Am I autistic?

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Thankyou everybody for replying. As for the breakdowns Callista and Whirlingmind, I think you both have valuable points there which are much appreciated.

It is a tricky one, like you say these things could just be a mixture of poor social skills/anxiety/OCD/general eccentricity, and that is what I put it down to before. Great advice about seeing the doctor Callista, you are right that those are the underlying questions and that is the kind of thing that I will be saying to them.

Whirlingmind, it's interesting to hear of your experiences. I only fairly recently discovered that female AS traits can be somewhat different from male traits and therefore sometimes not as easy to detect or categorise as AS. I just bought a book by Rudy Simone called Aspergirls. You may have heard of her. She is a female with AS who interviewed a range of other females on the spectrum and used her findings along with other research and her own experiences to write a guide that specifically focuses on female AS. From reading about it online it seems to have been a lot of help to aspie girls and their families/friends who wished to understand more about their experiences.

Yes I am in the UK and I will definitely have a look at that link.

whirlingmind: I don't think Callista meant to imply that to have autism you have to have every little symptom or trait -she was just trying to separate out the stereotypes about AS (gifted, intellectual) from the symptoms and associated traits (special interests, problems with social cues ect) and to give the OP a sense of what other things certain traits can indicate. Giftedness is not at all more prevalent among those with AS than in the general population. Also, what Tony Atwood is talking about is a fantasy world (imaginary world) which most kids have becoming a special interest, all consuming, the kid spending all their time in this world ect. This is often used as a coping mechanism for AS girls, escape from reality ect. What she described sounded more like just normal pretend play alone and with other kids. I still think the OP might have AS and should see a professional if she wants help with the problems she listed....just wanted to point these things out.

^^^
In one of Atwood's books he states that the average IQ of people with AS is average like in the general population. There are more people below average and more people high side of average -extremes -people with AS often have more trouble or less trouble with school- still there aren't more geniuses with AS than in the rest of the population. I read this in Chapters-don't have the book. I don't have a reference for this. WHen I looked up autism or asprerger's and IQ for scholarly in my uni's library all that came up are the mean IQs of AS groups vs. typical groups in studies- them being matched for IQ-interestingly they go over the mean IQ for each group and the AS group is often lower-they have to be similar though- so , AS group mean IQ 94, typical group mean IQ 104 ect. Maybe just selection bias...people who participate in the studies. Maybe some features of high intelligence resemble autism (like particular strong interests) but then it's important to separate the two. High intelligence is not an indicator of autism. It'd take more searching to find the reference.

Edit:Also in the book he was discussing that some false estimates of a higher IQ in the AS population come from the fact that if you just did a bell curve with people diagnosed with AS and compared it to the general pop it would be high beacuse AS is currently requires a "lack of global cognitive delay" so by definition we have normal or higher intelligence-because it's autism with normal intelligence and no speech delay. This doesn't mean people with AS tend to be gifted and this book says that when you statistically adjust for the above problem our IQ's average out to average. Anyway, this confusion will lessen when AS becomes part of the ASD category and we don't have all these confusing sub categories-then we'll get different stats.

Anyway spacing out is not the same as what Tony Atwood was talking about. He was talking about kids who's imaginary worlds become their whole lives -sure it could continue into adulthood to a certain extent- but it's not really like a documented thing that this manifests in spacing out as an adult- and as Callista pointed out spacing out is just really common among NT's too- and extremely common among those with ADHD so it's not necessarily an autistic thing.

Lack of info from childhood.

there are some great comments on this thread, I wanted to add my support to their posts -

I think you definitely describe a lot of my behaviours and preoccupations : I was diagnosed earlier this year, having self diagnosed using WP and a range of tests you can get on the internet ... books, studying child development and wondering about it for years previously...I wanted to ask you a quick question - you said you were:

Very interested in Psychology, Sociology, Philosophy and highly intellectual and so can understand psychological theories very well but find it difficult to apply this.

I've recently had to come to terms that a lot of my preoccupation with these subjects over the years (to the exclusion of pursuing other subjects and hobbies that I would have found easier) has been fundamentally to try to understand human behaviour and ultimately myself.

Do you think that this is maybe why you are interested in the above? What is it about psychology that really gets you?

I'm not suggesting your interest in psychology shows that you're an aspie ... but I do
think a lot of aspies and borderline aspies get involved in psychology and in my experience, quite a few of us end up working in this and other related fields.

anyway - if you are wondering I would suggest at some point when you can, you spend time discussing these concerns with a qualified specialist in assessing female aspies - there are so many stories on WP of people going to see psychs with v outdated takes on all this, and with no experience of assessing women.
all the best!