What reasons you had to initially deny you might be ASD

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QFT
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06 Jun 2022, 6:06 am

Jayo wrote:
or I acted in a passive-aggressive manner


I do it too, but I attribute it to my aspieness. Because my version of it is along the lines of pouty 5 year old, and being younger than my age is a part of Asperger.

Although I wouldn’t have said it back at the days I was questioning my diagnosis. After all back then I just went by the books, the books described aspies as robots, and robots don’t play pouty mind games.

But from where I am sitting nowdays I know Asperger is infantilism for a large part. And then yes, pouty mind games can be an integral part of it.



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06 Jun 2022, 6:28 am

I was once baffled by an accusation of being passive-aggressive. I think she was just hoping to get me into an open fight that I'd lose.



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06 Jun 2022, 7:14 am

QFT wrote:
Jayo wrote:
or I acted in a passive-aggressive manner


I do it too, but I attribute it to my aspieness. Because my version of it is along the lines of pouty 5 year old, and being younger than my age is a part of Asperger.

Although I wouldn’t have said it back at the days I was questioning my diagnosis. After all back then I just went by the books, the books described aspies as robots, and robots don’t play pouty mind games.

But from where I am sitting nowdays I know Asperger is infantilism for a large part. And then yes, pouty mind games can be an integral part of it.


Hehe. You'd be amazed by the number of NT "adults" who I've met who behaved in a P-A manner...sometimes juvenile behaviour spans both NT and ND folks.



1986
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06 Jun 2022, 8:15 pm

This thread got me thinking whether I'd even qualify for an ASD diagnosis anymore. I understand that past Asperger's diagnoses are automatically transferred to ASD, but I feel especially this part of the diagnostic criteria doesn't apply to me anymore.

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Deficits in developing, maintaining, and understand relationships, ranging, for example, from difficulties adjusting behavior to suit various social contexts; to difficulties in sharing imaginative play or in making friends; to absence of interest in peers.

The only part where I'd still qualify is absence of interest, but that's not entirely true as I've just decided to focus exclusively on my family. I went to a wedding reception last week and made no social faux pas, in fact everyone was just happy to see me there. Could my previous issues just be explained by a lack of maturity?

The question is on my mind because I feel like a fake as I evidently don't have any typical autistic issues anymore. Is it really a disability if you're not struggling anymore? (Except for my psychotic/bipolar symptoms, but that's unrelated to autism.)

Or am I just confused because my range of symptoms don't seem to match the majority?



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07 Jun 2022, 3:05 pm

1986,

That sounds like a self-assessment. Might other folk around you see things a little differently?


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07 Jun 2022, 8:20 pm

Double Retired wrote:
1986,

That sounds like a self-assessment. Might other folk around you see things a little differently?

It depends. My family has never acknowledged the diagnosis and will probably refuse to do so in the future as well. The psychiatrist who did the evaluation interviewed my parents as part of the process and wrote down that they likely were "in denial of any kind of weakness". She thought I had pretty obvious social deficits, but on the self-assessment tests I scored myself as having no social deficits at all. Might this be a case of Theory of Mind deficit, that I can't "see" myself from another person's point of view, and only evaluate myself internally?

With other people, the opinions vary a lot. I've got answers ranging from "yours must be very mild then" to "that's hardly a surprise".

The whole thing just makes me feel confused.



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08 Jun 2022, 1:38 pm

I'm thinking more along the lines of whether or not you can really see all of your "symptoms".

For much of my childhood I figured I was just like everyone else. I could see other people but I could not see myself the way they saw me. I could see what other people were like and assumed that since I was also a "'people" I was probably much like what I saw in others.

In other words, I might've been a jerk or strange without realizing it.


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11 Jun 2022, 12:58 am

Prior to a psychologist bringing it up, the idea of ASD never crossed my mind because I (and my family and teachers, seemingly) only knew of the stereotypical level 3 cases. I didn't even know the concept of Asperger's existed; I only knew "autism" as applying to the children with intellectual disabilities who needed to be in a special classroom in elementary school. (Nothing against them, of course, it just didn't apply to my own life whatsoever.) After the first psychologist I ever saw brought it up, I was still initially surprised/confused because I had had some friends as a child, a warm and talkative personality, and liked jokes/humor, which didn't fit some of the most common stereotypes of Asperger's. However, after more education on how the spectrum actually works, plus being formally diagnosed by the specialists, I understood.



