For the Neurodivergent Folks

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I was diagnosed with ADHD (predominantly innatentive) at age 34. After my son was diagnosed as autistic I started poking around whether other people in my family might be autistic and somehow ended up back at myself. I found a therapist who specializes in trauma and neurodivergence and even though I felt kind of stupid asking, I told her I wanted to know if I was autistic. As recently as yesterday I was thinking, “Well, I don’t know why I thought that, clearly I’m just garden-variety weird. Dumb of me to bring it up.”

And she told me today she thinks I am autistic (+ ADHD), this is colloquially known as “AuDHD” and is complicated to spot and diagnose due to the presence of both kinds of traits (which usually implies the absence of others.) For example, the ADHD love of novelty and the autistic love of sameness and routine are diametrically opposed. When you have both, you get some interesting results. For me it seems to manifest as a lifelong obsession with trying to find the perfect system + routine but due to ADHD traits, pretty much failing at achieving this on every attempt. It’s done a number on my self-esteem, to be sure.

She’s still evaluating me, but we discussed my lifelong periods of hyperfixation on fiction writing, both the times when I can’t think of or do anything else besides write (it has interfered with my relationships and my job), and the periods where I get stuck for weeks or months obsessing on a certain scene or section of the novel and being unable to move forward until I “fix” it, rewriting it 30 times in as many different iterations as I can, but never quite getting it right. She said that while short-term hyperfixations are common in ADHD, the prolonged and intense nature of the hyperfixation and obsession over details was more indicative of autism than ADHD.

My husband suspects he might be autistic so we’ve had some amusing conversations about how we’ve always said we just “clicked” because we’re such direct communicators and we said in unison, “Why would anyone want to do anything different?” It then became a conversation about how superior our direct approach was. :joy:

I think a part of me was just expecting to be told, “What, you, autistic? That’s crazy.” So to hear a trained professional say she thinks I am autistic is a little mind-blowing (I think I felt simlarly when I was diagnosed with ADHD.) I’ve always been an odd duck, preferring solitary activities and marching to the beat of my own drum. This has gotten me into some social trouble, historically, and I have really bad social anxiety. I think as I’ve gotten older I’ve learned to rein in my weirdness so it’s not as noticeable to the average person. My social life now is fine. I have my groups and my people I’m comfortable with, though perhaps not the level of closeness I would prefer. But I know I’m perceived as withdrawn and quiet at work, my CEO has joked about it openly. (Protip: The less you say, the smarter people will think you are.)

Anyway, yeah. Cool/weird stuff, there’s a lot to process here. Curious how anyone else sees neurodivergence showing up in their lives?

2

When my dad passed away a few years ago, I was able to take possession of some old VHS videos of me when I was a kid, and while watching those videos, I can only think “wow, how obvious could it be?”

In one video, my dad told one of his many jokes, and you could tell I was obviously hurt by it because I didn’t know he was joking. In another video, I was trying to explain something, but I was completely stressed out and stimming like crazy. Heck, I go watch some of the first videos I ever made as a musician. People always said “the videos would be pretty good if you’d stop swaying back and forth”. There is also one where I’m singing, and I keep moving my hands in the same way that many would regard as “stereotypical stimming”. I’ve learned how to stim in unnoticeable ways over the years. But I’m always, always, and always stimming in some way unless I’m asleep.

I’m typically more curious about how autistic folks grow up. People who have ASD oftentimes end up in abusive childhoods not necessarily because their parents are “bad people” but because working with someone who has ASD can be so frustrating. I currently lead a team that has at least three folks who are autistic and possibly a couple more. Firstly, they are my most valuable associates because if I can get them aligned on an overall goal or idea, they will go way outside the box in finding solutions. It just takes so much work to get to that point, and I can totally understand why neurotypical folks get so frustrated. It took years to help them to understand that I trust them to fill in the blanks. That I need them to make decisions. That they aren’t always going to have all of the inputs needed to make a “correct” decision. And that as long as they always focused on the end goal that I constantly preach, they would do well. Even if they make a poor decision, the first statement out of my mouth will always be “thank you for making a decision”.

