List the extra things that come with your autism

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This past week, with my diagnosis just a few days ago, I’ve been connecting all the dots in my life. You know, the things that make me ME, and how ASD is a big part of it. So.... These are the things I have beyond my social interaction issues, poor eye contact and repetitive behaviors.

- Facial blindness
- Auditory processing issues (hearing deficits)
- Sensory processing issues (food, light touch, high pitch sounds, light, certain smells)
- Working memory deficits
- Unspecified anxiety
- Unspecified depression
- Sleep disturbances
- GI issues
- Arrhythmia
- Low blood pressure and sudden drop in blood pressure
- Headaches
- Lower immune system
- OCD tendencies
- Dyslexia symptoms
- Joint pains (?)

I’m sure there is more, but these are the ones I can think of right now. Would you like to share yours, please?

In my case, it's just flat out weird.
How weird? It can appear and disappear as opposed to long term and diagnosable.
Either way, said personal inconsistency, dichotomous and paradoxical states is still affecting me nonetheless.

Maybe it is with autism, maybe not with autism, maybe neither and it just doesn't exists nor should exists.
Maybe autism is just one ingredient of the many, maybe autism is a 'light' the rest is just the lens and what it reflects, maybe autism is just another lens being stacked with others.

Maybe it's just human, mine happens to be more visible and more notably short term it confuses me and everyone.


It could be anything and more from your (OP) list to a certain extent it can be relatable to as many might.
Or it could be none whenever specific conditions and state of being is met, making said list irrelevant.


In my case, it just doesn't matter any more.

Gained Number Post Count (1).
Lose Time (n).

Lose more time here - Updates at least once a week.

Not sure if these are diagnostic criteria but:

-Don't eat much and hate large meals
-Auditory & visual sensitivity
a) deep bass & certain sound frequencies
b) blue lights from modern electronics & lighting
-Tactile sensitivity
-Stimming subtly but frequently
-Broken pain perception
*Some things that should really hurt, don't. Some things that shouldn't hurt, do.
-Strongly active imagination
-Love of science & reality, not interested in fake stuff

Lots of autistics have comorbid issues. Some of mine are:

Dyspraxia (coordination disorder)
Dyslexia
Dyscalculia (poor math skills)
Dysgraphia (poor writing and drawing skills)
ADHD
Learning disabled in general.
Memory problems.
Generalized anxiety disorder.
Mild schizophrenia.
Prosopagnosia (face blindness) to a degree.
Agnosia (poor at reading expressions and body language).
Photophobia (light sensitivity).
Hyperacusis (sound sensitivity).
Irregular sleep-wake rhythm.
Arrhythmia in the form of palpitations and tachycardia.
Mild hypertension.
Pollen allergies.
Sinusitis (sinus problems).
Asthma plus occasional acute respiratory ailments.
Arthritis.

I work from home, and that resolves many of my difficulties.

My Traits
1. lifelong reduced affect display (mostly don't display emotion)

2. preference for ritual behavior (feel irritation when pattern changes)

3. terrible at long, spontaneous speech (excellent at short, direct, from memory speech).

4. very focused on patterns (commonly, I point out to others, "the pattern has changed")

5. poor eye contact (my doctor said "look between my eyes")

6. My brain is hyper-active, I need to take in information, I need to order it, make sense of it, think about the causes/motivations, perseverate about it, think about patterns. Likely, I will have greater retention of such seeming esoteric information than others. I enjoy putting it in an order. I enjoy solving something. In this regard, it is like I am not human. I am like an outsider.

I have a lot of the same ones.

Face blindness
Auditory processing issues
Sensory sensitivities (primarily hearing and touch)
Memory issues (though a large part of that is due to ECT I had for severe, treatment-resistant depression)
Dyscalculia
Social anxiety
General anxiety
Selective mutism
On-and-off severe depression
Sleep issues (trouble both falling asleep and staying asleep, can't remember ever having awoken feeling rested in my entire life)
Frequent shutdowns (my brain just kind of goes on autopilot, and I'm not very aware of what's happening around me)
Headaches and occasional migraines
Frequent sinus infections
Undiagnosed respiratory issues

And probably more that I'm not thinking of right now.

