"No one ever understands me."

[KrenkoMobBoss]

Yes, that old thought-terminating emo cliche. I know it can be hard to take that phrase seriously at this point, but please try to keep an open mind.

I have, for as long as I can remember, struggled with communication. This is likely at least partly due to being somewhere on the Autism Spectrum - they keep changing it, I used to be "Autistic," now I'm "Asperger's Syndrome," neither of which mean a damn thing to me, even after Googling furiously. But I digress.

For the last decade or so, I've been working hard on my communication skills, and I feel I've come a long way. I'm much more clear and articulate then I once was, perhaps even moreso then a lot of my peers, if only because I'm actively trying to be clear pretty much all the time. But it still seems like there are a lot of things I just can't get people to understand. In particular, when discussing artistic pursuits or Dungeons and Dragons, it has proven completely impossible to make myself clear to the general communities I've found - I've been searching for years, I think I've been to too many places to write this off as "I'm just looking in the wrong place."

This is incredibly frustrating, because I'm very much dependant on other people for support in nearly every way. I'm just not able to function on my own. It's how I've always been.

Generally, when I need assistance with something, I ask for it. I've gotten very good at asking for directions, and advice, and recommendations, and for the most part, things work out well for me. But in tabletop gaming and in learning to create art, I'm completely unable to make any headway on my own, and I'm completely unable to explain my troubles to the veterans in the fields.

What should one do, when one observes that they are suffering a total inability to communicate?

[JustinReilly]

Hmm... At least regarding art, that doesn't terribly surprise me. I'm nothing like an expert on Spectrum disorders, but from what I do know, that makes a certain kind of sense. From what I understand, there are significant differences in how your brain takes in, filters, and processes sensory information, which lead to/are related to differences in general cognition. There are filtering and pattern-matching algorithms that function differently or not at all in your brain that are a major part of how we perceive the world. Your higher brain receives much more of a 'raw feed' than ours does. I would guess that stage magic doesn't work as well on you as it does others as magicians exploit those filters between sensory input and conscious perception to make certain that even if we see the trick, we will not perceive it.

So, your communication issues are because your brain is perceiving a different world than mine is. Now, with concrete things -- the physical, the mathematical, etc. -- there is an objective reality behind both of our perceptions. With effort and experience we can use that fact to translate between our brains. No matter how differently we perceive it, a brick is still a brick. A quadratic equation is still a quadratic equation. But the feelings evoked when you look at Picasso's Woman Descending Staircase? Where would you start to translate something that subjective? And there's the rub, art, at its core, is about an attempt to produce certain mental states in another's mind. If our mental experiences are too different, you may be trying to evoke something that we literally can not comprehend. Couple that with the fact that any group of experts at anything are going to get somewhat hidebound and their discussions will become increasingly jargon filled which wouldn't help you.

Now, these are just my very slightly educated guesses. I would be interested to hear you actually try to describe what you're wanting to do, at least to satisfy my own curiosity.

[Nepene]

What messages are you trying to communicate that are not coming across clearly?