WE BEAT THE NEWS MEGA
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Pretty much feel the same (except I don’t have OCD afaik, but I don’t really care if I do or don’t). But I think my autism tends to bother me more for sensory-reasons rather than social-reasons.
I think I scored pretty similarly on the CAT-Q. I think it was the compensation section I particularly scored low on. Ironically, I think its partly because I just avoided looking at people’s bodies, so all of the “copying body language from other people/media/etc” was just a big nope. But that might be more of a “avoiding thinking about my own body” because gender stuff than autism-related. Same reason why no forcing eye contact. I also think my masking was more of just minimizing being weird in certain ways rather than trying to appear normal.
Yeah, I also don’t really force myself to do eye contact very much. I pretty much don’t do eye contact ever unless it happens to pop into my mind and I do it for a few seconds out of politeness. Being autistic definitely caused me to struggle socially, but because I’ve been very isolated for the past year and a half that hasn’t bothered me as much as it might have if I was in school or something (I’m actually going back to college in the fall, so I’ll see how things are like then.)
I also rarely watch TV or movies, and when I do it’s quite rare that I’ll get invested enough to remember specific phrases or behaviors to repeat or whatever. I’m realizing that I think I mask a lot more online than irl? Online I will actually find myself falling into the speech patterns of a space I’m in (for example I used to spend a lot of time on tumblr and my friend and I joke that I have a “tumblr accent”.) Irl I kind of just shuffle around as my awkward self.