Sometimes, there isn’t a correct decision, and that’s one of the most difficult things to come to terms with when it comes to someone who is autistic.

3

Being “neurodivergent” would explain a lot of things in my life, especially when I look back on childhood and teenage years, but even as an adult. I’ve often read that you can simply have yourself “tested,” but I’ve always wondered how? You can’t simply ask your family doctor, can you? How do those of us who don’t have a therapist go about it? And I’m in my 70s. Other than finding out for sure what I’ve often suspected, what good would it do me now?

As an aside, I work with a woman my age, a lovely, intelligent person, who’s been diagnosed with ADHD…and she can’t stop talking about it, which would seem to verify her diagnosis.

4

I feel that. I was obsessed for a very long time with the idea of moral perfection and making the correct moral choices and always found myself lacking the information needed to know if I was making the correct choice. I relate a lot to Chidi in The Good Place. (I also had a stint as an evangelical Christian because that moral certainty was so appealing to my adolescent brain.)

As my son gets older it becomes apparent his brain is a catalogue of IF-THEN statements and he gets very frustrated when I can’t account for all the possible conditions and conclusions. Just something like explaining the rules of the road to him. He wants to understand all traffic laws but he has a hard time with the reality that often times what you do on the road is a total judgement call based on context in that moment.

I actually have a hard time with that too. Which is one reason I hate flashing yellow lights and places you can turn right on red and all of those sort of situations where you are supposed to decide. I wish it was much more dependent on rules than my own judgement.

Incidentally my childhood was very rough and ADHD did not help. I think my Mom may have been autistic herself, but in the more stereotypical engineer way, and her brain could not compute my ADHD traits. I was a head in the clouds kid, my hyperfixation has always been fiction writing even as child. I was always writing or reading and not the least bit interested in the proper way to wash dishes. She thought I was this way on purpose, to spite her.

5

Well, I am not surprised :slight_smile:

As you know, I have figured I was autistic-ish ever since my daughter was diagnosed (“what do you mean, it’s not typical for people to have to learn how to do eye contact? I totally had to learn… oh wait.”) but this:

…could have been describing another family member of mine who has never thought of themselves as either autistic or ADHD. I don’t think this particular person is diagnosable with either, but I think it’s possible that they’re on a spectrum where they may be sub-diagnosable. Interestingly, their kids are also kind of on that spectrum where they’ve actually had them looked at a couple of times because they have a lot of the traits, but not enough of them to be diagnosable, if that makes sense. Huh.

Also things like, my ASD kid has told me that she felt being a small child was really hard for her (and it really was – it was hard for her parents too!) because she didn’t know how to do stuff the way she wanted to, especially coordination-wise (like write, pour the milk, etc.) and that would upset her a lot – and that she feels like being older is much easier.

And now that we have got her anxiety managed and she’s grown up and has more control over things, she is rocking being a teenager! But yeah, it took a lot of work to get to that point, omg.

Oh, THIS. My kiddo has always been terrified of making the “wrong” decision, which means she’s tops at math but terrible at social stuff, where there often isn’t one “right” thing to do.

6

I kind of went through this when I was diagnosed with ADHD so I sort of know the drill, but yeah. Realizing I probably put way more thought into how to have a social interaction than the average person. Yes I used to rehearse the hell out of conversations until I learned it never goes according to plan and you will never get to say the thing you wanted to, so it’s pointless. But I frequently have to think about, okay, am I making listening face? Eye contact? Body language matching? Okay, I think I’m doing it right…

Another thing I used to do with writing in my early teens, I would take a scene out of a book and rewrite it pretty much exactly, only changing some details and language to “fix” it to my satisfaction. My own improved version of the same story.

I asked my writer friends if they ever did that and got mostly “WTF” reactions.

