Autism severity can change substantially during early childhood, study suggests

I experience this in a sense when I meditate deeply (= a 10 day retreat, 10 hours per day). What I see in my field of vision, I then feel in my body. It's a whole new information channel that I'm able to tap into, and it's lightning quick. It tapered down a bit since I'm not meditating anymore, but it didn't fully go away (this was 8 years ago).

What I think that happens: my insula attached to the default mode network and is feeding information into it. It gives the ability of being much more sensitive at certain forms of empathy.

I remember before I went in thinking: research says I'll be better at emotional intelligence when I do this, I wonder what will happen. 10 days later I realized I became a lot better at empathy. So my emotional intelligence did grow :)

There's quite some research on this, but I'm going to be lazy and simply recommend Search Inside Yourself.

Disclaimer: the experience discussed in this comment is one of the reasons why I chose my username back in the day. So I'm biased.

There is very likely not a reliable scientific guide to making and keeping friends, because it depends very much on the circumstances and the people involved.

Some people have many shallow friendships, others just a few deep ones.

Some people extend the hand of friendship early, others take years of persistence to become friends with.

Some people value time spent together on shared experiences, others value talking, others value gifts or help in times of crisis and others value being told how good a friend they are (once the friendship is clearly there).

Many people are friends with individuals they have known since high school and it is generally harder to make new friends after that point. It's also pretty easy to lose friends as you age due to differences of opinions or beliefs.

Perhaps the biggest skills in making and retaining friends is finding common activities and experiences you can share with them (outings, games, sport, dining, interests, topics of discussion, etc.) and finding the right time to invite them to engage with you in such things.

Very often there are logistical hurdles to overcome and that is all: do they have a car, is there a convenient bus, is the venue you are meeting nearby, are you available when they are, do they have a babysitter, is the suggested date suitable for them, have they currently got some other crisis or deadline to deal with, etc.

I find that if I ask to spend time with people too often, they may think I am "clingy" or "needy" and push me away. If I ask too little, the friendship never really gets established. It's a balance that is different for everyone.

I would not expect it to be authenticity and complicated philosophy or self.

It may simply be, that communicating with autistic takes much more effort from neurotypical people, is more frustrating. Eventually they stop trying and putting that effort on. Just as communicating with other is tiring for autistic, except neurotypicals have plenty of neurotypicals around to communicate with.

I dont really want to guess, knowing nothing about parent. But the issues in communication with different functional autistic people I had observed that broke it down where things related to social interactions. For example, inability to imagine yourself in other peoples situation can make autistic look selfish and unfair (when enforcing rules for example). It also makes it hard to impossible to strike compromise as opponents situation is not taken into account by autistic and is perceived as "illogical".

Autistic can be overstepping boundaries without really knowing, making people uncomfortable as they have to defend those boundaries. Can be insulting or controlling without having bad intention, which forces other people to react to it in "defense" or leave for own sanity.

Small tip: look for smiles in the corners of the eyes. This happens when laughter is genuine. If you do things that make someone laugh genuinely, they will probably stick around.

How to Win Friends and Influence people is also a masterful book for socializing. It basically teaches you what naturals do automatically.

Hmm... this is just a suspicion. But one possible reason could be that you're too serious and not playful enough.

I could totally miss the mark here, but that is what I've seen in my own life. I make a friend am too serious, couple of months later I am all by myself again.

So I decided to become more playful, and that really worked! If you are noticing that you might be too serious yourself and might need some playfulness. Here are a couple of things I did:

1. Asking: how am I naturally already playful, I enhanced that. I simply looked harder for more situations to utilize that playfulness.

2. Understanding: what is playfulness? It took me 2.5 years to understand that it means to not be serious (e.g. the sky is purple and there BE CATS ON CATNIP ATTACKING US! 2.5 years of trying to get an emotional feel for playfulness. Yep, it didn't come easy but now I have a hang for it. It's quite fun :)

3. What type of playfulness can I do?

This list is non-exhaustive. Note: always err on the side of being respectful if you feel a that a certain form of playfulness is too difficult to pull off. If you don't do that, then you risk being a little mean, and a little offending and all those things. It's not the end of the world, but it's simply not nice.

The types that I know:

- The roleplay: I once approached a woman in a club pretending I was her long lost brother and that I was raised in the jungle by apes and that I was still learning her language speaking very broken English. She laughed her ass off and played along. Who knew that pretending to learn English could be so fun!

- The fantastical exageration: I already provided an example of that.

- Teasing: teasing is like trying to hurt the other person with the twist that it should be positive and not actually hurt them. If this idea seems confusing, err on the side of being positive and not hurting people.

- Trolling: it feels like teasing but it isn't. You basically try to fool someone a bit, but you do need to see if they are able to take it. Err on the side of caution and safety. One friend I have used to be a bit rigid. He's gotten used to me now. So with him I could be quite light saying like: "look, it's a red tree." "No Mettamage, it's brown!" "No it's red, it's like a hellspawn from Satan!" "What do you mean, it's so clearly brown, what are you smoking?" "Everrryything my friend. Want some? ;-)" "My god dude, everything? Haha, you're crazy mettamage" "I know :-)" "Hit me up" "For sure" "Oh, yea, now I see that tree is totally red!" (just to be super explicit: the smoking thing was a roleplay, no one smoked anything)

- Musical improv: I did this since I was 4, it's second nature. Just pretend that life is one big improvized jazz band and hum and dance along with it to whomever you're talking to. It's quite Disney-like really, like some Disney character suddenly starts singing.

4. What happens if I fail? Are there failure modes that I can't recover from?

If people simply think you said something silly but weird, you're fine. If you went a bit controversial and tried to be playful that might pose a problem, so the tricky bit is to stay light. My guide is to stay respectful, that helps a lot.

5. Are there forms of social imitation I could learn from?

- Watch comedy that you like but is popular

- Go to improv classes