First time in history!! !! The NT/AS open hotline ! !! !! !

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Seeking isn't the same as maintaining. She probably puts up a decent front, but regardless of what she says I would suspect she is, among other things, afraid of anyone knowing her too well. Certainly, true friendship comes with responsibility, which she clearly does not relish. But there is more, and I would guess she is afraid of it. A lot of well-off people are. It can take a while, but the people in the core of a local community tend to figure it out. Everything on the outside, not much on the inside. Maybe people are complicit, because most usually allow them to have it that way, being nice in public but never going deeper.

I don't carry other people's troubles in my mind, or do they carry mine in theirs. And, yet, there are a lot of people I am sure would be there for us if something really went wrong. And I've been there for others. I may not have a lot of intimate, party style friendships, and at times I wish I did, but it seems a whole lot easier for most people to build those than to develop a network that will actually stand by them in times of trouble without asking too many questions. Yet it is those networks the women in my family seem to build. My mom was stunned, completely stunned, by the reaction when my father died. She isn't that social, but she is very caring, and everyone reached right back out to her. I like to think that I have the same, not that I'm eager to test it. But people know who is out there that can be counted on, and they have reached out to me when they've needed things, and the few little things I've asked for people seem to be glad to give. There is much warmth in sensing that, its like a security blanket, but someone like your sister won't ever feel it, because she doesn't want to play the return. You kind of learn who the "pay it forward" people are around you, and you love them for it. At least I do. Its different than who you go to lunch with; hard to describe, given that I am not that socially popular and, yet, feel connected anyway.

My AS husband, btw, has a lot of trouble with this middle ground I feel we live in. He gets really cynical, and figures we should ignore them all, as they don't seem to like us well enough to invite us to event X. But I really think we've chosen that, in our own subtle way, and I know, KNOW how much people he is ready to write off value knowing him. Lol, I think I'm totally going off on a tangent now ...

Point being, your sister is choosing isolation because she doesn't understand the undercurrent. She'll always float on top of the ocean and never explore beneath. She's learned the art of appearances, but not learned the rest. Opposite of what you live with, in many ways. But equally impairing.

So very true. We're exact opposites. I feel another person's pain, it's too painful for me, so I can't bear them suffering, and I'll avoid it at all costs, so that it doesn't give ME pain. I don't have empathy, but I have over-compassion. She has over-empathy, and no compassion. I see that you understand Aspies deeply... I wonder if these people wish they could feel compassion, if they feel their lives are seriously lacking without it... The problem with me is you answer a question and it makes me wonder many new ones!

Life is full of mysteries. It's good to be curious. But I don't have all the answers.

I was not speaking about all people, just all MEAN people.

I actually think bonding meanness is higher on the evil scale than the top three you listed. Why? Because bonding meanness seduces "good" people to hate and it can occur from the "bottom up" rather than the "top down". There's never a single individual responsible and no act of force is required to make masses of people complacent in the meanness. It's also the most irrational and unpredictable type of evil. I think the root of genocide and the majority of mass scale evil is bonding meanness. Orwell's 1984 makes a good case for this IMO.

Do Aspies feel and think more intensly and deeply then Nt's? It seems NTs glide through life either ignoring the pain or are totally oblivious to people gossiping behind their back or ? I know those arn't great examples so I hope this question is understood.

It's impossible to know exactly how deeply a person is emotionally affected by something. What may look on the surface as "gliding through life" can just actually be more numerous ways of coping with things. One of the most powerful helps for coping is also the ones that AS people have the greatest difficulty accessing: a strong social support system. Being isolated from others makes everything harder. When an NT person has an intense feeling, it is likely they also have somebody or several people they can share it with to help process it. This emotional help from others will look, from the outside, like "gliding". It's actually being carried along by others and carrying them along when they need it. If you are isolated and can't access that kind of emotional support, things go less smoothly.

There is an aspect to what pook was saying that I notice as well and I don't think it's all related to lack of social support. I know for a fact that I have a much harder time bouncing back from even minor frustrations and disappointments. It seems I have a much stronger emotional need for things to "go well" than other people. One little thing can go wrong and then everything seems out of whack until the issue gets resolved. I'm simply unable to regain focus on anything else.