It’s funny because I write romance and I effectively feel like I’m trying to fix the whole genre. 80% of the time when I pick up a romance novel, I end up thinking, “I could do better” and then go work on my own novel. That sounds arrogant but it’s just how I feel.

When I’ve looked at the screening tools they ask questions like, “Did you learn how to act from movies and TV shows?”

No, man, I learned from books.

7

I have a couple of traits associated with folks on the spectrum; I don’t read certain social cues, and it is very difficult for me to maintain eye contact. I believe the trouble with eye contact is physical; if someone points to, say, a bird or squirrel in a tree I physically can’t focus on a small area for more than a few seconds. The cues I don’t pick up are those of a romantic nature; I could never tell if a person had that type of interest in me unless they told me directly. I doubt that makes me ASD.

8

I’ve read some research about eye contact and ASD. It seems most autistic people don’t find eye contact uncomfortable, except inasmuch as they don’t see the point. There’s some magic thing that neurotypical people get from looking into someone’s eyes; it gives them information. Autistic people do not get this information from looking into someone’s eyes, therefore they might as well be looking at anything else.

Personally I think my eye contact is probably sufficient, never had any issues with it, I think it’s probably less than average but I know at least when it’s most critical.

My son is much more stereotypically autistic (Level 2) and people would still express doubt because he has decent eye contact.

It’s not really a great measure of how autistic someone is.

I hear a lot of guys with this complaint, my husband is one of them. I think it’s just the most nuanced and complex social dance so it eludes many.

Myself, I am very direct and assertive in romantic relationships. I can’t flirt (not even with my own husband), I can’t do the dance, so I just lay it out there directly and take my chances. Which is what I did for my clueless husband, and it worked out for both of us.

9

Ugh. I hate making decisions, and I don’t really know why. It feels like I regret a bad decision far more than I enjoy a good one, maybe because you don’t get to find out if the other option would have been worse. Sometimes I think I’m going to regret my decision no matter what I choose, which makes it even harder. And I’ll always leave as many choices and possibilities open as I can, because I don’t like being limited.

Now that I’m an adult, the executive dysfunction is in many ways a bigger problem than the social issues. I have so much trouble dealing with all the bureaucracy of life - reading my emails; paying bills; scheduling appointments (and remembering to attend them); dealing with car tax, insurance, and MOT, plus regular services; forms that need to be filled in and returned. This stuff, along with all the daily maintenance activities that are never completed, is like a weight hovering over me, never resolved and ready to mess up my life at any moment. And then there’s work, where it’s a constant battle to stay focused on what I’m meant to be doing. I’d be a lot further on in my career if I could just direct my attention where I want to.

You ask your doctor to refer you for an assessment, and then if you live in the UK, you get put on a multiple-year long waiting list. Not sure what happens in the US.

Okay, I’ve heard of body language matching though I usually don’t have the spare capacity to think about it, but what the heck is listening face?

10

Haha yep this is me too! (I apparently do listening face pretty well even when I don’t think about it, although I have to make sure I make the appropriate facial expressions when emotions are indicated.) Though perhaps I’m a bit more flexible about rehearsing conversations than you are. Like, I will come up with some of the most probable things I think the other person might ask me (and come up with reasonable responses), and some of the most probable things that I could ask them, and rehearse those. Usually at least one of the things I’ve rehearsed (but also usually not all) will come up. I do this with my kids too when they are about to have a social interaction. “If [friend] says to you [common thing that it would make sense for friend to say], how will you respond?” and going over it with them, and priming them with potential questions they could ask.

This is me too. I don’t find it at all uncomfortable, but I had to be taught to do it because I didn’t really see why I should; for me it was one of those rituals like shaking hands that okay, don’t particularly make sense and you learn how to do it. At this point I have learned how to do it and it’s fine, although I realized relatively recently that I tend to let my guard down when I’m with my family – but it’s most important for me to do it with my kids so that they learn how to do it too, so I have had to be more conscious about that.

