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Comment by shazbotter | Hacker News Reader

I'm autistic, and what you describe doing sounds impossible to me. I live in constant fear of inconveniencing others. I personally find it inconvenient when someone outside my close circle wants my time.

It's expensive for me to perform socialness, so I tend to assume it's not free for others as well and avoid placing that burden on them.

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I learned from my therapist to stop trying to change my behavior based on how I predict other people will feel. If someone has expressed a clear boundary that is one thing, but otherwise I will not assume “I texted too much already I don’t want to bother them” or “I shouldn’t say the thing that’s on my mind they probably don’t want to hear it.” I still need to keep track of when I am genuinely talking too much around people sensitive to that (I check in with people, and it varies per person based on conversational styles) but now I allow myself to express what I want to express and I have a lot less anxiety about what other people think. My therapist describes the tendency to modify our behavior based on the predicted comfort of others as codependency or people pleasing, which might be useful things to research. Changing yourself is not easy or trivial, but over the course of time, we can change and grow a lot in life. Doing so has been a decades long effort but I am so much better with social interactions these days, and it has been quite rewarding to get here.

I learned to do this a few years ago and it is easily one of the most freeing things I’ve ever done. Funny thing is, before I had thought of myself as someone who was just really empathetic and justified my behavior as being concerned about the well-being of others. But now it’s clearer to me that I wasn’t actually paying attention to how others actually felt but was mostly making a ton of assumptions in efforts to avoid my own discomfort.

Why not just start making conscious decisions?

Like "Here's my path to statistical victory/social success/meeting needs. Chances are, it'll be in some small degree inconvenient for others, it'll be rude to them, it'll make them angry, and it'll put a burden on them. Will it worth my chances on victory/social success/meeting needs?"

That's how I do it, but my needs socially are mostly already met, so the incremental gain for being outgoing serves no practical need, but has some notional risk and cost.

You're right, socializing has different costs for different people.

Some fences are boundaries, not barriers and that's ok!

Not every fence needs to come down. Honor what serves you.

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