u/joebiden_deez_nuts

Can anyone else relate to the following?

Imagine this, you are at home , with a friend or even just someone who is "normal" writes you a message. The message could look like this for example : "Hey , hope everything is going well, me and my friend went out fishing today it was really sunny!"

Ok all in all this is a totally normal message, but the problem arises the moment I try to answer to it . Whenever I write out in this emotional tone that normal people use in theire messages to be "relatable", I get this intense almost painful feeling of cringe on the inside, it is involuntarily and is extremely discomfortable. So much so I end up making weird noises, pulling my beard or making stupid faces like ripping open my mouth really far.

This makes it almost impossible to ever "mask" like other autistic people do, because I just can not deal with this feeling. I feel like I will never properly be able to talk like all the others, and will always kind of stuck , giving short answers like yes or no or maybe.

This is not social anxiety at all, because if I get asked a question directly , I can really start monologuing, but it is like my body is refusing to mask at all, and I fear it will cause me problems ever getting a job or holding a friendship, which I always struggled massively with. I lost all friends eventually, cus my hobbies just become more important to me.

If this is written a bit weird or some things don't make sense together I am sorry, I have a lot of trouble writing long texts, which is why i usually use ai to rewrite them, but I wanted to for once write it out in my own words and see if others can still relate and not misunderstand me.

Does anyone else feel like the social and interactive side of the internet completely overloads your brain to the point where other peoples opinions literally overwrite your thoughts before you can even form them?

And to be clear, I am not talking about the generic evolutionary mismatch argument everyone repeats about how the human brain was not made for social media. Shut that down completely because this is something entirely different. It is a literal processing difference where absolutely everything has a massive impact. Even the exact number of likes, the volume of comments, and the clickbait thumbnails carry immediate weight. My brain cannot filter them out automatically, so every single implicit social signal is taken literally and has to be consciously processed. If I watch a video titled something like five things you are doing wrong, that external opinion immediately occupies and completely overwrites my mind before I even have the chance to think about it myself. My brain just gets invaded by it and I cannot form an independent thought.

I do not want to downplay sensory issues at all because they are still a huge and heavy burden for me in everyday real life. But specifically when I am at home working at my PC, it is not the screen or the physical sensory stuff that drains me. It is this constant influx of social data and external opinions that invades my mental space.

I have realized this is exactly why I get anxious or paranoid so quickly, both online and in real life. Every piece of advice or critique or suggestion immediately turns into a rigid internal rule loop where my brain decides that because I messed up last time, I now must do it exactly a certain way. Because everyone always says criticism is helpful and you need to accept it, I force myself to internalize it. But forcing it just amplifies the paranoia and creates endless loops of trying to monitor myself to prevent mistakes.

This exact same wiring translates to real life too, completely blocking my communication because of the explanation cost. Like when I sit at the dinner table wanting to tell my family about something I made or did online. I know exactly what I want to say, but it feels like a total wall between my brain and my mouth. It is not anxiety because I feel fine right up until that point. Instead, my brain is subconsciously calculating how much effort it will take to explain it if they misunderstand, or dealing with the fear that my dad will make some weird assumption or insinuation, like blaming my dark room or interpreting something negative into it. This anticipated effort completely blocks the action of speaking. Forcing it drains me so much that after thirty minutes of dinner, I am entirely exhausted and just end up staring into space. Even trying to type it on my phone does not work, because starting to type in front of them feels like another conspicuous action I have to manually force myself to start.

The same breakdown happens outside of conversations too, like when things go wrong logistically and require social interaction or messaging to fix. I accidentally returned two items in a single box to Amazon instead of separating them, and they only refunded half the money. I just accepted the financial loss because trying to contact customer service and explain it felt like an impossible barrier. I cannot force that initiation energy under pressure. It only works much later when I am completely calm, but since these things have deadlines, later basically means it never happens and I just swallow the disadvantage.

Does anyone else relate to the internet and granular social input being the absolute heaviest cognitive load, even when you already deal with massive sensory issues in real life? Especially the part where external opinions literally prevent your own thoughts from forming?