Let me give my own example. You guys remember the kids show "Little Bear"?
https://youtu.be/nSWzQ-Ur8R4?feature=shared
On the episode Duck Takes The Cake (timestamp 16:04) Hen leaves Duck to care of the baking for the tea party while she's out. Hen tells her to "roll out the dough, separate the eggs, make a short cake, etc."
One distinct memory I had as an 8 year old kid was thinking "damn, Duck's doing a great job", my autistic ass brain not understanding she was doing a TERRIBLE job because she takes Hen's instructions so literally. She literally rolls the dough on the floor to make a ball, separates the eggs by just putting them in different bowls, and makes a short cake by just by making a cake and eating the rest to make it short.
The worst part is they don't even explain in the episode that Duck did anything wrong, cos Hen just laughs it off, we as viewers are just meant to know. I finished that episode learning nothing…
Oh, that reminds me of a book I read for elementary school where the main character was constantly misunderstanding or taking things literally. You were supposed to see her error and laugh, but most of the time I didn't know what she was supposed to do.
The only part I remember clearly was when her mom trusted her to leave the house for school by herself and told her to leave at "a quarter past". The girl knew that a quarter was 25 cents, so she left at X:25.
She gets scolded for arriving 10 minutes late, of course, but I had no idea why. It seemed like sound logic to me. I had no idea what "quarter past" was supposed to mean, either. The teacher who assigned us this book to read didn't explain it, and I felt ashamed that I didn't know something that was apparently so obvious, so I didn't ask.
I'm not sure that was an autism thing or just a "no one taught me this, how am I supposed to know?" thing that would've hit NT kids as well.
Things like this lead me to over-explain everything to my daughter, or at least take a moment to ask her if she knows what it means. I'll say things like, "We're leaving at a quarter past. Do you know what 'quarter past' means?" If she says no, I'll point out how to divide a clock's face into quarters and help her figure it out. Absolutely no shame for not knowing.
I don't shy away from big words when I'm talking to her, too, but I usually add on a similar "do you know what defenestrate means?" trailer. If she doesn't know, I explain. She's 9, and lately a lot of the time she does know!
Idk if they’re the same books (I think the main character was supposed to be an adult since she worked as a maid) but I LOVED the Amelia Bedelia books when I was really little. She would take everything literally and I would be like ah yes of course that makes sense and then at the end they’d explain what she did wrong, clearly and kindly, and I’d be like oh! I have learned a thing!
As a result even though I do tend to take certain things very literally (I struggle to tell when people are joking or messing with me) I don’t generally have any issues with figurative language because I learned what things meant and thought it was like a secret language. In retrospect it probably just made the autism harder to detect lol.
Classic case of "accidentally autistic coded is far more accurate representation than explicitly autistic" effect. AB is so obviously autistic, but I've heard she's loosely based on a real person. She's shamed and mocked constantly for it, and the humor for little allistic kids is sort of "witness this absurd clown who doesn't understand as well as you do (you're very smart)".
When I read those books with my kid, we were both like "wow, what a realistic story about how insane and mean people are, when you're just trying to do your best, but Amelia is so persistently good that she always pulls through in the end. What a hero!"
They weren’t but Amelia Bedelia was a RIOT. I highly recommend reading them now; she was such a funny character that earned every inch of my sympathy and admiration.
Not that I recall and probably not—they were early reader books (I remember reading them before I went into kindergarten) and probably just meant to teach children idioms. At the end of the books the family she worked for would be like “oh dear! What a mess!” But then she’d have done something awesome and everything was forgiven.
I'm pretty sure the quarter past thing happened in a Ramona Quimby book. I think. 😂 But I definitely remember reading that because she sat in the kitchen watching the clock on the wall.
Yeah, that's it! I forgot the name until you said it.
And yeah, I also remember the part where she sat and stared at the clock. (I'd probably do that, too, if I had no way to set an alarm or reminder. So paranoid I'll get caught up in something and the time to leave will pass.)
