You know, reflecting on how I used to feel before I knew I was autistic and had reasonable but different limits, I think about how often I felt like "I don't want to do X" but did it anyway.

And I think about how "I don't want to" is a box that could hold one of many things.

Now it's never "I don't want to X", it's often "I don't have the energy for X" or "I'd prefer not to have to do X if Y is going to be there" or "Doing X is really loud and therefore painful".

And how before I started getting to know myself I just thought I didn't want to do X.

I used to think "I don't feel good" or "I feel good". Now I think "I'm proud of the work I did today but bothered by my friend's comment and a little bit anxious about that family thing next weekend" etc.

These things can be learned - it's just sometimes we don't learn them.

What I'm describing is something called "alexithymia", or the inability to label one's own feelings. It's common in autistic people, and also in men steeped in toxic masculinity.

What do these groups have in common?

They're both situations where someone experiences emotions that are then not reflected back at them by others.

If you're in toxic masculine culture having feelings other than anger you won't see those feelings validated.

Same if you grow up having autistic emotional responses.

Being autistic means being delighted by some beautiful observation and being mocked for your joy. It means being hurt badly by something that other people have deemed harmless. It means your internal state is rarely reflected in how people treat you.

Growing up like that means you don't learn to associate complex inner states with these things called "emotions" that other people seem to have with so much nuance, kind of.

You never map your inner states to the linguistic model everyone else is using for discussing emotion.

But with time and attention you can learn, as an adult, to start to interrogate your inner state for more and more details. It turns out those details are there, you just have to kinda figure out how to learn to listen to them -- and unlearning the walls you built against them.