[saghm]

My point isn't that neurotypical people will always be familiar with whatever idioms they encounter, but that learning those idioms is way easier for them. It seems like you're misunderstanding what I'm saying as the struggles of not understanding specific things as being specific to autistic people, and that's not the case; I'm saying that while neurotypical people might have to deal with specific cases of idioms or figures of speech, autistic people will often struggle with the meta-problem of struggling with idioms or figures of speech as an entire category rather than with not being familiar with individual ones. I don't just struggle with understanding language like that when dealing with people who come from a different background than me; I struggle to understand language like that when talking to my parents and my brothers and my wife, despite having talked with them more than anyone else in my life. That's not something that most people would struggle with, but it's something that I suspect a lot of autistic people would relate to.

[quinnirill]

As someone having experienced (and of course still experiencing) similar struggles as a person with ADHD, the Heureka moment for me was realizing that the difference is I'm overthinking it. In quite a lot of the situations, there's no right answer people are looking for. There's no strict protocol, people just say whatever random stuff that comes into their mind and it might not even be related to what the other person said, then the other person builds on from there or says their own random stuff. Sometimes they strike a chord, sometimes they don't. Sometimes they end up saying the completely wrong thing and then they may or may not attempt to correct the situation. Trying to attribute a system to it is mostly just my own desire for order that probably doesn't exist. Like most things in life, the system is so complex that it might as well be random in some aspects.

[zozbot234]

"Overthinking" stuff is good for you actually. It's just a phase of learning any sort of skill: 1. Unconscious incompetence 2. Conscious incompetence 3. Conscious competence 4. Unconscious competence. Step 4 is where you get rid of the "overthinking" bit.

[quinnirill]

For sure, zero disagreement there! Just pointing out my personal observation that most people seem to not really do that.

In myself, overthinking is a quality I value very highly in some situations while also being one of the highest contributors to personal misery in other situations. In the net though, definitely a keeper.

As you say, it leads you down a path. Often at the beginning there is pain, such as being painfully self-conscious. At the end of the path is often self-development though.

[0u89e]

Actually I have a completelly opposite experience. Being among people, that I do not understand and where I am foreign is the best state for me to exist so far - it makes those people to adapt to me. I start to get communication issues, when they decide that I am no more foreign to them and that I should now adapt to their silly ceremonial behaviours, which I am very fully aware that I am not going to do.

>>> I struggle to understand language like that when talking to my parents and my brothers and my wife, despite having talked with them more than anyone else in my life. That's not something that most people would struggle with, but it's something that I suspect a lot of autistic people would relate to.

Exactly - I have never fought more battles to dominate than with my relatives. And to be fair the cases where I was getting along was when I fully subjugated to their will.