I think it needs to become common knowledge that "inability to read social cues" can show up as overcompensating.

You don't know how much misbehaviour is allowed, so you become the perfect child who never tests rules.

You don't know if someone is irritated with you, so you'll be extra generous and self-effacing.

You don't know how much is expected of you at work so you'll kill yourself in a minimum-wage job and not notice that nobody else is working like this.

"Hardworking and quiet" should be as much of an autism red flag as "ignores rules and doesn't know when to stop talking". Or why don't we just start using words to communicate so i can stop tracking everybody's eyebrow twitches, that would be great.

Vogue Italia Jan 1993 - Eva Herzigova by Walter Chin

autism screening quizzes will be like “do you take things too literally” and then ask fifty of the worst-worded questions ever dreamt up by man

A while ago I read about autistic people and nesting somewhere & I think we don't talk about that enough. Apparently, a lot of autistic people like nesting. I love nesting. I carefully choose a space to build my nest and I bring all my little trinkets there. I surround myself with everything I love and everything I could possibly need in the next few hours- my water bottle, a snack, my weighted blanket, my soft blanket, hand creme, my headphones, my charger, my favorite stuffed animals- so I don't have to leave the nest to get anything. It makes me feel save and calm and like everything is gonna be ok. This is a nesting appreciation post. Any other autistics who love a good nest?

reading about how autistic women are more likely to be victims of sexual assault really adds a whole other perspective to victim blaming- "she should have known better, she shouldn't have invited him in, she shouldn't have worn that." autistic people tend to be very honest and literal, and won't always be prepared for the subtleties of dating and "implications" of certain actions. this goes for highly intelligent, "high functioning" or "aspie" people too, i.e., people who don't need caretakers and may not know they are on the spectrum. this is vital to consider when discussing sexual social cues and the "responsibilities" of women to protect themselves from men.

Yeah, I agree with the comments in the notes. Funny how men who don’t respect boundaries get the get out of jail free card of “oh, maybe he was autistic, he probably didn’t know any better, he just didn’t get social cues im sure he’s a really nice guy etc etc” but there’s suspiciously no “oh, maybe she was autistic, she didn’t mean to lead him on, she didn’t mean to be rude to him, she didn’t mean to break his heart, she just didn’t get social cues”. Why do creepy autistic men get all these excuses but autistic women like me get accused of leading men on and would probably be victim blamed if we got raped by a male friend? This is why I refuse to have male friends/aquaintances oh my god this shit is awful

Stained Glass Transom window hanging 36 14 X 13 incl hooks ebay steven9416

I think it needs to become common knowledge that "inability to read social cues" can show up as overcompensating.

You don't know how much misbehaviour is allowed, so you become the perfect child who never tests rules.

You don't know if someone is irritated with you, so you'll be extra generous and self-effacing.

You don't know how much is expected of you at work so you'll kill yourself in a minimum-wage job and not notice that nobody else is working like this.

"Hardworking and quiet" should be as much of an autism red flag as "ignores rules and doesn't know when to stop talking". Or why don't we just start using words to communicate so i can stop tracking everybody's eyebrow twitches, that would be great.

Sometimes (though not nearly as often) you get subtypes of this where overcompensating even grows into a special interest. I'm looking at you, autistic actors, psychologists, etiquette experts, interculturalists, anthropologists, sociologists, hospitality gurus, fiction writers, philosophers... All you bemused scholars of humanity.

"Ah, this doesn't apply to me... after years of intense study, I can reliably read most social cues!"

When you spend all day in a performance where you are so incredibly Normal and Socially Skilled and then collapse into a nonverbal puddle as soon as you get home, that's an autism.

...

Also. "Not picking up on social cues" is a frame of the situation which looks in from the outside, where "social cues" are a mundane, obvious facet of reality.

As an internal experience, it feels more like: "Most other human beings are weird and unpredictable, especially in groups. They seem to have shared sets of secret rules and nearly imperceptible ways of communicating which lead to erratic, disturbing behavior."

In addition: if you notice that your ability to parse and respond to social cues suddenly goes to absolute shit when you are tired or distracted... you might be looking at hypervigilant social compensation. like a swan gliding through a pond full of sailboats. sure, you might actually be more maneuverable and faster than the sailboats in some circumstances, but boy howdy are those little feets paddling underneath the surface..

....oh.

So much this.

