Female Friendships through an Autistic woman’s eyes

♡𝗠𝗬 𝗘𝗧𝗦𝗬 𝗦𝗛𝗢𝗣♡
Transition Techniques neurodivergent-friendly Guided Workbook

Rest & Regulation Guided Workbook for Neurodivergents

Discovering your Masks ADHD & Autism Workbook

ADHD & Autism Uncovering Your Stims Workbook

ADHD-friendly Weekly Planner · Helps with Executive Dysfunction

♡𝗢𝗡𝗘 𝗢𝗡 𝗢𝗡𝗘 𝗖𝗢𝗔𝗖𝗛𝗜𝗡𝗚♡

♡𝗖𝗼𝗻𝗻𝗲𝗰𝘁 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗺𝗲♡

♡𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗱𝘂𝗰𝘁𝘀 𝗜 𝘂𝘀𝗲♡

[angelplaysyt]

It's like a glorified, universally accepted and expected, unspoken rule among neurotypicals that you have to create a whole shiny, perfect cookie cutter character for the world to see you as, and they just... Believe in it so wholeheartedly, and I could never understand it even as a young child.

[karizmaw]

I feel like every friendship I make I am fighting for a position within the friend group, always the “fourth one”. Nobody ever talks to me one on one, even on the phone, but when we’re in groups we act like we know each other despite talking over each other and sticking to specific topics of conversation. It’s so fatiguing.

[rachelwong]

It’s almost like we’re punished for telling the truth

[miahammonds]

"Naturally, I'm actually a very out-going, warm person but I think throughout time, as I learned how to be more socially appropriate, that's when I started to become extremely introverted." THIS!! I felt this statement because it's so accurate especially relating to my life. For a while now, I've had this theory that masking had caused isolation. I feel like this is a part of it. For most of my life, I've always been introverted but I just don't put myself out there as much as I used to. There are times when I can be extroverted with a small group of people aka my close friends but otherwise, yeah.

[Vonmacfire]

I personally find other females too judgmental, inauthentic and just not nice. I just can’t feel comfortable around that untrustworthy nature I often sense in them.

[katiea]

“These aren’t conversations people have in real life” YES

[veronis]

From my personal experience, I can think back to many scenarios where I have copied how other women around me dressed and behaved as means of blending in. When neurotypical women try to befriend me, I push them away (more like giving the cold shoulder) because I know that at some point I'll get tired of having to play pretend with them, and I'm not sure how they'd react to the "real" me. A pattern I've noticed with my friendships is that I gravitate towards other women who I suspect are also neurodivergent (it's like gaydar but for neurodivergency lol). My closest childhood friend was also high-functioning autistic, and my current best friend has ADHD. The friendships that I have with neurodivergent women are my closest ones due to a lack of social/cultural expectations. We can just be ourselves.

[queenofhorror]

As an autistic woman I had a lot of friends growing up, both girls and boys (though separate groups most of the time) and I just recently started noticing the patterns between the dynamics between me and my friendships with girls and my friendships with guys. With girls it was more intimate, and very intense in the sense that they were very open about their problems and felt like they could be honest with me (but I always struggled with this and never really opened up) one of the toxic things I could remember from most of my friendships with girls is the competition and talking badly behind their backs if they didn’t something wrong or something small that they didn’t like. I never understood that, or why it was a big deal. So it was a lot of fakeness and bitter energy around girls. With guys, I didn’t have this problem, BUT, they often never respected my boundaries, especially physically, and I was subjected to a lot of sexual harassment and SA when I was very young so that was not ok. And no matter how close I got to my guy friends and no matter how much they accepted me, they still saw me as inferior to them. I don’t know how to explain it, but I definitely felt it sometimes. This is just my experience and everyone is different, but I think after years of having questionable and toxic friendships, I much prefer to be alone and I don’t feel any pressure to behave or conform to people’s expectations of me, especially as a woman. And I think women should learn how to be ok with being alone and not feel like they have to be a certain way to be accepted by society.

[dexivxr]

What you are sharing makes so much sense. I steer clear of groups of women, not because I don't like women, but because I feel like I can't be myself. I've had a few close friends, who actually were more autonomous and masculine in certain ways.

[dianorrington]

The subtlety of Autism is something so tricky to explain to non-Autists, but you do an amazing job of it. So grateful.

[EMVelez]

Definitely relate to that fear of losing my personal autonomy and wanting to get away as soon as I notice it. I don’t want to be part of any group. I only want to be myself. Not anyone else.

[DeSpaceFairy]

I'm not a woman so in matter of friendship between them I have no clue how it works, but I totally agreed with what you said about expectation on women. Often I had the impression that women are practically reduced to a biological or social function by both men and women, I always thought it was weird and even weirder when people are "surprised" (in the best cases) that women weren't meeting those obviously unrealistic expectations.

[christinadonnelly]

This is really strange because I must have literally been so oblivious to social structure that I didn't even notice people were copying each other the way you describe. My problem with female friendships has always been inconsistent opinions and behavior. Behavior switching based on context and person that they are with. It unnerved me to see someone mutating their perspective and personality so I kept my distance. I feel a lot more non female after your video because it sounds way more complex than I even imagined.

[flubberbubberc.]

Just went to a neuropsych recently and she asked me “have you ever seemed to come off too clingy or want too much attention from your female friends?” How should I know? I’m not them.

[Arggggggggg]

I feel like throughout my life, I've been the copycat and taken on other people's ways of dressing, mannerisms, and doing things to fit in with them. But also on the other hand, at different points in high school I always had a best-friend-of-the-moment who was the new kid because I would always befriend the new kid. But it wouldn't take long for them to make other friends and ditch me because their new friend group didn't like me or wasn't friends with me for whatever reason.

[melisaco]

I don’t really have female friendships at all. Unfortunately my experience was I was always attracting narcissists female friends because they could manipulate me and thrived on making me feel bad about being myself. I have since ceased those connections. I do get along exceptionally well with males when it comes to friendships.

[EMVelez]

Ah the NT person’s refusal to accept another version of reality other than their own as valid is something that drives me MAD and has made me end more than a few friendships with women. No one is living anyone else’s individual experience. Having the audacity to project your own experience onto others is something I cannot fathom.

[Buttondor]

Another aspect of mimicry and copying is that women with asd typically use it as a social tool. For me I spend a lot of time analysing not just the social behaviour but also the physical presentation of women and take on those features as a form of masking my asd

[flubberbubberc.]

I remember girls I thought were my friends were copying parts of me, but couldn’t be me, so they started trash talking me behind my back

[saiiiyy]

I felt this video so hard. I always wondered why my female friendships, even some of the best ones, either faded out through life or ended in ways that just didn't fully make sense to me at times. This made me really sad through life wondering why I couldn't fully foster and nourish my friendships with other females. Thank you for the work that you do, you are helping many of us feel validated and come to terms with our own things in our lives. 🧡