Do they not like me or are they just introverted?

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All my life I've been paranoid as to whether someone doesn't like me or whether they're just introverted and want to have time alone.

And now I'm getting paranoid again. One of my classmates who lives on my street and I started taking the bus home together. Suddenly she would just disappear and not make it a point to take the bus with me.

She goes with other friends on the metro (sometimes myself and some of my friends join), but she's also super-introverted so maybe she just wants her alone time on the bus? Or maybe she just expects me to make the first move?

This is medical school and I'm in a very small class so of course I'm worried about rubbing people the wrong way which sadly I (probably) do more than I like....however I improved a ton from childhood onwards so I do so much less.... in fact I can safely say the majority of people in my class seem to like me. However, I'm starting to feel insecure, like how a (legally but not fully) blind person must feel when people repeatedly tell them to try to count how many fingers. I'm just so.... clueless. And it's a sucky feeling. I don't even know what I did wrong!

Due to all the rejection I've experienced I'm super-paranoid (understandably). She lives on my street and I don't want to alienate one of my few potential study partners.

Any advice on how to distinguish between whether someone doesn't like you or whether they're just super-introverted? I kind of suck at decoding people and it's getting to me today. This is not a happy day

I often worry if people really like me or not also. I have very little ability to read nonverbal cues and only notice the most obvious ones.

The only reason I know that I miss most nonverbal cues is because other people often mention things they noticed about different situations that I completely missed. In those cases several people agree on the situation and I am the only one that didn't get it.

I can't ever really tell, but I go through phases in which I think positively and assume that they do like me, then I go through phases where I dwell on how I can't read the cues that would tell me if someone is a genuine friend or not. This usually continues until they do something obvious like invite me to do something fun, not just because they need my help with something practical but because they enjoy spending time with me. Right now I am experiencing one of those negative phases. In these phases I can easily perceive things as rejection which is a depression trigger for me. I try to logically reason that maybe my friend is busy, distracted, not feeling well, etc. though when in a negative phase logic always loses.

During these times I usually feel isolated when around others as I often dwell on how different my friendships are from NTs. I wonder if people think I am annoying and/or too boring etc. the only thing that has helped me is an obvious positive social interaction with the friend in question. I still can't read the nonverbal cues, but that usually triggers another positive phase.

So I reread this post before I hit submit and realized I may have gotten a bit off-topic and ended up thinking out loud quite a bit. I think it may still be quite helpful, but just wanted to apologize in advance if it does stray a bit.

It's hard to say without seeing the situation more. I have a friend who recently figured how he's an Aspie. He constantly would say that other people hated him. His roommate? Hated him. His intern boss? Hated him. His teachers? Hated him.

That said, as a kind of NT on the outside looking in, I didn't think that any of them hated him at all, but when I told him that he didn't believe me. And I thought he was very likeable myself and he was probably my best friend during our study abroad program (someone else who likes to talk about interesting things and not gossip was highly appreciated and he was fun to hang out with)...but if you asked him about me now, I'm afraid that he might tell you that I hated him. And I definitely didn't and tried to make that clear since I saw what he thought about other people's feelings of him.

My sister, who's also an Aspie, has the same issue where she's never quite sure how other people feel about her. Unlike my other friend, though, she tends to lean towards (mostly) assuming the other person does like her, albeit holding back a tiny bit. I remember asking her about these kids from our neighborhood she'd walk home with, because I had these slight alarm bells going off in my head and I was worried, and she told me that they were her friends and brushed off my concerns. The next week I came home to find her crying because they'd thrown rocks at her. They weren't her friends in the slightest.

So it can be hard either way to figure out situations - I suppose there's a friendship version of Type I and Type II error (Type I - think they like you and they don't; Type II - think they don't like you and they do) and they can both be very destructive. Type I error allowed my sister to end up in dangerous situations and betrayed by people she thought liked her. Type II error makes my friend feel alone and like the world is against him, when, in fact, it's not.

I think the solution may be what my sister's doing now - namely asking trusted people their opinion. So if she's worried that her roommate doesn't like her or something, she can ask me and she knows I'll give her an honest (albeit softened and kind, if they don't like her) answer. She has other friends she can do this with as well. It gets easier once you have one trusted person, because they can verify other trusted people, who can then verify other people...and so on.

Long story short, I would try to find someone to be that person for you - someone who is there to see the situation in person and can give you their opinion.

I think it is often very hard to tell. Some times it is obvious, but the difference between "prefers not to engage in social activities despite being capable" and "wants to avoid you whilst remaining polite" is IMO very hard to judge.

I spend the bulk of my therapy sessions trying to figure out the answer to this question.
I can be very odd and I am often withdrawn. Even when I do interact with others, I have a hard time following the conversations and zero in on portions that are WAY off topic.
Most of the time, it's paranoia that is fueling my feelings.

It does make sense. And oops! I think I just revealed my lack of understanding of how medical school works. Definitely use your own judgment then. Good luck!

So found my go-to person....

Of course, someone in my class did notice my lack of social skills and did confirm that a lot of my suspicions about classmates hating me are true.

