<aside> ⚠️ How to interact with Um_nik and not wish to kill him and/or yourself

</aside>

• First Draft

I am autistic.

I wrote the previous sentence and proceed to read wikipedia about autism and related things for 2 hours. I’m not sure you need any other proof… But you need to understand how it manifests in me, because…

If you've met one individual with autism, you've met one individual with autism. - Dr. Stephen Shore

Obviously, I can’t say whether some trait is caused by being on autistic spectrum or it is just me. I think in most cases it’s a combination of both. I don’t want to use autism as an excuse for being a dick, moreover, I disagree that it is a disorder. Yeah, I think differently from what is considered to be the norm. But it’s not bad. Being normal is boring. The problem here is that people are taught to expect neurotypical behaviour from others, and our society is build for neurotypical people. So when I exhibit autistic behaviour, many people think that I behave wrong.

• I do not pick up on many social cues. And it’s not even about non-verbal communication, I can understand body language, change of tone and facial expressions. I don’t understand when some phrase with literal meaning is used in social context with different meaning. The most glaring example is “How are you?” I guess it means “Hello” for some inexplicable reason, but if someone will say “How are you?”, I will assume that they are actually interested in my feelings.

  • Yes, I think that smalltalk is cancer.
  • Recent dialogue

  I’m starting to think that my behaviour will look insane here. But I genuinely don’t understand why would anybody phrase something as a question for politeness. How is it more polite? See, the previous sentence is a question, and I’m actually interested in the answer.

  • I use sarcasm a lot myself and in most cases I can understand when someone is sarcastic. I don’t understand most of so-called post-modern humor though.

• I don’t care about being polite in general. That’s just not one of my communication goals. My main goal is to move the idea from my mind to the mind of the other party (or parties) with minimal distortion.

  It doesn’t mean that I will be rude in random half of conversations. I try not to attack people accidentally (but when I want to attack people on purpose, it is usually over-the-top, since I want to clearly communicate that I’m trying to attack, but that’s not very relevant here). But I will not go out of my way to protect your feelings.

  For example, if I was testing a round or reviewing some problem proposal, and I think that some problem is bad, I will just say directly that the problem is bad. I will not try to phrase it differently to hide the sad for you truth, it goes against everything I believe in. On the other hand, when I say “the problem is bad”, I mean exactly that and nothing else (that’s generally how my autistic brain works). For example, I don’t mean “you are a bad problemsetter”, or “all your problems are bad”, or “you are a bad person”, or “I don’t like you”, or “I hate all geometry problems (assume that problem was geometry)”. I mean “the problem is bad”. This particular problem.

• I value honesty. To an extreme level. People from CSAcademy once called me “brutally honest”, and I like that title. I think it is accurate and I like that I am brutally honest.

  I guess this is connected to the previous point. For me that kind of politeness is inherently dishonest. I don’t understand how “hiding what you want to convey because Society” is good.

• I don’t understand why some people are so focused on being objective and so scared of being subjective. Every thought, every concept, every idea we have is based on our individual experience. Everything we think is subjective. For me it means that everything we say is subjective, because I believe that we should say only what we think. Everything I say is subjective, and that subject is me. I would add “I think that…” or “In my experience…” before every sentence I say, but that’s too wordy. Read this comment exchange to get a more verbose explanation of my views.

• I don’t understand which words are offensive and why. I say fuck without even noticing it. I swear a lot and I don’t see a problem while it is among peers in unofficial setting. This probably have a lot of interconnected reasons, including autism, the fact that I grew up in Eastern Europe, and the fact that I watch a lot of British comedians and panel shows.

• When I say “This is fucking stupid”, you should ignore “fucking”, then add subjective prefix, which will produce “I think that this is stupid”, which you should translate to “I don’t understand why do you think that (it is a good idea)”. And it is not a comment on you, it is related to a particular thing you said. This kinda follows from previous points, but this is a very frequent special case, so I decided to include it here.

Some other things from my personality, that I think are less caused by autism:

• I think I am a good person. But I’m not a nice person. I think that there is a very big distinction, but many people assume that I’m not good because I’m not nice.
• I have low self-esteem.
• I desperately need positive feedback when I do something I consider to be useful for others.
• I prefer to talk like equals in every situation. I don’t like to act like a boss, and I don’t like to be talked down to. There are “exceptions”, like in a work group there should be a leader who distributes tasks and make decisions, and others should follow the decisions made by leader, but that’s the full extent of the leadership, the leader is not better or more important, they just have a role to make decisions.
• I am terrified of money-talk and work-talk. If I receive unexpected communications about possible jobs (usually someone asking for tutoring) I delay reading the message, sometimes for weeks, in some cases I just never open them.

I was born in Ural region of Russia on August 15, 1996 and lived in Russia until March 2021 (so, for 24,5 years). I cannot change where I was born. Russian is my mother tongue, and I have some ties to CP in Russia and Russian-speaking CP community in general (for example, I continue to participate in Petrozavodsk training camp even now). Having said that, I despise Russian government and fully support Ukraine. My wife is Ukrainian, and we lived in Kharkiv (Ukraine) for almost a year. Including first days of full-scale war. It was scary. Nobody should experience that. Slava Ukraini! After a couple of weeks in Lviv we managed to escape first to Poland and then to Lisbon (Portugal), where we are living now for almost a year.