called “masking”, which is basically where we learn to act like non-autistic people to seem less “different”.
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