parakeet

Hi everyone! Thank you for reading my post. I'm a first year PhD student. Loving and managing well at the academic side of things (meaning classes but also research etc.). But I am having a severe interaction problem with my adviser, which in stressing me out to the point of losing sleep over it. I have an established adviser who had successful PhD student for the past 20 years, and has had a good relationship with every single PhD and postdoc she supervised. I do like her both as a researcher and as a person. I have some form of autism, never diagnosed professionally but evident enough to have been pointed out to me in the past. I have A LOT of problems with the dynamics of social interactions, 'subtle' cues (more like: anything which is not stated 100% literally), understanding people's point of view, and on top of that I have really bad anxiety and easy sensory overload. Till this point in my life this affected me making friends, but not career-related things. I have been with my adviser for nearly a year, and our interactions have not improved. When I go to the meetings, the results I bring are good, but I am anxious to the point I either can't talk much, or I sound aggressive. Also I never know how to take turns in a conversation, how to end a meeting etc. There have been periods in which I was relaxing more, but what happened was: I can't communicate my thoughts in a way to be understood, so adviser gets frustrated (after a few meetings of this), plus I cannot understand feedback that is being given (or understand at all that some feedback is being given), because the language used by the adviser in order to not be aggressive is not explicit enough for me to understand. After months of me not following the feedback, adviser would get annoyed and ask me why am I not listening to them, and only then I'd understand they were trying to give me feedback. This happened twice, both time I only understood after Months! So after at least 5 meetings of this... The knowledge that I may be doing something totally off and that I am not going to find out for months, and that at that point my adviser will be already very annoyed for the time wasted, is giving me even worse anxiety. It has gotten to the point that I completely shut down if she's around, while I totally fine talking to the other students. And she is trying very hard to bond with me, she comes and makes jokes and compliments me for stuff, but then she gets more annoyed as I am really unresponsive. Problem: what is going on in my mind when she comes around is trying to think of what is going on, and by the time I would be ready to have a happy response she probably left annoyed that I do not talk to her. It is making me very sad that I could be doing fine in my PhD as I am doing well in my research, presentations, classes etc... and yet where the problem arises in pure social interaction... What do I do? Plus, I am afraid the adviser will decide to not supervise me anymore given I am the first person she has problems with.