Autistic people socialise and communicate differently to non-autistic people. However, qualitative exploration of this, particularly from an autistic, perspective has so far been limited. Here, we explore autistic people’s accounts of their own social communication behaviour and experiences. Nine autistic adults (4 women, 1 nonbinary, 4 men; aged 23-70) took part in a two-week focus group, discussing: signalling (dis)interest/(un)enjoyment during conversations; their ‘natural’ social communication behaviours; what talking to (non-)autistic people was like; and related topics. We developed five themes: autistic experiences of self, attention, and environment; autistic expectations about how social interactions should work; conflicts between autistic and neurotypical-normative expectations; the effort of compensation/masking; and finding/creating shared understandings across neurotypes. Our findings highlight how (non-)autistic social communication ‘styles’ differ, and the way environment impacts autistic people’s environment social communicative ability. In particular, they emphasise the role that neurotypical-normative environments play in constructing autism as a social communication disability.