Tell us you were late-diagnosed/discovered as autistic without telling us directly
Tell us you were late-diagnosed/discovered as autistic without telling us directly
Tell us that you discovered you were autistic as an adult without directly telling us that. Imply it by sharing personal experiences.
I'm not diagnosed, only lately suspecting, but well, one experience that stuck with me, was on a communications training at my workplace, which is an IT company, so the participants were a whole sack of nerds.
The trainer gave us instructions to stand in a line next to each other, she'd read forms of communication and we should take a step forward, if we did not like that form of communcation.
So, "e-mail" → 3 people take a step forward,
"phone call" → 7 people take a step forward etc..At the end of it, I turned around to see where the others ended up and realized I had walked almost twice as far as everyone else. And I felt like I was rather conservative about it, too...
"I don't like communicating through e-mails, phone calls, video calls, group calls, group video calls, and I feel awkward in a group chat like Slack. I dread group meetings, I get nervous one-on-one in the open office and during private conversations in a separate room. I can't hold a presentation for a group, or for a single person. I also get anxious when writing replies to text messages and end up with a wall of text, I then have to spend up to an hour editing it down to not sound insane, seriously considering every single sentence and whether I can comfortably leave that information out. Oh, and snail mail and fax are ridiculous. "Talking it out over lunch" makes me distracted as I worry about eating incorrectly.
But I am comfortable posting anonymously on a forum..?"
lol thats a good one 😆
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Ok, so this is an autistic thing too? I thought it was just my training from lab work seeping into real life.
It could be both or that your innate desire to be efficient lead you to that position
My whole life, I have lived by adhering to rules and protocols. Nearly everything I do is based on a decision flow chart that follows internal protocols I have developed throughout my life that I consciously think about when making decisions and then, of course, lessons learned after the event. When I'm alone, I explain these processes out loud to my imaginary audience.
There are only 2 areas in which I do not do this: art and sex. For some reason, in those two areas, I just disconnect and go with feeling. It's like I'm not even thinking. However, everything else is a consciously thought out process.
I once told a coworker when discussing a creative process, "that works for you, but I think in bullet points and black & white."
I don't understand why people with autistic kids describe their kids needs as special. These needs are all completely normal. There must be some misunderstanding.
...oh
lmaoooooo 😂
I've heard so many accounts of parents learning they were autistic because their kids were discovered to be autistic.
Yeap that'd be me. We always joked about it growing up, but once I took my son to his first screening I was a bit freaked out.
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When work is slow and stable I'm bored out of my fuckin mind but when shit hits the fan and I've got minimal staffing I can cover 4 stations at once faster than most people could cover 1
omg! Before I was discovered as autistic, I got got put on buspar for anxiety per my complaints. It worked so well, that I had no desire to do anything. I told the doc that I needed to come off of it because I needed anxiety to keep me motivated to accomplish tasks. Really, I just needed the stimulation. 😆
When someone pointed out that I had made the same meal for dinner for most of my meals every week, for 4 months.
4 months? Those are rookie numbers.
Well I've been eating the same breakfast and lunch meals for years. It's just that this instance was the one that made me start looking into Autism.
Just reorganized my collection of 18092 PDF files by renaming them based on 12-word criteria pattern. Which is funny, since the number of files corresponds with the majority of the registration number of USCSS Nostromo.
All done by hand.
Lazy Saturday. Depending on the timezone, also Friday and Sunday.
Can you tell more about the pattern?
I have 3 projects at work, a project a home, plus chores, and a routine for feeding the animals and keeping the house clean, which I can't adhere to, so lump them in as chores, and I have to talk with friends regularly about twice a week, assuming I'm not overwhelmed and sit in dead silence, and the projects at work overwhelm me, so the project at home suffers, which overwhelms me, so chores don't get done, and that overwhelms me, and I talk to friends, but they can tell I'm overwhelmed and they ask me what's wrong, which overwhelms me, so I sit in front of YouTube and get high.
I just started on my meds a week ago. Here's hoping.
I like to recite grammar rules or language facts to myself when I'm feeling stressed out, almost like a form of meditation.
I got super excited when I discovered we had a whole department at work dedicated to maintaining all the back end customer/vendor/product data in our systems.
Now I'm in it, and I love it so much.
In the last few years I started to describe myself as an introvert-extrovert with a social battery.
Behold my bewilderment when I found out it's masked auDHD.
I recently found out that it's not common to always buy the same brand of generic food types like apple juice, fish fingers, cereal,...
Wait...people are just changing up brands haphazardly when they go shopping? Do they investigate the brand and make a rational choice beforehand, or are they 1700s trans-Atlantic risk-takers just upheaving their entire lives on a whim?
get this right, it genuinely shocked me too. some people just... look at the product, and then go "i'll buy that!" and then they buy it. they are not even making a conscious choice when doing this. their brain intuitively tells them "yes, this one" and they don't have to think it out.
more often than not, the product that wins is the product with the better or "flashy" packaging and style. that's one reason why they spend all that money on advertising and branding. to me, it's sooo strange. why would you not read up on your choice beforehand, or at least investigate each packet to check for food aversions, find out which one is the best $/unit value, etc? why should the packet the food is in, have any substantial bearing on your choice of purchase? (there are edge cases where the packet matters, i know)
to answer your question, yeah there is a lot of risk-takers out there!😱
Define "late"
It's a loose definition, but to give a definite definition with ambition of decision: after childhood, so 18+ years old. It doesn't really matter though.
"..and that was so annoying, like, why are they arguing with my diagnosis"
"Huh. I suppose I'm still arguing with mine"
Whenever I get stressed I find something to alphabetize.