The Obligatory Autistic Christmas

Why some traditions drain instead of connect, especially for neurodivergent minds

It’s Christmas time again. For some, it’s the so-called nicest time of the year. For others, including me, it quietly isn’t.

This is not a moral difference. It is not a lack of warmth, empathy, or appreciation.

It is a mismatch.

Gatherings

From a young age, I struggled with large, ritualized family gatherings. The format was always roughly the same: fixed times, fixed roles, long stretches of sitting still, polite conversation, shared meals at prescribed hours, and an unspoken expectation that this was “cozy” by definition.

For others, it genuinely was.

For me, it wasn’t.

What I lacked at the time was language. I only knew that, somewhere deep inside, my system was overloaded long before the day was over.

Around the age of twelve, my most persistent internal question became painfully simple:

“May I please just stay home?”

Home

At the time, that question sounded unreasonable, even to myself. Only much later did I understand that it wasn’t about avoiding people. It was about preserving autonomy, predictability, and recovery time in environments that offered very little of any of it.

The problem was never togetherness itself.

It was obligatory togetherness.

When presence becomes mandatory, when deviation is implicitly penalized, and when “it’s tradition” outweighs individual experience, something subtle but important happens: participation stops being voluntary and starts being performative. At least, that’s how it felt to me.

That distinction matters more than most people realize.

Cozy

I’ve since learned that “cozy” is not a universal state. For some nervous systems, particularly neurodivergent ones, prolonged social exposure without exit routes is not neutral. It accumulates over time, and in my case it conditioned an adverse reaction as the so-called cozy season approaches.

These days, that conditioning is almost physical.

Not dislike, not resentment, but an automatic response. My nervous system learned, through repetition, what this season historically demanded of me.

Autism

I was diagnosed as autistic much later in life. Nothing changed overnight after my diagnosis, except the framing, and my understanding of social overload and autistic meltdowns.

Suddenly, a long line of experiences clicked into place:

• the exhaustion after social rituals others seemed to enjoy;
• the craving for solitude not as withdrawal, but as recovery;
• the disproportionate weight of expectations that were never explicitly stated, yet strictly enforced.

What once felt like personal failure revealed itself as a structural mismatch.

Interestingly, when social interaction was genuinely optional, the experience changed completely. As a teenager, I once arranged to work during the holidays, not as rebellion, but as a practical alternative.

To my own surprise, those days were genuinely pleasant. People showed up because they wanted to. There was no script to perform, no familial ledger to balance.

That lesson stuck.

Lesson

Later in life, I made a deliberate choice to give my own child something I hadn’t had: real freedom of choice.

Not freedom in words, but in practice. No social debts. No emotional bookkeeping. No retrospective guilt.

The result was exactly what one would hope for: he can choose to engage or not, without pressure, and without inheriting my history.

This reflection is not about blame, nor about rewriting the past.

Social systems are often well intended, slow to adapt, and blind to those they quietly exhaust.

But intention does not negate impact unfortunately.

Understanding this has allowed me to stop forcing myself into contexts that reliably drain me, without resentment, and without needing others to agree.

A closing thought

Some people recharge in company.

Others recharge in solitude.

I happen to recharge in solitude.

Problems arise when one of those is treated as the default, and the other as deviant.

I’d be interested to hear whether others recognize this pattern in their own lives.

Brain out