I already read this book, but I'm interested in everyone else's thoughts.

Any passages or quotes that stick out to you?

The section on "female" autism really stuck out just because its just so frustrating to see how autism has been looked at within the gender binary. As a CIS man, there are so many of the listed traits for "female" autism that I fit into that it makes me wonder how a psychologist would have approached me if I ever tried getting a diagnosis in the past and maybe even now. It just makes me think of another way that gender norms can be so damaging to society and the need to move on from them in general.

Experiences similar to the ones described in this chapter?

As a POC, the experiences described here of having to put on a "nice and quite" mask. When I was in elementary school I got in trouble a few times because, as my mom described it, I often laughed at my friends' jokes the wrong time and was causing disturbances in the classroom. There was also another time when I was pull aside by a teacher's aide when I was playing "knights" with a couple of pencils and she told me I should play such violent games and pay more attention in class. Thankfully overall my experience in elementary school wasn't all that bad since most teachers and the principle were very nurturing, but it kind of sticks out in my mind reading this book now. Some of my more disruptive behaviors continued into middle school where I would often make sound effects to go along with what we were learning about. I don't really remember being corrected or called out on that behavior much since I was actually getting good grades, but at some point something kind of just clicked. I stopped making noises in class. Socially I always thought that I was open and friendly with most people, but recently I reconnected with a few of my middle school classmates on social media and they welcomed me into our school group, but also told me about how quite I was. I never really thought of it, but I also remember being bullied a bit for being a slow talker. I did have to take speech therapy while I was in elementary school, but I don't remember the exact reason though. But it probably contributed to my being so quite in social settings.

I continued with my "well behaved" persona in class into high school and through my time in college. I would still have outbursts of loudness and quirkiness whenever I was around friends, but I also started to isolate to a greater extreme starting in my sophomore year of HS. Even now I'm not entirely sure what triggered this. Maybe it was autistic burnout and I didn't really realize it. My friends would often tell me to stop being alone so much and invite me over to eat with them. The rest of my time in high school was a constant cycle of being comfortable enough to hang out with my friends during lunch and isolating myself. But everyone that I talked to during graduation and after always tells me I was such a nice and sweet guy even though I was a bit of a ghost, which got some people to nickname me Casper.

I kind of lost track a bit there lol, but kind of going back to POC specific examples, code-switching and its similarity to masking stuck out to me. I've kind of blended the way I speak in informal and formal setting to where often in social settings other POC comment on how "proper" I speak much in the same way Timotheus described. I clean up my language a bit more when I have to speak to higher-ups at work, but I feel like there isn't a ton of difference. At least when I speak English. When I speak Spanish its a bit more extreme. I still don't really quite speak like most people from my ancestral country, but at my old job my coworkers would point out how I spoke such proper Spanish when I was helping customers. I never really thought much about it. Growing up in the US bilingual I always felt my Spanish was a bit "broken" so I think I subconsciously made more of an effort to pronounce things well enough so that customers understood me better. Sometimes I even do it within the same conversation. Like most recently someone pointed out how quickly I switched from a more localized accent to a more formal accent within the span of a couple of sentences. It was kind of funny, but it also got me to realize about how it just happens without really having to think about code-switching.

What hit you the hardest here?

Anand's relationship experiences. I realize that while there are people that I open up to to an extent, I'm never really fully myself with them. I think about all the friendships that I've let slip by and it pains me that I haven't been able to maintain friendships beyond settings I'm around people the most, the workplace. The friends I do still communicate with still feel like they are so distant. And I realize that a lot of it comes from the fact that I feel like I'm more of a burden or annoyance to them. I struggle with romantic relationships as well. Even now there's this great fight I have within my mind of do I open up to my crush and risk showing a side of myself that I feel they wouldn't like?

And feels so destructive. In recent times I've felt that mental strain imposing itself physically where I feel so tense just overthinking my relationships with people. I recently chatted with a friend on Discord. He told me to get a mic so I could have a voice chat with him. I eventually got it and its been sitting on my desk since. Every time I think about hitting him up to chat I just freeze from all the thoughts I have in my head. Similarly with my crush, who's shown me affection. Whether or not its romantic or platonic, it doesn't matter. Anytime I think of replicating it I just freeze up and end up thinking about it so much that I start to feel physically tense. There's nothing more that I'd like to do than to open up to the people in my life who have opened up to me, but its just so hard.

