Do you try to fake NT?

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I spent a long period of my life faking, I eventaully cracked from prolonged exhaustion, I don't try anymore for the sake of my health.

I don't try...I wouldn't even know how.

It should be possible to fake neurotypical behavior. Just find out what other people believe in and what is most popular even if that means putting your personnel beliefs on the shelf.

I don't really know how to answer. I did spend a lot of my life when I was younger trying to be "normal", but it never worked. People thought I was weird no matter what I did. Now that I'm more aware of myself, I try not to fake it when it makes no difference, but I do try to fake it when dealing with people on a business level. It's very difficult though. It's been causing me a lot of anxiety, and I don't feel I do a very good job anyway.

Nah, it mostly involves knowing how to answer them when they try to talk to you. Everything else is optional.

at work i did to an extent. didnt bother with facial expressions though. with the friends i used to have i didnt have to. same with direct family but i do act a lot with other family. i also tried it when my parents tried to drag me to shrinks. facial expression, vary tonal intonation, eye contact, no stuttering, use typical teenage language, talk confidently- not excessively not too little. they always picked me out anyway on some fault or other. the last one was that the conversation was defined by her talking to me and me responding. i thought that was what i was supposed to do. i hate faking it. i feel like a janus. can't sustain it for long either.

I fake it when I think I have to, but it's exhausting so when I'm with people I know well I stop. After over 40 years of experience I like to think I'm good at it but I dunno...

~Kate

When in Rome............

I have never been good at it. I try, but it's just a given that I won't be able to keep it up indefinitly, and the longer I'm around someone.... well, they're just going to figure it out. I guess by "faking it" I really mean, clerks in checkout lines and stuff, but any interaction that's more than that, I am terrible at faking it, and it only takes a matter of minutes for the stranger to catch on to something. I recognize that look that some people get, when they realize I'm... um... not on the same page... but I honestly do not know what to do about it. So, yes I fake it, ~but~ I really stink at faking it.

No. I just be myself. It's easier and healthier for me, that way.

I am very inhibited socially, so when I am in public I wouldn't want to do anything that makes me really stand out, and I don't think I do. But I am very socially withdrawn. I don't feel able to fake 'normal' interaction eg. making small talk, making eye contact and in that way it just isn't a choice for me to fake NT social behaviour. If I tried I would blow it in the first few seconds because I just don't know how to fake it. And as others here have said, people know straight away that there is something strange about me and people tend to ask me if I'm OK a lot, which shows that they have noticed. In fact, I think the more I try not to appear odd and the more pressure I feel under socially, the more odd I appear and the more disabled I actually become. It is best for me if I can just find some way of letting people know that I have what I see as a social disability.

I guess I'm living proof you can fake NT behavior so well that you fool yourself.

So...you visited other planets?

Growing up, I never knew what aspergers was, I thought my little quirks and eccentrics were abnormal, so I would try to cover them up and act normal. My parents would always tell me to "act normal" when I would wave my arms, talk too loudly, or do anything out of the ordinary, and at school I would hardly ever talk, so nobody ever suspected there was anything different about me. I made a lot of friends in middle school, who, although I did not realize it at the time, had various mental abnormalities, so I never thoguht there was anything wrong with me. I did not really start to think I was different until I started high school, when socialization got one hundred times more complex and confusing to me than it was in middle school. I pretty much lost all of my friends, and the ones who stood by me pretty obviously thought I was weird and/or different than "normal" people. Also, when I started working at a restaurant as a dishwasher, I noticed that I could not for the love of God, multi task. I could not be carrying dishes and answering a question at the same time, it was simply impossible. So to answer your question, I faked NT behavior succesfully until I got into high school, and now although I still try to fake it, it does not seem to be working nearly as well anymore.

I fooled myself, but it's becoming increasingly obvious that while I learned some things (like how to socialize to a certain extent - and by that I mean how to have conversations with people) that a lot of things were just awkward or difficult all along, and I wasn't really all that good at faking it, I just either didn't know, or if I was aware that there was something that put people off or whatever, I blamed it on other factors.

I want to say I basically had no idea, which is at its base true, but I have had hints here and there over the past 14-15 years I think (from the first time I realized I do palilalia, to the time I realized that Asperger's is characterized by intense interests and monologues, and my tendency to somehow manage to spot other autistic people on forums and then get into mutual flame wars with them over semantics without consciously realizing they were autistic until we were up to our eyeballs, and I realized "wait, this is just like that argument I had with X.").

After I started researching the possibility seriously - I'd been convinced but ignored it three years ago - I've had people tell me they suspected because it's apparently obvious in how I write.

So, I fooled myself but I was apparently easy to fool.

I'm usually aware that there's a difference between my behavior and typical NT behavior. I've gotten pretty good at faking normal conversations, I think, but my ability to do so wanes over time. I get tired out because I'm essentially just acting. Being myself, on the other hand, is still tiring (but not as much so), but often means socially inappropriate behavior. So it's been hard to find a mix between the two.