Acceptance by people... it feels surreal sometimes.

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I can relate to that a lot. I often feel like i never measure up no matter how hard I try (or that i am just one small slip away from devastating failure that can ruin everything); then on the occasion when i am accepted with open arms--especially if the other party doesn't need me in any way, just simply offers acceptance with no strings attached--i get all emotional about it. I guess because i am so starved for it. I often don't tell people how much they mean to me because it would make me cry to do it, and of course then i would hate myself in the morning...

I can also relate to the lack of confidence part of this discussion. I have come a long way since i was a teenager and twenty-something...but i still don't feel i have the same confidence level of most people in their 30's. I have learned to fake it better, and i have confidence of a greater database of knowledge and experience. But it is all learned by memorizing each part of how to function in each situation; if i am in a situation that has no pre-established protocol or i haven't memorized it, i get flustered easily. Oh, well. I guess that is somewhat the story of my life and will always be.

JoeBos, you really should pat yourself on the back. Getting out of your comfort zone is difficult and comes at a high price for some of us. I ended up getting badly burnt out. Just make sure, you are going into this with your eyes wide open. When it gets too tough, take a step back and decompress.

Note: I envy your feelings of acceptance

The place where I feel most accepted is here, I always prefer to be in the company of fellow aspies, it feels like we're all accepting of each other. I've never really felt accepted by anyone in my life before, I was never accepted at school and now im at college I still don't feel accepted there, I've never even had a real friend before.

I still don't feel like I'm 100% accepted by my family either, a lot of them still don't really understand autism, when my parents had a son it feels as if they expected somebody completely different and that I'm somewhat of a disappointment. When i had a job I wasn't accepted by anyone there either. Often feels like I'm alone in this world.

I can relate to this stuff from the other end. I hear people talk about this kind of thing through the course of my research and occasionally it's from someone I actually know. I've been taken aback, more than once, to hear about this lack of confidence from people I personally look to for social acceptance.

It really is a human thing that we all experience but not many people are willing to talk about. But I think some people experience a lack of social confidence to a crippling extent, whereas others of us can push past feeling awkward pretty easily. So in that way, it's kind of discredits the experiences of people having a hard time to think of it as something we all share. I would say we share it in uneven portions.