Some Things I Find Rather Odd About My Autism

Post Reply New Topic

I've been reading a bit from Oliver Sacks' An Anthropologist on Mars lately, specifically the titular story about Temple Grandin. I've also read some of her work in the past (not very extensively, but a bit), and it seems only recently that she has conceded that some autistic people think in ways other than just visually, but as evidenced by what she told Dr. Sacks twenty years ago that

she didn't always think this way. Indeed it seems that traditionally autistic people are thought of as being strictly visual thinkers and nothing else, but the paradigm is changing, and I am a good example of that - I am a lexical thinker - I think in language, programming, music, etc. - yet I am still autistic. So that is the first thing I find odd about my autism, and which makes other autistics seem so foreign to me. Other things include:
1. My ability to understand others empathetically
2. Little-to-no stimming
3. No echolalia (at least from a demonstrable perspective)
4. No problems with language acquisition at all (reinforcing my lexical thinking)
5. Good grasp of figurative language
6. Good understanding of emotions as expressed by eyes and face
7. Yo hablo Español
8. Я говорю по-русски
9. I seem to have an innate understanding of how languages relate to one another in similar as well as different families (like the relationship between the Spanish "cuanto" and the Latin "quantus", or the Russian "работать" and the Czech "robot", or the Russian "мед" and the English "mead").
10. In retrospect, I was actually quite popular in middle school - it was only in high school that I began to see myself decline in popularity as I became more depressed and more detached from others. In college, though, I regained a bit of this popularity because of my voice recitals (the audience of students and faculty roared at the end of my performance of Rachmaninoff's "Въ Молчане Ночи Тайной").

What do you guys think of all of this?

While I can think visually I'm really good at processing numbers, and to a lesser extent words. I can remember complete conversations I had years ago, but can't remember the face of the person I talked to, even though I just saw her again and had another conversation--just doesn't register.

Not only are my math skills excellent, I read and write amazingly fast. I can flip through a book and literally absorb what I see. But, I can also zone out during person to person interactions.

Okay, I'll compare myself to what you wrote.

Re: Your preface paragraph about being a visual thinker ... Since I'm an artist, and have vivid technicolor dreams, I would say I'm a visual thinker. That said, I can play music by ear, so apparently I'm also an auditory thinker. And I also like interpretive dancing, so maybe I'm a "whole-body thinker"?

1) I can sense when people have emotions, sometimes even from really long distances away ... That said, am not sure I process correctly what I'm picking up.
2) I'm way more likely to stim when I'm alone or think nobody's watching. (Question: Why do they call it "stimming"? Shouldn't they call it "calming" instead?)
3) For emphasis I may repeat myself. I can mimic characters really well.
4) I believe I acquired language just fine. That said, I get the feeling that I wasn't all that talkative, but that was likely because I wondered why so many people wandered around stating the obvious all the time, instead of waiting to speak until having something new, exciting, different, or important to say or communicate.
5) I used to get into bad pun wars at the university ... Lots of fun!
6) Am not sure I can read emotions properly by looking at someone.
7) Hablo espanol tambien ... (my keyboard isn't cooperating with the accent marks and I'm too lazy to look up the ASCII codes right now, so please pardon me on that)
8 ) I don't speak Russian, but I've worked with French, Italian, Portuguese, and German as well as Spanish. Have also studied Latin, Japanese, can sing in Iroquois, and led a panel at a science fiction convention where I had everyone play Simon Says in the Klingon language. Also remember a few words of Elvish.
9) Have some knowledge and experience with comparative linguistics.
10) Grammar school ... not popular, good thing neighborhood kids were friendly back in the good old days. Junior high school ... people were nasty. High school ... I survived because I was on the track team, so that meant people wouldn't bully me. University ... loved it. I was pretty popular with certain groups of people. After graduation ... you know, I think I could have been popular, except that I live what I believe in, and that's not popular. Basically, I don't follow the crowd.

...

Last edited by the_phoenix on 17 Nov 2015, 10:30 pm, edited 1 time in total.

As for remembering faces, I once tried taking an online facial recognition test ... it was so frustrating that I had to quit half way through because I was doing so bad.

...

I have these in common with you:

1. My ability to understand others empathetically

4. No problems with language acquisition at all (reinforcing my lexical thinking)

5. Good grasp of figurative language

6. Good understanding of emotions as expressed by eyes and face

EDIT: Have to add that the empathy and ability to read emotion on a face was only acquired later in life similar to the other responder. As a child I lacked those skills quite considerably.

My only issue with seeing that someone's facial expression is showing a certain emotion, is that although I can see and interpret the emotion or the change from one emotion to another -- ie, they look normal and happy one moment, then their face starts to get angry -- where I go wrong is that I often can't figure out why their apparent mood has changed. Thus, this failure is a social deficit of mine. I can read their face but I can't then correlate it to a cause and respond accordingly.

The result of this is that I spend a lot of my life walking around knowing something "went wrong" in that conversation but trying to figure out what exactly. I need to improve my response regarding being able to ask them on the spot, but my reaction time is also slow -- slow processing, and I don't get to ask, as the moment is gone too fast leaving me still processing what I'm perceiving.

I've always been good with figurative language, but that may be because I've always been a words person rather than a numbers person. I'm terrible with mathematics but I was ahead of the curve academically, regarding language and speech, vocabulary, writing skills and creative writing. So, learning the meanings of figures of speech never presented much of a problem to me because I saw the inherent creativity of non-literal terms, even though I have a mostly very literal mind otherwise.

Last edited by BirdInFlight on 18 Nov 2015, 9:27 am, edited 1 time in total.

