Understanding Non-Autistic Social Skills

I had an insightful twitter conversation with an allistic (non-autistic) person recently (@noidd on twitter) and I think sharing this conversation about social interactions between allistic and autistic people will help us understand each other a bit better.

I used the term “social skills” in the title, but what I really mean is understanding non-autistic subconscious social processing.

Please note that this is one conversation about social interactions between an autistic person and a non-autistic person and does not apply to every non-autistic person or every autistic person, but it may give a bit of insight into how allistic people and autistic people generally think during social interactions. It is important to note that Noidd is specifically answering my question about how his subconscious social processing works, so most of what he is writing about is not conscious thought, but the subconscious way his brain works during social interaction. He’s…