I need help understanding different personality types!

[JackHatchet]

want people to not try to "read between the lines" when I say a thing. I want people to accept that sometimes I'm just going to be too anxious to do stuff and a lot of times that anxiety comes with a sense of not knowing what I am actually anxious about.

This is an interesting point of interest. Reading between the lines generally arises when communication isn't clear. For example if someone has anxiety, and they don't know how to communicate that to someone--it basically forces them to read between the lines to try and breach that gap in communication. It's one of those two-way street things. Where both parties have to work to meet each other in the middle--or else it can make things worse.

When it comes to the difference between acceptance and tolerance. I think it goes more into the give and take system as well. At least for me. I fully believe that any meaningful relationship, friendship, romantic, ect--requires a balance. If I have an awkward friend, who gives back in a meaningful way--I accept him for his good and his bad. But if I have a friend who doesn't contribute anything, and he's just a friend out of pity--then I merely tolerate him. However, that's not an autistic, or depression, or mental-illness specific thing. I just don't want to hang out with people who take and never give back. I tolerate that they exist, but I don't accept them into my social circles or my communities.

One of the things I've been trying to work on over the years is find ways for people to contribute back more effectively. For example, my ex with the schizophrenia couldn't hold down a job at all. Schizophrenia + social anxiety was a bad combo. So we worked diligently to find alternatives. And eventually we got her into writing fan-fiction. And eventually she became a one on one tutor for college math.

So when I meet people in-game with depression/anxiety. I try to find ways they can contribute to the FC/social circle so they can feel more accepted and less tolerated (you know what I mean). It's not always easy especially with the depression folks, because they seem to need more attention than they're able to give. I apologize for over-generalizing. Also, while I've had some hands on experiences with depression/social anxiety. I'm still new to the whole autism thing. It actually seems like a pretty cool thing for folks to get so involved with their hobbies and passions. I think there's a lot of potential to channel that into something productive.

I know it's easier to just accept people at face value, and try to force something to work, but I'm really excited and interested in more long-term life-lesson type solutions. I like the complexity of it all. I don't like the idea of everyone being judged on the same standards. I think different personality types can excel at different things. And that while we all have strengths and weaknesses--it's doubling down on our strengths that can really make us shine. I think it's terrible sad that some people feel ostracized and lonely when there has to be solutions for people to give back to society and become more desirable in social circles. Anyways, I think I got rambly too.

[Caity_Cat]

[Part 1 of 2 because I Talk Too Much™ and exceeded the text limit for forum posts]

Alrighty, I waded through the thread a bit, but not all of it, sorry if I repeat stuff that's been said already lol. I just want to respond some before I forget what I want to say.

As someone who's very open about being autistic and hangs out a lot in the fringes of the online autistic community, I just figure I should weigh in.

To start, there's a saying that floats around in the autism community: "If you've met one autistic person, you've met one autistic person."
Keep in mind that autism is a spectrum; how different autistic people present, their preferences, their skills, and their deficits, can vary wildly. Men and women typically present with different traits as well, so my experiences will possibly read differently from the male autistics that weigh in. You'd need a lot of people to talk about their experiences to even come to a modicum of an understanding of it. The best way you can handle things in the future when you make a friend or just meet someone that discloses this, is to simply ask them about these things to learn their personal perspective and what they want or how they feel about things.

That said, on to the more specifics of your post. Some of what you said initially is a bit vague/broad, but I'll try to reply. So, an autistic person talking about how they feel they don't belong or don't fit in is certainly not super uncommon. The majority of us were "othered" for most of our lives. A lot of us can have trauma from being bullied. So even if we're in a group that's accepting of us, we can still sometimes feel as though we don't really belong there, that people don't like us, etc.
A lot of autistic people do something called "masking," which is essentially employing a set of copied or learned social skills to better communicate with non-autistics; this is a sort of survival skill that helps us avoid being ostracized or bullied. ((As a side note about that, doing this is VERY exhausting because a lot of effort and thought has to go into it, and learning how to do it doesn't make us any less autistic. This might be a kind of hit-or-miss metaphor, but think of it like running Window 10 in a VM on a Mac laptop with very limited battery life.))
In a sense, that feeling of not belonging could in some cases come down to the fact that they're having to try to act like "everyone else," because they're worried people won't understand them. This is just one idea of course, but it's one of many varied possibilities that wouldn't be innately apparent to you that could be contributing to this sort of issue for an autistic person.

On them not initiating conversation with you first, I'd bet money that sometimes it's that they feel as though they're going to annoy you somehow. It can take time for us to figure out that someone actually enjoys talking to us. Like...it can take a LONG TIME sometimes.

[Caity_Cat]

[Part 2 of 2 because I Talk Too Much™ and exceeded the text limit for forum posts]

We aren't able to read situations as well to be able to figure it out easily, and a lot of us would rather just not engage than end up being rejected or disliked. I know for me personally, the quickest way I figure this out is if someone is regularly trying to strike up conversation with me for a long while and engages me about my interests (without being too pushy)

It could also be that they just aren't sure how to properly initiate a conversation, so they overthink to the point that they just don't do it.

On the flip side, you could just give them vibes they don't particularly like. But that's something that happens between people sometimes, autistic or not.

It's not so much about wanting or not wanting tolerance. Actually, first, "tolerance" really, really sounds like the wrong word here. That implies you're just "dealing with" them. "Acceptance" is the better word/goal. If you ever feel like you're just "tolerating" someone, you aren't doing them any favors and you ain't gonna become friends.

or like leveling in a video game. I don't enjoy leveling at the slightest. But I understand that it's a required stepping stone towards end-game content. If it's relatable to something like small talk. Why would someone with Autism choose to do something they might dislike like leveling a character, but would avoid small talk? Shouldn't the philosophy be the same?

My dude, my buddy, my guy. These can't be compared. Leveling a character is something that we are choosing to go do, of our free will, on our own time, and we can just as easily choose to simply not bother and walk away from the game. Small talk is something that can be thrust upon us when we might not even be expecting it, and if we don't handle it right, we could end up making someone dislike us or think we're weird. You feel me?

It's true that I tend to lump Autism in the same groups as depression and schizophrenia. I wouldn't really know what to clarify it as. I'm open to suggestions! But while I understand that people are happy and content with Autism. I get a vibe that a lot of people still suffer socially from it. And if the positives don't outweigh the negatives--then doesn't that make it an illness?

Look into the term "neurodiversity." Also, it can be argued that most autistic people are only suffering because society and the world at large are not built to be friendly for us at all. It's loud, bright, convoluted, full of seemingly arbitrary social rules and standards, etc etc. There was actually a study done recently where they compared autistic-to-autistic communication, autistic-to-allistic(non-autistic) communication, and allistic-to-allistic communication, these were the findings: https://bit.ly/31hIVqb

Okay, I'm tired now lol. I'll read the rest of this thread and respond to other stuff after some sleep.