Many of you don't have free minds. why?

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Despite you guys being aspies a lot of you still seem bound by societal rules. Many of you seem keenly aware of other people, what society thinks is the proper way to be and how you 'don't fit in'. I wonder why though. I'm genuinely curious because I expected a lot of you would be like me; free from giving a damn about social order. I thought it would be be understood that worrying about other people's view of you is silly.

You sound a bit like my brother. He's never cared about fitting in or what other people think. For me though, I have a completely different personality. I'm the passive, rule-follower who has no confidence. I grew up in my brother's shadow thinking I was stupid and worthless and the only real friend I had growing up was very NT and very into society. Me being the impressionable youth I was, I fell into the same habits she exhibited. It wasn't until college that I changed my thinking to "people are stupid and selfish." And I went the opposite direction of not giving a crap about what other people thought. Unfortunately, even now I can still see the effects that friend of mine had on me, though as long as I don't get an attachment to someone, their opinion of me is of no consequence because I know me and I know what I think and feel and believe. If someone I am attached to claims I'm something other than what I am, it hurts because I trusted them and they inherently lied to me. It's a betrayal.

Hopefully that answered your curiosity and wasn't just a rambling mess ^.^;

At least for me it is because of my parents who are pressuring me to follow social norms.

I guess the site ate my reply...

I think it can be conditioning, though I'm not going to say it's the same for everyone. Getting in trouble with your family and school for doing things you think are normal, but they see as rude, can make you try to fit in because you don't want to be a "bad" person. Excessive criticism from your family over little traits which don't really matter can also be demeaning. As you get older, you also have to make compromises to keep a job. All difficult things, and it can take time to work through issues caused by your family and develop a better, more independent sense of self. We tend to recognize our issues after they've been ingrained, which doesn't mean you can't get rid of them, it just takes effort.

Last edited by HighLlama on 01 Aug 2015, 2:14 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Probably because the western world at large views an inconspicuous mind as a commodity, prizing them for their malleability and uniformly moderate convictions. The human tendency you're examining is sometimes known as eusocial behavior. Sometimes entire subsets of the societal norm form around social indifference itself; anarchism, the beatnik generation, the Haight Ashbury and the open source software languages that built most of this page are all examples.

Well, I don't want you living next door to me if you're running a crack house, playing garage at 3am and blowing dope smoke in granny's face.

"Social order" is a very vague term - sometimes it's just common sense or common courtesy

Before college, I did not care at all what people thought of me. I considered most people pretty stupid and had zero empathy.

In college, my interactions with a few people changed me quite a bit. One person actually had the guts to tell me that I was a bad friend and a pretty selfish person. I have to say that what she told me really woke me up. I didn't want to be selfish, mean, or rude. I didn't want to treat people badly or hurt them. But a lot of my "not caring what people thought" meant that I *did* and *said* things without thinking about their impact on others.

After that, I started caring about how I was being perceived by others. In fact, I think I swung too much the other way, getting overly concerned about fitting in and "doing the right thing."

There's a balance between being palatable to others and not losing one's own self. But I think it is hard to strike that balance. I given up a lot of my own self over the years, especially in raising my children. I don't regret it, though I wish I knew how to balance it better. No one can be 100% completely "true to one's self" without being selfish and disregarding the needs of others. At some point, it is necessary to give up one's own wishes for the sake of someone else. It's called love.

A good song about the same idea.

I'm the only male in my immediate family and having a "free mind" in my house is off limits for me.

I'm kind of ambivalent. I don't believe I'd get very far without being able to win the approval of others. Sometimes I need other people to help me with this or that, and there's no law saying they have to help me, and if I've been aloof, then they're not so likely to want to help me out. I've always been quite socially motivated, I think people are stronger as a group, and I enjoy making people happy whether or not they're likely to reward me.

But I don't like taking it too far. I've let myself be sucked into social events where I've gone down quite well but I've come away feeling like I've been abused. There's a grey area between completely selling out to the mainstream game and being totally inflexible to anything I don't happen to feel absolutely great about. That's where I can feel abused, though sometimes I come away feeling glad that I did it, when the discomfort was well worth the benefit. Sometimes I feel no discomfort at all. It's hard to know in advance what will happen.

