I wish I could use this

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Sometimes, I feel like I have increased social awareness, and I'd like to help other autistic people with my insights during this time, but I know from past experience that I'm a horrible communicator who can barely hold down a job, let alone actually start any kind of successful organization or movement. In fact, there are times when I fantasize about having a social coach myself. Plus, I'm still drowning in student loan debt due to poor decisions I made in my 20s. I feel like I wasted my life, but it could be worse.

Still, though, I'd like to develop some kind of useful skills that would enable me to help other people. I'm already in my 30s and not going to get younger.

Everything I attempt to accomplish, is like "you can't make a silk purse out of a sows ear"

You can't measure your quality of communication, so you can't objectively claim it is getting better

However anyone could say anything

Since most of the problems that autistic people have are caused by non-autistic people's malice, I hope you can help autistic people defeat those non-autistic people using your skills, rather than helping us adapt to the malicious environment.

If you have any coping tips, you can always share them here on WP. Aspies are often better at communicating in writing than they are with the spoken word.

The main problem for me is that when I'm functioning really well, I'm hardly even sure how I got there. I try to keep detailed notes about how I'm thinking, but I'm not sure if the changes are related to coping with autism or to a related mental disorder I may have besides autism. I just know that I have experienced some changes, such as being able to guess what people are going to say/do during a conversation or coming up with "reasons" to care about my appearance other than personal satisfaction or fear of people's judgement. This better "theory of mind" or whatever it's called, is kind of a new experience for me; it started happening a few years ago. At first, I ignored it because the idea that I could understand people better than I thought I could was a bit alarming to me, and it kind of goes away from time to time, but I thought maybe I could actually use this to help people? I don't know, and I don't know if it comes from reading books on how to cope with autism and applying it to real life scenarios or what.

It’s called “experiencing life.”

People have to be open to changing their situations within themselves, and should not close themselves off to outside input.

I can barely keep a job, too—though I’ve had my present job for 41 years.

Helping people with information that they are not looking for is a very difficult nut to crack. I discuss it frequently with old, wise heads. Progress may depend upon a "rogue wave" of lucky boosts that we see in viral trends. Our best advice is that "chance favours the prepared."