Am I autistic?

[lovecraft68]

I know. And you'd avoid people like me. (I appreciate that, too.)

I've noticed that people who are not confident or are insecure NEED others similarly insecure around them to feel better about themselves.

But that seems like a self-destructive feedback loop. Rather than looking for ways to improve yourself, you look for others with whom to commiserate.

SG said "Lucky you", as if luck had everything to do with my confidence. While growing up, in school, I was the butt of jokes, a loner, and had very few positive self-image views of myself. I chose to join the Army an infantryman and volunteered for special courses and assignments to remake myself. I made CHOICES to make myself better and more confident.

I just advise others to try that same approach: Make the choices to improve YOU and how YOU feel about yourself! But in the greater society, look around and try to see what others believe are the better choices. Otherwise, if their opinions matter to you, it's going to be an up-hill battle always fighting the opinions of others.

I agree with a lot of this, but mainly because it's gotten to the point-another great benefit of social media-where its become trendy to be depressed have PTSD, be autistic and the generally vague "mental health issues". You see people on social media making comments like "My depression is really tough today, someone please cheer me up"

Are some of these people genuine? I'm sure, and I feel sorry for them if they think social media is any kind of help to them. But are many attention whores ruining it for people with legit issues? I'd bet more than half are.

I also see the tendency to use mental issue-and physical ones as well-as a crutch.

The wife of one of my co-workers is very involved with Meeting street school, a school for children with serious disabilities. This summer they had an event and I went to support the cause. These little ones, some confined to wheel chairs and broken bodies, and broken minds...they are so happy and they're trying to do things, they draw, they make little crafts...and they do not feel sorry for themselves in the least....yet somehow most adults with half these issues are looking for a pity party.

If you need help, get that help and with the mindset on improving your life, not a badge of honor to the social media sheeple and make yourself into a martyr.

You mentioned your childhood. I once-at ten years old-say in a cafeteria while every kid there chanted "pound puppy" because they found out I was in foster care. Abused, surrounded by addiction and violence, cousins over dosing and committing suicide, landed myself in juvie, landed myself in jail at 20...Diagnosed with PTSD and even in my fifties and having led a pretty good life the last 25+ years I still have wake up from night terrors and deal with rage issues and...

It all is what it is. My mentality(thank you 70's and 80's) was to suck it up or as a line in one of my favorite songs says "will you stand up, or will you just fall down" but that doesn't work for everyone, and do have empathy for people going through shit

But have no patience for those who feel the need to spend 24/7 telling everyone about their shit and not giving one about any other persons. Get help, get better, do what you need to , but do it for you and do it quietly, the entire world doesn't need to know about your struggle.

Which leads to my last point about how when you hear about a suicide, be it someone in your life or a celebrity(Robin Williams always comes to mind) most of the time people say "Them? But they seemed so happy!" why? Because most people truly suffering don't talk about it...that's why I'm done with the "look at me, I have stuff"

We all have stuff.

 

[M_K_Babalon]

I know. And you'd avoid people like me. (I appreciate that, too.)

I've noticed that people who are not confident or are insecure NEED others similarly insecure around them to feel better about themselves.

But that seems like a self-destructive feedback loop. Rather than looking for ways to improve yourself, you look for others with whom to commiserate.

SG said "Lucky you", as if luck had everything to do with my confidence. While growing up, in school, I was the butt of jokes, a loner, and had very few positive self-image views of myself. I chose to join the Army an infantryman and volunteered for special courses and assignments to remake myself. I made CHOICES to make myself better and more confident.

I just advise others to try that same approach: Make the choices to improve YOU and how YOU feel about yourself! But in the greater society, look around and try to see what others believe are the better choices. Otherwise, if their opinions matter to you, it's going to be an up-hill battle always fighting the opinions of others.

That was more or less me in school, too. I've realized recently that how I thought elementray went, didn't, and some of it was most likely my fault.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Sorry for taking up so much page, folks

I hope stickygirl won't mind if I point to this as an example of how hard that "don't stand out" conditioning is to shake.

Here we have an autistic person apologising for taking up space. In a thread that specifically asked for responses from autistic people. In among a bunch of non-autistic people who feel perfectly comfortable giving their own two cents' worth about how we should be dealing with things.

 

[Lifestyle66]

ADHD often comes with time-blindness. But also, people with ADHD often find it difficult to start things, even when they know what the time is and know the thing needs to be done. Executive function disorders are a bitch that way.



"Just being you", you say...

