Autism
I find it very difficult to write this and yet I still want to push on because of the content feeling I get out of it. The thing is I have to understand what I am and what I'm not and I have to come to terms with these things. Perhaps I'm not really sure what exactly I am entirely but I have some ideas, given the title of this post I bet you can understand one aspect of who I am. I am autistic. And that may come as a surprise to some of you? But not necessarily to all of you.
I think the reasons as to why I find it difficult to write about this are kinda obvious, there is obviously a huge stigma to being autistic. Being autistic is the epitome of cringe culture and is generally accepted that if you're autistic you must not be very good at socialising. You see this in the furry community all the time with the constant lampooning of gangles and socially inept individuals that are omnipresent in our fandom. For those that don't make fun of them there are those who simply pity them for having a mental disability. And so of course I'm gonna feel defensive about this aspect of myself because for most I seem like a very sociable guy whose not really a gangle or awkward or anything like that but being autistic is so associated with that I feel if I say "I'm autistic" then people will associate perhaps normal social undoings as a symptom of this condition. Or maybe I just feel people will feel I'm a bit of a loser, whether they outright say it or not I can imagine people projecting some level of inferiority on me for having this condition. So I don't say I have it.
Which seems fine right? A mental condition doesn't have to be everyone else's concern, especially when, I feel, most people can't really tell you have it. So then why do I feel I want to announce it now? In this regard this is more for me than anything, I've been pondering why I haven't been so social lately. I've been drifting away from many different social events and have kinda had a hard time moving to social events. This is kinda normal for a lot of people on the furry fandom right? But in this case I don't think it's normal. Let us go through the normal reasons why someone could drift from social events:
- Anxiety: Although I do have some aspects of anxiety I don't have social anxiety. In fact I'm pretty outgoing and confident in general with what I have to do, especially when I know someone well. I've analysed this carefully and I know that when I don't want to go socialising it is not fear that holds me back from it.
- Introversion: This is a likely one in that I'm simply introverted. Yet it feels more complicated then that, I have a lot of people saying I'm introverted but just as many believing I'm extroverted. When I am socialising with someone I do get energy from it when I actually enjoy the conversation and even when I'm getting a lot of energy I still sometimes feel the need to go away from the social engagement.
- Depression: I pondered that maybe I'm depressed? A lot of this social withdrawal comes from the idea that the effort of the social engagement is not worth the reward, which might be confused with apathy. The thing is while I do feel like I may have some elements of very mild depression, I don't believe depression by itself is what is causing me to disengage.
And so now I'm considering another option that I suppose I've been too scared or too resilient to kinda address, what if I'm disengaging from socialising because of autism. So this article is there to explore that idea but more importantly to describe how this condition has effected me more than a lot of people would probably guess.
When I was a young child I was very different to what I was now and I would be much more associated with a general typical aspie. I was a very angry child, I was extremely resistant to any sort of change, especially unexpected, I had many quirks, repetitive behaviour, an odd form of communication, super picky eater, couldn't handle any kind of over stimulation and couldn't form social relationships or appropriately empathise with anything. It was so bad when I was young that I was deemed developmentally delayed, would suffer from an intellectual disability and was put in the special ed class for some time in primary school. I underwent speech therapy, occupational therapy and several other outside therapies to teach me normal social skills, I dunno how effective they were it's hard to tell. Now I work at Google, have a degree in physics and computer science, have a loving relationship and have many friends so this initial assessment was probably wrong.
I'll describe my symptoms in more detail, a lot of the things I still have aspects of today.
- Change: I used to be extremely resistant to change, any change in my normal routine would be horrible for me and would cause me to have a tantrum and breakdown. This was doubly true for unexpected changes. I followed exact routines all day and didn't differ from these, I can't really remember the routines that I did but it was things like how I ate, how I got to places, my morning routine and so forth. As I grew older this fear of change dampened and then it became simply a fear of large changes, moving houses or moving schools or something I'd be very resistant too, which is a little more normal. Now I'm ok with even large changes, although I still am not a fan of unexpected changes. In general if someone invites me to do something really fun that I didn't expect I'd be doing there is a lot of resistance in my mind even if I know I'd have fun. I can sometimes overcome this resistance, but it's a difficult process and causes me some anxiety.