However, most of the girls I know who are autistic (except for me and my child) don’t have any issues with eye contact.

11

It’s sort of a posture of “I’m paying attention to what you’re saying” which involves looking at the person, maybe angling yourself towards them a bit, and having an expression on your face that conveys interest rather than polite boredom. I suspect my face does this without my having to think about it (and even when I am politely bored, lol), because people tend to like to tell me things, haha.

12

My parents veered from thinking I was brain-damaged and preparing to hire a speech therapist because I barely spoke at all before age 5, to thinking I was a genius who just couldn’t keep his mouth shut, to thinking I had Asperger’s. I can’t blame them.

Some of my divergent traits:

Being unable to tolerate sitting through movies, to the point that I’ve seen only maybe ten movies in the last 12 years.

Always needing to plug my ears with tissue because things were too loud at concerts or ballgames, when no one else needed to.

Thinking at age 6 that Beethoven piano music was composed by Beethoven the movie dog (I’d never heard of the the historic composer), and feeling ashamed that a dog could compose music while I could not (and hence prodding myself to be more musical.)

Using unusually literature-ish terms, like “umbrage” or “parsimonious” at age 12.

When I played with toy cars at age 5, I wasn’t “playing” so much as I was lining them all up perfectly straight, like with a ruler. I would also get angry because my toys were all out of proper proportion size; why is a dump truck larger than an aircraft carrier when the carrier should be 1000x bigger?

13

I just thought that’s what every one was doing. Going through life and trying to fool people into not realizing you didn’t know what the hell you were supposed to do.

I’ve been working basically by myself for 20 years, and am now back in a situation where I have 30+ co-workers, plus innumerable museum visitors, and I’m having to change a lot. Pay attention when these people start talking about their family lives…stories about what they saw on the news…How do you react to that sort of stuff? Just shut up and do the work. I’m amazed by the amount of time that is wasted by “chit-chat.” I’m slowly leaning into the inefficiency and learning to talk to people again, but it is difficult.

14

I don’t know how I fit in with anything. When I read the traits of autism, half of them sound exactly like me and the other half sound like the exact opposite of me.

The school had me see a shrink when I was 14 because they couldn’t understand why I didn’t socialize more while the other kids were bullying me. If I had a diagnosis, nobody told me what it was. I received zero useful information from all that. It seemed like a big waste of time. I suspect the shrink was lousy at his job but faked it well enough for the school admin.

I live with anxiety and depression. Someone told me that makes me neurodivergent. My friend who also has anxiety and depression told me no it doesn’t.

I’ve “heard great argument about it and about: but evermore came out by the same door as in I went”! Trying to get a fix on the subject is like trying to nail jelly to the wall.

15

I have a bit of a different issue when it comes to eye contact. I have a bit of a strabismus in my eyes, and people don’t really notice it unless I look right at them. This took me years to figure out. When I’m at a certain angle with people, eye contact is virtually impossible. I don’t think it has anything to do with being autistic, though. It’s a vision issue.

But the other thing I find interesting is my primary special interest has been reading people. This has always been a thing. I got very good at it as a kid, out of necessity, but about 25 years ago I happened upon a poker book called “Mike Caro’s Book of Tells” that opened a whole new world to me.

Suffice it to say that I’m always reading people, and that information never comes from the eyes. To the contrary, the information I get while making eye contact is unreliable. I’ve reasoned that the reason for that is when people are being insincere, their eyes are what they are trying to control the most.

I’ve run into a lot of professional poker players over the years who say “never look at the eyes”. Having a poker face has more to do with what you’re doing with your hands, shoulder, posture, etc.

It’s more than a face! Lean forward a bit. Make sure that your arms aren’t crossed. It helps to use one hand to kind of rest your chin. Furrow your brow a bit, and nod while the other person is talking at the points where the important information is being conveyed. A good way to avoid eye contact is to kind of raise your eyes towards the ceiling like your thinking. And if you furrow your brow while looking at them, it does double duty by making you look interested while making the lack of eye contact less obvious. If they have especially interesting or surprising details, you can softly say things like “oh, wow”. You kind of have to ease into this listening posture. If you jump into it all-at-once, it creeps people out.