Autism comes in many forms.

I'm a lexical thinker--but I acquired language very late: at age 5.5

I only acquired considerable empathy relatively late in life

I only acquired understanding of facial emotions relatively late in life

I only acquired relative good grasp of figurative language relatively late in life.

I have slight echolalia still.

I speak poquito Spanish, and no Russian at all.

I don't have that innate language sense you mentioned.

I was not popular in school--less unpopular during senior year in high school, though.

I just took one that displayed celebrity faces, and I got a 93% on it (most people get around 85%). The only two people I didn't recognize were Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher (I thought Tony Blair looked a little like Ted Bundy or some other serial killer, and Margaret Thatcher looked a bit like Nancy Reagan to me).

Wow, I can totally relate to that. Even just today, my mom got EXTREMELY upset at me, and I thought it was because I did something wrong before I left the bathroom (I inferred this based on the fact that she started screaming "I hate him, I hate him!" after she left the bathroom, which was shortly after I had left). In reality, she was upset because I "ruined" her morning (she wakes up early, and I, being out of a job and thus thrown out of schedule, have been waking up at 6:00 am to prepare for a whole, productive day, which she doesn't like because she likes her alone time in the morning). So, I have a hard time inferring why others are sad or upset or even happy, like you, rather than just the fact that they feel that way. To be fair though, that's a hard one to just "pick up on," and she didn't explain it for a few minutes - she just kept screaming and yelling and glaring at me until I asked her enough times what was wrong.

I understand that Autism comes in many forms, but now I wonder, what exactly makes Autism "Autism"? (I explored this a bit in one of my other posts, and eventually just ended up ranting about how I "felt like a freak like everyone else here," for which I apologized soon after, but it was still disrespectful and I am ashamed of it)

Now I suspect it might be "feelings" that make us autistic - both physical and empirical, as well as emotional.

I think that Autism can be thought of in terms of an even broader spectrum - the spectrum of feeling. At one end are autistics, like us. At the other end...are psychopaths. And then there's everyone else in between.

Autistics not only seem to feel things physically more or less than average, but they also seem to feel things emotionally a lot more than average (I know I do - music elicits profound senses of emotion from me, to the point where I've nicknamed the key signature B-flat major "God's key signature," because of its warmth and benevolence).

Psychopaths, on the other hand - as far as I am concerned, they're dead inside. There is nothing to their emotional being, even though outwardly, unlike a lot of autistics, they seem to express a lot of emotion (which I think is just an evolutionary advantage for survival). Indeed, it seems that autistic people have become "the enemy" over time, and psychopaths are now the idolized "heroes of the modern age" - people like Donald Trump, for example.

I've been an atheist for most of my life, and yet I still feel (and have felt) an intimate, spiritual experience with a higher power, something I've just been trying to hide from and push away because I felt that it was "irrational" and made bigots out of people.

I've been thinking about it a bit, and tone of voice seems to be something I can understand well (even in writing I can detect sarcasm sometimes). I also don't adhere to a strict and rigid routine to as much of an exaggerated degree as the stereotypical autistic person (I'm welcome to change and unpredictable circumstances, so long as they don't effect me too adversely ).

Exactly! And it's amazing how many people expect us to divine this instead of how about that person actually just tells us what they're upset about!

Lol, so true.

Your situation is similar to a lot of older autistic of my generation, who may have been diagnosed as being different, but we didn't fit into any known box. If you are high functioning enough, having to figure stuff out on your own may not be a disadvantage. Places with good support systems for autistics past childhood are rare.

Another thing I find odd about my autism: I might not even be autistic! It could just be Social Anxiety Disorder (or SAD, a rather ironic acronym). Seriously, a lot of my issues seem to be as simple as "I avoid social situations because of intense anxiety; I am constantly worrying about being judged; etc.," and I suspect a lot of us here who think we are autistic really just have pervasive social anxiety. I've just always felt "off" with autistic people (even the most high-functioning ones), and I never even received a "proper" diagnosis - just PDD-NOS. I do feel comfortable with a "normal" non-autistic lifestyle, I just have a lot of phobias relating to people and society.

Another contributing factor to my symptoms that I've left out for fear of "smack-talking" my mother is that she is a recovered alcoholic who drank from a time before I was born until I was 17, so I grew up in a small place beneath our landlord with a single, alcoholic mom, and some say that that doesn't really do much to you, but I think it does. I only ever got structure in school (and not that much of it), but at home things were constantly a nightmare for me. The things one of my middle school/high school buddies took for granted - two happily married parents; an amazing house; a nice, stable, devoutly religious lifestyle; and just overall happiness and well-being - were things that I would have killed for, but I didn't have those things. I sometimes wonder if I am a sociopath because of my childhood/adolescence...

Basically, if truly autistic people (at the least the high-functioning ones) are all similar to Temple Grandin (or even fictionalized characters such as Sheldon Cooper), then I am NOT autistic - just socially anxious. I'm not even half as intelligent or savant-like as a lot of aspies (I think my I.Q. is about 134, which is only a little above high-average) and I get along with people pretty well when I'm not anxious (I'm not socially awkward or incompetent, just anxious and fearful).

I don't know, what do you guys think?

If you say you are autistic people are going to assume you have impaired social skills. Normal people don't study these things.

It is very common for people with rare neurological diseases to say they have MS. It is a very easy way to explain why someone can't walk and needs assistance. Many doctors can't tell the difference between the rare disease and MS. Even with genetic testing, you might not know what you really have for years and years. Normal people don't want to know the details.