Does anyone go a while without checking WP with this result?

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I love spending time on WP, and one of my favorite things about it is having all of you people to relate to; but there is something that happens when I go a good stretch without checking the forums or reading about/talking about anything autism related.

I feel like the more time I spend on here (or reading/talking about autism), the more I consciously think about my autism; and in turn the more I think about my autism, the more I see the difference between me and the average person/NT out there. Then, I just go a while without checking it, or reading up about -anything- autism related (for no particular reason), spend no time talking about it, etc.

I still always notice how different I am from everyone else, but after a while, it's as if I -forget- I have autism, because I just don't think about it.

Every day I notice how I'm different, and in big ways. Yet the word/thought -Autism- will not enter my mind every day. I'll just be carrying on as if autism were never discovered, and I was just an extremely eccentric person.

I was diagnosed with HFA at a pretty young age, so for all intents and purposes, I've always known I have autism; yet, I still will not even think about it for long periods of time, even though I periodically go mute, have lots of sensory issues, and many things that never happen to NTs, yet I won't even think about my autism.

But, when I check NP regularly, along with talking about or reading about autism, I will think about autism every single day, think about why I'm different and all that, rather just keeping on being me and not caring why everyone else is different.

Does this ever happen to any of you? Or anything like that? Do you ever spend a lot of time not thinking about your autism as if autism was never even discovered? I'm interested to hear from you all because many of you were not diagnosed at such an early age, so I imagine that may be what your life was like before being diagnosed.

I didn't know about autism until a few months ago, age 27. Before this I only had a vague sense that I was different. I was generally able to convince myself that I was *fairly* normal, maybe just a bit introverted and damaged from bad experiences in the past.

The interesting thing I guess is that since I generally avoided social situations, there was no one to make me aware of just how weird I was. I never had a lot of friends or a social life. So this "fairly normal" self image was sustainable.

Just a different perspective for you

For as long as I can remember, I've constantly thought about everything around me and especially WHY I'm not like everyone else.
Knowing that I have autism/Asperger's just gave it a name. I admit that yes, I hang out on WP more than I should and yes, WP forces me to think more about autism.
But hey, ASDs are my special interest, along with Sherlock Holmes (I spent even MORE time on that). Aren't special interests supposed to be, erm, all-consuming?

I had the same thing going on for much of my life, except for the fact that I knew about my autism from about as far back as I remember. No friends for the most part.

Only the past 4 or so years have I even began to have a social life, due to my special interest turning me into a busy person, who has to deal with other people to do what they love most.

I feel very different from other people, yet for the most part they tend to treat me kindly. The ones I've become friends with generally have told me I was a bit odd at first, but once they got to know me (and I got more comfortable around them) they liked me. I feel this also helps me forget about my autism.

I am pretty new to WP but I have always been way too self analytical even before I knew anything about autism or suspected I might have AS and spent hours and even days wondering why I am different and why socializing other than 1:1 with someone who shares my interests and is fine with in depth conversation that's really info exchange rather than superficial small talk and why that seems so easy and innate. Also why simple things like cleaning, budgeting, unpacking when I move, laundry etc overwhelm me so I avoid and procrastinate and have anxiety attacks.

I find so far that I am really thankful to have found WP but it's huge and full of so much info that it overwhelms me and while I do post to threads I see on my twitter feed by following the link, I rarely go back and see what others have written or comment further. Maybe if there was a WP app like I have an fb app and a Twitter app but hard to know. Checking my email is overwhelming for me!

Another reason why I like coming back to WP - posts like yours where someone talks about themselves but could have been easily describing me.

I am verry merry berry busy eberryday now, so I don't WP as much as I used to, and I also eggsperienced this effect.

Eberryone thinks of me as an eggstremely eggcentric person, and I think of myself as an eggstremely eggcentric person too.

This is verry merry berry funny, because I do autism research and think about autism a lot, but little about autism and me.

I love this thread, because I have so many opportunities to use my egg and berry words.

Because I know what goes on inside my head, that Iam a really funny clever interesting guy, every Woman's dream, I forget that though I might be like that on the inside, for some reason, Iam unable to reveal this to the world, the world sees some sort of crazy walking Zombie type person, coming here helps me to remember my self perception is a completely different person from what others see in me.

Being reminded possibly helps me not expect too much from life, to face up to what I really am instead of the fantasy me that lives in my head?

I haven't been diagnosed yet, but since I found out about autism sometime last year, there hasn't been a day when I didn't think about autism. I think it's still dominating my thoughts. Because I'm starting to think that I should adjust my life to suit my condition (, which is quite a major project in one's life), I cannot help thinking about autism every day. My life has been a disaster in many ways so far and I want to change it.

I think since I joined WP I probably have been at least reading other people's posts every single day. So I don't know where my thoughts would go if I don't come to WP for a while. Before knowing about autism, life just felt so difficult without any known reason although I actually did think there must be some brain condition that I had that was causing this difficulty. So even if you don't consciously think about autism for some time, I believe you still know the reason for your differences from the others at least subconsiously. That is very different from not knowing about autism at all and feeling miserable, unhappy, sad and frustrated.

I hope in the near future I will not think about autism all the time (nothing's wrong with thinking about it) and live happily.