I am curious: what was the process for the diagnosis? Obviously this isn’t something that shows up on a blood test or any kind of scan, so I assume it was some sort of questionnaire and/or interview?
I have never been tested, but I think I have some of the characteristics: quite introverted, total disinterest in any kind of sport (especially team sports); interested in ‘nerd’ stuff like science and math etc.
On the other hand I don’t find it too hard to make small talk for at least short while, and have actually played in quite a few rock bands, so I guess I would count as only marginal?
It’s an assessment tool called the “Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule - Second Edition (ADOS-2)” and it comprises a mix of interview and participant storytelling. It’s also preceded by the completion of a few questionnaires by you and your partner.
Not every autistic person is great at math, but autistic people are better at math, on average, than non-autistics.
I read a neuroscience study where they found that the part of the brain responsible for facial recognition appears to be used by autistic people when they do math. It’s like an extra math brain, at the expense of the social stuff. So you’re on the right track with your theory!
A clarifying question would be, how well do you understand social rules? Do you often upset people without knowing why? Do you try to copy other people’s gestures and body language rather than having it come naturally to you? Can you read faces? How well do you understand and process others’ emotions?
I was listening to a podcast on autism in girls, and they gave a great example. She was walking in the park with her parents and they ran into another couple and their daughter who they hadn’t seen in a while. The autistic girl didn’t say hi. When asked afterwards why she didn’t say hi to her friend, the autistic girl said she didn’t know she was supposed to. Her parents explained that it’s nice to greet people you see in the park.
The next day they went to a grocery store and the autistic girl started saying “hi” to everyone in the store.
She didn’t understand, intuitively, that there are different social expectations for different contexts.
Autistic women also are more likely to make friends than autistic men, but they may have a hard time keeping those friendships.
One of the hot topics in research right now is whether or not autistic women have a different type of autism than autistic men. Or whether there are a lot of different types in the first place.
An interesting, and differing but related, aspect of autism is that prosopagnosia (face blindness) can also overlap with autism. I have a low level of face blindness and I had difficulties with math in highschool and university. If I have a strength it seems to be in detecting patterns in language, hence my love of puns and perhaps something of a linguistic facility.
That’s fascinating! Especially that it lines up with what I’ve observed in my own kid. Thank you for all these great links!
On your social rules discussion: Heh, I’m one of those “self-diagnosed” ASD people – after my kid got her diagnosis, I realized that neurotypical people don’t usually do what I did, which is as a young adult realize that I could study other people and figure out social skills from studying their interactions, drawing conclusions about patterns and rules, and memorizing them, the same way I might study biology or French. (Before that I was kind of clueless and wandered around not knowing what to say or do a lot.) I’m very sure that most people don’t take that cerebral approach to social skills! I am pretty reasonable at social skills now (not as good as people who are actually good at it, like my sister-in-law, but not super awkward either) but I also still think about it consciously a lot more than I bet most people do.
The first half of this I tend to doubt from my personal experience. My experience was relatively similar externally to a typical “autistic girl” – I was able to mask to some extent, I had friends until middle school when social skills became more important, I did some typical girl things – whereas my daughter presents as a typical “autistic boy,” where she doesn’t even get that she “should” mask. But she clearly gets a lot of her brain function from me – from what I understand about her internal thought processes, internally we actually think a lot alike. She’s just… more extreme than I am (both in her social and her math functioning, for that matter); degree, not kind.
One of my friends who is autistic herself and works with a lot of kids who are on the spectrum (she does math education) says that in her head she codes that ASD adds “more boy” to how the kid acts. I realize that’s not really PC to say, but that’s kind of how I feel too.
Those are very good questions, and might be useful for others who are concerned! Let me see:
Upset people without knowing why? <
Not very often, though I have had situations I wasn’t expecting, like a breakup of a band or romantic relationship. Where perhaps I hadn’t noticed some underlying tensions…?
