Summarizing the "You're Weird" Narrative

So, I spent a lot of time last week preparing a character for a D&D campaign that my spouse plays in.  For the confused, Dungeons and Dragons is kind of like telling stories around a campfire, except it's a cooperative story you're all making together, and you use dice to figure out whether important actions in the story succeed as intended.  You basically get a group of people together, one person runs the world, and the others each have a character that interacts with the other characters and the world.

So you get, say, a group of 5.  4 players, who have your stereotypical fighter, rogue, wizard, and cleric group.  And your game master, who runs the world.  This group of fantasy heroes goes and fights off an invasion of goblins.  The game master says what the goblins do, how the invasion advances, and how the players' actions against the invasion turn out.  The fighter might want to attack the goblin horde head on, while the rogue would prefer to sneak around to find the leader.  The group, between themselves, settles on what they'll do, and then tells the game master, who has the players roll dice where appropriate (for example, to find the goblin leader amidst the horde, and how well attacking him goes).

Chris had been having fun with an online game for months now.  And I'd looked through some new and interesting ideas for characters, and come up with something that had, after years of apathy, piqued my interest in playing again.  The campaign was apparently pretty decent for story (which is what I like), the players were seemingly nice folks, and the game master worked with me to make the character fit into the world.  The first session even seemed to go fairly well, sans a minor miscommunication during play.

Then yesterday, the game master messaged my spouse, complaining that I was basically disrupting his game and doing things all wrong.  In a virtual tabletop environment, I prefer to use text to describe my character's actions, and apparently that was unacceptable.  The game master preferred everything happen via voice, but hadn't bothered to tell me this ahead of time.  But instead of talking to me directly about it, the game master took it up with my spouse.

This is a classic neurotypical move.  It's too uncomfortable to express your ire directly to the object of that ire, so you take it up with someone more comfortable, yet accessible to the person.  This third person is then expected to relate the situation to the transgressor, who... is then supposed to apologize or change their actions or whatever the expected response is.  I've seen this happen over and over, and it's kind of crap.  Unless the situation is so volatile that neither party can speak civilly to the other, you're basically pulling a third party into your argument... because, apparently... you can't handle the idea of discussing the problem directly with the person.  Why is this normal and okay again?

The upshot of this was that I ended up spending five hours playing telephone with the game master, who, for the first couple hours, couldn't seem to clarify what he was upset about, while insisting the upset was my fault, then, after eventually messaging me directly, finally settled on an almost specific version of "you're just not doing things the way I want them done."  Even when I tried to summarize and clarify what "the way I want them done" was, he was still evasive and continued to insist that the whole thing was my fault.

This is a very common narrative that autistic people get, which is one of the reasons I'm complaining about it publicly.  In a nutshell, this is:

Autistic Person: *does Normal Activity A in an unusual way that suits them well*
Intolerant Neurotypical Person: *upset by the strangeness of Autistic Person* "What are you doing?"  
AP: *startled and confused* "Er, I'm doing A."  
INP: "Why would you do it that way?  That's stupid and wrong!  Why aren't you doing things the right way?!"  
AP: "This way works well for me and gets the job done.  It seems okay." 
INP: "You're terrible and you should feel bad.  Do A the way I demand you do it!"  *refuses to describe exactly what they're expecting*
AP: *tries to do A with the incomplete information*
INP: "That's still not right, what are you doing!?  Do it this way!" *clarifies a little bit better, getting more upset the more they have to explain*
AP: *finally figures out what INP wants, and does it*  "Okay cool, that... really isn't at all natural to me and I don't like it much."  
INP: "Too bad!  Do it that way from now on!"

This particular version only happens if the intolerant neurotypical person is confrontational, which I've noted above is rare.  Usually, INP's second line is merely thought inside their skull, and the autistic person is avoided, fired, and/or excluded.  The dialogue, then, rarely proceeds past that point, and yet the autistic person is expected to understand what they were doing "wrong", why the INP was upset, and is then further expected to correct their behavior for future encounters.  

Does this seem fair to you?  It doesn't to me, and it's particularly crushing when it happens over and over, in high stakes situations, like your job.  It's part of why so many of us suffer depression and anxiety.  And speaking personally, it's why I've kind of stopped bothering with heavy social interaction environments like Dungeons and Dragons.  I will, invariably, get something wrong, or be too different or weird, and this is what results.  Unless I have a really strong and abiding reason to stick it out, that's it.  

The older I get, the less patience I have for that crap.  I hope the world gets more tolerant in a hurry, because I'm only going to be 30 this year, and if my pace of lost patience keeps up, I'm going to end up a shut-in.