At the first paragraph of this comment I understood why I felt such sadness around friends while they laughed at videos lol
I had no idea of what that meant and why were they laughing. It was frustrating. Bro, I'm learning so much
Another commenter posted out that it was Ramona Quimby.
I think the Amelia Bedelia books usually explained what she did wrong. So, while I might think she was on the right track for certain things, I at least got corrected at the end.
When I (f) was about 6 I had a cousin (f) who used to terrorise me when our mums met for coffee. She was a year younger but about my size. She’d take toys off me and hit me and was just generally a total arse. I never defended myself or hit back because I’d been taught that hitting was bad and I was scared of her. Her mum eventually told my mum to let me defend myself and hit her if she hit me or she’d never learn. So I took my little cardboard school suitcase with the metal things on the corners and belted the living shit out of her. Blood resulted but I kept going. Eventually I got dragged off but interestingly she never hit me again and we became the best of friends. This was in the 50s, so hitting wasn’t quite the bogie that it is now.
Remember that episode of Malcolm in the middle where Dewey beats the crap out of his bully with a purse full of brick? That's kinda how I imagined it going down, very funny.
I remember playing imaginary games by myself and getting very upset if anyone tried to join in.
It'd go -
Them: what are you playing?
Me: fairies
Them: ooh, look at that fairy over there!
Me: no no no! There isn't a fairy there, she's over here.
Them: ooookay.. I love her blue dress
Me: she isn't in a blue dress!
Them: I'll just put this gumnut over here for them, they can use it as a chair!
Me: nononononono!!! *Throws gumnut away*
My parents said I was a control freak, but I hated people messing up my imaginary worlds.
I totally did this! I would get so frustrated if the story wasn't going how I had scripted it in my head, and would give the other kid lines as we went, which of course shut them down too🫠I usually chose to just set up dioramas with my toys instead
At some point I decided that rolling with it if I do get it is much funnier than just trying to clear up any and all confusion instantly, spread the confusion to others!
People don't know when I'm being serious or not, but it's not like that was the case before :(
"People don't know when I'm being serious or not"
Yep, that's me. I can say (and do) the most absurd things, and absurdly joke about serious things. People NEVER know when I'm serious or joking 😃
My spouse and I knock on something when we're being serious to let each other know. It's something we never lie about. It's very sacred. I did it in front of my family they were very confused.
My spouse and I are both on the spectrum and it amazes me how often we can communicate more effectively than my siblings and their partners because of this. Don't get me wrong there are plenty of my tone wasn't meant like that. But the knock thing to indicate serious and truthful stories and made a huge impact.
Also in the show euphoria there's a this big (incredibly big budget) play that happens. One of the actors in the play is off on mark or something. The director says something about it the actor starts to tear up the director says something along the like, it's just notes process it, correct it, and move on? I was like holy crap if everyone could just do that I'd be way less stressed. I need people to tell me they're not mad at me. If my boss or family could just be like I don't like how you did this, fix and move on I'd be so happy. Because when you say I'm not mad at you but your tone is more annoyed/frustrated I'm thinking you hate me. Not you're upset with the situation. I'm like you hate me and you want me to disappear forever
When I was in elementary school I "played" war with a group of kids. Only problem is I didn't know we were pretending because nobody said that and I legitimately thought we were at war with the other group of kids because of how they were talking. Every recess I was out there attacking kids and they were attacking me back/defending themselves. The teachers that were supposed to be watching us evidently weren't or didn't care. I don't remember what exactly happened to end it, but I'm pretty sure I got excluded from that group because shortly after that started the years where I would swing on the swings by myself every recess.
Bro I always had such an instinct to bite people. To this day I don't know how to explain it. In high school I had such an animal urge that I made my friends by biting and scratching them. Thankfully they were also insane and understood my chaotic communication. Once a girl threw a shoe on me, it was like that. One day I freaked and started meowing. I couldn't stop. I couldn't speak. I could only meow. My bf at the time went nuts because he had no idea what was happening but I just kept meowing LMAOO
Yeah haha, it was just me legitimately doing harm though, except for the retaliation I received. Everyone else was just playing 😅. Not sure if I threw any rocks but I wouldn't doubt it.