However, she was really compassionate about it and genuinely wanted to give me the feedback. She thinks they just misunderstand me and think I'm intentionally rude/aggressive/etc. She said she is open to me asking for feedback.

I'm glad I have someone like that. I feel so insecure about my autism I just want to hide. But she makes me feel that it helped her relate to me that I disclosed my autism... she now knows some of the things I do are not my fault.

I am so happy you found someone! I've seen the same situation play out with the people thinking someone is intentionally rude/aggressive. It seems to be worse for girls on the spectrum than guys. There was a girl who lived in my dormitory who is definitely undiagnosed on the spectrum. She'd gone to a psychologist and they said she had bipolar, but I swear she was even more Aspie than my sister. (In a lacking social skills moment on my end, I asked her if she was AS...oops. She wasn't happy about that, but that's how I know all this. btw, when I compared her to my sister to the bullies in an attempt to shield her [didn't mention AS, just poor social skills] people flat out denied it - told me they knew my sister and this girl was nothing like her. Never mind that I'd lived with my sister for almost two decades and they'd met her for two minutes...made me so angry.) Anyways, all my dormmates hated her. They isolated her and were really cruel - never physically, but they literally gave her the silent treatment and turned others against her. It made me so angry, especially with how I tried to shield her and just failed, over and over. It was painful.

There is a happy ending, though, which is why I'm sharing this with you. By the end of the year, people had started to realize that she actually just had poor social skills (although I think they chalked it up to being part of her personality) and became friendly...in fact, some of them became good friends with her and, two years later, still are good friends with her. So no matter how bad your situation is, you can turn it around!! !! !! !! !! !! !

I wrote a whole article about the experience on my website...it's called From "Bully" to Bullied because I think that's what happens a lot of times - NT people misinterpret AS lack of social skills (bluntness, rudeness, etc) as being signs that they're a bully ... and then they intentionally bully the other person in return with the social isolation, etc, that you seem to be experiencing. You may wish to show your new friend the article to confirm to her that she's right, it's definitely an AS lack of social skills thing... : http://autismspectrumexplained.weebly.com/bullying.html

Don't feel insecure! It sounds like you're a pretty cool person - you just have to find the people that appreciate you - like this girl you just met! Some people appreciate AS traits in other people. Like me - I pretty much seek out Aspies because they're generally the most interesting and my version of fun people in the room. My roommate, who's as NT as you can get, appreciates AS traits, too. We were randomly paired and five years later we're still best friends (remembering that I'm BAP and extremely awkward), and when other people were bullying our dormmate she stood up for her (in a much angrier, more vocal way than I can manage - I'm not very good at acting angry or confronting people head on) and made the others feel ashamed of themselves. And my sister, who is AS, actually has more friends than I could ever imagine because she's found a safe, accepting community (who mostly consist of nerds, geeks, and LGBT people who are all used to being bullied and are therefore more inclined to be accepting). [Despite my best efforts to the contrary, she, too, went through the "bully" to bullied experience.] So things can work out.

Good luck with everything! If you ever want to talk, PM me. I feel like I've gotten to know you a bit now and you seem like a really cool person.

My sister's dorm this past year was surprisingly similar. We were both Honors college and while my floor was full of neurodiverse (no diagnosis, but there was at least plenty of BAPyness to go around) AMAZING people, her floor was full of "perfect" people. Who I would argue, based on the way they treated my sister, are actually incredibly hugely flawed, but that's just me.

Anyways, what happened was my sister simply hung out with my floor all the time. With the way I was buried in work, I hardly hung out with my dormmates (and purposefully tried to stay out of her friendship groups so they would fully be of her making), and soon they became great friends with my sister (far closer to her than they ever were to me). So even though she still lived in the dorm full of "perfect" people, she spent most of her time on my neurodiverse floor.

If you can do that, find another group to hang out with in your spare time while still going through med school with the "perfect" people, it may help you get through this process. I know it's a lot harder than it sounds, but maybe join a club you think is more likely to attract a like-minded crowd (my school literally had a Quidditch team) and you might find some similar people. Or try going to some LGBT group things (as an ally or whatever your sexual preference would happen to be). Personally, I'm not LGBT, but after my sister started hanging out with the club on campus I did too and seriously regretted not having done so before. They were all incredibly accepting of differences - I watched my sister as an Aspie, a girl with PDD-NOS, and another girl who was currently on the manic phase of bipolar get welcomed with open arms. And not in the pitying kind of way - in the way where they actually appreciated others for who they are. They've been bullied and judged and they don't seem to be fans of it (I'm sure some are, but the group I was with wasn't). I don't know, but if you're not sure where to find a community for yourself, that may be a place to start.

(I will say, by the way, that I'm guilty of the mother henning thing myself...but I do that with everyone. I'm always the dorm mother, the girl who makes sure you take your medicine when you're sick, rest when you're tired, and study when you ought to.)

Maybe keep this girl around to help you out? She doesn't have to be your new best friend or anything, but if you can keep the window of communication open with her you can continue to ask her questions in the future.

Future doctors need to know how to work with a diverse group of people - including neurodiverse - not only as coworkers, but also as patients. If they can't, that's a weakness of theirs, not of yours and it doesn't make you any less of a human being.