I've seen threads like this before. Lots of people with autism have a lot of the same side issues.
Some issues listed by some in this thread so far could likely be a symptom of autism. Others are comorbids (a simultaneous but different condition). My most difficult to figure out comorbid is my dysparxia, because dysparxia has similarities to autism. So it's difficult to separate the two in some areas.

Mostly self diagnosed:
Visual looming syndrome
poor appetite
Irritability
Black and white thinking/splitting/paranoia
anxiety
low level depression
PTSD

- OCD
- Sensory issues (food, touch, smells, sound)
- Attention deficit (I've literally gotten distracted 10 times whilst writing the first 2 lines of this)
- Underweight due to selective diet due to sensory issues
- Inability to read facial expressions and listen to someone simultaneously
- Dyslexia, Dyscalculia & Dysgraphia (I literally used to put capitals in the middle of words)
- Alexithymia
- The opposite of face blindness meaning my brain remembers faces extraordinarily well.
- My brain also remembers extremely long medical words and definitions really easily. Despite this, I still don't have a career (lol).

I have the standard anxiety and depression but I feel like a very small number of people can say they're anxiety/depression free in 2019. It's all I ever hear people moaning about nowadays. That and Trump.

Insomnia
Dyscalculia
Moderate face blindness, slight difficulty reading expressions
Some sensory sensitivities
Anxiety & depression
Some ADHD traits (inattentiveness, need for movement)
Highly repetitive thoughts (OCD?)

OP here.... Today I had an epiphany.... I knew there was more to my original list. But I’m still trying to understand what this is. For the longest time, I knew I had a hard time expressing my more complex feelings, putting them into words. As I researched about ASD, I started to gain the vocabulary to explain a lot of what goes on in my head.

But, back to the epiphany. Talking to my husband today, I came to the realization I don’t have all of the “receptors” to feel/understand when I am loved. Like, cognitively I know my parents have always loved me, and yet, when I was 3 or 4, I remember sitting on the floor thinking and feeling nobody loved me. The memory is as vivid as it had just happened today. When things go unsaid or not demonstrated clearly for a while, my brain tends to interpret it as rejection or indifference. If the few (?) receptors for Love I have are not hit in an exact way, it seems to me I register it as Not Love. Apparently, Love should be understood implicitly and not replaced by indifference.

So I do feel love, I can love. But I have a distorted feeling about it if my “receptors” are not hit in the limited way I can detect it. This was a main blow for me today, as the feeling of rejection and indifference played a huge part in the way I felt growing up and as an adult. It is real to me.

Is this Alexithymia?

Perseverative thoughts and pacing
constant stereotypies from the moment I wake up in the morning
Poor vocabulary
Poor at memorizing
Don't study others to mask
Don't try to make friends and don't know how
Forget to try to make eye contact but don't want to anyway
Withdraw and don't communicate when I should
Terrible at expressing myself, takes a long time to write a post
sometimes have myoclonic jerks but it's probably normal
Eat too much when I eat food I like because I don't know when to stop
Trust people too much and easily taken advantage of
Don't have a regular doctor and don't always seek medical help when I should and don't know how except to go to a
walk in clinic
Can have terrible emotional outbursts when stressed which I always regret afterwards

The responses were helpful to me in identifying three additional issues, all likely ASD related.

Dysgraphia, looked it up and that's me. Had much criticism from elementary school teachers about my pencil grip. Handwriting was unusual looking and had problems with the hand tiring too quickly. Computers saved me from this problem however. I also seem to have largely outgrown this issue. I am looking at some notes in front of me and thinking they look much more typical than when I was young. I also seem to now prefer the standard pencil grip.

Selective mutism. It's not a diagnosis, but I have terrible anxiety when speaking in most group situations. My speech becomes hard to understand in many cases.

Dyslexia, looked it up and have long had mild concern with some symptoms. I remember a childhood example. I had written something like 10$ instead of $10. I was way too old to make a mistake like this. My mother must have been concerned but did something strange in pointing it out to me. She said my teacher called to report I had made this mistake. I apparently had a look of horror on my face when she said this because my brother sitting nearby jumped in with "the teacher didn't call".