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Neurotypical social norms are not actually mostly arbitrary bullshit! The specific mechanics can be silly for the same reason the vagus nerve is silly, evolution over time, but they're mostly active "I am mindful that you are another person with feelings and I am not treading on them" signalling.

With that as your lens, think about norms like leading with praise if you have bad news, asking how they're doing, giving a white lie answer to that question, even eye contact. And if you can't hit all the notes perfectly, you can at least be or act *sincere* in your caring.

Good actors don't perform by mimicking facial expressions blindly, they generally think of something that brings up the right emotions for the character and scene and then that shows through. I find ways to be curious about people, and to care about them as people, at least a bit.

Gosh I am so grateful to hear you say this aloud because this is critical to why social norms exist in any society. Neurotypicals adapt to them more easily but they exist for society as a whole.

I once found an old book of etiquette and I was like, wait this actually sounds like a guide book for non-typcials... the whole thing was just telling you what to do with your hands and little scripts for different situations.

Yep, and the scripts help, but you gotta understand and feel the intent or you end up in the uncanny valley of social performance.

i was unaware it was going around but i guess i’ll just say, like, yes, you can do this and also doing this can break you irreparably in meaningful but specific senses and that really needs consideration especially bcz typically after ur broken ppl will not do much to help u get back to stable

Yeah which is a big part of why I do something that isn't "play a normal neurotypical person 100% of the time" and my partner in particular is one of the people I do not perform around as a rule. If I had to, we would not be compatible.

I figured out a sustainable thing that fails relatively gracefully if I can't keep it up. It doesn't set expectations too high in terms of conventional social performance and it contextualizes the times I don't or can't follow them better.