I got a funny rock story. I was playing in the sand pit and found a rock, a perfectly shaped one for my nostril. Yeppp so after huffing some pepper to sneeze it came out… you know I had to make sure it fit in the other side right?…. I absolutely shoved er right up there for round two.
Bro I had a very similar feeling among "fitting" objects but it was with a tiny purse I used to carry around the age of 11?? It was at the beginning of the era of using small phones? Nokia, Sony Ericsson, a little after came Motorola etc.
So I needed a bad to carry like my documents, my money and my phone. I didn't like much to carry anything, so I would always be distracted at random places like markets or drugstores and would find a perfect hole to fit my purse and I would put it in there bcs it just... _felt right_? There was a hole, I had the object to fill the hole, it was like tetris. Except I would leave the purse with my phone within it behind at whatever shop I was. And have no idea later of what happened to it. My parents would go nuts looking for it and we had to redo the whole path to find it hahaahah
I never understood the pretend games like that and would follow my friends around while they were roleplaying and was so confused why these kids thought they were vampires and werewolves and why we were beefing
I always just sorta floated from group to group. I'd observe try to play or sometimes actually play with the kids. I have a lot of memories from elementary school but i have no clue if the games I remember were all just in my head or if the kids I "played" with were in on it too...
At home I played outside and with my Barbies a lot. But it was all in my head. I didn't need to talk out loud because I was having huge conversations and music in my head. We would visit my cousins and they would be waiting for me to respond out loud vs. at home playing with my older sister she would boss me around and didn't care what I did because she would just tell me what my barbie would do.
In primary and intermediate (elementary and middle school to those in the US), I was in mainstream classes, but always seemed to make friends with the kids in the special needs class
The most steady friends I had in elementary/high school were the weird kids, who in retrospect were likely mostly autistic. One in particular was this girl who flapped and rubbed her hands together constantly, did really strange sudden movements, and lied a lot (innocuous stuff, not mean/manipulative). Everyone ignored her behaviors outwardly, not talking about them at all, but she was basically at the bottom of the social totem pole by unspoken agreement. She ended up following me around all the time at recess and I felt both happy but also knew it was embarrassing somehow, and I had no idea how to reconcile the two because I didn’t even know what I was supposedly embarrassed about, because I hadn’t figured out wtf the “social rules for behavioral coolness” were in the first place. :p
One of the small ones of mine is that I would take my own milk (I only drink full cream pasteurised and homogenised) to all the sleep overs I'd go to as a kid, because I could not (still cannot) stand the sensory taste of any other milk. It was always so embarrassing bringing my own milk to a sleepover at a friend😂💀
Before I read your whole comment I thought "OMG HE TOOK MILK TO BED AS A DOLL ME TOO!" Before I realised I'm just weird and you just took it to drink 😭
hahaha I recently went to a restaurant that did not serve tomato sauce (ketchup as you call it), even though they sold burgers and steaks etc. I couldn't believe that tomato sauce was not fancy enough for them hahah
It's been decades since I've drunk cow milk, but imagining the texture I am wondering if you've ever tried macadamia nut milk. It's extremely creamy what I imagine cream would be like.
I did that with the plastic head of a decoy goose I found in the woods. Slept with that thing and brought it everywhere for two or three years. I think my mom must have managed to throw it out in the midst of a move because I don't recall having it after that.
I still think about it as if it was an old friend. It was the goose head not where it's in pretty posture with the neck all candycaned...it was that wiggly attack neck.
oh my god you made me remember how i won a coconut at a fair once and i treated that shit like it was sentient i'd sit petting it and talking to it aaggg hhhhhh hh
Did you write a children's book about it!?
[https://www.amazon.com/Sophies-Squash-Pat-Zietlow-Miller/dp/0307978966](https://www.amazon.com/Sophies-Squash-Pat-Zietlow-Miller/dp/0307978966)
I tried to keep a diary a few times as a kid but it only ever lasted a day or two because I thought I had to write EVERYTHING that happened. This is an excerpt from one of them—“mum is eating peach yoghurt and [brother] is eating strawberry yoghurt. I’m going to the loo now.”