I'm unable to put my problems "on the back burner" the way NT's seem to be able to. Whenever I'm in a situation where there's multiple open unresolved issues looming in the future I simply cannot relax. If I can't resolve an issue in my head immediately I become emotionally undone and start feeling like I have no energy to enjoy anything. It seems to be go hand in hand with how my mind tends to always home in on one thing at a time which is very much an autistic trait. Anyways, I feel like I'd still have issues even with social support just due to the way my brain is wired emotionally.

marshall, everything in your post is exactly what happened to me today (and other days for as long as I can remember). To be a bit off-topic, I used to believe that I was a crybaby, which is impossible because I ABHOR crying in public. But one little thing--and I mean little--can knock me down for the rest of the day. Though I try to "see the light," so on and so forth.

I do have a question, though: When I act as freely as I do in public (let's say I'm bopping my head to the music in the elevator), why do people (NTs, I assume) feel it is necessary to tell me to stop? I'm not hurting anyone and, yet, it's the same issue over and over again: people want to tell me to stop.

My dad and I are the same way as marshall describes, we always thought it was due to childhood trauma...

Because those particular NTs are just damn morons.

I headbang to music on my Discman in public. So does an NT I know. Mostly no one minds except for the odd few busybodies who want everyone to be exactly "normal".

Question to the NTs:

I contacted an old childhood friend whom I hadn't seen in years through Facebook. He was so happy to hear from me that he kept writing me emails and messages and asking me to chat on msn. Then we chatted (in writing), and after a few minutes he lost interest, barely wrote, then said he had to leave and we'd talk again another day, and I never heard from him again. What do NTs conclude or do in such a situation? Or does it happen only to me?

This happens to probably every single person who joins Facebook. It's certainly happened to me several times. After you've reminisced about shared memories, you realize you have years and possibly decades of unshared memories and the task of bringing each other up to date is just too overwhelming and not worth it for somebody you never see in person. What I do in these cases is let it drop once we're done reminiscing. Then I check back on their Facebook page once a month or so to see if they've added any new photos or done something I can comment on. Other people apparently do the same with me. After a flurry of exchanged emails I don't hear from them again until I post something of interest like a new picture of my daughter and then I'll get comments like "cute kid". The protocol for this is still totally up in the air since it's such a new thing so we're making it up as we go along. If you want to follow the protocol I've seen and used, wait a month or two, see if there is anything new on his page and make a little comment on it (this is small talk via Facebook). Don't expect a response to that comment. Instead, at some point there will be a comment on something new you've posted on your page.

Thank you, Janissy. It makes sense. I was obviously mistaken thinking that he might be a bit lonely and happy to renew an old friendship.

One more to the NTs:

I met a woman at a tour last week, she was so incredibly cool (by my terms), I hadn't met someone like her in many years. I thought we really got along great, we did some extra touring together, she seemed very nice and happy to be sharing and she told me so. Then we went for lunch but I took the wrong turn to the restaurant I had suggested and she totally changed, became silent and sullen. I never heard from her again. What does an NT conclude / do in such a situation?

That's a puzzler. It isn't the norm (in my experience) unlike your Facebook experience which is pretty much guarenteed for anybody who joins Facebook and gets serious about it. This is where the famous Theory of Mind falls short. Because I'm consulting my Theory of Mind to figure out why somebody would become upset because you took a wrong turn to a restaurant and I'm not coming up with anything reasonable. So I'll have to go with unreasonable. Maybe she thought your accidental wrong turn was done intentionally and you were actually trying to lose her- get away from her. That's absurd, but I couldn't think of a reasonable answer so I had to come up with the most likely unreasonable one: that she thought your mistake was actually done on purpose. If it was me in that situation I would gently ask if something was wrong. If she was upset because she misunderstood your action, this is where she would say something like, "Are you trying to get rid of me? You don't really want to spend time with me anymore?". Then you could clear up the misunderstanding, if that's what it was.

I took the wrong turn, meaning that we had to walk quite a bit more. But since I don't get the unsaid, who knows what may have pissed her... It could be one of a hundred things, I'm always clueless as to what pissed someone off. I didn't ask her what was wrong, because from my experience, people tell me nothing's wrong and then I don't know what to say or do with their hostility...