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11 Jun 2022, 2:47 am

I went from pretty ignorant of autism to feeling like I should consult with a professional to investigate and do differential diagnosis to confirm autism vs. schizoid personality disorder. That was the same point I first did an online assessment and it scored way higher than I expected.

It's funny because considering that it was overlooked as a kid I've never fallen into the 'borderline' or 'subclinical' range diagnostically, I guess between my own masking and a degree of enabling from my parents (at least one of whom is ND) it was actually actively seeking cracks, rather than simply falling through them, at least at times.

Although, it did serve as a wake-up call regarding how easy it can be for someone to both have a significant disability and to also be totally oblivious to the need for support or the notion that they'd qualify and to instead just let things fall apart around themselves over and over again.

This ultimately played a role in forming some of my ideas on how autism, and especially undiagnosed autism can be a contributor to the development of mental illnesses as well as why undiagnosed autism might be over-represented within at least some homeless communities. Severe autistic burnout can destroy a person's life and can reach a point where you're basically just that dog from the this is fine meme, it seems reasonable both that this could completely disrupt a person's life but also that after experiencing it that some might literally do anything to avoid being put through the process again.


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12 Jun 2022, 6:09 pm

About 20 years ago my boss said he thought I had mild autism. I thought he was trying to bully me but was confused because it seemed a strange way of bullying.

Some years later I started noticing the lead character on the TV show 'Bones' was a lot like me. I read some articles speculating that the character had Aspergers which they said was on the Autism Spectrum. I said to myself "I probably have it". That is as far as it went, it was nothing more than a mild curiosity to me. So while I was not in denial of my Aspergers per se, I was in denial about its importance.


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13 Jun 2022, 2:12 pm

oh look, it's me!

I self-diagnosed in the early 2000s, officially diagnosed in 2004, disidentified (with ADHD re-diagnosis) in 2007, and recently I realized I've been autistic the whole time. (Possibly AND ADHD.)

My autistic (or claimed to be) ex-partner convinced me that I wasn't autistic basically because I passed so well as "normie," though he didn't see me at my job and see that I was only holding onto it so well because it had low social contact (I was doing home health). Basically he felt that because I had self-diagnosed before, that it made my official diagnosis invalid, especially since it was based on narrative to a clinician (this is a fairly standard diagnosis trope of the 90s-2000s) and didn't take place in the context of a mental hospital like his did. He felt that my diagnosis came "too easily." (My diagnosis was based upon my early childhood speech and motor delays and documented issues in K-12, and recommendations from the schools that my hippie parents, who don't believe autism really exists, did their best to not follow.)

Also my ADHD diagnosis was followed up with participating in a clinical study with UC Davis MIND Institute so we thought, for a long time, "if I were autistic, wouldn't all the stuff I went through with the MIND Institute, have caught that?"

Also he was convinced that if I were truly autistic, I wouldn't have had any friends at all, whereas in my teen years and early 20s, I did have lots of friends and even managed to date, though I got dumped a lot. My social world was a mix of NDs and gifted kids that I met in computer and gaming spaces - but over time, the autistic people kind of got pushed aside and now the core of the group is allistic. I also was out of the group for two decades and I'm sure I only hold onto old friends now because of the internet and because of distance, so my doing Autistic s**t (tm) just doesn't come up.

He thought I was just an internet addict. But the internet is like 90% of my compensation, I use the computer to navigate situations so that I don't have to deal with groups of people in real life. With the computer, my Dunbar Limit is much much higher than it would be IRL. In real life, I can only handle interacting with people 1-on-1 for any length of time.

(Ironically, my ex projected a lot of stuff onto me that reminds me of what NTs think autism is vs isn't. After he became convinced I wasn't autistic, he became convinced I was just doing the things I did out of choice.)

I came to believe I wasn't autistic as well and that my symptomology could be accounted for by just ADHD, partly because I hadn't actually experienced a burnout yet.

