Autism in phases?

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Does anyone find their AS becomes more prominent at certain times?

I seem to go through phases where I function normally and then for reasons I'm unsure of as yet, I start to fit every AS stereotype going.

I'm thinking this probably comes after a period of severe stress which would make sense as my guard would be down somewhat but until its happened a few more times, I can't be sure if I'm right.

It does my head in as usually i can mask my "symptoms" (for want of a better word) but during these phases I have to really curb screaming shut up at loud noises/chatting or more embarrassingly slapping my head. I have to bite my tongue to stop correcting people rather than just accept everyone is different. I just want to withdraw which is impossible with family.

I get worse in a few situations that I'm aware of - when I'm sick (lost all social skills last time, I completely weirded out two workmates then had to hide for the rest of the day to avoid doing it again), when I'm hormonal (irritable) and when I'm annoyed/stressed/any negative emotion - I get frustrated and irritable and want to yell at people. I think the sick was because I didn't have the energy to remember what I was meant to do (it was very dramatic, I've never seen myself do that before) and the irritable is pretty self-explanatory.

Yes AS seems to manifest itself in phases here, and I've heard that's true for others too.

I put it down to fluctuating levels of stress, fatigue, trust in the other people, and whether or not I happen to be doing social stuff as a special interest at the time. But that's only an intelligent guess at the real causes......I was being very sociable last summer but was mystified as to why, and when I finally flipped back to being a typical Aspie, I couldn't understand what had gone wrong.

I get overwhelmed very easily, and whenever I get overwhelmed my AS symptoms get a lot worse. My brain has to work harder to process information, and I end up missing things. It's like my brain has too many signals it's trying process at once. Which gets me even more frustrated. Background Noise, Stress, etc. tends to send me into "Overwhelmed Mode". However, whenever I'm in a comfortable environment, I have little trouble masking my AS especially if I'm doing something I'm interested in.

I could never definitively put my finger on this as why this in myself. There are phases to where you're fine and phases to where it is a block in functioning. I used to think I was bipolar, but never experienced "mania" so this didnt fit it well either.

I go through periods to where I become pretty isolated and every unexpected sound bothers me. ...even a piece of paper sliding off the desk onto the floor gets on my nerves. I hear everything and it seems that even the presence of someone in front of me exerts a force 'into' me to where it feels too much at the time.

I think it too that there is a correlation with stress and fatigue. It's a mystery for now....... why and how?

I really don't notice much at all except a loss of interest in socialising, which comes over me for no apparent reason.....I first noticed it last time when somebody was due to visit me, and I wasn't sure that they would arrive, as their record for keeping to arrangements had become poor, and then I realised I was kind of hoping they wouldn't. It's just about possible that it's a perfectionism thing, I might have been unconsciously switching off them on account of my not liking their unreliability (I much prefer people who meet me when they say they will, or I can feel disappointed or horribly unprepared).

The other factor is that I more or less lost a couple of people who had personalities I could really relate to - very warm, immediate, nonjudgemental, soft of voice yet extravert, kind hearted, and extremely witty. I've noticed before that I tend to unconsciously mimic people I like, so I suspect I was feeding off their banter and to some extent becoming like them. I feel like I've become a colder person since losing them. But I don't know if it's the loss of role models or the loss of the reassurance that they must have been giving me with all that warmth.....I barely felt that consciously at the time. I knew they were an asset, and I noticed I was feeling better after talking with one of them once, but that's all I knew.

Hmmm....it's not surprising that I don't know why AS waxed and wanes - I can't identify my emotions, even retrospectively it's full of guesswork.

It's a very interesting area for me these days, because I'm looking at the question of Aspie traits getting worse in relationships, over time, and I can't yet tell whether it's always down to the relationship turning sour, or whether it's just a fatigue/stress thing - in short, I'm trying to work out whether I'm capable of sustaining the social demands of living with another person for decades without the need for space going permanently out of control and wiping out the relationship.

I have constant fluctuations in my abilities. Plus more overload makes difficulties that would normally fade into the background more obvious. I don't see it as my autism (I'm not AS) getting more prominent. I just consider those fluctuations part and parcel of being autistic. It's mentioned in books on autism where even parents notice their kids being able to do something one day and not the next.

There seems to be a continuum between autistic people who have made permanent, fixed forfeits of certain abilities in favor of others (whose abilities stay the same constantly and never or very rarely change except during overload possibly), and people whose abilities are constantly shifting rather than settling on one pattern and staying there.

I'm quite close to the end of the shifting end: I have a general vague pattern of what is easiest to me that usually stays that way sort of at least, and then everything is otherwise always shifting (just a few shifts are less likely than others). So my abilities are never even close to constant and I get taken either as having very fixed high abilities or fixed low abilities by people who can't imagine shifts like mine. (Like assuming that each ability or difficulty they see is always like that, and any variation is the illusion of an ability that isn't real or laziness.)

I was going to suggest this myself. If I can't even tell when I'm exceptionally stressed (I thought I was sick last time, to my partner's vast amusement) I'm sure I can't pick out mild stress, which means I can't see those correlations to the effect it has on my life.