This is the thirteenth post in my autism awareness month series.
When someone asks me what I want to eat, or which color I prefer, or what I should work on next, something happens at times that's hard to describe to people who don't experience it.
From the outside, my response might look like indifference. I might say "I don't know" and smile quietly. To the person asking, this can read as not caring, not being engaged, not valuing their question or the interaction.
But inside, something very different is happening.
Most people think "I don't know" just needs an answer, any answer. But to the autistic brain, the question creates a demand for the right answer, and there might not be enough data to determine what that is.
It's not psychological anxiety. I'm not worried about choosing wrong or disappointing someone. It's more fundamental than that. The question creates a void, an abyss with no foothold. Imagine someone climbing a wall, and another person telling them to put their foot in a hole that should be right there — but the climber cannot see or feel that hole anywhere. It's not that they're afraid to step. The ground they're being told to step on simply doesn't exist for them.
"What do you want to eat?" sounds like a simple preference question. But my processing system receives it as: given all parameters — nutritional needs, energy levels, what I last ate, what's available, time constraints, current sensory state — what is the optimal answer? If those parameters aren't fully specified, or if I can't access my internal state clearly enough to know what my body needs, the equation can't be solved. There's no answer to give because the question, as received, is computationally incomplete.
And here's where the social trap closes: while experiencing this groundlessness, this inability to locate the answer, I also don't know how to adapt my social behavior to signal what's happening. I might smile (a learned safe default) or keep a blank face (because I have no spare processing capacity for managing expressions while searching for ground that isn't there).
This gets interpreted as exactly the opposite of what's happening. The person asking sees indifference. But the "I don't know" isn't about not caring. It might signal the opposite — needing the right answer rather than just any answer, needing sufficient information rather than being able to approximate casually.
The person asking has no idea their simple question created this effect. They think they asked for a preference and got apathy in return.
This is part of why the "you can't know what you don't know" principle matters so much. Until I understood that for neurotypical people, "I don't know what I want to eat" often just means "I have no strong preference," I didn't realize my processing was different. I thought everyone experienced that demand for the right answer. This will be the topic of the last post tomorrow.
This is part of my April 2026 autism awareness month series. First published on LinkedIn on 2026-04-28.
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