I am thinking that possibly I am not a great communicator not only ‘because I’m autistic’ but because my communication skills have been blocked when I was younger.

First, it was not possible in my family to ask why certain things are happening, at least not when my dad was around. Mum was happy to give some explanation but if dad was in the same room even that wasn’t possible; he would just scream at you in response even if I spoke to mum.

The other thing is that there was this massive issue in my family of my dad’s mental illness and we weren’t supposed to talk about it.

Now I can see that if I need to ask a question like ‘could you please tell me what you meant when you said…’ I feel really uncomfortable; like if I expect that there is something really bad hidden there. It feels to me that, if there was nothing wrong going on, there would be no need to be indirect and I wouldn’t need to ask. I see situations in my past when I didn’t like something, yet I asked questions about it in ways that I knew won’t get me the answer, because I didn’t want things in the open, I only wanted to look like I did. So am I really that bad at communication? Because, in a way, I knew exactly how to achieve the result I was after.

Maybe I’m not bad ad communication, maybe I’m bad at focusing at positive intension? I really do not know.

It feels really strange to realise those things, you know. It really felt to me like I was bad communicator because I was autistic and there was nothing else going on there.

As I said multiple times on the blog, I believe that we, autistics, understand life through patterns in our past, and possibly those are mine: if things are hidden, that means there’s something bad going on; asking clarifying questions can have negative consequences.

However, I’m not sure I want to deal with that. No one should be making me to look into my past in ways that I don’t feel ready to. Blogging about things that happened is different, as I do it on my terms. But I’m not sure I want any deep insight into my own, deepest issues, you know?