Do you try to copy other people’s gestures and body language rather than having it come naturally to you?<
That’s a very interesting one. Never. Wouldn’t even occur to me, though I probably do it unconsciously?
Can you read faces? How well do you understand and process others’ emotions?<
That’s hard to quantify. Obviously I realize that others have emotions. And I can recognize many of them in facial expressions, though I am probably not very good at it. I’m certainly no empath…?
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If I have a strength it seems to be in detecting patterns in language, hence my love of puns and perhaps something of a linguistic facility.
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I tend to score very high on language tests in my native English. Strangely and unfortunately this does not seem to correlate with ability to learn other languages (which some people can pick up like sponges, it seems). If I want to learn another language, it’s a slog in the classroom for me…
This is and has been my weakness and is apparently a common one. I can look back and, knowing this, can troubleshoot almost every negative interaction that I can remember.
This is very similar to what I’ve done in my life. About 20 years ago, I began work as a union organizer. This requires knocking a complete strangers’ doors, or going into their workplace, and engaging in conversations, finding out about them, and moving them to action (sign a union card, for example).
This was very challenging work for someone as neurodiverse as me. I struggled mightily. For many of my co-workers (the “naturals”), this sort of work came, well… naturally, and I just couldn’t figure out what to do to have a “succesful” conversation.
So what I did was study what the “naturals” did. And I broke it down, step by step. I would deconstruct their conversations, notably the ones that ended up with moving a person to action, and figure out what they did to get there.
As someone on the spectrum, I never did get very good at the one-on-one conversations with workers we were organizing, but I became a fantastic educator. Because I was able to break down “successful” conversations, and effectively articulate the steps needed to have a successful conversations to new union organizers, I ended up being a trainer for about 10 years, and wrote more than two dozen training modules. Before I was hired to do the training, all of the other trainers were those organizers who were “naturals” when it came to organizing. But because they never had to actually figure out how to talk to workers, they were never actually able to break down coversations and teach the art and craft of those one-on-one conversations that we use in union organizing.
So while I was never actually very good at one-on-one organizing, I was damn amazing at teaching people how to have successful one-on-one conversations (if I do say so myself). All because I was forced to break down what the “naturals” did, study it and re-construct it.
I certainly wouldn’t say that I’m brilliant at it - it’s more the structural aspect, if that makes sense. For example,my ability in French is maybe a 60% capability. My wife and I were vacationing in France several years ago when I noticed that some street addresses had the word “bis” following the number (eg 25 bis) if there was an additional unit squeezed into a space. So it obviously means “extra” or “twice” or something of that nature.
That occurred to me at the time and immediately the connection to biscuit (same word in French and English) and “cooked twice” and the Italian “biscotti” rapidly fell into place in my mind, if you can sort of visualize a verbal Tetris.
That sort of thing is fairly common to me
That’s definitely the kind of thing I would associate with autism in females (based on my limited reading. When our son was diagnosed, my husband realized he was probably missing people clinically, especially women, so he went on a crusade to learn everything he could about how autism presents in women, and I just know what’s filtered down through him, and talking to some autistic girlfriends.)
I don’t think I am autistic but I was one freaking weird kid, so I feel like all the building blocks were there. When I was very young I was hyperlexic and had zero interest in my peers. Once my interest in my peers started developing, I made friends okay, but I was not popular due to my intellectual arrogance/precocity and was made fun of a lot. But the weird thing is, I didn’t care. I had no desire to fit in, I was happier by myself. I spent many recesses in a corner reading. In junior high I became a born again Christian and started bringing my Bible to school, and was obsessed with Christianity and highly annoying to everyone who knew me, and again, did not care. (That phase was fortunately only a few years.)
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve placed more importance on fitting in, to an extent, and I worry way more about what people think now that I have social anxiety. I feel like I understand social rules, I just really suck at them, especially the small talk kind of stuff. I recently met with some people at our local housing alliance for a work related thing, my first time ever meeting with someone outside the organization by myself. I did okay, but toward the end I just didn’t know what to talk about, so I started talking about my son. And it felt TMI to me but I honestly didn’t know what else to talk about. I don’t have the gift of gab, as they say. I don’t know how to talk about things that aren’t important.