Was there anything about the communities featured in this chapter that you got new insight on? New things to relate to?

A lot about the trans and genderqueer community was eye opening. Especially in relation with how conservatives usually speak of them and the prevalence of autism in the community. As Dr.Price wrote about JK Rowling, I often hear the whole "trans people are just mentally ill or confused" from online conservative personalities and from my coworkers, both of whom are conservative. I also hope that as a whole the community of mental health professionals can move beyond such a limited way of thinking for trans and genderqueer people, much in the same way I hope they can change the way they treat POC and women.

Anything clarified in this chapter that relates to the last one for you?

The autism with comorbidity section furthered my understanding of how much overlapping there is in autistic traits with other mental health conditions and how its best not to approach autism with a "yes or no" way of thinking about it. Just talking with others and their life experiences can do so much to bring more clarity to what you may be feeling.

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I disagree with the author's assertion that Rick Sanchez from Rick and Morty is coded-Autistic. In his place I propose as a character readable as autistic.

Ah damn I just noticed this book club. I’m NT but I have the audiobook. Is this open to all?

how are you all reading so fast? I've barely read through the introduction.

Right, so I can't sleep. My thoughts.

There's a number of passages in this chapter that hit me really hard. Probably one of the hardest for me to read, looking back, because it brought up a lot of very painful thoughts and feelings and memories.

I can't related to the POC or LGBT* bits, being a cis white man, but every single thing on the "female autism" list on page 53 are things that 100% have applied to me my entire life. I'm immensely stressed out by social situations, and part of the mask is having to pretend not to be, otherwise I'm "weird," which is one of the traits that other human beings (real people) recognize marks me as one of the human-shaped things that it is 100% okay to be cruel to. (I do appreciate that Link the slinky twink aided yet another person in realizing and embracing his gender transition though, that's pretty funny tbh) Other than that, the insights about how so much of gender is a role you perform and are judged against that makes me feel a bit better about not being a traditional manly man, what with the crying and prolonged social isolation and such.

The Highly Verbal and Outgoing section, though... I'm loud. I'm a loud motherfucker. People constantly tell me I'm too loud when I'm speaking. When I get excited I raise my voice and I am almost never cognizant of it. I'm also extremely introverted due to all the times I tried being outgoing as a child and just ended up getting my feelings hurt again. I've done an exceptionally good job constructing the mask I use now. Everyone at work "loves me" according to my brother, but I don't really feel it. Most of the time I hear people talking about their social lives and love lives and just feel a dull pain threading its way through my chest and tears trying to well up, because I feel completely clueless when it comes to actually making real friends. I definitely interrupt too often and get "too enthusiastic," which is why I reflexively don't usually allow myself to get excited about anything even when I'm alone. It's damned hard for me to adjust to different social contexts, so I try to keep consistent behavior. I think it's slowly killing me:

"While they found it easy to make surface-level friends at the bar where they worked, they say that bonding with someone in a deeper way proved very difficult. They second-guess themselves, and are constantly running an algorithm in the back of their mind about how their actions and words will be received by others. They think a lot about how they're perceived and rarely feel at home in any community."

I spent, I'm sure, damn near $1000 on group social skills coaching sessions in 2022. I realize now of course that it helped me develop my mask more than actually teach me the skills I need to form, strengthen, and navigate relationships. I feel like this passage is exactly where I'm at right now. Everyone at work likes me. Most customers I interact with like me. Nobody is mean to me or excludes me or anything like that. Yet I am entirely suffused with the feeling that not a single person in the world cares about my feelings, because every time they slip out under the mask people don't like it. My anxiety and frustration are disturbing to people around me, and I always feel like my happiness is misplaced, and I'm terrified someone will actually see me crying while I'm silently going over paperwork in a free cubicle. Nobody calls me. Nobody texts me. Nobody invites me to do anything. I feel incredibly alone, and never more so than when I'm surrounded by people. Seas of humanity forcing salt into my wounds.

