A friend had articulated effort required for any interaction in terms of effort required vs. quality of outcome. The axis goes from -100 to 100. If starting from normal human experience, you start in the middle at zero. Want something that’s a 50? Put in 50 effort. Degree of difficulty can shift the starting point to negative numbers, so starting from a -30 requires 80 worth of effort to get to that 50, and so on.

She’d introduced the concept when discussing the tradeoffs of trying to win over a new boss who’d been poisoned by the old boss’s comments (which she weighed at least at a -30 or worse) vs. starting at zero in a new job at a new place. She decided to bounce.

I’ve adopted this example to explain how I view social interactions while being autistic. Dealing with allistics when you’re autistic adds at least a 20 point penalty, and it gets harder from there if you’re tired or overstimulated.

In practice, if I mask right, at best it’ll still make me put about 20 extra points of effort in to get a result that allistic people expect starting from zero. I’m not saying I think they always get the best-case result, but I’m pretty confident it takes more effort for me to get there.

If someone notices that I’m “weird” despite my attempts to mask, difficulty may slip to -40, which can tip the balance of whether it’s worth it. Remember, 0 is the baseline of not doing the thing, so achieving a negative result can be worse than not having done anything at all.

People unaware of the tax may call me antisocial, which misses the point. For them, it’s starting from zero, putting in 10 effort for a 10 return. That may be worth it. If I have to put in 50 to get a slight bump to a 10, it’s not.

[Edit: I’m not sure this makes sense as written. I should probably revise it for clarity, but I doubt I ever will.]