Another reason I stopped believing I was autistic was believing that I was coping better than a lot of the autistics I knew. A lot of this is just because of invisible supports that aren't seen from the outside. And also because I'm an alexithymic "robot/Vulcan" style of Aspie as opposed to a highly emotional/sensitive style. Basically I came to believe for much of the time I believed I wasn't autistic, that I was just an a$$hole.

And past a certain point, I stopped having visible "emotional" symptoms, especially after being on SSRI meds that made me even more alexithymic. Somewhere during my 30s, my autistic emotional responses started manifesting as health issues. I gained the optics of a chronically ill adult as opposed to an autistic one, and part of why this is, is because chronic health optics actually gave me more permission to "drop out" of a lot of stuff that my autism hadn't.
Pretty sure the fact that I have support *now* is because I *wasn't* trying to get it while identifying as autistic. Not that it's great for people with chronic health issues or chronic pain. But now that I am physically feeling better (thanks to the pandemic lockdown making my world me-shaped), I'm finding it hard to say no to a lot of stuff I used to get an "out" from.


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Last edited by orbweaver on 13 Jun 2022, 5:37 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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13 Jun 2022, 4:56 pm

1986,

It's possible you're a person who has an autistic early narrative but you "caught up" - you outgrew a lot of your symptoms - some few people even outgrow their diagnosis and we have no idea how many, because they're just living like average people who have a few points of Unusual Background on their character sheet. They haven't been through the therapy pipeline because they haven't presented for any kind of distress (though some of the time that may just be because they're good internalizers, like I became for a long time). They're not going to post on Reddit or WrongPlanet about it because they haven't had a reason to re-visit the autism narrative. (It might come up again once they have an autistic child.)

And that might be you.

But I feel compelled to reply to you because you remind me of me.

I am a very "mature" seeming Aspie who does not at all fit the optics of the more visibly disabled people we see on "Love on the Spectrum" or "As We See It." I can present the image of a consummate adult professional of my age group; by midlife, I've had a lot of practice at it (there is some element of Little Professor to this; as a child I was kind of a precocious kid who used to "play office" and would rush to answer the home phone so I could answer it like a business, was obsessed with stuff about office jobs, used to play by myself with my typewriter and file cabinet, etc.) And now I lean on a professional image and my big words so that I can advocate for myself when I have to, with the flipside that it means I'm never seen as actually needing anything :x .

It's not masking. My issues are simply more invisible. I am a really good case for some NDs who identify as "different, not disabled."

And yet I AM somewhat disabled; I am just lucky enough to have a strong enough load-bearing support system to have not entered the disability pipeline, or pushed myself to the point of worse breakdown than I've already experienced. If I *had* been forced to carry the whole load by myself - or navigate a core social world that doesn't consist of blood ties and (basically) marriage ties - then I would be truly boned and not in the fun way :skull:

I think a lot about Aspies in history, and the fact that we are entire families (leading to a pet theory that actually the mildly autistic presenting are a *numerous* clade of humanity that's been uniquely disadvantaged by social/economic/infrastructural changes over the past 300 years), and something that strikes me is that maybe our social brain is actually wired more to master/apprentice social roles, and under the right conditions, to our families, than to the big, anonymous informal social groupings of anonymous modern urbanites where the loyalties change on a dime.

If you are already living your life in the social shape that minimizes your energy expenditure then you may not be noticing your autism as much. I notice my autism the most when I'm having to deal with the world outside of the shape of world I'm most comfortable in.

1986 wrote:
This thread got me thinking whether I'd even qualify for an ASD diagnosis anymore. I understand that past Asperger's diagnoses are automatically transferred to ASD, but I feel especially this part of the diagnostic criteria doesn't apply to me anymore.

Quote:
Deficits in developing, maintaining, and understand relationships, ranging, for example, from difficulties adjusting behavior to suit various social contexts; to difficulties in sharing imaginative play or in making friends; to absence of interest in peers.


I feel like all the Aspies I know irl are actually social people, under the right circumstances. Though some have become less social around midlife because of a lifetime of accumulated bad experiences. (And also, there will be some selection bias, because the Aspies I am meeting in social environments - like tabletop role playing gaming - are the ones who like being in social environments.)