I’ve done a couple of the screening tools for autism, one of which I scored worse than the average autistic person, the other I scored quite low (where a higher score would indicate autism.) However, one of the issues with diagnosing autism through these screening tools is that they pick up people with social anxiety, which I already know I have. It’s not something that affects my ability to have close friends, at any rate, so I don’t feel the need to explore it much further. But it is interesting to me to think I may have passed along some of that “extra” to my son.
The last I read (though I haven’t tried to keep up) was that girls as a whole showed less autism in their population, however girls with autism tended to have more severe signs. There’s comparatively fewer “Aspergers” style girls; they tend to skip that part of the spectrum and go fuller in. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was an overall gender component or that ASD affected girls differently to some degree.
(I went with girls/boys just because what I read was about child screening)
The only characteristic I seem to have is obsessive calculating or trying to solve something. I am able to break away but am happiest when just left alone. I used covid to drop out of my social life and have never been happier.
I’ve recently come to think that I’m in the suburbs of Autismville, if that makes sense. Never diagnosed (with that anyway) but it kinda makes sense. On the other hand, from what i’ve read you can stim and not be autistic, for example, so
Oh man this is resonating a lot with me. I have turned out to be a bit of a go-to to for parents of ASD kids of my acquaintance where I frequently find myself explaining how one might explain the hows and whys of some kind of social interaction to an ASD kid, or how to break down the different parts of why one might do a particular social task. Many of these parents are way better at social skills than I am… but they do it intuitively; they’ve never had to break down and analyze why a conversation works and what the patterns are that are involved, or in the other direction, think about why it’s important to have such a social interaction in the first place (e.g., I talk to my kid a lot about how certain types of conversations function as in-group bonding).
This sounds like textbook girl-autistic to me, actually. Able to mask well enough that you seem mostly typical and fine, and with enough social skills that it doesn’t register as a pronounced deficit, but… also like all the girl autistic kids I read about. Though I know you went through a lot as a child and I know that can affect all these things too, so who knows. (I wonder this about my parents a lot; they both have some signs of being on the spectrum but also they both had pretty rotten childhoods, so I have no idea how much is which.)
On small talk: I don’t know if you want any advice, so feel free to ignore – but what I’ve learned is to have a few general questions ready to ask. Things you can ask anyone, like, “what are you doing for the holidays?” and “do you have kids?” [of course this can be fraught so use your best judgment] and “how long have you lived in [X town]”? (BTW, no one asked, but this is part of the function of small talk, to keep informational flow going, and hopefully at some point bump it up to a higher level of informational flow and less small talk, without awkwardness.)
If you know that you and the other person have something in common, then either questions or observations about that common thing can be really useful, and can be prepped beforehand. “How long have you been part of [housing alliance]?” or “How did you start out getting involved in [work thing]?” or observations that invite comments: “I’ve been part of [housing alliance] for X years and it still bugs me that Y,” or “I think it’s so cool that [work thing] does Z.”
I know some people who are amazing at this. I usually have a few general questions prepped and if we run out of those and the other person doesn’t reciprocate (they usually do), I am pretty much done – this happened just the other day to me when I was with a group of geeky friends, lol – but I know people who can just keep on and keep the conversation going and keep asking questions. I think for them, partially they can think on their feet faster, but also they’re intuitively interested in other people and naturally want to find out more. I’m not intuitively interested but I am cerebrally interested and can usually keep it up for a few minutes at least.
My kid goes to a social skills therapist who said to her, “If you ask questions [she calls them “socially wondering questions” to distinguish them from questions solely to elicit information] then you don’t have to talk as much!” and I was like, yeah, that! I figured that one out! Lol.
You know, that sort of vague acquaintance with various languages happens to me too: I can see the connections. Doesn’t help with actual conversation in other languages alas.