- Planning: As part of the above I loved plans and lived for plans. I used to wear a watch and had to always know the time because I knew when things were supposed to happen and had to make sure they happened when they were supposed to. I know I even planned for fun events, like I knew what time I should start playing video games, what time I should start talking with friends and the like. Even today I still like plans and feel out of place if there's something that I didn't plan for, however I've mitigated this by having flexible plans that can be reconfigured. If something unexpected happens that disrupts my original plan then instead of getting upset I'll try to create a new plan that encompasses the unexpected event and shares similarity with the original plan. This can take some time but I've become remarkably efficient at it, if you ask me to do something that I didn't expect and I pause, it's not really me considering whether I want to do it, a lot of the time it's me figuring out a new plan for my day that'll allow me to do that event.
- Water: This one is the most overt of my symptoms that I still have today. I only drink water and despite what I'll say in response to "Why?" the truth is it isn't because of health effects or anything the like, it's because I am absolutely disgusted by coloured liquid. It sounds incredibly silly and it is, but coloured liquid is repulsive to me, absolutely repulsive to the point that even being in the general vicinity of some coloured drinkable liquid makes me upset. The weird thing is this disgust isn't even consistent, some coloured liquids like vegetable oil I'm completely fine with, but others like coke or cider or cordial I'm disgusted by. I have a feeling this stems from an event in my childhood where my dad gave me lemonade after telling me it was water, this seems like a pretty OK experience but for an autistic kid this was extremely traumatic. It was traumatic tbh, it seems such a stupid thing to be traumatised over (a slightly different taste in your mouth then you'd expect?) but that's what autism does to you, the littlest of unexpected changes seems like the biggest deal. To date I've found no way to mitigate this really, I'm still disgusted by coloured liquids even today and when everyone's drinking I just kinda have to deal or distract myself from it.
- Social: I used to be very classically inept at social situations. I didn't get people, I didn't particularly like people a lot of the time and in general I didn't consider other peoples feelings and lacked a lot of empathy. I've resolved this issue almost entirely to date which is partly why I'm such a functioning member of society despite it. I'm not entirely sure the exact method I've resolved this but part of it was actual logical, particularly when I learned about the theory of relativity and started applying it to every day life. Separating yourself as an absolute frame of reference forces you to consider other peoples feelings, creating empathy. It also gives you the tools to consider other peoples frame of reference based on what you know about them and through observations you've had and through basic intuition that I had to consciously learn, as opposed to neurotypical people who may be necessarily good at learning that intuition. Particularly part of the reason why social situations are so exhausting to me is partly because I am still consciously constructing, rebuilding and remembering a mental model of how I expect the social situation to go, I'm predicting what you are thinking and figuring out what I should say that would be appropriate for the situation. I know even NT people do this too to some extent, and to some extent it has become much more natural to me, but it still requires effort on my part. It's especially taxing when I'm already tired and not comfortable enough to let down that mental model to be myself (like when I talk about things I'm passionate about), in this case I just end up feeling extremely awkward and I don't have the energy to figure out the best non-awkward steps. When I don't feel "up" to social situations it's basically because I don't have the faculties to navigate them at that stage, and so I avoid social situations in this mood to avoid looking foolish or making mistakes. In terms of empathy I'm always having to guess what other people are feeling, which I suppose everybody does but for me it's a sense of anxiety of getting it wrong and misinterpreting what they say. Both the autism and my poor sight means it's difficult for me to interpret non-verbal communication and so I require verbal communication and subtext to try and understand what people are saying. A lot of the times if I'm unsure I'll just be frank and ask the person what they're feeling, or what they mean, and be direct. It would be great if someone told me that I upset them, or that I am doing something wrong in their eyes, I'd super appreciate it but polite society tells us we shouldn't do that directly and that's annoying to me.
