Do I have autism?

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Hi there,
I'm new around here and was hoping you could help me with some advice I'm a 23 year old female and ever since I could remember I always hand flapped. When I was younger my parents took me to a psychiatrist who asked me whether or not I did this, but as I was too embarrassed to say yes I said that I didn't. Since then I always wondered about it, but didn't really pay too much attention to it as it was just something that I was used to doing. After some googling I've learnt that this potentially may be related to autism. I've paid more attention to it over the past couple of days and worked out that I have different types of hand-flaps depending on if I am by myself or in public. When I'm by myself and I get excited or nervous, I clench my fists and shake them in the air really fast. In public, I just keep my hands to the side and with an open hand start twisting them fastly. Could it be possible that hand-flapping relates to something other than autism?

A couple of other things:

- It's hard for me to empathize, if someone is telling me about someone who has is sick for example, I just don't know how to react. I'm worried that they might think I don't care and whether this is showing on my face. I just usually try and keep a straight face and say that "I'm sorry to hear that".

- I have never understood why I am so sensitive with my neck. When I sleep at night I always have to have a blanket covering it. My husband has tried to annoy me a few times before by touching my neck and I start getting really angry and hitting him without even thinking. Even touching it myself makes me cringe.

- If my husband puts his arm around me or even touches me in general, it irritates me most of the time too. I just bear with it

- I get fixated on things. The other day I bought a new pair of shoes and noticed a scuff on them. I spent hours trying to fix them and ended up making it worst (note to self, nail polish remover removes the shiny coat on shoes). I was able to put a gloss on them to give it the shiny finish again but I kept taking it off because I knew they were still marked, and then I'd reapply the gloss and take it off again. Eventually I got so frustrated and started throwing things around the room in anger.

- I get really attached to objects. I hate throwing things away. If I touch something at a shop I have to buy it because I've touched it. If I break something like glass, I don't like throwing it away so will just put it in a plastic bag and hide it somewhere.

- I have no friends and I hate socialising. I don't like meeting new people. If I talk to someone I tend to over think the conversation and replay it over and over again in my head and start to get worried that I might have said something that offended them. What I've tried to do lately is say as minimal as possible, that way there is less risk of saying something that could be offensive. When I was working I felt like I had to try really hard to speak to people. I would have to train groups of people (up to 5) and that would be all I could think about for weeks and would stress me day in day out. When there was social events at work, I would call in sick.

- I hate people walking or sitting behind me. If anyone is behind me, I think they are going to kill me. I play out my death in my head and I start getting really nervous and freaked out. When I'm nervous I start biting the sides of my fingers. I have always done this when I get anxious and have even deformed one of my fingers from biting on it too much.

- I have voices in my head that tell me to do things. For example, when I was trying to get into uni I would have things like "If you do this, you will get into uni". At the moment I have nothing I really want so my head will just tell me to do things with no reward. The things I do is mainly stupid little things like "say this out loud" or "don't step on that crack" or "touch the hot iron".

- The other day I said "yolo" to my sister to annoy her, the whole day I was subconsciously saying yolo yolo yolo out loud (so that backfired as it ended up annoying me more than anything lol). I will get a phrase stuck in my head and will say it all the time without even thinking about it. I was saying "sawadee" (hello in Thailand) every day for 3 years after we went to Thailand which drove my hubby nuts. If I'm trying to get ready quickly for example, I'll start saying go go power rangers or some other phrase from tv.

- If I send an email, I will obsessively check my emails every 5 minutes. I will reread the email I wrote over and over again.

- It takes me a long time to write things like emails, essays for uni (even when I know the content well, it will still take me 4 hours to write one short paragraph).

There's a few other things but they are the main ones I can think of at the moment. Thank you very much for your time in reading this and I appreciate any advice at all that you can give

You do sound like you could have a case of aspergers which is now known as in dsm5 as Autism Spectrum Disorder (They got rid of the labels for a bunch of autistic disorders and put them under the one). I think if you're curious you should seek out a professional.

But the voices thing is normal for everyone. My old therapist told me she ones had a client who had a voice tell her to push her baby's carriage with the baby in it down a hill. She felt so bad about it. She shouldn't. Doesn't mean she's a bad person. Doesn't mean she's crazy. It's just a stupid little voice. Everyone has it. I still don't understand the reason-but I'm learning. It might be our minds just trying to busy itself. Or pop up our biggest fears of our selves into our heads because deep in our subconscious we are thinking about said fear. Anyway it's just an annoying voice it doesn't mean anything... unless you think it's a living thing or something.

Only a qualified and licensed mental-health practitioner can render an accurate diagnosis.

I don't know of any member of WP who fits that description.

Join the club. Most of us here do a lot of what you've described. I'd see about getting professionally diagnosed to know for certain.