I really envy people who can soak up conversational fluency in other languages easily.
It’s a genetic talent, I think. Alas, I don’t have it…
I think there was a similar post a few months back to which I responded, but the more the merrier. This was exactly it for me. I was diagnosed with Aspergers (before that word was retired) at the age of 35, and what followed was months of replaying conversations and other interactions from throughout my life over in my head and saying “Ohhhh…I get it know, why I messed that up.” I was also told by a psychiatrist earlier this year that I very likely have ADHD as well (“Wow,” I asked her, dripping bitter irony, “can I be so lucky to have both at once?”). I never got a “level” diagnosis, but I imagine I’m up around 1. Usually I get by pretty well, but little clues sneak out now and then. I was out with a friend at the Leafs game last night, and when she did a selfie of us in the stands, I commented that I didn’t like “my Tuesday shirt.” A few minutes later she was all “Waitasec…do you have a different shirt for every day of the week?” and I remembered, oh yeah, not everyone does stuff like that.
At any rate, congratulations. There are ups and downs, but Having A Name For That Thing is a great feeling ultimately.
Oh god yes…one of my strongest memories of the period immediately after my diagnosis was the realization how exhausting masking was, even (or maybe especially) when I wasn’t fully aware that I was doing it. I think I probably came off as a bit of a zombie for a while that summer, because I deliberately stopped doing it for weeks.
It’s very common, such that I think anyone with an ASD diagnosis should be screened for ADHD as well. 20-40% of people who are autistic also have ADHD. Same deal for OCD. And it’s confusing because autistic traits like repetitive behaviors can look like OCD.
When my son was not much older than a year, he started his peculiar method of play, in which he would line up all of his toys, and he would become very upset if anyone tried to show him how to use the toys for something else, or if we didn’t get it exactly how he wanted it.
So my first thought was OCD. But my husband specializes in OCD. And he was like, “I don’t think so.”
My son’s currently fixated on things being “perfect.” He can’t stand that things aren’t perfect. If his granola bar has a little piece crumbled off, he loses it. If the thing we’re trying to build doesn’t work out to his exact specifications, he loses it. He just cries, “Perfect! Perfect! Perfect!” over and over. I have told him over and over, sometimes things aren’t perfect, and that’s okay. (A mantra I should tell myself more often, as I’m a bit on the perfectionist side myself.) Boy, he really doesn’t want to hear it.
I do believe my son has ADHD as well, probably, but he’s too young to be diagnosed at this point. He just reminds me so much of me sometimes.
Funny, I just had a middle school memory of all the conversations I rehearsed beforehand. Especially talking to my bullies. I would spend hours rehearsing what I was going to say to my bullies.
Hell, I still rehearse conversations before I have them. And they never go the way I planned.
I got my Level 1 ASD diagnosis two years ago, at 55. I had taken my (adult) son to an appointment with his neuro-psychiatrist (for ASD, anxiety and ADHD), and sat in. We all knew that my son and I were very similar, but I have coped pretty well in life, so never thought about going further. One of the topics of discussion was anxiety.
Leter that day I was trying to get things organized for dinner, and was under some pressure of time. I started feeling stressed, though I didn’t really know why. At that point I clearly remember thinking “I guess this feels a lot like how my son must feel when he gets anxiety attacks”. The following revelation was what some people call a third thought - “this doesn’t just feel like an anxiety attack, it is an anxiety attack”. I was so used to just pushing through that feeling that acknowledging what it really was was liberating.
It took me a year to schedule my own evaluation, and starting some medication for anxiety has really made a noticeable difference. I am way more aware of my own behaviors and reactions. I also hanged job role so I don’t deal with customers, which was a major source of anxiety in my working life.
I also have ADHD elements, but I don’t take medication for that. I work at home as a Support Engineer, so I context-switch a lot, and can use distraction as needed to refocus. It works really well for me, and I am an extremely productive member of my team.
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