Community is not your reward for being a good person

Friendship for autistic women feels like it's behind a paywall. There's no Terms of Service agreement to read or sign, but we have to learn a ton of rules we don’t understand or agree with anyway. Once we know them, we also have to watch people repeatedly break those rules (without having an outsized reaction!) that turns people off. But try to break that rule yourself, and all hell breaks loose. Get ghosted by people you liked a few dozen times and eventually you’ll play the game well enough to have one or two ride-or-dies by your side. Yay?!

It's a fact: to survive in a neurotypical society, women with autism have to eat a lot of shit. We apologize for breaking rules that don’t make sense; for being too loud, or not loud enough; for not being comfortable (or not performing comfort) at parties or in clubs. We do this to keep the peace, and constantly keeping the peace is exhausting. Allistics don’t realize how exhausting this is, and autistics grow to resent how few people are willing to meet us halfway.

This phenomenon even has a name:

The double empathy problem.

Last week as I was walking home from my kickboxing gym I put on an episode of the podcast Difficult Conversations with KadyRoxz entitled, “Does Autism Make You a Bad Friend?” The consensus? Only if you let it. After all, if a friend does try to meet you halfway by approaching you with a genuine concern about a behavior that hurt them, blaming your neurodivergence and telling them to suck it up because that’s “just how you are” is an awful way to go about things.

But if the people around you see being a “good friend” as being a doormat, someone who ignores her own boundaries to go to the noisy club and laugh along to mean-spirited jokes at her expense, then yeah. You’re a bad friend to those bad friends, and you owe them nothing.

More autistic women seem to experience the latter, though — constantly acquiescing for the comfort of those around us. We’ve been conditioned to do this throughout our lives. We learn that women should keep sweet and be nurturing. We learn that autistic people are a burden and should do everything we can to make ourselves easier to be around (which means something different to pretty much everyone). Bringing family dynamics and culture into the mix really muddies things.

To me, all of this begs the question: is an autistic woman’s acceptance in society predicated on the perfect performance of neurotypicality? In other words, is community our reward for being “good enough” at the act?

(Daily disclaimer that autistic men certainly do have their own unique struggles worth discussing. We don’t do that here. If you’re looking for those subjects, there are plenty of posts out there tackling the specific issues of autistic boys and men, and I encourage you to click off and find them!)

Long periods of isolation are a hallmark of autistic womanhood

First, some facts: Autistic women face unique challenges in finding a sense of community due to differences in cognition and social expectations. Neurotypical social norms often prioritize small talk, emotional expressiveness, and implicit rules of engagement, which can be draining and confusing for autists. For women in particular, this creates a barrier to forming meaningful connections, as our natural communication styles and needs may conflict with conventional norms. This mismatch can lead to alienation, prolonged isolation, and the general vibe that we are at once “too much” and “not enough” in most social contexts.

Those social connections are essential for women to have any amount of power over our own lives. Historically, communities like whisper networks, book clubs, and covens gave us space to trade resources, compare experiences, and protect one another. Group chats and support networks save lives. Healthy connection is crucial.

Attitudes about friendships and community within a broader society often fail to consider or value the diversity of cognitive experience, too. Neurodivergent women are some of the most empathic, passionate, detail-oriented people I know, and we tend to prefer relationships that are built on shared interests or intellectual pursuits rather than emotional exchange. But because those attitudes don’t mesh in close-knit, emotionally intense friendships, our contributions are regularly misunderstood or undervalued.

As a result, we learn to mask, hiding our passion and interests and mimicking neurotypical behavior until we either blend in at the expense of our authenticity, or crash out entirely and search for an accepting community elsewhere.

There’s also a secret third thing:

Becoming a leader in your community

Comedian Steve Martin is credited with the iconic quote, “Be so good they can’t ignore you,” which I’ve been trying to live by. Being brave enough to unapologetically showcase your skills, strengths, and even special interests in community will give the people around you opportunities to recognize those strengths — or even seek you out for them. Some autists learn to escape the neurotypical social dance by finding a knowledge or skill gap only they can fill, then filling it. Relentlessly.

Don’t like the way society misrepresents the lives of autistic adults? Get a Ph.D in neuroscience! Be the only actually autistic autism researcher in the room, and once you’re there, wipe the floor with anyone who casually disparages your research, and do it with facts and logic. Tired of people ignoring your input in class? Grind as hard as possible on the intricate details of the project, show up the next day having done 80% of the legwork on your own, and watch your classmates’ smug grins disappear.

Becoming a purveyor of institutional knowledge or support can not only improve your social standing in your community, but offer you an opportunity to engage with your special interests in public, which can help you to feel more authentic in spaces where there’s pressure to mask and conform. And it’s a major ego boost to feel like you’re indispensable in your field. But, a word of advice on this strategy:

Leadership requires strong boundaries, especially for autistic women

Making yourself “useful” without looking out for your own needs opens you up to exploitation. Setting yourself up as a gatekeeper of anything in your community without first establishing boundaries will burn you out. When you've become the leader of a mutual aid project, the sole study group organizer, or the only female coach in your gym…you are taking on too much.

There’s a difference between occasionally taking on a leadership role and becoming a gatekeeper. Part of community work is getting comfortable with sharing the load. By becoming a gatekeeper of any community resource, not only are you making these people beholden to your schedule or whims to get for a service only you can provide, you’re also putting a massive burden on yourself…and a target over your head. You are, after all, the best person for the job; over time people will expect you to come in early, stay late, or work without compensation (be that money or reciprocity) to dispense said knowledge.

If people start talking like they're waiting on an Amazon Prime same-day delivery from you, you’re overdue to set some boundaries.

Community isn't perfect, either!

I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that the bar for most communities is not very high. There are plenty of terrible people in communities, so if you’re not perfect, don’t worry about it!

My kickboxing gym is one of my favorite places in the country. The coaches are kind and inspiring and the space is inclusive across genders, cultures, and generations. I love it. But it shouldn’t surprise you that martial arts gyms, like most male-dominated spaces, have very high rates of harassment and assault against women. Despite having many female members, my community is no exception. Part of my contribution to it is helping women and nonbinary people to get their grievances heard when one of the “good guys” in our community turns out to be a snake, and to make sure they never feel comfortable making the same decision twice.

Community is your reward for showing up, not being “good”

With specialized knowledge and strong boundaries, you can become a respected leader in your community. If you’re terrified of saying no, or rejection in general, leadership might not be for you just yet. And if that’s the case, don’t sweat it; there are always more tools and strategies at your disposal to change your situation, even if they’re not clear to you right away. Isolation is always temporary.

Sometimes you just need to make like the Hanged Man and wait for things to shake out before your next opportunity for connection comes along. Until then, focus on your skills and building up healthy boundaries.

True friendship and community expects nothing from you but your contribution to keeping the culture alive. When a community’s culture is hostile to autistic ways of thinking, the goalposts of what will be expected of you in order to belong will never stop moving. Your comfort will be predicated on your ability to meet constantly-shifting expectations. (Thanks, corporate America!) But if the community is open to diverse ways of thinking, the people around you will be patient and open to hearing your thought process, even if they don’t immediately understand it.

Leave people behind who love moving the goalposts and focus on experiences that build you up. Since no friend group, community, or organization is perfect, why should you expect perfection from yourself in order to have your basic need for connection met?