I’m SCREAMING, I just had the seminar on autism for the first time and our TA just asked if we already know something about the topic and I just had to hold back bursting out “yes I’m autistic so of effing course”… This is going to be great lmao.

@melancholyflowerboy that’s a really good idea! I haven’t decided yet on when I want to bring it up…

Like I mentioned, I already had her as TA in two seminars (they were both on the topic “sextypical development” and thus we also briefly learned about autism as well). She’s a really honest person and very laidback which is nice, her class is interactive which is super rare. And she really likes me and often agreed with the points I made during arguments.

She has already finished studying a while ago and is working at my university. She’s doing studies on autistic people and she’s been working with them. In the seminar I have now, we are focusing solely on autism and treatment methods (diagnosis and therapy). And while doing that, we’re working on actual case files that she collected during her work with autistic people. And there are two who are similar to me - a boy who’s been misdiagnosed with ADHD as a child and who’s hyperintelligent and a girl who’s been diagnosed at seventeen (I’ve been diagnosed around half a year after my eighteenth birthday).

Thus I think she might already suspect that I’m autistic. She had plenty of time to observe my behavior and I also made it known that I do research on the topic in my free time… The semester just started this week… I’m not sure if I want to mention it now or if I should wait until we’re finished with our presentation or if I should do it after the courses are over in order to not influence her grading process.

Well, this is going to be really interesting either way. I’m excited to see how it turns out and it would be so rad if she’s autistic, too (I noticed a few symptoms and the only other person I ever suspected to be autistic found out that she is as well). For example, she’s really not good at eye contact and sometimes even turns her face away completely when speaking to you or the entire class. In front of the class she speaks out loud what she’s thinking and often her thoughts make little jumps. Therefore she explains her train of thought often. She uses a lot of gestures while talking and when she walks with empty hands, she does the typical Autistic Raptor Hands™ just like I do…

I’m excited, really. This is going to be something. (but we’ll also talk about stuff like ABA…) And this was just my first day this semester.

I have been gone for ages, but I just wanted to say that YES, she knew I was autistic in the first seminar in the first semester and that she was actually autistic, too.

Was a very validating experience, because to this day, therapist try to diagnose me with other shit and doubt the autism diagnosis due to my childhood trauma.

something that people really dont understand about ADHD is that we dont “jump from one idea to the next”

we have very fast, very associative minds that connect ideas. we have a train of thought, it just goes WAY faster than yours!

example: im thinking about dogs. that makes me think of pitbulls, which makes me think of an animal planet show i enjoy. the show connects to tv in general, which makes me think of my favorite cartoon. i associate my favorite cartoon with art and animation, and i wind up thinking about shading techniques.

TL;DR: having ADHD is kinda like playing a lifelong game of 7 Degrees of Kevin Bacon

…WHAT THE FUCK

I am plagued by this but also that associative learning makes it really easy to be a hyper-generalist in terms of skills and knowledge.

This is how my brain works….

The downside is, very few people can keep pace with these jumps, and I’ve actually been told my “mind leaps” are annoying.

Yeah.

Let that sink in.

Being told that the way my mind makes connections between Point A and Point D while seemingly bypassing B and C is “annoying”.

… this.

It drives my husband absolutely NUTS- we’ll be having a conversation and in a lull between sentences I’ll have jumped ahead six topics, pop back in with a “Yeah, and-“

Meanwhile, he’s looking at me like I’ve grown another head. To him, whatever I’ve just said is a total non sequitur, but I can track EXACTLY how I got there… it just doesn’t make any sort of sense to anyone but me.

Oh, hey. Apparently I’m officially 40yrs old. I am now five years past the average lifespan of an autistic.

And 38 years past the estimated lifespan your doctors expected when you were born with a jacked up heart. :P

38 year AND 31 years AND 22 years AND 10 years… Glad they finally decided my cybernetics will Outlast me because it was getting confusing keeping track of my life expectancy!

if you have all three you win

Hey Leute,

Ich bin zur Zeit am Überlegen, ob ich versuchen sollte eine offizielle Diagnose zu bekommen.

Ich habe noch keine, da mir zum einen Schule sehr lag, ich also im Unterricht keine Probleme hatte. So mit meinen Mitschülern konnte ich nie was anfangen und die nichts mit mir. Meine Eltern hatten schon seit der Zeit den Verdacht, dass ich autistisch bin, haben sich jedoch nie um eine Diagnose gekümmert, da sie mich nicht "zwingen" wollten. Haben dabei aber voll übersehen, dass ich nicht in der Lage war, dass aus eigenem Antrieb zu schaffen.

