I don’t have a single proper example for this – I have a lot of very vivid memories from my childhood, but they are completely random. I don’t remember any major misunderstandings that I was then shocked to find out the truth about. But I do suspect that I tended to misunderstand a lot. I’ve been diagnosed as neurodivergent as an adult, and when I look back on my childhood, I feel like I spent most of it feeling like I didn’t quite understand what was going on around me. So I guess the answer to this is that I misunderstood people. I didn’t understand when I was being manipulated, when people were not trustworthy or when they were being insincere. Now I’m extremely good at sensing when someone isn’t being honest or when there’s something going on behind the words. But it’s a skill I had to learn in self defense because of years of struggling with social nuances.
What about you guys? Any other neurodivergent folks out there who had similar experiences?
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Kind of? I was actually very good at understanding other people; when I was a child, it got to where if I reacted negatively to some particular adult, my parents were immediately wary of them. But I was always puzzled about the part where other people didn’t seem to see it. Like, we had this one priest at church, and I swear the man didn’t walk so much as *ooze*. He was that sleazy. But he was good at schmoozing (which I very definitely was not) and people seemed to really like him.
He turned out to be embezzling from the church, and the person who uncovered it had to report it *twice* before the charges stuck.
But there were a lot of things that other people found important that I just didn’t understand (church in general was actually one of them) and I spent a lot of years trying to sort out whether that was a me-problem or a them-problem. A lot of it, I eventually concluded, just isn’t that much of a problem.
I get that. I was thinking about when I was a young child, at the beginning of school. I didn’t understand that there were people who would purposely be mean or use others or just try to make others feel bad. So I always thought the best of people – which I learned over time was too generous! By the time I was a couple of years into school, I had learned. I’m really good at reading people now, often I’ve had a vibe about someone and ended up being right – though no one listened to me at the time! The *oozing* makes perfect sense to me! I do often wish the world was how I expected it to be – I dislike manipulation and insincerity. I’d prefer that these things were just openly expressed and dealt with! I tend to avoid people who fake. It’s exhausting trying to figure out what’s really going on!
I’m the rare dyslexic who usually makes mistakes talking or writing and rarely makes them reading, but still remember misinterpreting things I heard and read in a completely neurotypical way. I live on what’s classified as a private road with a public right-of-way. People can walk past as long as they stay on the road, but we’re not obliged to maintain the road so that they can drive. When we first moved in, at age six I heard that as “public ride-away.” The public could ride away–it made sense. I don’t remember when I learned the correct spelling and meaning of the phrase.
You know what, I actually prefer “public ride-away” – it’s such a lovely and wholesome mental image!