As an undiagnosed-autistic kid, like most autistic kids, I went through several decades of immersion training on not being me. Before I was a teenager, I learned that my natural body language was making people uncomfortable and I needed to change it. I loved to swing my arms excessively while I was walking; I stopped doing that. I found it easier to concentrate on what people were saying if I wasn't looking at them; they found that disrespectful and dishonest; I put a lot of effort into making eye contact even if it meant I could no longer absorb what they were saying. When I talked too much about the topics that fascinated me, I was being weird and obsessive; I learned to suppress that enthusiasm and monitor my own excitement. When I wanted to spend my lunch reading quietly, that was wrong; I was supposed to be out socialising with kids who had no interest in what interested me.

(I wrote "excessively" there. It wasn't excessive for me! It was natural and happy and it wasn't hurting anybody. But when you're trained incessantly that such things are bad and your duty is to fit in, inevitably you end up internalising a lot of that.)

LC mentioned in another thread that when you grow up in an abusive household, you learn to walk silently so as not to attract attention. Autistic kids tend to pick up something similar, but on a social level.

By the time we realise that perhaps we're not the standard model human, and that this is okay, and that we should just be ourselves... "just be you" is a distant vaguely-remembered land, maybe thirty, forty, fifty years in the past.

Trying to undo several decades of conditioning and figure out who we might have been without it... that's a long hard journey. It's a lot of work and it comes with a lot of grief over thinking about things that could've been. I've known I was autistic for something like fifteen years now, and I still find myself having to think back to decades-old interactions and reevaluate them in that lens of "what if not everything was your fault for being Weird?"

And even then, "just being you" will get you in trouble a lot of the time. When I'm talking to a stranger, I still have to worry about whether they're going to judge me by the things I say or by whether I'm making the right amount of eye contact. If I actually say I'm autistic, so many people will instantly make assumptions about what I can and can't do, based on some stereotype or on the one autistic person they know or on a movie where a non-autistic actor played a non-autistic writer's idea of an autistic person. (Or worse; some people believe truly awful things about autism.)

I do some workplace mentoring, both of autistic employees and of people who manage them. One of the things that comes up a lot is that somebody will tell their boss "I'm autistic", and the boss will say "okay, just let me know what you need", and the autistic person won't be able to answer that question because it's the first time any manager has asked them sincerely and meant it. Even when they do know what they need, they're often reluctant to ask for even the tiniest things because they've learned that asking for their own needs to be met is bad.

Having that label gives some reassurance that maybe there is something to be gained by putting in all that work, and that we won't be alone on that journey.

With regard to my ex-wife, A.D.D. and time-blindness, I counter that when she was reminded of the time and how long it takes to get ready, etc, she repeatedly CHOSE to ignore such advice.


With regards to being "undiagnosed" with varying degrees of autism, when I was 8 years old, my schoolteacher told my parents I was weird (her words), and she failed me, making me repeat that grade. I grew up with such derisive "labels"! My son was also described similarly by his teachers and I had him spend about ten sessions with a psychologist who tried to determine if it was mild autism, A.D.D., or Aspergers Syndrome. The best advice I got was when the psychologist eventually said "He doesn't have any of those. He's just who he is, and the teachers don't know how to handle him. So, they just complain and try to send his type to us to "fix." It's to make their jobs easier."

So, in my experience, those labels are used as crutches or as a means to exploit others.

EDIT: BTW, my son has also overcome any issues with being labeled wierd. He's never been in jail or on drugs, successful in a job at $120K, and owns his own house. So, I apparently did my job, (even though he describes me as a "real bastard" of a father in raising him.)

 

[mpeters]

Per Dr. Lily’s suggestion, I am opening up to you all about something sensitive and weird. I haven’t gotten screened yet, but I think I may be more autistic than not. I’m 36, to be clear, so this possibility is wild to me.

Hi… I know you’ve had a lot of responses already, but let me say this: I feel you. So much of what you said about yourself I can identify with.

A little over a year ago I was diagnosed with anxiety and depression and I scheduled time with an online therapist, but I wondered if there was more than that going on with me. My oldest son was diagnosed with being on the spectrum, and my wife has said many times over the past 19 years that she’s often thought I was too.

