My stepdad is a great and nice guy, and I’ve suspected for a while that he might be autistic. He’s very quiet and reserved, rarely shows strong emotion. Chuckles rather than laughter. He’s also fixated on certain things and hobbies, and can talk/ramble about them for quite a long time. He likes puzzles and, what have been given to him, legos. Putting together and taking apart things.
Like I said, no hard evidence, but I could see it.
The more I read and the more I understand about autism the more my life suddenly makes sense.
My wife apparently fully believed I was autistic and thought that I knew I was as well.
I didn’t find this out until after we were married.
She would say stuff every once in a while that I took as a poor joke, nothing really mean, just stuff about how I was autistic. That’s not her style of humor so I always found it weird but it never bothered me so I would just play along. One time about a year after we got married, known eachother for 9 years at this point, she make one of those “jokes” and I asked her why she why she said that. It led to a very awkward and humorous drive home.
I decided to look into a bit and I can absolutely see why she thought that. Looking back at it now she’s always done things to protect me in certain ways and make me comfortable, she always just knew me, better than myself I guess.
my mother. for the longest time i thought her personality traits were merely her sucking as a person. she was abused and beaten her whole life and the anger she felt made her rotten. as i grew older i started learning about autism and even became close friends with someone who, at the time, was diagnosed with Asperger’s. then some time in my 20s i learned that my cousin was being suspected of being on the spectrum by his doctors. i started putting the pieces together then. my mother doesn’t understand human interaction. i used to think she was just an impatient, easily bothered, mean, grumpy asshole. but now i see her responding largely out of confusion and not being able to process how disorienting that is. she has gotten better with therapy, thankfully, but at one point in her life she was too difficult to be around. two things she does that make me think she could be autistic is she takes everything literally. she is extremely bad at understanding sarcasm unless it is explicitly laid out lol. also, she just doesn’t find a lot of things funny. it’s not that she has no sense of humor she just doesn’t “get” comedy. she’s also very avoidant of people.
All the damn time. For older generations, getting diagnosed was a taboo. So people who learned to mask well enough were just that person with a lot of hobbies, who struggled to fit in or seemed like they didn’t even try to NTs. I’m pretty sure it runs in my family. Though I’m the first to get a diagnosis I think.
I have a buddy that will randomly call me on the phone to discuss a cool fact he learned. “Undiagnosed but everyone is pretty sure” To be clear it is awome and I love that guy
Fantastic type of Guy
How is he with sarcasm? I have so many autism traits that I tend to vibe well with autistic people, but I’m also naturally very sarcastic and that’s something they pretty much always don’t like.
In his case, I think he likes/understands sarcasm and makes sarcastic jokes pretty often.
It seems autists tend to either not get sarcasm or have it practically be their first language (I am in the latter camp).
My sister is neurodivergent; but not autistic.
She was my trailblazer and my relationship w her is significantly stronger w her than anyone else in my family because of it.
The rest continue to insist that it’s all simply in my head and that I should just “snap out of it” 🙄
I feel like half my friends and family are neurodivergent in some way or another.
There’s a theory about this and the way neurodivergent people gravitate towards each other due to similar communication styles. Has to do with the double empathy theory as well. I wish I’d have a link, but I don’t.
Personally once I started to see it, I see it in most of my family members and also those friends that stick around or co-workers I get along with the easiest. And I also see that lot of the incompatibility issues and fall outs that I’ve experienced can probably be explained by this.
Yet sometimes deeply masked fellow neurospicys can be the worst, but it does help to get where they are coming from if I can understand the masking.
double empathy theory
I hadn’t heard of that, but it makes a lot of sense.
Yeah my manager. And we think I was right.
Yo, same.
A professor in my MBA, that was kinda confirmed when she projected her youtube frontpage full on “autism in adults” video recommendations.
My entire moms side of the family is some flavor of neurodivergent. We talked about it the other day and she let on to me that she was in the 1950s/60s version of special ed because she had what today would be considered a learning disability. That’s when I realized why my parents were so adamant about keeping me in “normal” education even though I was bored out of my mind because I was smarter than the rest of the kids. They refused to have me tested for anything…. As an adult I got diagnosed with ADHD and I’m almost positive I’m autistic as well. And out of boredom I took an IQ test while waiting for my moms apt to finish up and scored a point below genius….
I pick up on patterns so much faster than most people to the point that it’s annoying. For example, I knew the company I worked for was for sale a whole year before it went public, not because I had any insider info but because I could see the moves being made were ones a company would make if it was trying to sell.
Pretty much everyone in academia and engineering that I’ve met I clock as being at least a bit autistic, though relatively low support needs. The people who identified as “less autistic” or “not autistic” were either weirdly low trauma or had some political motivation to worship normality (e.g. conservative gamer bros at uni).
im 99% sure my MILs husband is, and I suspect their daughter is as well.