But social withdrawal isn't the same as initial lack of social motivation. Also, I have been in social spaces forever (minus the times in my life where I was trying to be "normie") that have been about half ND, and there were always a few Aspies in them.

One of the most freaking extroverted people I know - possibly one of the biggest extroverts on the planet, she will literally talk to anybody at all - is the first person I ever knew to have an Asperger diagnosis. She gets a lot of rejections and gets treated badly in some kinds of social spaces, especially ones that have more emphasis on "classy manners." But she enjoys talking to just random people, across all kinds of social barriers, that most NTs wouldn't ever talk to.

Quote:
The only part where I'd still qualify is absence of interest, but that's not entirely true as I've just decided to focus exclusively on my family. I went to a wedding reception last week and made no social faux pas, in fact everyone was just happy to see me there. Could my previous issues just be explained by a lack of maturity?


My family used to refer to that as "being on good behavior." Are you really sure that you're not presenting Aspie anymore... or do you just have optically adult coping mechanisms, as far as most people see? People don't see the autism in me because I'm not irritable (especially not after becoming a heavy weed user, but I digress.) Also, when people dislike something about me, they never attribute it to autism.

I can turn in an Oscar winning performance for any one-time social event. Social behavior at one single event isn't how people get diagnosed. If it were, there are NTs who would get diagnosed with stuff. I relate though because I've been through many social situations that had me asking "am I really autistic."

I know some Aspies who are obsessed with manners, and can be absolutely polished for formal social events. My probably-Aspie mother and my bff both come to mind. But in dealing with them on the day to day, managing a relationship, trying to be in a group, that's when it comes out.

Also, I'm very very good at spotting who I can be myself around at this point. Perhaps you are, too? I am also very good at masking my own autism by leaning heavily on the computer for all non-partner/non-family interactions in between fairly sparing in-person meetings. It is easier to keep up the flow of relationships online.

Quote:
The question is on my mind because I feel like a fake as I evidently don't have any typical autistic issues anymore. Is it really a disability if you're not struggling anymore? (Except for my psychotic/bipolar symptoms, but that's unrelated to autism.)

Or am I just confused because my range of symptoms don't seem to match the majority?


You mentioned having pulled your social life in to focus on your family. Here is some thought I have, because that reminds me of me.

Presently, very few people see my autism. It's because of how much I've managed to shape my life to fit my autism. It's only when I'm in some state of decompensation that it's really obvious. It's also only around people I am with literally every day over time, that it's obvious.

They see that I have a partner - one who is NT-passing (he has ADHD and CP, but is outgoing and pretty socially normal) and fits certain middle class metrics (graduate degree, tech job.) At that, they see that I have a partner who has many, many normie middle class NT friends. So there is some degree of halo effect.

They see that I have skillsets and a mid-career level career title on LinkedIn - though few really have any idea how underemployed I've been, or how infrequently I've worked full time, throughout my adult life. I haven't consistently worked full time since my big burnout at 40 (I'm 48 now). Mostly it is just here and there. But even when I am working, people don't really see my autism unless I'm 1) in a job where other aspects of the autism are disabling, i.e., executive function/processing/attention/motor stuff/etc, or 2) the job doesn't have very high turnover. And the autism is almost invisible from the outside now that I'm working from home. Most of the issues I have related to my autism at work can't easily be parsed, by people external to me and my workplace.

On the outside, people see that I have some friends - they have no idea what these friendships have been through, or that I'm pretty much (other than my partner) exclusively friends with autistic people, aside from the people I'm brought into contact with by my partner (with the exception of the one mutual, who's also probably autistic).

Also, I focus mostly on my family and my partner because that's the source of my supports that maintain the illusion that I'm "functioning normally." It takes far far fewer social spoons for me to focus on my partner and family than to try to have a social life outside of this.

Whenever I've been in a space where I'm actually trying to meet new people - such as, the times when I've moved to a new town, and had to start over - the autism became very visible. And it is very visible to people I live with.

