The easiest way to do it if on a laptop or tablet – so that you can take your sweet time – is to collapse that preview window that shows at the right. Then you can post your YouTube link at your leisure.
To make double-sure that your YouTube link will display properly, your should add an ampersand and a number after the link. I use a random four-digit number usually, but the specific number you choose doesn’t matter. For instance, I did this to your link (link intentionally broken – imagine no spaces):
All the “&1256” does is make it far less likely that said YouTube link has ever been uploaded to the board before. Yes … Discourse enforces a bizarre “YouTube links can only be uploaded ONCE to the entire forum for all time!” rule. No idea why.
I seem to remember someone telling my wife that they thought I could be on the spectrum. I think they may have based that on me telling them I didn’t date when I was younger mostly due to my inability to read social cues. As far as I know I don’t have any other characteristics. I have a hard time maintaining eye contact, but I can’t keep my eyes focused on anything for very long without it being physically uncomfortable. I suspect it came down to “guys who look like you shouldn’t have trouble getting dates.” I also don’t have a very long attention span, but more in a daydreaming or looking out the windows sort of way.
That describes ADHD subtype predominantly inattentive* pretty well. The idea of ADHD is still very grounded in the “troublemaking boy who struggles in school” paradigm, but I was a quiet girl who aced all my classes and spent a lot of my time chasing the ideas in my head. This is how I like to describe it – the distraction is in my own head. And I did pay attention a fair amount in school, because I loved to learn. Where it really showed up, particularly in my teen years, was at home. Domestically I’ve always been a bit of a disaster. I’m overwhelmed by mess and frequently forget to put things away, lose things, miss appointments, forget to do things entirely, and have trouble prioritizing and starting tasks. The incident that triggered me going to get an evaluation at age 34 was, one night I left an entire case of raw chicken in the breezeway. That’s the ADHD tax. Every one of us has a horror story about how many dollars their inattention cost them.
Around the same time, my husband said, “Hey… so I have this client…” And he described the client (minus personally identifying info) and I said, “Oh, she has ADHD. Haha, that sounds like me.”
“Yes, yes it does. We need to talk.”
It was this client that forced him to think outside the paradigm of “hyperactive boy” and recognize that ADHD can be present in all these ways even for high achievers, people who externally look like type A people in their school and careers. What people don’t see is the incredible amount of effort it takes to maintain that facade. The internet lingo for that is “high-masking.”
*The way the DSM has this mapped out currently is very stupid. The diagnosis is Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. But there are three subtypes - hyperactive, combined, and predominantly innattentive (which means not hyperactive.)
So my diagnose is: Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, not hyperactive
Stupid. It just fans the flames of ignorance about the vast number of undiagnosed people out there who think they can’t possibly have ADHD because they’re not hyperactive. And I was one such ignorant person before my husband explained it to me.
Within the last few months I took an adult autism quiz online. It wasn’t just some clickbait type thing, and the questions were extremely similar to those on clinical measures. It also came from an actual academic or medical site, which I don’t remember.
Obviously this isn’t a diagnosis, but does have some validity in letting you know if you might qualify for a diagnosis of ASD, or if you are just awkward at small talk.
Anyway, here is a similar test. You need to scroll down very far on the page to get to the questions. The stuff you’re scrolling past talks about how some of the questions are outdated or were not good discriminators between people with an autism diagnosis and those without.
26 is considered “presence of autistic traits” and 79.3% of people with an autism diagnosis score 32 or higher.
There are 50 questions, but it only takes a few minutes to respond. Don’t think about each statement too much. Below I’ve linked the 10 item quiz.
For both tests, there are 4 answers to each question, but when scoring they collapse the definitely/slightly responses, so there are really only two choice: agree or disagree.
If 50 questions is too long, here is a 10 question subset.
I scored a 14 on the 50 question test. And no one has ever suggested I’m autistic. A jerk, a clown, and a sage, but never autistic.
Answering a question above, I’ve been called “retard”, but I was a tween/teen in the 60’s and “smooth move, retard” and the like was just a part of the back and forth on the playground. It’s also the type of phrase I haven’t heard at all after my high school years.
It could just be that I’m easily bored. I’m fairly well organized, and not terribly forgetful. I don’t care for details, but my wife is very detail oriented and makes up for it. In my retirement I’m a part time substitute teacher. I’m experienced enough that I don’t necessarily need to follow the detailed plans teachers leave me.