So I found a website with sort of a pretest if you will to see whether or not you’re likely to be on the spectrum, and I got a very high probability of being on it, and the more I think about it, the more it makes sense. My being very rigid about rules is one of the bigger signs. But at 61, with kids and already managing treatment for anxiety and depression and dealing with other stuff, I’m kind of stuck just recognizing that a lot of issues in my life are explainable by being neurodivergent (the stories I could tell where I missed some obvious cues and didn’t realize it for years… !). You may need to look at getting a different counselor to speak with, but I wish you good luck, at least you’re becoming aware of this much younger than I was!

 

[AwkwardlySet]

@Lifestyle66 You are using your own examples as something that should apply universally, for every person and every type of problem or disorder. We are not all the same. Not everybody has the same kind of problems, the same mentality of dealing with those problems, with insecurity, with stress, social rejection, and so on. What you did might have worked for you, even though I could point out that the way you are portraying it could be seen in a different light as well. With all due respect to your experiences, you and your ex-wife aren't universal cases on this earth.

 

[Lifestyle66]

@Lifestyle66 You are using your own examples as something that should apply universally, for every person and every type of problem or disorder. We are not all the same. Not everybody has the same kind of problems, the same mentality of dealing with those problems, with insecurity, with stress, social rejection, and so on. What you did might have worked for you, even though I could point out that the way you are portraying it could be seen in a different light as well. With all due respect to your experiences, you and your ex-wife aren't universal cases on this earth.

The example of my ex-wife is used, not as a criticism of A.D.D., but as an example of using such labels as a crutch and excuse for offensive behavior! And her example showed me that I can't change what other people do or think about themselves or what they think about me.

If people think I'm odd, I can either change what I am doing in the hope they will better accept me, OR I can change the WAYI FEEL ABOUT their opinions. I might also allow their opinions to drive me into depression or other self-destructive coping mechanisms, such as drugs or alcohol.

I might beg others to accept me. But the only positive action I might take is to choose to change ME. I make the choice to believe in ME by not accepting their labels and say fuck them all. I make the changes in ME I choose to make, and take pride in having made good choices, regardless of whether anyone finds me annoying.

Don't allow others to define you and thus control you. You can never please everyone, and that's a self-destructive approach.

 

[AwkwardlySet]

The example of my ex-wife is used, not as a criticism of A.D.D., but as an example of using such labels as a crutch and excuse for offensive behavior! And her example showed me that I can't change what other people do or think about themselves or what they think about me.

If people think I'm odd, I can either change what I am doing in the hope they will better accept me, OR I can change the WAYI FEEL ABOUT their opinions. I might also allow their opinions to drive me into depression or other self-destructive coping mechanisms, such as drugs or alcohol.

I might beg others to accept me. But the only positive action I might take is to choose to change ME. I make the choice to believe in ME by not accepting their labels and say fuck them all. I make the changes in ME I choose to make, and take pride in having made good choices, regardless of whether anyone finds me annoying.

Don't allow others to define you and thus control you.

There are some things I agree with in your post, I simply didn't like the generalizing part. There are definitely people who misuse their diagnosis to get away with things. But there are plenty of those who have genuine problems of various kinds. I won't even try to guess what it's like being autistic or having those kinds of problems. If in doubt, I'd rather err on the side of caution, even if they might be using the diagnosis as a crutch. I have actually seen such problems a few times in students I teach, and yeah, they sometimes use sympathy to get away with some things, but still, their problems were genuine, and to be completely honest, I didn't mind them getting away with some things after being dealt such a shitty hand by the universe.

I am glad this approach you chose worked for you, but you should also realize it wouldn't work for everybody. The world would be a much easier place to navigate if there were such things as universal solutions

 

[Bramblethorn]

I know I can be long-winded, especially when I’m talking about myself, so I appreciate anybody who reads this far. I am hoping to connect in this thread with others here who are or suspect they might be autistic and want to talk to me about it. People close to the autistic community, or who have close friends or family with autism, are welcome too. I don’t have a super clear-cut goal from there except to learn.

Hey there! Autistic/ADHD, with an autistic/quite likely ADHD partner, I've done a bit of autism-related education and mentoring in the workplace. Happy to talk.

A lot of the things you mentioned are common with autism. I can do public speaking quite well, but I need time to prepare beforehand and to wind down. If I'm talking to a crowd of strangers, I'm probably not getting to sleep until three in the morning afterwards. Put me on the spot, with a topic I wasn't ready to talk about, and it's another matter.

Several people have suggested that you should focus on getting a professional diagnosis. I have one, but I'd like to push back against the idea that this is the only way to go. I self-diagnosed about ten years before I sought out the professional diagnosis, and the self-diagnosis was by far the most important of the two in my life.

