Why do so many autistic adults deal with self-hatred?

4+ decades of trying to search for what is wrong with me, why do I lose friends, why am I a ‘third wheel’ friend, a spare tire, easily forgotten when someone newer, netter comes along. Did you not like me? Did I make you mad? What happened? Why did me getting sick mean you can’t remember me online? Why is face to face or being in public so important? How did you infer that weird idea from what I literally, carefully, said? I treat you nice if you even speak to me, and excuse a lot of meanness towards me. But I am the one forgotten, alone, left out. Not the people who smile to someone’s face, then gossip behind their backs.

Being unable to fully bridge a gap you’ve been trying to cross since you realized in PreK that other little girls are not nice to you, and little boys are 50/50 about playing with you, it makes you feel like a failure. When your mentally immature and unstable parents tell you you!re a waste of time and money, and they wish you!d been given away at birth, it makes you not like yourself.

I spent 47 years being told I was weird, worthless, left out, ghosted, ignored, failing to fully fit in in spite of exerting a lot of energy to do so, having work stolen, being gaslit, and essentially wondering why the hell everything felt like I was exercising in 10 times Earth’s gravity and everyone around me seemed fine, energetic, and things that bothered me did not bother them.

What do women talk about mostly(among themselves)?

Now, I see that I was not noticed as autistic as a child. And that being autistic makes me not fit in. Most of the world cannot think in the same way I do, they may not even see the same things I do, or feel the same things as I do.

People like me fine if I fawn, bend over backwards, rarely assert much at all. The minute I need to set a boundary, look out for myself, that’s it. I am alone.