- OCD-like symptoms: I used to have some OCD-like symptoms as well, these luckily have been not too major. And here I do mean OCD in the traditional sense of an obsessive compulsion as oppose to the misinformed "need to be very tidy", although I did have aspects of that too. Two of the most prominent ones I have are as follows. The first is corners, corners for me is a sense of a bit of anxiety and it's hard to describe why. Basically if I bump into a corner, not hardly but more like brush against it, I have to touch that corner in the opposite direction. To me it feels like the corner is made of skin and by brushing against it the skin has been ripped off and is now just hanging there revealing an open wound, so I have to put the "skin" back by brushing the corner the opposite way. Even when writing this I'm touching my table corner haha. Note that if I brush against a corner and I don't notice I did it, I will obviously not have this compulsion. When I think about this compulsion directly, like now, I have an urge to touch a corner even if I haven't brushed even brushed against it, I dunno why but it causes anxiety. Again today the symptom is generally a lot more mild then it used to be and I can not touch the corner if I really didn't want to, but it would still be hard. The second one is remote controls and, despite knowing the physics of how they work, I don't like a remote control pointed at me because I feel like I'm being "laser-beamed" by it. What's weird is that with laser pointers that actually laser-beam me, I don't mind at all, but with remote controls that propagate EM waves in all directions, I get anxiety about being laser beamed. Brains make no sense sometimes. Those are the two main symtpoms of OCD-like behaviours that I have, I have others but these may be considered more normal (if I have pens they have to be parallel to each other, stuff like that).
- Sound & Texture: Partly attributable to my poor vision I am very sensitive to sound. I don't mind being in a crowded place so much but a loud place is hard for me. There are also sounds that I absolutely hate, the most prominent one being the scratching of pencils. Seriously I hate pencils so much, I hate using pencils and I hate when other people use pencils, this is a little annoying for Homertime I think cause he's an artist who draws in pencil a lot of the time and he knows I don't like it when he draws near me cause of the sound the pencil makes (he's also used it as a silly punishment, which I like). In terms of loud sounds, I used to be unable to cope with loud sounds, such as at a party or in a very crowded place or even at the cinema. I've since learned to deal with them mostly, I've learned more to change my focus from the loud sound to something else. I still definitely prefer to be in quieter places but my aversion to loud sound has been more in the "normal" category as opposed to abnormal. Textures still urk me, there are bad textures that I hate touching. The bad textures are usually unpolished wood or the cardboard texture you get at the back of notebooks. I hate touching it, to the point that I actively search for notebooks that don't have that cardboard texture. I remember in high school every notebook they had would have that texture on both sides and everytime I had to open my notebook I had to just deal with the intense uncomfortable feeling of touching that texture. Touching that texture FEELS like what scratching nails on a chalkboard feels like, it makes my blood run cold and makes me cringe. I dunno why, but there it is.
- Self-harm: So an odd symptom of autism when you're a child is self harm, I don't do this at all anymore which is good. But when I was a kid I'd used to hurt myself, this would be pulling my own hair out, biting myself, scratching myself and the like. The thing is this wasn't done because of like, depression or anything, it wasn't an emotional thing it was just a behavioural thing. Honestly this only happened for the first like 7 years of my life? So I can't really remember what motivated me to do that. It could have been stress or a means for me to relax, or it could of just been some kinda compulsion. I don't really remember but I'm glad that I got over this symptom pretty quickly.