Beyond that, there's the "total sellout" thing which I hate. That's where the Aspie throws away their identity and tries too hard to fit into NT mainstream life. In my youth I flew rather close to that occasionally - not knowing I was autistic, I thought I could do better by having "the right attitude." But it didn't work and I always ended up feeling ashamed of myself. These days I just won't do it at all. The older I get, the more I seem live my life on my own terms.

As for a free mind, I think mine's always been pretty free. Even if I don't always express my opinions to others, I still have them, and I don't take up society's beliefs and values as if they're mine, unless I can really see the validity of them for myself.

It was a matter of me wanting to have friends and be liked and not be teased and picked on. I wanted to be treated nicely and not get any meanness and what kids thought of me mattered because it had impact on how they treated me. If they didn't like me, they wouldn't want me around and not want to be my friend. Even if they didn't dislike me, it was a matter of tolerance and how much they can tolerate and handle. I didn't like being thought of as weird or a show off or crazy or insane or stupid or mean or rude so it did make me try to conform and act better. All the negative feedback kids said about me showed me how I came off to others so I looked at what I was doing to cause it and started to work on changing that part of me. I started to look at what do nice people do, what do mean people do and not do what mean people do and I used movies for that and books. Today it's about wanting to be a good person and treating others how I want to be treated. I think it's called picking your battles. Do I want respect? Do I want to be treated well? Do I want to have an easier time online and in real life? How do I want my kids to be? Do I want them to be happy? Do I want to be a good mother?

I used to be bullied, abused, and treated like a criminal because I didn't fit in, socialize well or care what others thought. I was put in several homes for people with chronic mental illness, kicked out when my meltdowns got too extreme, hospitalized, drugged, and generally treated like a lost cause. So if I still fear that one day I could end up back in a home, or hospitalized and heavily medicated, or even thrown in jail because of what others might think of my odd behavior you'll just have to forgive me.

When you're put in a home where other adults have severe schizophrenia or the minds of 3-year-olds because of brain damage you're not allowed to have a free mind. You are told to act like everyone else. You no control. NONE. Only sleep or death will release you from the constant torture your mind and body are going through, but the staff won't let you. They just give you horrible drugs. You cry, they drug you. You argue, they drug you. You stim, they drug you. You accidentally hurt yourself, they drug you for that too, but don't give you anything for physical pain. Asking them for a freaking Tylonel is like asking for a kidney, but they're always eager to shove psychiatric drugs down your throat or stab you with needles.

To this day I still have dreams where I suddenly find myself back in one of these homes with no memory of how I got there, and I desperately want to go back to my apartment but someone is already living there.

Ah don't worry I'm not like that. I have common courtesy but I won't hold myself back because my family want me to be a certain person or stay with 'friends' who are manipulative. Also that kind of behaviour isn't not caring. To act like that you do care, you want to mess up others lives. I don't want to mess up people's lives I'm neutral

Thank you everyone for your replies. It's real interesting. I can't help but feel kinda less human than you guys though... I don't have so much emotion about things anymore. things are what they are. Of course I do feel emotions but everyone else seems to feel things more intensely. Weird that.

That sucks so much. I don't think I would treat anyone that way if I worked at the home. And 'normal people ' are supposed to have empathy...

Yep, that's me all over. I DO care about my social performance. You've kind of got to care if you have to go to work and are close to getting engaged to a boyfriend. Why would I want to go around acting weird? I want friends. I want to go out feeling accepted. It's no good saying ''oh act weird, if people don't like you for it then they're not friends''. I really don't buy that s**t. If I want friends, it's up to me to control on how I socially perform. And in any case, part of how I behave and socially perform is kind of natural in me. I can feel other people's opinions about me. People have good opinions, then I feel good. People have bad opinions, then I feel ashamed. It's just the way my mind works. That's where I can relate to NTs well.

I can't help it if I'm like this. I like to conform. Sure, some conformity rules are annoying, like the gender double-standards (''men look OK doing that but if a woman does it it's really bizarre'' kind of thing). But, that's life. Otherwise, I find people interesting. I go on Facebook to keep up with social media, and what's going on in the world too (often news reports get posted on Facebook, so I keep up with it that way, as I don't really watch the telly or get into newspapers). Also I like fashion magazines, looking trendy, going shopping, chatting to people, looking after my body, and being in love with my boyfriend. I hate work, but I do love fitting in there, and keeping up with the crowd.

Sorry. Not all Aspies can be like you.