Has anyone ever thought you were autistic before?

In My Humble Opinion
65

So. I scored 33 on the 50 question quiz. And I didn’t match anything on the ten things video. What to make of that combination?

I don’t think I’m autistic. But there’s something. I’m partly faceblind, thought ‘mind’s eye’ was a metaphor and was startled to discover recently that apparently most people actually see what they’re imagining, and had to spend many years learning from the outside social signals others seemed to have picked up automatically by the time they were six. Also am physically clumsy, and some texture issues, and some noise issues.

The school wanted to hold me back, in kindergarten, because, they told my parents, I was “socially retarded”. (They were using what they thought was correct technical language at the time, which was 1956.) My parents saw, I think, only the second word, and threw a fit; and got me sent on to first grade. I was academically precocious, and they knew it, though the kindergarten teacher, who was awful, hadn’t figured it out. The first grade teacher was much better, and let me stay in the classroom under her desk at recess, because I was afraid to go play with the other kids. I don’t think I was afraid of being beaten up, which didn’t really happen there; I think the other children just made no sense to me, and I was afraid of doing something wrong because I couldn’t tell what was accepted as doing things right.

I remember at about age nine, at summer camp, being surrounded by a circle of other little girls taking turns at telling me everything they thought was wrong with me; and telling me that I needed to behave like them. And I said to them, with passionate sincerity, “I want to be like you. But I don’t know how*.”

They stared at me in utter incomprehension. They thought of course I knew how, I must just be being weird on purpose.

By the time I was fifteen or so, I still didn’t know how to be like them. But I mostly didn’t want to be, any longer.

66

Jesus.

Your horrible story does add another wrench into things. Giftedness can also look a lot like autism. When I was little I mostly wanted to be alone to read. My teacher told my mother, “She doesn’t engage much with the other kids. She just sits in the corner and reads.”

My mom: “Is she happy?”

“Um, it seems like it.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

I actually think there’s something affirming in that. I was allowed to be my weird self. I didn’t really care about other kids because their interests were not interesting to me. As I got a bit older I became more social, but there was always this bit of awkwardness. I got mocked for my precocious vocabulary, but the striking thing to me is I was wholly unmoved by my bullies. It was very frustrating to deal with such irrational children but I don’t think I internalized their insults much at all. I was just angry that they were so wrong. And trying to explain why they were wrong just made me seem weirder. Any of my behavior at that time can be viewed through the lens of trauma, autism, ADHD or giftedness. I think it might be actually impossible to determine which it is.

This is a bit frustrating to me because I find my issues easier to deal with when they are neatly labeled. Otherwise it’s a bit of a tangle. Probably my poor working memory. I look at all those symptoms and get overwhelmed.

67

Took me a long time to get to that point. Probably I was somewhere in my late twenties.

And the thing is: I was precocious academically. But I really was terrible at social intelligence. The school wasn’t wrong, exactly; they just didn’t have a clue what to do about it.

I was overjoyed to find out, in my fifties, that there’s a word for faceblindness. I had thought it was just me.

68

Exactly this.

As background - recently my daughter underwent an evaluation for ASD. She did it essentially as a form of employment defense, after a cow-orker had accused her of ethnic insensitivity. (Which is ridiculous as my daughter is the most fervent social justice warrior I’ve ever met. The work situation blew over.) My daughter believes that she - and her oldest daughter, have multiple psych diagnoses - autism, anxiety, depression, ADHD - and possibly others. As I’ve posted before, I tend to think psych pathologies are often (not always) overdiagnosed, and often (not always) used as an excuse for personality traits/preferences.

After discussing my daughter’s testing/work situation, I asked her if she thought I was on the spectrum, and she responded “Definitely!” I don’t care to quibble with her opinion - or to seek confirmation. I’ve long known that my mind works differently than most, and I often am confounded by why people think and act the way they do. But at age 65, 2 years from retirement, with plenty of friends with whom I pursue my interests, and good to great relations with most of my closest family, I don’t perceive how accepting this “diagnosis” would change much of anything. I’ve already adopted a number of techniques to deal with the fools and assholes around me (most significantly - keeping my damned mouth shut! Also, realizing that the appropriate response is most often removing myself from a situation, rather than expecting the others or the situation will change.)