- Imagination: I dunno what to call this one but have you ever had a day dream so intense that not only could you see and hear everything with perfect clarity, but you'd forget you were in reality and begin acting the motions and making the sounds you'd make in the fantasy world? So, it was odd, I essentially built worlds when I was a kid and I would act like I was in the those worlds, make the sound effects of explosions, move by body around and jump around, and I'd just basically forget I was in the real world. Seriously, I could do this for literal hours and would not realise how much time went by, it was kind of like an intense flow or hyperfocus on this fictional fantasy universe that I constructed. If I was ever bullied for anything however, it was this, every recess and lunch I'd just play by myself, making my sounds and jumping around and everyone would find it very strange and would let me know, in mostly aggressive fashion. The thing is, and I'm a little ashamed to admit it, I still do this, even today, even as an adult, I still play around in my fantasy worlds and yes, make the sounds and do the motions. The only real difference is I do this discretely and when I'm alone, never when I'm in front of somebody, and I only really do it when listening to music now. To me it's given me the ability to craft insanely detailed and unique worlds with interesting stories, I'm even writing one of them now as a comic and my dream is to adapt my favourite world into a video game, unfortunately I dunno if I'll ever achieve that dream. This is just what it is I suppose.
So why do I talk about these symptoms in such great detail? Perhaps because I want people to know that these symptoms still affect me, even if their effect is milder then it used to be. And to loop around to the beginning of this post, I guess maybe these symptoms could be why social situations are exhausting to me or why I sometimes avoid them. Think about it, normally when I'm doing something social it ends up in a pub, this is usually a loud place, with lots of alcohol and coloured drinks and that requires a good amount of small talk and conversation navigating. It's HARD sometimes and I feel like I do a damned good job in coping with everything, but sometimes it's hard and sometimes it's easier to just self isolate and be alone. And sometimes I'm ok with that, and sometimes I'm not. I don't want to be a loser, so I am trying, but it's hard.
I dunno how much the autism actually effects me, sometimes I feel like because my symptoms are so mild that I wouldn't qualify as being autistic but sometimes I also feel like this is because of the insane amount of coping mechanisms that I've created for myself. That yes, I can be normal, but being normal requires a lot more effort than maybe it does for other people. Maybe by admitting that fact, by admitting that I am autistic and it is harder for me, it'll make me feel better about myself. It could also equally make me feel worse about myself. So I dunno, but I guess that's it.
I think the reasons as to why I find it difficult to write about this are kinda obvious, there is obviously a huge stigma to being autistic. Being autistic is the epitome of cringe culture and is generally accepted that if you're autistic you must not be very good at socialising. You see this in the furry community all the time with the constant lampooning of gangles and socially inept individuals that are omnipresent in our fandom. For those that don't make fun of them there are those who simply pity them for having a mental disability. And so of course I'm gonna feel defensive about this aspect of myself because for most I seem like a very sociable guy whose not really a gangle or awkward or anything like that but being autistic is so associated with that I feel if I say "I'm autistic" then people will associate perhaps normal social undoings as a symptom of this condition. Or maybe I just feel people will feel I'm a bit of a loser, whether they outright say it or not I can imagine people projecting some level of inferiority on me for having this condition. So I don't say I have it.
Which seems fine right? A mental condition doesn't have to be everyone else's concern, especially when, I feel, most people can't really tell you have it. So then why do I feel I want to announce it now? In this regard this is more for me than anything, I've been pondering why I haven't been so social lately. I've been drifting away from many different social events and have kinda had a hard time moving to social events. This is kinda normal for a lot of people on the furry fandom right? But in this case I don't think it's normal. Let us go through the normal reasons why someone could drift from social events:
- Anxiety: Although I do have some aspects of anxiety I don't have social anxiety. In fact I'm pretty outgoing and confident in general with what I have to do, especially when I know someone well. I've analysed this carefully and I know that when I don't want to go socialising it is not fear that holds me back from it.
- Introversion: This is a likely one in that I'm simply introverted. Yet it feels more complicated then that, I have a lot of people saying I'm introverted but just as many believing I'm extroverted. When I am socialising with someone I do get energy from it when I actually enjoy the conversation and even when I'm getting a lot of energy I still sometimes feel the need to go away from the social engagement.
- Depression: I pondered that maybe I'm depressed? A lot of this social withdrawal comes from the idea that the effort of the social engagement is not worth the reward, which might be confused with apathy. The thing is while I do feel like I may have some elements of very mild depression, I don't believe depression by itself is what is causing me to disengage.
