ever wonder where your autism came from?

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sometimes i wonder why im autistic.

however, both my parents have traits (my dad has more Schizophrenic traits,)

mom: OCD traits, trouble making and keeping friends (BPD)sensory issues, all or nothing thinking, very inteligent

Dad: Introvert, trouble making and keeping friends (no desire to have friends), strong visual skills, dislikes crowds

i actually am turing out a lot like my Schizophrenic grandmother, or so my grandfather says (the way i talk, my hygiene is poor, my face in general) but i strongly believe my autism is a result of genes, excspecially since my sister and i also share triats

Sister: OCD, trouble making and keeping friends(BPD), sensory issues,

the difference between my sister and i is that she doesnt make friends because she assumes everyone hates her, so she has to adopt a different personality while i simply dont understand social rules at all.

do you ever think about where your autism came from, and where do you think it came from?

Dont know in my case. No one else in the family has any issues. There were complications during my birth. I was born cyanotic. Basically I suffered brain damage.

I would like to know a lot more about my sperm donors medical history, just not going to happen though, so I let questions like why did this happen to me drop

Mine is genetic. I got tested by 23andme, then looked up research on SNPs linked with autism, and I have a lot of different autism-related alleles.

Doesn't surprise me, really. My Dad's family has a lot of people with autistic traits of traits of other LDs (ADHD, dyslexia, etc). And my Mom's family seems to have a lot of highly verbal people with no spatial skills. My Mom is probably NVLD (though her social skills are fine), my Dad's pretty sure he's autistic. So just looking at the way my relatives are, I figured it was genetic anyway.

Its from God's wrath for allowing same-sex marriage!

We all know that!

Jeeze!

My dad has traits with social deficits. I have no clue what he was like as a child. My mom is shy and never good with keeping friends while my dad has a few friends from high school and a few long term friends but she is very NT and light bothers her. My youngest brother had problems with transitioning between things and sometimes had troubles with friends and he had acute sense of taste and smell he was a picky eater and always complained about smells which I thought he was just exaggerating and just whining to get attention. My other brother is very NT so I don't notice any traits in him or any similarities.

My uncle is short tempered and has anxiety and is not empathetic and acts all cold and he is a loner and hasn't had a relationship in nearly 30 years.

My grandma may have had it, she was literal, had anxiety, problems with adjusting to change, also had acute sense of smell and said inappropriate things. My parents were the one that thought she may have it. She was never diagnosed.

I had a great uncle and he was a loner too and never married and his reason was "women are lot of work" "friends are lot of work." I sometimes wonder if he had other traits but I am not sure, he has been dead for 13 years.

On my mom's side, she once said she wonders if her older sister has it. I also wonder if my cousin has it because mom said we're lot alike. She doesn't relate to people her age, she relates to people at her job who are elderlies.

ADHD and speech problems run in my family but no one has ever been diagnosed with AS or autism. I do have an aunt with a mental illness and two different professionals or more have said she has Munchausen. Even my own mother who is a nurse has said that about her too and one of her (my aunt) daughter in laws who is also a nurse. She has always been the way she is but got worse as she got older and my mom suspects she may be Bipolar too and she has alienated people around her including her own children and siblings. Now my mom won't even talk to her because she can't deal with her drama. I have another aunt with schizophrenia. My youngest brother has ADD I found out, never officially diagnosed but he is medicated for it now. That explains his problems he had in school. He takes it because it helps him do better at work and he can't go without it.

I am the only one with an ASD diagnoses. I feel so alone. My traits could be coincidental because of traits my dad and relatives have and my little brother.

I believe I only have Asperger's because my mum is cursed. She said that when she was a tiny baby, apparently her mum (my grandmother) came into unpleasant contact with a gypsy, and had my mum in the pram, and she reckons she gypsy put a curse on her. My mum has had a lot of bad luck and misfortunes in her life, more unlucky than her other siblings. And then she had to have a mentally challenged dick hole for a daughter (me), who is lonely and unhappy which makes her worry about me more and feel unhappy. And her sibling's kids are all NTs and all seem to be getting on, succeeding socially and academically.

Or maybe I'm just cursed. There is no other explanation. There was no complications at birth. I was born a healthy baby, only a couple of days late, so I wasn't even born prematurely. I weighed 7 pound something, which is around average. There was no birth complications at all. Also none of my relatives have any traits of Autism. Maybe one or two of my cousins had some visible Aspie traits when they were children, what caused concern for teachers at school, but even they seemed to have ''outgrown'' their possible Aspieness and have grown into happy, social adults.

