Is this abnormal for an autistic person?

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I am chronically, deeply lonely, mostly at night. I have severe insomnia ( I usually sleep at 5 am) and wake up in the mid-afternoon. I am fine being alone in the day ( I don't get many hours of daylight due to my sleep pattern), but once night falls, my loneliness intensifies and reaches a crescendo in the middle of the night, when everything is dark and quiet. From hanging out in autistic spaces, I see many autistics like dark and quiet spaces. I don't. I hate darkness and dim lights. They make me really depressed and I hate complete silence. I like daylight and I love being out in the world but unfortunately my sleep pattern is completely the opposite of that.

I have a solitary job with no colleagues and I usually see my mum for maybe 30 minutes to 1 hour a day during weekdays ( I go home on weekends). Weekend evenings are family time. I am very fortunate to have several close friends all the way back from school, but we usually don't meet more than once a month. Other than that my only daily human interactions are brief exchanges with food servers/cashiers, or very short small talk with my housemates. I am asexual and can't imagine having a partner. I had a cat but he passed away several years ago, and I don't feel I am in the position to have a pet anymore. I crave human contact. I feel even more lonely because I seem to be an anomaly as an autistic since most autistics have small social batteries. Is this really abnormal for an autistic person? Does anyone feel as lonely and need as much human contact as I do?

People of all sorts can have a variety of social need. That you aren't looking primarily for romantic connections, you may be able to cultivate connections through volunteer work.

Even if volunteer opportunities are few, you might contact a nursing home directly and offer to read to some of the residents.

Nothing abnormal about an Aspie feeling lonely. Some don't, but many do. I start feeling very down if I'm denied meaningful human contact for more than a few days. I even suspect that those who claim not to need friendship may have simply given up, may be suffering from a degree of alexithymia so that they're lonelier than they think they are.

ASD is a spectrum disorder and not every one of us loves darkness and silence. I'm mixed. I'm kind of fascinated by absolute darkness and total silence, but I wouldn't want to be immersed in that for long. And when I have to live in a dark home with small windows, it starts to feel depressing. I do tend to shut off windows, but only because I don't like the public being able to look in, and I can probably only cope with dingy surroundings because I hyperfocus an awful lot which helps me to ignore stuff that would otherwise drive me up the wall.

As for silence, mostly it's just that my attention is easily shattered by certain background sounds. Rather than trying to get the world to shut up, my strategy is to play a recording of rain and thunder or "pink noise" - a continuous, non-invasive sound that drowns out everything else.

It's unfortunately common for an autistic person to feel that way.

Because they're human. With human needs.



Seriously.

I wish there's a badge that says 'this autistic has no social interest and is upfront asocial' and 'this autistic is socially emotionally driven and is a lonely soul' instead of stereotyping with the former or projecting by the latter.

Or an upheaval over the idea of what humanity is VS their associations with neurotypicality and neurodivergence.

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