Also, I've *just gotten better* at lots of social pragmatics, even though it's via hard work and intellectually processing things that NTs don't seem to intellectually process. (Do many of them intellectually process stuff at all...? :twisted: )

I have learned a lot of "meta" and foundational stuff about how social spaces work. This is not masking. This is more akin to having "fences around the law" and social rules around which a *broad* range of social situations can fit. This comes about from life experience over four and a half decades, and from study, and peoplewatching. I can perform the back-and-forth of conversation, it just takes much more energy to do (and can be sustained for less time) if I'm talking with an NT. (Even if I'm talking with someone who has a more ADHD style, I have ways of adapting to that, and they aren't usually micromanaging my interaction the way an NT would.)

A broad foundation of social knowledge gives me much better coping skills than would just LARPing the part of a person who fits in. Because of this, I don't have to LARP nearly as hard, or as much, as I used to. I can mask much more sparingly.

And the thing is, this is a case where someone who's studied social interaction all their life, can just stop seeming as autistic as they did when they were younger.

(Also because I'm a low-emotions type of Aspie rather than a high-emotions one, that probably makes it a lot easier, because I'm not having to manage crying/blushing/losing my temper in public.)

Also, knowing where my social glitches happen, and what neuro thing is going on, helps me avoid a lot of problems. I know for example that I do not visually process the outside world while I'm speaking. I know that I can't follow signaling/turn-taking in a casual group conversation and that at some point, I stop being able to keep up. I know that sometimes in the middle of a long conversation, or when I'm interacting with people in a distracting environment, my brain shuts off and sometimes I inadvertently do rude things. I also know that some inadvertent echolalia can happen if there's a TV on in the background. I know that I am literally having to translate everything I think about into "normie speak" and that different people (this is hugely gendered btw) require different dialects of normie speak, and that I'm having to navigate this *visually* inside my mind while I'm speaking and that it's like having to compile from assembly code, or like having to emulate, and that it's actually much easier for me to *listen* in Normie than it is for me to *speak* in Normie. (Online is really the only place I actually express complete thoughts. At all.)

Now - all of this sounds like it's incredibly hard, doesn't it? But after so many years, I really don't think about this. It's when I'm under duress that it becomes obvious, and I've managed to arrange my life to minimize that duress.

Knowing all of these things about myself made me realize that a lot of what I deal with socially, is stuff that's hardwired, that I can't help. But at the same time, knowing what is actually going on *with my brain* is a million times more helpful than just knowing which cool kid I'm going to emulate. Because that's when I get actual useful workarounds as opposed to just more costumes to put in my closet, literally or figuratively.

And it may be the same for you. After so many years, you may have found some workarounds.

I have a ton of workarounds, and they work... most of the time... as long as my routine doesn't change that significantly, I'm not overworked, and/or I don't have a major life stressor, and as long as I'm not physically in distress.

In short, maybe your autism isn't so visible because you've been able to make your life fit your autism more than the other autistic people you're comparing yourself to.

People don't see how autistic I actually am until my supports actually fall away, or I am sick/stressed.

Most people would never, ever begin to grasp the magnitude of what I've dealt with based upon the appearance of my day to day social functioning, and or the fact that I even appear to have a lot of friends. (Facebook makes it so easy to have a curated self.)


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1986
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15 Jun 2022, 8:03 pm

Quote:
And it may be the same for you. After so many years, you may have found some workarounds.

I have a ton of workarounds, and they work... most of the time... as long as my routine doesn't change that significantly, I'm not overworked, and/or I don't have a major life stressor, and as long as I'm not physically in distress.

In short, maybe your autism isn't so visible because you've been able to make your life fit your autism more than the other autistic people you're comparing yourself to.

It's an interesting point of view and it's certainly possible that what I sometimes view as a lack of symptoms is rather me having found workarounds to avoid being put in a situations where my symptoms rear their ugly head.

For example, it might be that I learned to "cope" with sensory problems by overexposing myself to them, building a thick skin so to speak so even when things are chaotic around me (e.g., the subway) I can keep my cool.
Probably choices like where to live, what do to for a living, who to spend time with, etc. helped me not being put under unreasonable stress, too.



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15 Jun 2022, 8:21 pm

1986 wrote:
Quote:
And it may be the same for you. After so many years, you may have found some workarounds.

I have a ton of workarounds, and they work... most of the time... as long as my routine doesn't change that significantly, I'm not overworked, and/or I don't have a major life stressor, and as long as I'm not physically in distress.