And so now I'm considering another option that I suppose I've been too scared or too resilient to kinda address, what if I'm disengaging from socialising because of autism. So this article is there to explore that idea but more importantly to describe how this condition has effected me more than a lot of people would probably guess.
Ok so this is where the article actually starts
I'm autistic. Specifically I was diagnosed with Aspergers Syndrome back before that was combined with the all the other conditions under "Autism Spectrum Disorder" as defined in the DSM-V, I was diagnosed at about 3 years old. Most people probably wouldn't really pick up that I'm autistic (I'd like to think anyway), I'm good at socialising, I've held onto very meaningful relationships and am in general a weird but likeable and normal person. I feel I am empathetic, I feel I am moral and intelligent and I feel in general I am a contributing member of society in the social sense. But it wasn't always the case, in fact autism has effected me significantly throughout my life.When I was a young child I was very different to what I was now and I would be much more associated with a general typical aspie. I was a very angry child, I was extremely resistant to any sort of change, especially unexpected, I had many quirks, repetitive behaviour, an odd form of communication, super picky eater, couldn't handle any kind of over stimulation and couldn't form social relationships or appropriately empathise with anything. It was so bad when I was young that I was deemed developmentally delayed, would suffer from an intellectual disability and was put in the special ed class for some time in primary school. I underwent speech therapy, occupational therapy and several other outside therapies to teach me normal social skills, I dunno how effective they were it's hard to tell. Now I work at Google, have a degree in physics and computer science, have a loving relationship and have many friends so this initial assessment was probably wrong.
I'll describe my symptoms in more detail, a lot of the things I still have aspects of today.
- Change: I used to be extremely resistant to change, any change in my normal routine would be horrible for me and would cause me to have a tantrum and breakdown. This was doubly true for unexpected changes. I followed exact routines all day and didn't differ from these, I can't really remember the routines that I did but it was things like how I ate, how I got to places, my morning routine and so forth. As I grew older this fear of change dampened and then it became simply a fear of large changes, moving houses or moving schools or something I'd be very resistant too, which is a little more normal. Now I'm ok with even large changes, although I still am not a fan of unexpected changes. In general if someone invites me to do something really fun that I didn't expect I'd be doing there is a lot of resistance in my mind even if I know I'd have fun. I can sometimes overcome this resistance, but it's a difficult process and causes me some anxiety.
- Planning: As part of the above I loved plans and lived for plans. I used to wear a watch and had to always know the time because I knew when things were supposed to happen and had to make sure they happened when they were supposed to. I know I even planned for fun events, like I knew what time I should start playing video games, what time I should start talking with friends and the like. Even today I still like plans and feel out of place if there's something that I didn't plan for, however I've mitigated this by having flexible plans that can be reconfigured. If something unexpected happens that disrupts my original plan then instead of getting upset I'll try to create a new plan that encompasses the unexpected event and shares similarity with the original plan. This can take some time but I've become remarkably efficient at it, if you ask me to do something that I didn't expect and I pause, it's not really me considering whether I want to do it, a lot of the time it's me figuring out a new plan for my day that'll allow me to do that event.
- Water: This one is the most overt of my symptoms that I still have today. I only drink water and despite what I'll say in response to "Why?" the truth is it isn't because of health effects or anything the like, it's because I am absolutely disgusted by coloured liquid. It sounds incredibly silly and it is, but coloured liquid is repulsive to me, absolutely repulsive to the point that even being in the general vicinity of some coloured drinkable liquid makes me upset. The weird thing is this disgust isn't even consistent, some coloured liquids like vegetable oil I'm completely fine with, but others like coke or cider or cordial I'm disgusted by. I have a feeling this stems from an event in my childhood where my dad gave me lemonade after telling me it was water, this seems like a pretty OK experience but for an autistic kid this was extremely traumatic. It was traumatic tbh, it seems such a stupid thing to be traumatised over (a slightly different taste in your mouth then you'd expect?) but that's what autism does to you, the littlest of unexpected changes seems like the biggest deal. To date I've found no way to mitigate this really, I'm still disgusted by coloured liquids even today and when everyone's drinking I just kinda have to deal or distract myself from it.
