Both, according to signals from surroundings. How the fuck should I know what’s expected of me?

I underreact pretty much everything. Many people think it’s weird but it’s me and I’m not going to mask it. 🤷

Because of the ADD my big challenge is emotional regulation so it’s less that I overreact and more that I spiral. Getting better with age. Anyone who needs advice. Exercise. It’s not a cure but it helps to even out the peaks and valleys.

I’m always calm, even when dying inside. Being in pain does not work for medical personnel with my reaction. It’s not expected for patients to calmly state its unbearable (feeling close relation to Spock in SNW here).

Bipolar is also a neurodivergent thing, so yeah, be me: overreacting to everything, which is pretty exhausting, then spending days in bed to recover.

Underreact for sure. I’m basically a Vulcan unless I’m hamming up a reaction for entertainment value.

Uh. Uhhh…

Both. I want to exploit “underreact to things you are expected to have a big reaction to” and briefly considered becoming a 911 dispatch because being calm in a crisis is an asset as one. Nobody wants the 911 dispatch who starts crying in empathy and saying “I’m so sorry, that must be hard,” they want the one who sends them the darn emergency vehicles. But then I thought about how I might screw up and be responsible for a life in a more immediate, “your fault” way than in the ways I am responsible for lives and can’t opt-out of. And unfortunately, like most people who don’t have my “underreacts to crises” trait, I don’t think I’d be able to handle that weight too easily if I did cause an accident. Perhaps I would react more “typically” with guilt, even if I’d be cool as a cucumber in the moment, during the screwup, and while handling the fallout of my screwup. (Becoming a surgeon would also take advantage of this trait, but my guilt and personal responsibility would be even worse with a screwup, and I’d probably get sued for malpractice. And the more immediate issue: I’m so squeamish.) Like typical people I don’t want the consequences of that type of job, so sadly my “underreacts to crisis, cool in a crisis” trait goes unexploited for the benefit of myself and others. Except for the two (2) total times in life an emergency happened in front of me and I called 911.

(What I mean by saying I am responsible for lives in a way I cannot opt out of: maybe I take a left in traffic onto an empty road instead of going straight, and 5 seconds later another car is behind me instead of getting the stretch of road to themselves like they would have if I just went straight. I stop at a stop sign and go on my way. This 10 second extra delay in their travel might be the difference between a speeding car hitting them or them being gone already. Without me, they would not have been hit, but you can’t really hold me responsible for something I had no way of foreseeing or controlling beyond this speculation that it could happen.)

I’ve lived next to a volcano, I’ve experienced poverty, I’ve seen crimes, my house got flooded, I’ve seen corruption; I have pretty much under reaction to many things.

Yes

A few weeks ago, we were sat in the office with one of our team leads (he’s cool and we’re on good terms) and then a colleague and me (both deep on the autism spectrum).

And our team lead told us that he found a place where we could go to play around with underwater robots for a day and that he was looking into booking that. He expected us to get excited and both of us were doing our best to look as excited as possible, but he was still left confused and almost hurt, because he expected a much stronger response. 🫠

My wife gets mad that I talk louder when I get excited about something. It’s really annoying