What the title says. Well intentioned, often other “neurodivergent” people look at your life, your autism, and say: “you should mask harder.”
For example, I accidentally said something that offended a friend. Won’t go into detail, but it was me unintentionally coming off as arrogant, not something bad like a slur or hate speech.
I asked for advice (elsewhere) and the advice was universally, “you see, NT avoid this topic at all costs. Going forwards, know it is best to avoid this topic.”
But isn’t this just saying “mask harder and be more palatable for everyone else”?
Every piece of “autism advice” I see even in “neurodivergent friendly” communities is basically “how to be less autistic.”
I’m pretty sure I’ve annoyed allistics (NT or ND) friends and acquaintances by bringing up philosophy, sex, politics, religion, etc much more readily than normally “appropriate”.
I’ll continue to otherwise be friendly with them but on this they can get fucked. The only time I’m enduring “safe” small talk is when I’m at work.
The key here is to accept that not everyone needs to be your friend… unless you live in the middle of nowhere or in rural bumfuck (or as mentioned before you are at work). Then because the number of friends you’ll potentially have will always be countable on 1-2 hands and you wont be able to afford losing one.
The actual good advice is: move to highly populated areas, accept that you’ll alienate a large portion of people, and settle on the percentage of cool ones.
Unfortunately, moving to a populated place is expensive. So first get a job, and save up for the move.