- Social: I used to be very classically inept at social situations. I didn't get people, I didn't particularly like people a lot of the time and in general I didn't consider other peoples feelings and lacked a lot of empathy. I've resolved this issue almost entirely to date which is partly why I'm such a functioning member of society despite it. I'm not entirely sure the exact method I've resolved this but part of it was actual logical, particularly when I learned about the theory of relativity and started applying it to every day life. Separating yourself as an absolute frame of reference forces you to consider other peoples feelings, creating empathy. It also gives you the tools to consider other peoples frame of reference based on what you know about them and through observations you've had and through basic intuition that I had to consciously learn, as opposed to neurotypical people who may be necessarily good at learning that intuition. Particularly part of the reason why social situations are so exhausting to me is partly because I am still consciously constructing, rebuilding and remembering a mental model of how I expect the social situation to go, I'm predicting what you are thinking and figuring out what I should say that would be appropriate for the situation. I know even NT people do this too to some extent, and to some extent it has become much more natural to me, but it still requires effort on my part. It's especially taxing when I'm already tired and not comfortable enough to let down that mental model to be myself (like when I talk about things I'm passionate about), in this case I just end up feeling extremely awkward and I don't have the energy to figure out the best non-awkward steps. When I don't feel "up" to social situations it's basically because I don't have the faculties to navigate them at that stage, and so I avoid social situations in this mood to avoid looking foolish or making mistakes. In terms of empathy I'm always having to guess what other people are feeling, which I suppose everybody does but for me it's a sense of anxiety of getting it wrong and misinterpreting what they say. Both the autism and my poor sight means it's difficult for me to interpret non-verbal communication and so I require verbal communication and subtext to try and understand what people are saying. A lot of the times if I'm unsure I'll just be frank and ask the person what they're feeling, or what they mean, and be direct. It would be great if someone told me that I upset them, or that I am doing something wrong in their eyes, I'd super appreciate it but polite society tells us we shouldn't do that directly and that's annoying to me.
- OCD-like symptoms: I used to have some OCD-like symptoms as well, these luckily have been not too major. And here I do mean OCD in the traditional sense of an obsessive compulsion as oppose to the misinformed "need to be very tidy", although I did have aspects of that too. Two of the most prominent ones I have are as follows. The first is corners, corners for me is a sense of a bit of anxiety and it's hard to describe why. Basically if I bump into a corner, not hardly but more like brush against it, I have to touch that corner in the opposite direction. To me it feels like the corner is made of skin and by brushing against it the skin has been ripped off and is now just hanging there revealing an open wound, so I have to put the "skin" back by brushing the corner the opposite way. Even when writing this I'm touching my table corner haha. Note that if I brush against a corner and I don't notice I did it, I will obviously not have this compulsion. When I think about this compulsion directly, like now, I have an urge to touch a corner even if I haven't brushed even brushed against it, I dunno why but it causes anxiety. Again today the symptom is generally a lot more mild then it used to be and I can not touch the corner if I really didn't want to, but it would still be hard. The second one is remote controls and, despite knowing the physics of how they work, I don't like a remote control pointed at me because I feel like I'm being "laser-beamed" by it. What's weird is that with laser pointers that actually laser-beam me, I don't mind at all, but with remote controls that propagate EM waves in all directions, I get anxiety about being laser beamed. Brains make no sense sometimes. Those are the two main symtpoms of OCD-like behaviours that I have, I have others but these may be considered more normal (if I have pens they have to be parallel to each other, stuff like that).