So, yeah, it's a curse. I just hope that is my ONLY curse, and that I don't have other curses to come, like cancer....

father: AS, ADD, seems schizoid or ODD at times, mood swings
older brother: LFA
father's mother: AS traits, a lot of mood swings, ODD
grandmother's cousin: low-to-moderate-functioning autism
mother's father: many AS traits
mother's younger sister: severe social anxiety disorder she seems to have developed around the age of 13 (hasn't set her foot out of her house literally in more than 10 years, she neither goes to the hospital when she has health problems and a doctor has to come to her home to visit her)

I think it's pretty obvious.

For me it could be either genetics or prematurity. My dad shows a lot of AS traits (poor eye contact, monologuing on special interests, thinking highly literally and overly-logically about things) and had a really hard time in school. On the other hand, I was born four months premature at 26 weeks, so there is every possibility that I am the way I am because of oxygen deprivation and brain damage.

I have a pretty good idea where mine came from, but I don't feel like discussing it out loud.

My mom has autistic traits, and I had a traumatic birth too.

Also I was born in the same city as Leonard Bernstein, who was gay (and married) – so basically, triple whammy there.

Me? It's a weird story, and it starts with my dad's father, my paternal grandfather. He was in the Philippines when Pearl Harbor happened. He fought at Bataan, and was captured by the Japanese, spending over three years as a POW. Yes, he was on the Bataan Death March. He was left behind at Cabanatuan because he was too sick to be put on the Hell Ships, which were ships the Japanese used to transport POW's to Japan, and most of which were sunk accidentally by the US Navy.

So anyway, the Americans freed the guys left behind, and they arrived home to a hero's welcome. San Francisco was a conservative, patriotic city in 1945, and the city was thrown open. Among other things, the young socialites of the city were ordered to "entertain" the freed captives. You can guess what happened next, some of them got pregnant, including my grandmother, and quickly married the POW's who got them that way. That baby was my father.

My father was a sickly kid, and a sickly adult. Later it would be theorized that my grandfather hadn't let his body recover from the horrors of the camps before getting my grandmother pregnant, and that the sperm was deficient.

Anyway, my mom was set up with my dad in 1972. They married in December 1973, and a few months later my mom was pregnant with me. I was born in November 1974. I was born with a collapsed lung, and with virtually no muscle tone. They had to put me in an incubator for three days. When my mom took me home, I had such bad acid reflux that I couldn't keep my milk down, AND I was allergic to cow's milk. My umbilical cord was deficient, and the placenta was watery.

My mom asked the doctors if there would be any lingering effects, and they said no. I hit all my milestones on schedule...and then around 18 mos I stopped talking and started falling down a lot. If not for speech therapy I likely wouldn't be able to talk. In the mid 70s the refrigerator mother theory was in vogue, and my mom was obviously not one, so the doctors didn't know what was wrong with me. For 25 years it was called the "mystery illness" by my family. It wasn't until autism broke into the news in 2000 that everybody figured it out.

I have a niece and a cousin on my Dad's side who are PDD-NOS and AS diagnosed, respectively. I'm pretty certain my grandmother on that side was likely HFA, too, so I feel confident it's just a genetic thing that pops up from time to time. My younger sister is perfectly NT, other than a touch of dyslexia, so it doesn't travel down the family tree in a straight line.

The niece is a twin, and her twin sibling has no trace of autism. Go figure.

Gamma rays... Pollution... Ozone depletion... Heck, television!

Or maybe, I should call it 'progress'!

Though on some days, I'd simply blame it on lousy luck.

Seriously, though, it's rather curious that both of my parents are introverted intellectuals; my mother never had much of a social circle, and prefers to be either buried in books or taking a nap; my dad is a soft-spoken artist with traits of OCD. Voilà, I came out autistic. Of note should also be that I suffered oxygen deprivation when my mother gave birth to me. I don't know where it came from, but since it was relatively mild, I've learned to handle it sufficiently for now.

I think my autistic-like traits are caused by childhood infections.

It came from my Jewish ancestors who were touched by God with genius, melancholy, a deeply felt compassion for others and, most of all, by suffering.