But you don't look autistic!

That's a sentence I hear 80% of the time when I tell someone I have autism. It always makes me feel a bit confused; what are autistic people supposed to look like? Do I have to act all strange and unpredictable? I really don't know. I guess we just look the same as other humans, nothing alien about it, at least not on the outside. Because sometimes I really do feel like an alien.

You rarely see it though, because I always try to mask all the "weird" things about me. I don't do it on purpose, it just happens. I think that from a young age I've been trying to "fit in" to the way "normal" people would behave and try to mirror everything they do, just because I would have no idea how to act if I were to figure it out on my own. 

Think of it as a game you're playing while you skipped the instructions on how to actually play, that's how life feels for me. Every little thing is a new and foreign thing to me and it's always a gamble as to how I should be acting. Of course I learned a bit since, as I see how other people would act, aswell as asking people about certain situations and things, but that didn't often go without a laugh from them. Some of them haven't been very understanding when I asked something that they thought to be common knowledge. But I didn't know! I had no idea it was even common knowledge, because in my earlier years I definitely though everyone was as oblivious as me.

To be absolutely honest, I have no idea what I'm doing when I mask, how different I might act as I do when I'm alone. It just happens, as I'm assuming has been for a big part of my life. I do know that it's super draining though. When I'm surrounded by people for a day I am absolutely exhausted, probably because of all the worrying about social etiquette, what to do when, keeping your attention on people's conversation, thinking of replies (what's ok to say, what's not ok to say), am I standing/sitting okay, trying to keep eye contact but then focussing too much on that and trying to keep focus in general because my mind has probably wondered off to other things 6 times.

There's things that's considered improper in certain situations and of course I've learned quite a bit on what I can an can't do, but it keeps being a gamble sometimes. Just as people don't really like it when you don't make eye contact or don't look at them for a while, so I'm supposed to continuously look into those intense balls of colour shooting fire into my brain? Great. Although perhaps I should write more on that in another post.

Tldr; being properly social is hard.

I suppose I've been rambling about a whole lot while I was planning on writing about just one thing, but I think I should just expect that for every post. My head is chaotic, so will my posts be. 🤷