In American movies, when kids are neuroatypical (have autism or another developmental difference) parents tell them we love you as you are and unconditionally accept, then they help them to integrate into society and learn to be part of it.

In the real world, when kids are neuroatypical parents tell them why the hell you can’t just be normal as all other kids. Then it took a life to learn what the hell the average human means by ‘being normal’ and to be honest it’s quite a journey.

I remember when I was around 10 yo we had a family dinner with several dozens of relatives and my parents were telling the rest what a happy family we are. Then I stood up and said out loud that it's a lie, we are a very unhappy family, my parents hate living together, cheat on each other, and are constantly depressed. No need to say that I ruined the dinner and my parents almost killed me for that. The funny thing is that I genuinely had no idea what I did wrong, I just told the truth. I have hundreds of these stories. They all are stupidly awkward and furthermore I still continue to trap into them all the time.

In one word, what most people know about communication and understanding by default, by intuition, or my common sense, we need to learn by logic. We have to learn what makes people upset, what makes people happy, all the verbal and non-verbal euphemisms people use.

Can you guess how many times it took me to understand that “Let’s watch a movie” means “Let’s have sex”. Because comm’n if you don’t want to watch a movie why do you say “Let’s watch a movie” and if you want to have sex why not to say “Let’s have sex” but to say “Let’s watch a movie”? It took me at least three iterations to learn this one.

When I was around 14 and got my laptop, almost the first thing I googled was how to study extrasensory perception because what if instead of decoding people’s words I could just read their thoughts and know what they mean. I think it’s a good illustration of thinking out of the box regarding problem solving skills. However it seems that even if telepathy works, the earth interfaces haven’t been developed yet.

There is an ‘easy’ way for neuroatypical human beings – choose a profession with as little communication as possible. My own problem with this is that regardless of all described above my favourite thing is hanging out with people, being quite social and interactive. If you open my diary – the most common question there is ‘oh I’d love to have more friends but God knows how I do that’ (I still don’t know how I do that tbh). But the thing is that the cost of socialization – feeling weird and awkward 24/7. It won’t be okay, it will be like this till the end.

I tried to write it funny tho telling a bit about the hardships of being neuroatypical. However I omitted all really hard parts of it because they are quite heavy to perceive and as I’ve learnt so far – people prefer skeletons to stay in the wardrobes. But as a tl;dr of this note – I want everyone who is reading this note to be a bit more patient and soft to weird people because people are mostly weird for a reason. If we could choose we’d prefer being normal. Many neuroatypical people do not report it under every acquaintance nor do they put it into twitter profiles. Love u