So das erste mal größere Probleme hatte ich wärend meinem ehrenamtlichen Jahr bei einem sozialen Verein. Da hatte ich jedoch von den anderen sehr gute Unterstützung, so dass es im großen und ganzen kein Problem war.

Im Studium kam ich auch ganz gut alleine klar, bis dann die Praxisphase meiner Bachelorarbeit kam und ich schon nach 3 von 5 Monaten so erschöpft war, dass jeder Tag nur noch ein Kampf ums wach bleiben war.

Jetzt bin ich mit meinem Bachelor fertig und wollte zurück in die Heimat und einen Master machen, dort wurde ich jedoch nicht angenommen weswegen ich jetzt auf der Suche nach einer Arbeitsstelle bin. Hab aber gleichzeitig große Angst, dass ich auch dort sehr schnell einfach überlastet sein werde, auch wenn es mir Spaß macht.

Und jetzt frag ich mich halt, ob mir die Diagnose Autismus in irgendeiner Art und Weise helfen könnte, oder ob sie jetzt nur noch Nachteile bringen würde.

Habt ihr da Antworten?

- Mod Koala

An sich kann es schon sein, dass dir die Diagnose da helfen könnte. Mit einer Diagnose würde es dir zustehen, gewisse Hilfen zu bekommen, die deinen Arbeitsalltag angenehmer gestalten. Es kann aber auch sein, dass die Hilfsmaßnahmen, die dir zur Verfügung gestellt werden, dir nicht viel bringen. Es wäre da sehr sinnvoll, sich mal vorher schlau zu machen, was geht und was nicht geht in dem Bereich, in dem du arbeiten willst.

An sich kann es sein, dass du mit einer Diagnose "attraktiver" für manche Arbeitgeber wirst, weil sie eine gewisse quote an Menschen erfüllen wollen, die eine behinderung/sonstige Benachteiligung haben. So war das z. B. bei einer Freundin von mir, die durch ihr Nierenversagen einen 100% GdB hat.

Es kann allerdings auch sein, dass du eher abgelehnt wirst, da Autismus immer noch sehr stigmatisiert ist.

Ich würde dir empfehlen erstmal zu gucken, wohin du willst. Ich persönlich habe auch einen Beruf gefunden, in dem ich mit meinem Autismus am besten umgehen kann und nicht darauf angewiesen bin, mir von einem Arbeitgeber Hilfen zu holen. Für mich wäre eine offizielle Diagnose sogar nachteilig, da ich dann nicht so leicht eine gute Versicherung finden würde und ich mich nunmal selbst versichern muss.

Lange Rede, kurzer Sinn - informier dich am besten mal darüber, was du machen möchtest und wie es andern Leuten mit Behinderung in dem Bereich / bei diesem Arbeitgeber geht. Danach kannst du dann weiter überlegen, ob du dir eine Diagnose holen möchtest oder nicht.

Autistic Person: "Can you start accepting me instead of trying to change me?"

Allistic Person: "No. You're weird. Weirdness should never be accepted. You have to learn how to fit in so you can function in society."

Autistic Person: "Fine. I'll follow your rules. But can you at least tell me what the rules are?"

Allistic Person: "No. Following the rules has to come naturally. If it doesn't, then you're on your own."

Autistic Person: "And people say that I'm the unreasonable one."

tafw someone doesn’t respond the way you wanted to your infodumping so you just immediately go like “Guess i’ll die”

that autistic feel when you can jump from either extreme of “overly expressive” to “barely any facial movements” drastically

Auditory processing disorder is like YouTube’s auto-generated subtitles. It hears words but cannot process them into an understandable sentence

this is…a way too excellent description….don’t know how to process this

And sometimes it’s like first of all hearing someone make weird sounds until your brain is able to puzzle the meaning together. As if someone was speaking a language you don’t know and there was a tiny translator in your brain who makes sense of it all for you but is only able to translate once the sentence is concluded.

Person: Uhhi geeefahr derrings beghyasturdi

(My brain, computing:????)

Me: What?

(My brain, after computing: I gave her earrings back yesterday.)

Person: I gave her ear-

Me: ah, was she happy about that?