*hugs* I'm sorry you feel like that. I think you're a great person.

*hugs* I think you're being a bit too hard on yourself, you do have people that care about you and you've never done wrong by me either. I know it sounds cliched but you just have to believe in yourself. Maybe you should also consider taking a little break from FA in order to clear your head and straighten things out, step back and look at the whole picture.

Recently I let a certain someone down, after promising myself I wouldn't do that again. How can I believe in myself when I'm never fully aware or certain what, if anything, I'm doing inappropriate? I just want to do right by them. And to add insult to injury, I'm told that I have to think about what I did wrong and figure out how to be better, as if it's not the question I'm already consumed with to the point of feeling sick. To try so hard to do right, and be told I'm being inconsiderate, makes me feel like I have absolutely nothing to show for any of my efforts.

Well, maybe you could try explaining to the person or to other people you meet in the future that you have some issues with social interaction and reading cues and understanding feelings? That could help things.

I already do.

Well, I think you've done your best and people should not expect more than that from you.

But I don't want to keep making them uncomfortable. I just simply do not know, most of the time, if I'm even doing it. I want it all to stop, but I don't want to push people away.

Well just tell them to tell you if you are making them uncomfortable. You can't read their minds and if you give them fair warning, then they should not get angry with you if they tell you nothing.

Well, that's part of the problem - he seldom ever would. He told me maybe three times that I can recall over the past half decade. The last time after he already blocked me. I wanted him to let me know if I was doing something wrong, but it felt like he went to great lengths not to talk about it at all. At most, I was admonished to think harder about it and do better next time. But I was already doing that to the point of neurosis. A few times I'd ask, "Was that inappropriate?" And more often than not, I'd get no reply.

And today, I realized that thinking so hard about it since then, has been making me physically ill. I can't keep doing it. As it is, I'm barely eating. I don't even know exactly what it was I did that pushed him over the edge, and I can't shake the feeling that he may never tell me. The most he said was that it was the breadth of what I'd done, in also making some of his friends uncomfortable. I wish they'd told me a lot sooner - I cared about their feelings, and didn't want them uncomfortable, and I wish it hadn't been entirely up to me to figure out what was wrong. I'm still not certain what it was that made each of them uncomfortable, either. If I still can't figure it out now when my mind is at overdrive, how was I going to figure it out then? I want and need to be told.

I think maybe your best bet is to just step back from everything and leave him and his friends alone. It sounds like you're putting in most of the effort in the friendship, but he can't be bothered to do the same or does not want to try to help you.

But have you maybe considered occupational therapy? It can really help with this sort of thing, at least from my own experience.

I already stepped back, once I realized how sick I was making myself. I'm feeling decisive now that I need to be told if something I'm doing is inappropriate, or most of the time I'll simply never know. Every impropriety, every time. I already try really hard to catch this myself, but it's clear that I'm still oblivious to the lion's share of instances. It's not just a matter of needing to be told once about a certain kind of situation - if it were that simple, I wouldn't have the problem. I just wish these things didn't so frequently exclude me from social situations.

I used to have a therapist until several years ago, but she moved to a different university and there was no one qualified to replace her. I was part of her special autism research program, and she was pretty irreplaceable in her capacity. There's all sorts of services for children with autism. But middle-aged adults with autism?

I definitely think you have to step back again and perhaps maybe take up a hobby. I know what it's like because I have Asperger's Syndrome which is a form of autism. Sometimes solitude can be your best friend, but other times you want the interaction with other people because as they say no man is an island, but it's a minefield trying to navigate the different social situations and emotions and emotional responses that you will come across. The best advice I can give you is to keep on trying, but try not to stress yourself out about things if they don't go as you'd expect them to.

Maybe you could look up some support networks and groups for people with autism? I am quite sure that they have them. And you could maybe look to have a few sessions with a psychologist because I know that they would know about autism-spectrum disorders as well and could maybe help you in some ways. Often, just talking about things that are bothering you is a good way to help oneself.

I still don't know how to deal with the fact that I was repeatedly hurtful to some people for years without even knowing it unless they actually spoke to me about it. I wish I could take it all back, and undo it, and not make them feel bad then, now, or in the future. It's not like I'm not regularly thinking about what I'm doing. Why can't I...just make it work? Intellectually, I know the answer. But I still feel like such a failure.

I know it's hard, but I think the only thing you can do in this situation right now is give them some space and time, then formulate an apology that isn't too rambling, but not too curt, and say you are sorry for what you've done no matter how unintentional it was. Then just leave them be and try your best to move on, don't contact them again after that, let them make the first move because you would've put the ball in their court.

And I would not say you are a failure, after all, look how far in life you've made it on your own. Just because you have some setbacks and things don't go our way, it does not make you a failure. It is a part of life no matter who you are.

That's the thing - I'm not on my own. I've never been on my own. I have family and friends.

See if they can help you. Talk to them and explain the problem, I'm sure at least one might be willing to help.

Yeah, I talked to my sister.

I think that entire situation I was in had me wound too tight, and the level of expectation I was trying to live up to was toxic to me, mentally and physically. It required me to give so much, with so little to go by, and with so little margin of error.

I mean, have you ever played Minesweeper on the highest difficulty? Or even on normal difficulty, there are some decisions that require a truly random guess because there's not enough information to go by. And sometimes, you hit a mine you thought was clear because you miscalculated. Or there's Candy Crush Saga, where it's not actually statistically possible to win by skill alone, since some game fields are genuinely unwinnable with at most a lot of random luck.

But ultimately, I just can't live by the expectations of people who demand that level of achievement of me. If I have to catch every last faux pas before it can happen, I'd not only be doing nothing else - I'd be having an aneurysm, because a blood vessel would pop trying to do it all. It's safer being around people who tolerate and accept my quirks and faux pas as benign, and don't suddenly hold me by unrealistically stricter standards after half a decade of knowing me.

Indeed, and I think you've finally hit the nail on the head about everything. You can't live to please other people all the time. *hugs*