In short, maybe your autism isn't so visible because you've been able to make your life fit your autism more than the other autistic people you're comparing yourself to.

It's an interesting point of view and it's certainly possible that what I sometimes view as a lack of symptoms is rather me having found workarounds to avoid being put in a situations where my symptoms rear their ugly head.

For example, it might be that I learned to "cope" with sensory problems by overexposing myself to them, building a thick skin so to speak so even when things are chaotic around me (e.g., the subway) I can keep my cool.
Probably choices like where to live, what do to for a living, who to spend time with, etc. helped me not being put under unreasonable stress, too.


Different situations require different adaptations. Much of the reason my autism stopped being so visible after 12 or so isn't just masking/LARPing as an NT. Part of it is that I actually did learn some emotional regulation techniques that took the edge off. But part of it is that I became friends with teenage boys and there was "yer mom" and "the Dirty Dozens" and all of that stuff that goes on in boy social environments. But part of it is also this:

Because I had a very very unstable environment when I was younger, a ton of my ritualism and sameness need is expressed inside a world inside my head.

I learned how to tune out the world around me. What I can't do is do that, and actually focus on anything external to myself.


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H_Taterz
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18 Jun 2022, 4:24 pm

"Experts" say:

People with autism have
1. Poor eye contact (my eye contact was never an issue)
2. Fails to respond to his or her name (nope again unless I was purposely ignoring someone)
3. Resists being cuddled or hug (nope again)
4. Fails to establish friendships with peers (I had lots of so-called friends)
5. No interest in sharing interests or achievements with others (nope - in fact, I was hyper needy)
6. Lack of empathy (this was a big one because I had TOO much empathy - overly sensitive)
7. Difficulties understanding jokes or sarcasm (I speak fluent sarcasm)
8. Often retreats into his or her own world (Okay, this one I'm guilty of)
9. Does not engage in imaginative or imitative play (I'm extremely imaginative)
10. Echolalia (I don't do this)

What I do have:
* Trouble understanding people's negative reactions to facts, and their seeming inability to understand philosophical concepts that seem very childlike and practical to me.
* Trouble keeping relationships when I don't feel they're all that beneficial to me.
* Sensory issues with freaking fleece. I HATE FLEECE. If you want to trap me, put me in a room lined with the devil's fabric.
* Stimming, but I didn't understand it was stimming until a few years ago. When I get so much energy inside, I feel like I'm going to explode, I scratch my head and let out a little high-pitched scream. It's almost like a tic I can't stop.
* Obsessive behavior on whatever topic or game I'm into at a point in time. I like understanding how things work, and that includes humans - which is why I like psychology and behaviorism.

Bottom line, because I'm highly imaginative and overly empathetic/sympathetic, I didn't think I fit the bill for ASD.






Elgee wrote:
Denial is amazing. Before I took my suspicions of ASD seriously, I came up with reasons why I couldn't possibly be autistic (I was finally recently diagnosed). I'm so mad at myself, because this delayed the diagnosis.

A few of my reasons why "I" couldn't possibly be autistic:



Last edited by H_Taterz on 18 Jun 2022, 4:50 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Age: 47
Gender: Female
Posts: 69

18 Jun 2022, 4:47 pm

:heart: this post.
@orbweaver, I feel like we're a lot alike!

I agree with pretty much all of this.
With the exception being about the 5th or 6th paragraph down where there were too many big words and my ADHD kicked in. :lol:

But no, you and I are definitely in the same book, and likely even on the same page.
I'd love to know what gaming groups you belong to! You don't have to post them publicly.
I'd also love to talk about graphic design. Right now, I'm taking some basic networking classes, to be followed by computer language courses.

If you have the energy, DM me!



orbweaver wrote:
1986,

It's possible you're a person who has an autistic early narrative but you "caught up" - you outgrew a lot of your symptoms - some few people even outgrow their diagnosis and we have no idea how many, because they're just living like average people who have a few points of Unusual Background on their character sheet. They haven't been through the therapy pipeline because they haven't presented for any kind of distress (though some of the time that may just be because they're good internalizers, like I became for a long time). They're not going to post on Reddit or WrongPlanet about it because they haven't had a reason to re-visit the autism narrative. (It might come up again once they have an autistic child.)