Advice on starting a PIP claim

May I post one of my answers to an activity for feedback? I understand that no one can comment on whether my claim is likely to be successful, I'm more interested in if its clear that I am getting my difficulties across.

Thankyou. Here is what I have written for question 9 talking, listening and understanding. Any feedback anyone can give would be gratefully received.

As part of my difficulties arising from autism I have problems with talking to people and understanding what they are saying. My problems occur for several reasons, the first being that although I have excellent hearing and can hear small noises that other people do not notice such as electrical devices humming I have problems with how my brain processes that sensory input. These problems include being unable much of the time to filter out and ignore background noise, and delays in processing verbal information. I also have trouble picking out what someone is saying to me if there are other conversations happening around me or there is a radio on or other sufficiently loud background noise such as traffic noise. When trying to listen in those situations I hear everything equally and have times when I just do not understand what has been said. In these situations I find that I have to keep asking people to repeat themselves and when the lack of understanding is down to a delay the meaning can suddenly hit me just as the other person begins to repeat themselves causing me to repeat it as they do, which can be distressingly embarrassing. I have the sensory processing issues all the time, all that varies is that my tolerance for background noise decreases as my levels of anxiety increase until I feel physically surrounded as if the noise is like a wall of water threatening to swamp me.
Another difficulty that I have is that I have a poor working memory and often forget things that have been said to me moments after having heard them. This is incredibly frustrating and makes me feel stupid. This can be especially problematic if there is something else vying for my attention as I can get distracted and immediately go blank on what was being said just before that. I also have this issue sometimes with written information when for example I read and try to remember a sequence of instructions but in that case it is not such an issue as I can simply quickly re-read the information.
In addition to the processing and memory problems I have a lot of difficulty with verbal communication due to the trouble I have handling social situations due to being autistic. I find interacting with people that I do not know very well makes me very anxious as I find it difficult to predict how they will respond to me. Most of the time when communicating with those I do not know I rely on saying things that I have rehearsed in my head, and this works fine for simple communications such as brief transactions in shops or returning a greeting. For more complex communications I can run into the problems with memory and sensory processing that I have previously mentioned.
There is a thing called Masking that a lot of autistic people do to cover up there difficulties in front of other people. It isn’t that there is a conscious choice to deceive as the person might not even realise that they are doing it most of the time. From my experience the best way I can describe it is behaviours learned over the course of my life, to disguise things that other people react negatively to or pick on you for. I get very anxious at the prospect of conflict because I have had experiences when younger in which I became very distressed during arguments and struggled to respond in a coherent manner which was seen as something extremely amusing to the people watching and something to remind me of whenever possible. The experiences that inform these behaviours are very much like learning that fire is hot through touching and they stay with me.
Due to the anxiety I feel when dealing with less familiar people (anyone outside of my immediate family) when communicating verbally there is a very high likelihood that I will be relying on masking behaviours. The problem with this is that these behaviours are so ingrained that a lot of the time I won’t even realise I am doing it, I am just focused on getting through the encounter. What this means is that even though I may be struggling due to being given too much information and not enough time to process it, or I may have forgotten something I will be very quick to agree that I have heard and understood. In these situations I respond with simple one word answers a lot of the time to hide the lack of understanding as my focus is on making the other person happy and avoiding potential conflict. An example of this is that before the pandemic I was in the Work-Related Activity Group for ESA. I would feel extremely anxious whenever I had to go an appointment at the jobcentre, so much so that I would struggle to focus on what was being said to me. When different things were suggested to me as possible paths towards work I would very quickly agree without fully understanding at the time the results of my saying yes; all that mattered to me at that moment was that the person I was talking to was happy with my answer. It was only later in the day when I had time to go over the encounter again that I fully understood and realised that I had got myself in a situation I might not be able to cope with. This difficulty in communicating caused me to sign up to being placed on a scheme with the Shaw Trust that was aimed at finding a path to get me into work, and then when on that scheme caused me to agree to progressively more until I had become so anxious and overwhelmed that I had a meltdown and just started crying in a meeting and could not stop.
When speaking or listening to my parents or brother because they are very familiar with me they can often spot the signs of me needing more time to think, or when I am covering up for not having understood. In an ideal situation in which I had support such as this all of the time I would not find myself getting into difficulties as often due to not understanding but masking the problem simply because someone with an understanding of the communication and sensory issues faced by autistic people would know about the need for extra processing time and the fact that we often have a poor memory for verbal information. Someone with appropriate knowledge would also know about the tendency to mask our difficulties as it is an extremely common thing among autistic people. Without this support I often find myself in situations where the person speaking to me thinks that I have understood what they have said but in reality I have not. Another example of this is if someone telephones and leaves a message for me to pass on to a family member. I will take the message, assure them that’s fine and then really struggle to remember the detail and cause the message recipient to have to phone and find out what the message was about.

I have completed my answers in a word document and currently have a close friend that is autistic with very similar traits to me reading through it. In question 15 where you can tell them anything else you want them to know I've dumped an entire life history with respect to my difficulties to explain why I was only diagnosed relatively recently but establish that I have struggled all life long.

Is it worth me getting my parents to sign a couple of letters confirming the things they do for me as additional evidence to include along with my diagnostic report? I would have to type them up and get them to sign them so they would probably have to be brief due to being dictated.