I’ve got early childhood trauma and had a lot of similar characteristics in some areas but not others. I have a sibling who is autistic and was convinced that I am as well.
However, there are some real differences.
Yeah, I look at that and I’m definately not autistic.
When I was taking the test, I looked at how I would have answered before I had better therapy for my PTSD, and I’m sure I would have scored much higher.
Well, I wouldn’t accept a psychiatric diagnosis from a 7th grader, but my psychiatrist said I am autistic. I pushed back a little, because I don’t have a lot of common symptoms. I don’t stim, I don’t hyper-fixate, I don’t have sensory issues (actually, I do, but they are mild), and I’m very flexible around planning and categorizing. But he said that the core of the diagnosis is that social difficulty (of not understanding other people without thinking about it), and that hit home for me. So is that a difficulty you relate to?
I probably have a moderate form of autism. I do have to put an enormous amount of effort in understanding other people when interacting. I’m totally with you.
“Understanding other people” in what sense? Understanding what they are saying when they talk to you? Understanding their body language? Their motivations? What’s going on in their mind? Their reasons for acting the way they do?
I used to wonder if I was autistic when I was younger, since I used to be extremely socially awkward. But I think it was social anxiety stemming from strong OCD that runs in our family. When my father was clinically diagnosed with OCD later in life it was kind of an ‘aha’ moment. It also explained my Grandma’s severe hoarding tendencies. I suppose I could also be autistic, but I feel like I’m good at picking up on things like subtle nonverbal communication cues that autistic people have difficultly with.
I eventually got over my social anxiety. In fact, my wife sometimes gets a little annoyed how chatty I can get with strangers when we’re out and about, I think.
I’ve had interactions go badly because other people want to be affectionate or supportive and yet they might get misled if I respond in kind (this is always the part that motivates me). So I’ll try to emphasize the truth about myself and frequently do it way too brusquely.
You can picture the heat I’ve caught for being stuck in this habit. I’ve sometimes thought this might be autism because I know it’s out of step with what’s normal.
Hmm. I do stim, i do hyper fixate, and i do have mild sensory issues. But i don’t really have social issues. Maybe that’s because I’ve found groups that are autistic friendly?
Anyway, i scored a 15 on that test, but several people have suggested I’m autistic, and I’ve scored higher on other tests.
My theory is that there are different kinds of neuro-diversity. Not all autistic people have the same issues, and some non-autistic people have ‘autistic’ issues like not coping with change or being sensitive about sensory things. So I think there could just be different things that cluster in various ways.
There’s also studies that show that autistic people communicate and socialise better with other autistic people than neuro-typical people do. Being in the right social group could help a lot.
I was meeting with my two best friends a couple of weeks ago - guys who I’ve known for about 40 years. After a few beers, I gathered my courage and said, tentatively, that in recent months I’ve started to suspect that I’m somewhere on the autistic spectrum, and asked what they though about that.
They laughed uproariously for what felt like 15 minutes and said, “What, you’ve just figured that out now? We’ve known for years!” I hate them.
This is interesting. Back in my 30’s when I first contacted mental health professionals I had a first session with a wise old therapist (my impression). I told her how my life goes, without mentioning anything about my childhood or hinting at any self-diagnoses etc. She listened intently, then pondered for a while and said: “I get the feeling that you have been severely traumatized”.
I had a traumatic childhood, but hadn’t thought of the neurodivergent / PTSD similarities, and after that first session (which I didn’t have the means to go further with), my focus turned to autism, Asperger’s etc.
I never felt the Autism “label” fitted me well, even though there were elements in there that sure rang true, and I never pursued a diagnosis.
Reading now a Mayo Clinic page on PTSD, it seems I am most likely a PTSD sufferer, and indeed not on the Spectrum.
I have a close friend with really bad ADHD and like fifteen years into our relationship we were talking and he was going through a rough patch, so I asked him if he was taking his ADHD meds. He said, “You think I have ADHD?”
“Oh my God I thought you knew!”
Not long after that he had his diagnosis.
The funniest thing about that, to me, is that I have ADHD, but had never considered it, because I associated it with hyperactivity and school performance issues, and people who were a lot like my absent-minded professor-like friend. So I felt like I could spot it pretty easily, but never looked at myself. My husband didn’t spot it at first, either, until he had a client with a similar profile to my own, and as he was diagnosing her he came back to me and said, “hey, I’ve been thinking… You might wanna get this checked out.”