I’ve been told that I’m a good listener. I find that odd because I interrupt people pretty regularly, on purpose. Most of the time it’s because I’m just tired of them blabbing on and on, but seriously: I think being perceived as a good listener has more to do with how you act when others are talking than to how well you are actually listening to what they’re saying.

But I also found that if you act appropriately while others are talking, it magically makes it a lot easier to understand them. I don’t understand it, but it works.

16

Autism spectrum is a spectrum. By definition, every one of you chiming in and your kids are high functioning. When “everyone” is ADHD or neurodivergent, then it has lost meaning.

I don’t mean to belittle or write that your experiences are invalid or anything like that. But I deleted the rest of my post so as not to be thread shitting based on the experience of raising my youngest very much on the autism spectrum, my other two kids diagnosed as ADHD, myself diagnosed 2 years ago with ADHD, and having worked in high tech for 20+ years where at least half the folks were diagnosed and/or exhibited classic neurodivergent behavior. YMMV

17

I agree. Two out of three of our children think they have a disorder. They - and every single one of their friends - are on meds of some sort.

Freya India recently wrote an article on this called Nobody Has A Personality Anymore.

(Like you, my intention is not to TS, and I am sympathetic to the OP. I understand some people genuinely have special needs. But today it seems like everyone has a disorder and special needs.)

18

It’s unlikely you’d be diagnosed with any kind of autism before the mid 90s, because the diagnosis used to include severe language delays or deficits and/or intellectual disability, and it was usually only diagnosed in young children. I was diagnosed about that age; similar story except that it was my parents concerned about the bullying and my social problems. But it wasn’t helpful at all, because understanding was so limited and there was zero treatment or support offered.

Things seem much better for kids and young people now: I see lots of info about support groups etc at my daughter’s school, and @Spice_Weasel has had a lot of help for her son.

Having anxiety and depression doesn’t make you neurodivergent, though they are commonly associated with it. There are screening tools available online if you want to know whether your symptoms fit.

I don’t think I have a problem with eye contact, but I have no idea what my face is doing. Probably the wrong thing - it’s quite likely I do look politely bored. I do know I tend to look depressed if I’m lost in thought or just neutral, because people tell me to cheer up! It’s annoying, but presumably well intended.

When you are practicing reading people, or getting body language right, how do you know if you are doing it correctly? I guess it’s fairly obvious if you do get it right, but if not, how do you work out what went wrong when there are so many possibilities? (Facial expression, eye contact, body language, tone of voice, conversation topics, ‘mirroring’ the other person too much or too little, time spent talking vs listening, doing the ‘listening’ posture too soon, and goodness knows what else.)

19

I was about to post what China Guy said. Like him, I do not wish to threadshit. But I would welcome a discussion of whether folk posting here have been diagnosed with a specific condition, or whether they self diagnosed themselves based on traits they perceive themselves as having which correspond with what they have read/heard about neurodivergence.

Also, when suggesting you are autistic (or anxious or depressed), do you also suggest the severity of your perceived/diagnosed condition? I think most of us have neurodivergent traits - at least at times. Does that make us all neurodivergent? Who exactly are the neurotypical ones?

Again, I intend no disrespect. I continually find myself curious and confused about this topic.

20

I don’t self-diagnose. I posted my diagnosis of anxiety and depression (also came with a side order of PTSD) because that’s the genuine diagnosis I got from psychiatric professionals and the way the illness interfered with living my life was severe enough for medical intervention. Thank you for your concern.

I might add that the anxiety has gone through the roof since January of this year.

Social Security Administration quickly approved me for SSDI on my first application. That’s one of the things that you pay attention to, isn’t it, Dinsdale?