Autism

Thank you for sharing, this was an enjoyable read!

The experience of noticing patterns that others don't, even after pointing it out to them, is extremely relatable to me. I didn't realize it was a neurodiverse trait, I just thought it was something relatively unique to my experience, so it's nice to discover I'm not alone there.

It's so unbelievably frustrating trying to warn people about dangers and being told that I'm making slippery slope arguments only to be proven right later again and again and again. It's really exhausting, and never even slightly validating when I'm proven right.

Reading that psychology article is... really something. This fucking passage:

There are many cases of neurodivergent partners who are able to mask their challenges and appear to people around them as articulate, thoughtful, caring, sensitive, empathic, and so on

Yuck, yuck, yuck. Implying autistic people have to mask to be articulate, thoughful, caring or empathic? We have to work harder to understand social cues and sometimes need a bit of extra guidance with things like sarcasm. In my experience autistic people are sensitive and empathic to a fault.

It sounds like what they're describing isn't autism, but rather more like sociopathy or something...

By the way, you have a little typo:

seeing patters others don’t and getting punished for it

Why is this even associated with autism specifically? Like, NTs in relationships with NTs can have people not believe them when they share stuff that is going on. Could also apply to rape accusations in the barest definition. “Person in relationship(consensual or otherwise) isn’t believed when communicated experiences with others”.

This is definitely a what is wrong with “their friends” issue and not anything to do with an autistic partner regardless of the relationship challenges.

Edit: To add, this could be a coworker who seems different around the person and they may not even be doing anything wrong. The friends or community are basically gaslighting by dismissal which leads to the ptsd or other symptoms. Also there is no reason to genderfy this. Probably could call it Cass Syndrome as that is close to original without gender as Cass sounds gender neutral to me.

Thanks for sharing this - I, too, especially in the past few years, have scratched my head and wondered how others can't see the blindingly obvious, as though they have no ability to see patterns or commonalities at all.

There have been a few instances where I specifically thought of Cassandra and mentioned her on occasion as a way to explain my feelings of being ignored or contradicted (when most of the time my warnings or suspicions ended up being correct).

Hehe there's something oddly satisfying when someone comes into my office and I respond to their unasked questions before they manage to ask them, just because I anticipated it. I feel like a psychic, but it's not - I just had our common pattern of communication down.

"What I was about to ask you?..." It's one of those three things, along with the answers. "That's scary. And impressive."

But yes, the frustration is there too. I hope to get into an environment where my perspective is at worst minority report, kept visible as a potential corrective tool.

I also think it ties to learned empathy and steelman perspective I have. I often try to consider what others, usually neurotypicals think, feel, see - even if they don't or can't account for it. If seen in this positive light it somewhat counteracts the frustrations.

Excellent read. Thanks for this.

What's funny to me is even if your predictions have been proven right most of the time, no one will believe you. Which to me is an even sadder lack of pattern recognition.