Image of a screenshot of Twitter of a screenshot of Facebook.
The Facebook screenshot reads:
Fun fact about me: When I’m having a conversation with you, I will periodically bring up personal experiences from my own life, interspersed withing your own stories that you’re telling me. I’m not doing this to try and make the conversation about me, or to take away from your own experience. Actually, what I’m attempting to do, is to try and show you that I do, in fact, understand what you’re trying to tell me, and that I am giving your story my full attention.
It can really be off-putting to some people, so if I’ve ever done this to you during a conversation, I just wanted to make sure you know that I wasn’t trying to take over your story, I was just doing my best to connect with you in the moment.
The screenshot of Twitter reads:
This. I am fully aware that I do this. And I feel so guilty every time, but this. Understand this.
While it’s normal to do this (outside of obvious one-upmanship) I think what makes it autistic is the crushing awareness of the pattern and the realization of how wrong the reaction to such an innocuous thing can be if interpreted incorrectly. Some sort of paranoia of being misunderstood.
Well apparently I have this paranoia although I think evidence of prior conversations makes it entirely warranted :)
I fight the urge to share too much of my own past experiences or knowledge by speaking to myself in my head during the conversation. I know it annoys people when I do this too often, but it’s so frustrating at the same time to remain silent that I came up with this trick to « unload my mind ». Took me too many years to come up with this solution to be honest ^^.