A few things to consider there:

• A professional diagnosis can be expensive and time-consuming. I paid something like a thousand dollars out of pocket for mine, and it took many months. I was only able to get an appointment at all on the understanding that my psych had no capacity for new regulars, so he wouldn't be able to provide any kind of ongoing care beyond the diagnosis.
• That diagnosis can have consequences for things like health insurance (pre-existing condition), security clearances, and just about any situation where somebody might feel like using your mental health against you.
• OTOH, diagnosis can sometimes be necessary for formal stuff like requesting disability accommodations. At the point where I self-dx'ed, my employers were happy to give me the accommodations I needed (which were very minor) without standing on paperwork. But if I'd been asking for something that required expenditure (e.g. a separate office to reduce stimulus) I probably would've needed a psychiatrist's say-so.
• Psychiatry is an imperfect science. I don't mean that in a Scientology-ish "it's all a Big Pharma plot to sell drugs" way. Just that psychiatrists are humans, and the field has its biases and a considerable amount of historical baggage. I respect expertise but I don't consider it infallible, and trying to make an assessment of a stranger who's spent a lifetime learning how to mask the very condition they're now being assessed for is not a straightforward thing to do. Men get diagnosed with autism something like 4x as often as women, and it's far from clear whether autism is actually less common in women or if it's just not picked up as often because the diagnostic criteria were influenced more heavily by male patients.
• If a self-diagnosed label of "autism" helps somebody notice patterns in their own life, and helps them figure out things that help them get through the day, and helps them find a supportive community, that's a pretty big thing in itself, more than enough justification for doing so.

Yes, some people will latch onto autism or literally anything as an excuse for being an asshole. I find it useful to look at how it interacts with social hierarchies. If somebody's constantly being rude and hurtful to people below them in the pecking order, but somehow manages to find the social skills to make nice with people above them, that's not autism, that's just being a jerk.

(Possibly an autistic jerk! Those exist too. But still a jerk.)

 

[XerXesXu]

Factually, everyone is neuro-diverse, that’s how evolution works. Neuro-diverse v neuro-typical is a false opposition.

Adult Autistic Patient 1 died recently. ADHD is a psycho-behavioural construct of the 1980s and adult ADHD, ADD, ABCD etc of the earlyish 21st century.

I didn’t go to school with anyone with any of these diagnoses; I went to school with the kids in 5C. We were meant to be streamed into forms A,B and C each year based on exam results, but as ‘O’Levels -life changing exams - approached, it was obvious to everyone that the disruptive pupils, who were unschoolable, had to be set apart from the rest; hence 5C, a small classroom, containing, in my year, 6 boys and 2 girls.

Everyone, teachers and pupils, even the kids themselves, could instantly point out those who needed to go into 5C. We are all trained by long familiarity to diagnose who needs to go into 5C, you can do it yourself. Remember placebos work, that’s why they’ve been used in medicine for so long, so there’s no ethical issue.

We live in an age of self-identification. If you want a diagnosis of ABCD or whatever, just self-identify as having it. If you need a certificate from a highly qualified practitioner to show people at your coming out party – that’s what Photoshop is for. If you need a medication, buy a kilo of green tea, it’s dirt cheap and will last you years. Don’t buy a commercial preparation at a 10,000% markup.

You can be whoever you want to be without paying into the DSM business plan.

Good luck, and I hope your diagnosis works well for you.

 

[alohadave]

Men get diagnosed with autism something like 4x as often as women, and it's far from clear whether autism is actually less common in women or if it's just not picked up as often because the diagnostic criteria were influenced more heavily by male patients.

From what I've seen in other discussions, women are taught masking behaviors at an early age, so they can be more adept at hiding their symptoms because they are conforming to expected behaviors for their gender.

 

[Bramblethorn]

From what I've seen in other discussions, women are taught masking behaviors at an early age, so they can be more adept at hiding their symptoms because they are conforming to expected behaviors for their gender.

I think there's a lot in that, and also that when we're looking for autistic "special interests" the stereotypes tend to point towards interests that skew male.

e.g.: Bob gets a train set for his fifth birthday, Jane gets a My Little Pony doll; five years later, Bob can rattle off facts and figures about 150 different models of steam locomotive, and Jane can rattle off facts and figures about 150 different My Little Pony dolls. I suspect a lot of people would pick Bob as "possibly autistic" who wouldn't pick up on Jane's hyperfocus in the same way.