One Word, Infinite Lookup Table
"Mind your manners."
Three words. One instruction. Sounds simple. For most people, it probably is. They heard it as kids, absorbed the rules through osmosis, and now run the protocol without thinking about it. Like breathing. Like blinking. The social firmware shipped pre-installed and it just works.
For autistic people, that sentence is a zip file with no decompression key.
Which manners? In which context? With which people? Because the rules change by setting, by relationship, by region, by generation, by tone of voice, by whether someone is having a bad day. "Mind your manners" assumes you already have the lookup table. It assumes the social grammar was absorbed passively, the way a first language is. It assumes the cost of compliance is the same for everyone.
It is not.
The Rules No One Writes Down
Etiquette, at its best, is a shared protocol. A set of agreements that reduce friction between people. Hold the door. Say thank you. Do not talk with your mouth full. These are documented. You can learn them. They are finite, consistent, and largely context-independent.
But that is not what people actually mean when they say "mind your manners."
What they mean is the other set of rules. The ones that are never written down. The ones that shift depending on who is in the room. Make the right amount of eye contact — not too much, not too little. Laugh at the right moments. Do not say what you are actually thinking if it might make someone uncomfortable. Match the emotional energy of the group. Know when a question is rhetorical. Know when "fine" means fine and when "fine" means the opposite of fine.
These are not etiquette. These are social performance specifications. And for neurotypical people, they run in the background like an ambient process. Low CPU. Barely noticeable.
For autistic people, every single one of those unwritten rules is a conscious computation. A manual lookup. A real-time translation running on hardware that was not built for it.
The Blur
Here is where it gets genuinely complicated. And I want to be honest about the blur instead of pretending the line is clean.
Not all etiquette is masking. Saying "thank you" when someone hands you a coffee is not a nervous system event. Not every social convention is an act of suppression. Some of it really is just shared protocol — the TCP handshake of human interaction. Both sides run it, both sides benefit, and the cost is roughly symmetrical.
But a lot of what gets filed under "etiquette" is not symmetrical at all.
When someone tells me to make more eye contact, that is not etiquette. That is asking me to override a sensory preference so they feel more comfortable. When someone expects me to perform enthusiasm I do not feel because the flat delivery of accurate information reads as "cold," that is not manners. That is a masking demand wearing a polite label.
The blur is real. And it is the blur that makes it exhausting. Because I cannot just dismiss all social norms and I cannot just comply with all of them. I have to sort them. Every time. In real time. Which of these expectations is a reasonable shared protocol and which one is a conformity demand that only costs me something?
Neurotypical people do not have to run that sort. The rules feel natural to them, so they never have to ask whether a given norm is mutual or one-sided. It just feels like "how people are."
Directness as Respect
Here is the part that most neurotypical people get backwards.
When an autistic person is direct with you — tells you the truth without softening it, gives you honest feedback without wrapping it in three layers of diplomatic padding — that is not rudeness. That is their version of respect. It means they trust you enough to skip the performance. It means they think you can handle the actual information without needing it dressed up first.
But it reads as rude. Because the neurotypical social contract says respect looks like softening. It looks like indirectness. It looks like "Have you considered maybe possibly thinking about perhaps adjusting this slightly?" when what they mean is "This does not work."
And then there is the inverse. The person who smiles, tells you what you want to hear, performs all the expected warmth and agreeableness, and is not being honest with you at all. By every neurotypical metric, they are being polite. They are minding their manners. They are behaving.
They are also lying to your face. But successfully.
That is the absurdity. The direct person who respects you enough to tell the truth is "rude." The indirect person who manages your emotions instead of informing them is "polite." And the autistic person is standing there trying to figure out why honesty is the one that gets punished.
What "Behave" Actually Means
"Behave."
"Be good."
"Act right."
These are instructions that contain no actual information. They are pointers to a file that neurotypical people can access intuitively and that autistic people have to reverse-engineer from context clues, trial and error, and decades of accumulated social penalty data.
"Behave" does not mean follow a defined set of rules. It means read the room and produce the output that makes everyone comfortable. It means suppress whatever you are doing that is creating friction, even if what you are doing is just being yourself. Even if the friction is not coming from your behavior but from someone else's inability to process your behavior.
That is the hidden instruction set inside "behave." Not follow the rules. There are no rules. There is just an ambient standard that shifts by the hour, and you are expected to track it in real time without being told what changed.
For autistic people, "behave" is not a single instruction. It is an open-ended, context-dependent, socially recursive computation that runs on top of everything else you are already processing. And the penalty for getting it wrong is not a gentle correction. It is social exclusion. It is being labeled difficult, or weird, or rude, or "a lot."
The Energy Tax
This is the part I want to land on. Because the distinction between etiquette and masking is not really about categories. It is about cost.
When the social expectation costs both parties roughly the same amount of energy, that is etiquette. Shared protocol. Mutual investment in smoother interaction.
When the social expectation costs one party significantly more than the other — when one person is running a lightweight background process and the other is running a full-stack translation layer in real time — that is not etiquette anymore. That is a compliance demand. And the person paying the higher price is usually the one being told to "mind their manners."
The autistic person is not refusing to be polite. They are drowning in the computational overhead of figuring out what "polite" means in this specific room, with these specific people, at this specific moment, while simultaneously processing sensory input, managing their own internal state, and trying to actually engage with the content of the conversation.
And when they get it wrong — when the lookup fails, when the translation misfires, when the mask slips — the feedback is not "here is what the expectation was." The feedback is just disapproval. Just the social penalty. No error message. No documentation. Just the vague, crushing signal that you did it wrong again and you should have known better.
Should have known. As if knowing were free.
What I Am Not Saying
I am not saying autistic people should be exempt from all social consideration. I am not saying manners do not matter. I am not arguing for a world where everyone just says whatever they want with no regard for impact.
I am saying the cost is not the same. And pretending it is — wrapping masking demands in the language of etiquette, filing compliance under "common courtesy," telling someone to "just behave" as if behave were a simple operation — that is the part that breaks people.
Not the rules themselves. The invisibility of the rules. The assumption that everyone is working from the same manual. The punishment for not knowing things you were never taught and cannot passively absorb.
"Mind your manners" is fine when everyone has the same manual. When the manual is invisible, unwritten, constantly changing, and only some people can read it — that is not etiquette. That is an access issue disguised as a character flaw.
The Protocol: Etiquette is a shared cost. Masking is a one-sided tax. The difference is not in the behavior being asked for — it is in who pays for it. When "mind your manners" means "suppress yourself so I do not have to adjust," it was never about manners. It was about compliance. And the people paying the highest price are the ones who never got the manual everyone else is reading from.