Dr. Price's bit about going into his apartment building and being overwhelmed by sounds is something I relate to directly as well. I need to use musician's earplugs at work to filter out a lot of the noise without cutting down on my ability to understand what people are saying. They're expensive, hard to maintain, and can get uncomfortable after wearing them all day. They also installed LED lighting in the office and the glare makes me hate having eyeballs.

The comorbidity section? Oh, this is my jam, having known I was ADHD since second grade, but frankly there wasn't much new insight for me here given how obsessively I've researched various aspects of ADHD the past few years. The things about people taking me stating facts as an insult, and the shitty psychological advice accompanying it, felt really familiar. And the really bizarre ways that ADHD and Autism interact leave me relating to damn-near contradictory things in this chapter. Dr. Price says his ADHD friends enlist him to find things in messes. I'm messy too, but I have a weird way of remembering exactly where I put shit based on a vague visual impression of what I remember it looking like the last time I saw it. Not just my keys, but the fold of a blanket nearby, maybe a crumpled post-it note of a particular color. And then I'll randomly tear through piles in my room for my shoes because I absentmindedly tore them off and tossed them on the ground. My ADHD can make me very time-blind, which makes me pay very close attention to the clock most of the time like an anxious compulsion. Without timepieces I really do get lost as far as sensing the passage of time.

"High-functioning" has so much bullshit packed into it. My "functioning" is very erratic. I can maintain my composure very well when I'm not overwhelmed with stress, I can instantly spot mistakes in paperwork that multiple other people overlooked, I have a vivid imagination and am a very good writer, I have a great sense of humor, a good voice, I can sing, etc. I can't balance my checkbook or keep all of my expenses in mind. I feel completely clueless in subtle social situations and constantly miss subtext. Stress overwhelms me easily and unravels all of my coping mechanisms so it can be rather alarming for people around me to see me suddenly explode or fall apart when I can't keep it up. I am at once hypersensitive to other people's emotions when directed at me and completely oblivious when I am not interacting, so mostly I feel confused and out of the loop on other people's feelings. And as I said, hearing other people talking about their successful and even unsuccessful relationships is physically painful for me at this point. I really tried putting myself out there last year and I have nothing concrete to show for it, just some very painful lessons and the wisdom I'll gain from them.

There's a lot of pain for me in this bit of the chapter; the "gifted kid" experience is one that I'm sure plenty of people here have been through. The passage that hits me hardest though is this:

"I also absorbed the idea, common to many 'gifted' children, that a person's intellectual potential belongs to society, not to themselves, and they owe the world greatness to justify their oddness."

Despite what people even here have told me, being weird is in fact something that makes people dislike you, sometimes very intensely. It's incredibly alienating and dehumanizing to realize that the reason a person doesn't want to be my friend is because they don't like the way I express my feelings, or that I have an enthusiasm for something they think is odd. If it didn't happen most of the time I could easily write it off as just a fluke, but the fact of the matter is I usually feel very discouraged when I actually open up to someone and try discussing something in earnest, without tailoring it to be something I think they'd like to hear. People tell me I'm smart. They don't really tell me I'm weird; the way they disregard my opinion and treat my feelings as an inconvenience and unconsciously exclude me from conversation makes that quite clear. But my family tells me I'm wasting my potential. You're so smart, you're so smart. If I'm so damn smart why is my life a mess, why am I miserable, and why do I fail at everything important?

My life's been mostly pain so far, to be honest. I've had few friends in my time, no real accomplishments, and trying to make myself feel good about the little gains I've made has a tendency to make me feel pathetic when I compare myself to other 37 year old men, who don't live with their moms and have real jobs and know how to make friends and date people.

I'm glad that other people are getting something out of this book club. I'm glad that there's some clarity, some comfort, some solidarity to be found here. I feel pretty awful about the world and about my life most of the time, but this place is a welcome respite. I feel like it's one of the rare places where I can actually express my thoughts in earnest and not feel like I'm completely fucking insane. I don't know how to find hope for the future, but something makes me keep going. I don't really know what that is either. I'm starting to think it doesn't matter. It's working, for now.

I really really been resonating with the descriptions of masked extroverts. I remember having regular conversations with a trusted high school teacher about 'not feeling like a person', or 'not having an identity', while being a social chameleon. I also resonated with the description of quickly making superficial friends but having a hard time connecting deeply.