69

My mother once said to me, “isn’t it nice to not have a label”. She was saying that if we were in elementary school today, we’d probably have both been diagnosed as on the spectrum.

And in middle school, when all the girls turn on each other, i did have trouble socially, and had one horrible year with no friends when i thought a lot about suicide.

That never happened to me, but in middle school, i was once surrounded by a circle of girls who said i didn’t belong there and threatened to beat me up. I looked for the least secure girl in the ring, and charged her, and she backed away, allowing me to escape the ring.

But by highschool, kids who had stuff in common with me (like an interest in math) were friendly again. By college i made a lot of friends. Or, enough to have a pleasant social life, anyway. Now, my daughter jokes that I’m a social butterfly. (She has trouble making friends.)

I’m probably on the autistic spectrum. I’m also probably on the trans gender spectrum. But basically, i yam what i yam, and I’m doing alright today.

70

My nephew is somehow different. The family and his support network have taught him lifestyle choices to help him blend in with the other twelve year old boys. He’s in two structured boys’ groups: American Boys Choir and Boy Scouts. Yet all his best friends are girls. The problem is the boys in his circles are not well-read and well-spoken enough to stimulate him.

It’s really funny when the boys in the groups say things that are erroneous and my nephew blows them away in the nicest ways possible! He’ll frame his remark withsomething like “Actually it could be this way.” It’s consistently a code for disagreeing with them.

71

That’ll get him far.

My husband and I had a difficult conversation this morning regarding our various needs in the getting-ready morning schedule, and at one point he wanted me to respond adaptively to the situation and I wanted rules. Ideally a series of if-then statements that tell me when I need to step in and when I don’t. I told him, the entire point of me driving my son into school every morning is because I want every morning to be the same. It never is and I hate it. Now I’m supposed to read his mind I guess. (Well, it didn’t go anywhere. In the end he figured out a solution that didn’t involve me and apologized for confusing the issue.) But it’s times like these, where I find myself emphatically saying, “I want everything to be the same every time!” I do wonder about myself.

72

When people who love routine marry people who hate routine … friction … ensues.

There’s plenty of room for both preferences within the umbrella of “normal”. No real need for either side to start seeking neurodynamic abnormality labels here.

73

He doesn’t hate routine. He’s probably more likely to be on the spectrum than I am. I’m a comparative mess. Because I am very definitively and conclusively dealing with a cognitive impairment to my executive functioning. It is maddening to constantly yearn for order, routine and predicability when you have ADHD, because ADHD effectively makes it impossible. If it isn’t the sheer amount of distractions and time blindness that knocks you off course, it’s your need for variety that sinks you, and that apparent conflict - need for variety vs. need for routine, constantly at war - is a common experience of people with both ADHD and autism.

It’s weird for someone with ADHD to crave order and routine.

But perhaps common in people with PTSD.

You see? It’s all one giant overwhelming tangle. It drives me nuts that I can’t pin it down, and that it may actually be impossible to pin down.

74

I have nothing useful to say except to express my sympathy. In a just Universe wouldn’t be that hard to just be. Ouch & hugs.

75

You know, Dopers tend to be very exacting people. I’ve never understood why that doesn’t apply to psychological and neurodevelopmental disorders. Apparently the driving desire to know ends for many at the human psyche itself.

Well, it doesn’t for me. I want to know and understand everything, especially myself.

76

It sucks! But I’m making progress. I am working on a system that’s not too fussy that appears to be helping. It’s Trello. The system is Trello. And using the time blocking feature. And part of what makes it hard and why I want my mornings the same is that no days are ever the same. I have a job with meetings and required events, I have doctor’s appointments and my kid’s schedule and it’s hard to plan and organize anything in that kind of context. I put together my December schedule yesterday and it made me almost burst into tears. I have no idea how I’m going to get it all done.