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Asociality

It can be hard to understand asociality.  When I tell people that I have no impulse to socialize, some of them think I am misdescribing the experience of being reluctant or afraid to socialize.  I want to find a way to make it easy to understand what asociality is and what it's like for me.

Here is the simplest explanation I can think of: the impulse to socialize is caused by an event that happens in the brain.  Some people never experience that event.  I am one of those people.

I had trouble with this when I was young.  I didn't know that asociality was something that could happen.  I tried to make myself be social because I believed I had to.  The people around me were social and they seemed happy.  I wanted to be happy, so I tried to be social.  But that made me unhappy because I was forcing myself to do something that was not normal for me.  I became very confused.  The world seems hostile when you feel like you can't be yourself.  I went into social interactions at gunpoint, my appearance of normalcy at stake along with any chance of acceptance.  This made socializing even more stressful than it would have been on its own.  As I felt forced to do something I had no interest in doing and was conspicuously clumsy at it under the scrutiny of my peers, even positive social interactions were traumatic.  Thus, socializing, which had previously just been uninteresting, began to look like something dangerous.  I developed social anxiety disorder, which can mask asociality.

But now I'm older.  When I look at myself I don't see the mask.  I still feel pressure to socialize but I know that I don't have to respond in any way.  I am allowed to take care of myself no matter what prohibitions others might try to impose.  There are still people who think I'm just shy, and sometimes I feel very motivated to disabuse them of that notion.  I would like to be understood and I would like to promote understanding, but I am within my rights to set any burdens down.  And even if I'm not in my rights to do so I will set them down anyway.  Because most things don't matter, and most things that do matter don't matter for very long, and anyway I don't want to be part of the argument about which is which.

There are lots of ways to be.  We may never see all of them.  I would like to contribute to an increase in visibility for neurodiversity across the board.  If I can't, that is OK.  I have at least a healthy understanding of myself, and that is a victory.

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