- Sound & Texture: Partly attributable to my poor vision I am very sensitive to sound. I don't mind being in a crowded place so much but a loud place is hard for me. There are also sounds that I absolutely hate, the most prominent one being the scratching of pencils. Seriously I hate pencils so much, I hate using pencils and I hate when other people use pencils, this is a little annoying for Homertime I think cause he's an artist who draws in pencil a lot of the time and he knows I don't like it when he draws near me cause of the sound the pencil makes (he's also used it as a silly punishment, which I like). In terms of loud sounds, I used to be unable to cope with loud sounds, such as at a party or in a very crowded place or even at the cinema. I've since learned to deal with them mostly, I've learned more to change my focus from the loud sound to something else. I still definitely prefer to be in quieter places but my aversion to loud sound has been more in the "normal" category as opposed to abnormal. Textures still urk me, there are bad textures that I hate touching. The bad textures are usually unpolished wood or the cardboard texture you get at the back of notebooks. I hate touching it, to the point that I actively search for notebooks that don't have that cardboard texture. I remember in high school every notebook they had would have that texture on both sides and everytime I had to open my notebook I had to just deal with the intense uncomfortable feeling of touching that texture. Touching that texture FEELS like what scratching nails on a chalkboard feels like, it makes my blood run cold and makes me cringe. I dunno why, but there it is.
- Self-harm: So an odd symptom of autism when you're a child is self harm, I don't do this at all anymore which is good. But when I was a kid I'd used to hurt myself, this would be pulling my own hair out, biting myself, scratching myself and the like. The thing is this wasn't done because of like, depression or anything, it wasn't an emotional thing it was just a behavioural thing. Honestly this only happened for the first like 7 years of my life? So I can't really remember what motivated me to do that. It could have been stress or a means for me to relax, or it could of just been some kinda compulsion. I don't really remember but I'm glad that I got over this symptom pretty quickly.
- Imagination: I dunno what to call this one but have you ever had a day dream so intense that not only could you see and hear everything with perfect clarity, but you'd forget you were in reality and begin acting the motions and making the sounds you'd make in the fantasy world? So, it was odd, I essentially built worlds when I was a kid and I would act like I was in the those worlds, make the sound effects of explosions, move by body around and jump around, and I'd just basically forget I was in the real world. Seriously, I could do this for literal hours and would not realise how much time went by, it was kind of like an intense flow or hyperfocus on this fictional fantasy universe that I constructed. If I was ever bullied for anything however, it was this, every recess and lunch I'd just play by myself, making my sounds and jumping around and everyone would find it very strange and would let me know, in mostly aggressive fashion. The thing is, and I'm a little ashamed to admit it, I still do this, even today, even as an adult, I still play around in my fantasy worlds and yes, make the sounds and do the motions. The only real difference is I do this discretely and when I'm alone, never when I'm in front of somebody, and I only really do it when listening to music now. To me it's given me the ability to craft insanely detailed and unique worlds with interesting stories, I'm even writing one of them now as a comic and my dream is to adapt my favourite world into a video game, unfortunately I dunno if I'll ever achieve that dream. This is just what it is I suppose.
So why do I talk about these symptoms in such great detail? Perhaps because I want people to know that these symptoms still affect me, even if their effect is milder then it used to be. And to loop around to the beginning of this post, I guess maybe these symptoms could be why social situations are exhausting to me or why I sometimes avoid them. Think about it, normally when I'm doing something social it ends up in a pub, this is usually a loud place, with lots of alcohol and coloured drinks and that requires a good amount of small talk and conversation navigating. It's HARD sometimes and I feel like I do a damned good job in coping with everything, but sometimes it's hard and sometimes it's easier to just self isolate and be alone. And sometimes I'm ok with that, and sometimes I'm not. I don't want to be a loser, so I am trying, but it's hard.
I dunno how much the autism actually effects me, sometimes I feel like because my symptoms are so mild that I wouldn't qualify as being autistic but sometimes I also feel like this is because of the insane amount of coping mechanisms that I've created for myself. That yes, I can be normal, but being normal requires a lot more effort than maybe it does for other people. Maybe by admitting that fact, by admitting that I am autistic and it is harder for me, it'll make me feel better about myself. It could also equally make me feel worse about myself. So I dunno, but I guess that's it.
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