This is my problem, I am impulsive and silly enough to still say things, but the way they come out sometimes makes me want to die a little inside and stop being perceived forever.
Sometimes if I am not doing too badly I still can turn it around, where the very failure of delivery can on its own get the laughs (or groans). If I sort of stay with it long enough to express something like "yeah, that was bad wasn't it? want more?". But it does require a minimum of social aptitude like you said, which for me varies a lot.
Since I have ADHD and Dyspraxia (motor disorder) I fuck up the delivery of things I want to say 9 times out of 10. I stopped giving a damn long ago because it really doesn't matter unless you're doing something that requires being fake as fuck to get ahead (job interviews), but I would be lying if I said it doesn't keep me up at night...
By the way, fuck employers who hire based on how good someone is at talking rather than skill. I pretty much can't speak for an extended amount of time without messing up a lot, and I suck at small talk, so if I had too little sleep or it's just not that kind of day I can be awkward to talk to for normies. I get it if it's for a sales position or something, I mean social manipulation is literally your job in that case, but this is for software development positions and stuff. Like for most tech jobs your job security/pay is 90% dependent on your social abilities, as well as your ability to convince your (usually clueless) employer that you're doing a lot of work – the amount of people who do significantly more work than others but get worse outcomes because the boss doesn't like them or they aren't getting credit for the work they do is insanely high. You could barely know how to do your job but still get ahead of others if you're good at social manipulation or even if others like your personality more.
I work on a more technical field of computer science (Computational Linguistics & a lot of stuff involving directed graphs) and stay as far away from anything involving web development or making products for clients as possible, so I don't have to deal with this shit, my job mostly depends on actual results. I probably would get better opportunities if I could socialize more neurotypically, but I'm not gonna dwell on a reality that can't exist. And I'm glad I actually have employment opportunities in the first place, if I instead went into humanities or business or wasn't able to do a degree somehow then I would've already killed myself ngl ((I am American, a humanities degree is basically just a piece of fancy paper that costed $50k+)). Besides, if I ever make $300k per year like big tech engineers, I might have to have my head chopped off when the revolution inevitably arrives.
