Communication takes more out of me than it shows.
A conversation can end, but my brain may keep going over it for days.
Sometimes weeks.
A phone call can end, but I may still be replaying what I said, what I meant, and whether I got something wrong.
A text can sit unanswered because I am still trying to figure out exactly what I want to say.
For a long time, I thought this meant I was bad at communicating.
Now I think I understand it differently.
Real-time communication is harder for me
Writing gives me time.
I can reread something.
Think.
Rewrite it.
Make sure the words actually match what I mean.
Talking does not give me that same space.
I have to listen, understand, figure out what I think, and answer while the conversation is still moving.
Phone calls can be especially hard because I do not even have the other person’s face in front of me.
I cannot use facial expressions or body language to help me understand how something landed.
Sometimes I get off the phone and immediately start reviewing everything.
Did that make sense?
Did I misunderstand something?
Should I have explained that differently?
Sometimes the answer I actually wanted comes to me after the conversation is already over.
Building a business makes this harder to avoid.
Networking means talking to people in real time.
Accelerator interviews mean answering questions on the spot.
Meetings mean listening, thinking, responding, and trying to read the room at the same time.
I can do those things.
They are also some of the most draining parts of building a company for me.
Silence can feel like an answer
Written communication is easier for me in some ways, but it can bring its own problems.
Sometimes the hardest part is when I send something and hear nothing back.
A text.
An email.
Something important.
Silence can start to feel like an answer even when nobody actually gave me one.
I have filled in that silence before.
Once, I sent a proposal to someone I thought I had connected with.
When I did not hear back, I assumed he did not want to work with me.
So I sent what was basically a farewell email.
In my mind, I was responding to a rejection.
The problem was, no one had actually rejected me.
I had taken the absence of an answer and turned it into one.
That is something I am trying to give myself more room around now.
No response can mean a lot of things.
I do not always have to decide what it means before I actually know.
Communication can stay in my body too
I do not only think about conversations.
Sometimes I feel them.
Stress in my neck.
My shoulders.
My back.
Sometimes talking itself leaves me with back pain.
I know that sounds strange.
But it happens.
My body can tense while I am talking and stay tense after the interaction is over.
So when I say communication can be tiring, I do not only mean mentally.
Sometimes I physically need to recover from it.
Understanding myself changed some of this
Before I understood that I was autistic, I did not have much context for any of this.
I just knew that things other people seemed to move past could stay with me for a long time.
I could replay a conversation over and over and wonder why I could not just let it go.
I could need more time to figure out what I wanted to say and feel like something was wrong with me for not answering quickly enough.
Diagnosis did not make those things disappear.
But it did help me stop judging myself so much for them.
Now I can recognize that sometimes I need time.
Sometimes I need writing instead of talking.
Sometimes I need to come back to something later.
Sometimes I need time after a conversation before my mind lets it go.
And sometimes I just need less communication.
That does not mean I do not care about people.
It does not mean I cannot build a company or have conversations that matter.
It means communication costs me something.
Pretending it does not does not make the cost disappear.
Maybe I need less, not none
There are moments when having no communication at all sounds peaceful.
No calls.
No messages waiting for an answer.
No conversations to replay.
Just quiet.
But that is not realistic for the life I want.
My company requires communication.
Relationships I care about require it.
The answer is probably not forcing myself to become someone who can communicate all day without it costing anything.
And it is not pretending I do not need less of it.
I can leave space after calls instead of stacking one conversation on top of another.
I can choose writing when it helps me communicate better.
I can ask for time to think before answering something important.
I can protect parts of my day when nobody needs anything from me.
And I can stop treating my need for less communication like something I have to fix.
Maybe I need less communication, and more space to recover from the communication I do have.