Reading some of the things in this thread makes me think I really have autism
Still not gonna get tested, I have a gigantic mistrust towards doctors and big pharma.
- I learned to read at a very early age, around 2 years old. My father liked to read comics and I would crawl on his lap and not only look at the pictures but ask what those squiggly symbols mean, so he'd say "This is an A", "This is a K", etc. At some point I knew all the letter sounds and blurted out the word written on a road sign while I was in the car with my parents. They were surprised I managed to read an entire word like that.
- While I had no problems developing speech, I always found conversation rules weird. My mother would remind me to say "hello" and "thank you" and "goodbye" all the time because I would often forget. I have a hard time performing small talk and casual conversation to this day, especially with strangers. It has gotten a lot better in my 30s but I still feel weird when I have to approach strangers for something. I will spend 10 minutes looking for an item in a store before I ask one of the employees where to find it, just to avoid having to go through the awkward stranger talk.
- As a kid I had weird habits that lasted into my late teens, but thankfully I managed to shake them off by my 20s. When I walked on tiled sidewalks I always had to step on the tiles and avoid stepping on the cracks. When the surface changed, I had to first touch the new surface with my right foot, not the left. So when tiled sidewalk changed to paved road, I always made super small or super wide steps depending on how much surface was left before the change. I had to walk on the surfaces
the right way or I would feel extremely uncomfortable. Same with stairs: I take the first stair with my right foot, the last stair with me left. It has to be an even number of steps, otherwise it feels wrong. If the stairs had an uneven number of steps, I would skip the last one. I'm happy I no longer feel compelled to do these things because they were a real pain in the ass.
- I never liked wearing socks, which also seems to be an autism thing? I have no problem with shoes, but socks are weird because of how closely they cling to the skin. They don't have the weight of shoes but still take away your ability to sense the surface beneath your feet. It's weird. I completely stopped wearing them about a decade ago, even in my boots. I don't mind the way shoes feel, but socks just feel restrictive, like they're caging up my sense of touch.
- Connected to that, I really like exploring surfaces by sense of touch. I love walking over different types of floors barefoot and feel the texture under my feet. When I visit friends and they have cool carpets I just walk over the carpet a couple of times to feel its texture, which usually results in some questioning looks until I say "I love how your carpet feels!" I also like running my fingers across surfaces to get a feel for their texture. Walls, railings, and so on. A friend of mine used to have a phone case with a really cool texture and I kept running my fingers over it. He found it really weird, at one point he even asked me if that was an attempt to flirt with him lmao. But no, I just
really liked the texture of his phone case. In hindsight, I realize that was a really weird thing to do. But I can't help it, I just love to touch things with cool textures.
- When I get into something, I get hyper-obsessed about it and want to explore its history and stuff everything into a category. That might be one reason why I'm so drawn to heavy metal, apart from liking the music: there are so many subgenres it becomes a joy to categorize all of them! When I find a new band I like, my mind immediately goes into categorization mode. So it's black metal, but what kind of black metal? Does it sound more like Norwegian, French, Slavic styles? What are its influences, what can I compare it to? My brain goes into this comparison / categorization / compartmentalization mode automatically, whether I'm listening to music, playing a video game, or reading a book. I just love putting things into neat little boxes, or even making up new boxes if I can't fit it anywhere.
- Talking to me about my hobbies can get very autistic very quickly. When I first met some of my gamer friends and we started talking about RPGs I think I overwhelmed them with my talk about influences and origins. "Oh you like Fallout 4? Did you know that there are actually four separate Fallout canons, and the original Fallout was inspired by Wasteland, which was a post-apocalyptic variation of the Bard's Tale formula, and its systems were inspired by an espionage-themed pen and paper game..." And at some point I was enthusing about how cool Gamma World was, and they mostly just nodded. I tend to go way too in-depth about topics I care about, and only notice days later that it might have been a little too much. Friends who know me tend to catch it and guide me back to a more casual-approachable line of conversation. I'm always very happy when I meet someone who's equally deep into a topic as I am.
Despite all that, I never thought about myself as having any sort of "condition". I was always the quirky goth/metal chick who's a little withdrawn but really passionate about her nerd shit. That's a socially accepted archetype, especially for my generation (teenage years in the 00s). But when I think about it, a lot of the things I do would come across way creepier if a guy did them, like touching a friend's phone case all the time. You'd think he was some kind of creep, right? But for a woman it's an adorable quirk.
That might be a reason women get diagnosed less often. If we do a weird thing, it's cute and quirky, if a guy does it it's weird and creepy.