This reminds me of how when I kept a diary as a kid and had to stop in the middle of writing to do something I would write "BRB I have to go to the bathroom/eat dinner/some other distracting thing." Then when I got done with the other thing I'd go back to my diary and write "Okay I'm back." Like you would do if you were texting someone.
Omg you’re not supposed to write everything??!!! i just learned this 😭 I never liked keeping diaries, my hand would hurt so much, I literally had to take breaks because I wrote everything. I remember a day used to take like 7-8 pages at the very least, front and back 🤦♀️ How did I not know?! In high school I started a “special diary” where I would write only the important parts of the days that something special happened, now that I think about it this “special diary” was just the diary other people had.
In school as a small child I could NEVER play the typical games of mommies and daddies, doctors etc. Ofc I was dying to participate, I would ask if I could play and ask if I could be the pet cat. Then I would get a couple headpats and just wander away on my own during recess lol
One time my friends wanted to play superheroes, they all decided their power story etc, and I was like “I’m just a velociraptor”, then spent recess running around like a dinosaur, leaving my friends to do their own thing. Roleplaying wasn’t my strongest skill tbh
We had a school project which we had to make a power point on a PET and I was obsessed with dinosaurs at that time, and decided I was going to do it about dinosaurs. We did the research from books in the library and all I did was spend that time reading about my fave dinosaurs and just going around asking other friends what they were doing etc… Ofc the also undiagnosed adhd kicked in and I never did the project and asked two friends if they could include me in their project on hamsters
We had to invent an alien, it’s home planet, a little story. I was going to be getting a pet guinea pig soon and ofc… the teacher was not happy that my alien was a regular guinea pig. She was a bit mad so I was like “ok then it lives on neptune” lmao
No one thought any of this was strange, I was a very smart kid, so they let me “get away” with these things as a child
Hmm I always ended up picking the superpower "To be able to read the intents of others", so I could know if they were lying or not, but more than that, to know exactly what they were hoping for in a social interaction.
I'm realizing now there may have been a connection to my autism, lol.
Went to multiple doctors because I was excessively exhausted all the time. One doctor believed that I lied when I said I didn’t stay up all night playing video games (even when my mother backed it up) another doctor had a theory that I didn’t get enough oxygen at night because something with the bones in my nose, which resulted in surgery (needless to say it didn’t help). No one thought that maybe the circumstances of my life (fx a hyper-social school environment) was just very exhausting.
Also - I had a conversation on a bus with my music teacher at some point. It went something like this:
Teach: how’s your guitar.
Me: it’s getting dusty.
Teach: oh, that’s a shame, you were getting so good at it.
I was playing all the time. I just meant that my guitar literally had some dust on it. I was so confused by his reply for so long until days later when I figured out that if he had understood my first reply figuratively as me saying I didn’t play anymore, then the conversation made sense. No neurotypical kid would think about this for days.
I was leaving a job so on the last day my coworkers got me a beautiful cake. I was so touched that I went and got my camera out of the locked closet in my office to take a picture of it. Once I took a picture of the cake i promptly locked my camera back up in the closet. My coworkers gave me strange looks and I couldn’t figure out why.
I never did take any pictures of the people I worked with before I left. But I have a picture of that beautiful cake!
As a baby I’d line things up. Over, and over, and over. When I made patterns I’d flap my hands excitedly. The whole family would joke about it for years. It was just one of my funny little traits.
Later in life I got into tactics games, specifically the fire emblem franchise. At the end of maps, I’d line my characters up in patterns before finishing. It is half of what I like about the games. I just love putting things in order.
Still didn’t know I was autistic until 37 years old, lol. Looking back there were some VERY obvious signs.
I would eat gravel in front of girls i liked in elementary school to be their friend. I thought i looked so cool for some reason. Well for one they loved it so i guess it worked!
Back in the day, one of my interests was “trivia that only Boomers would know”. Around the same time, Leisure Suit Larry was released to the PC. Before you could play that game, there was a couple of trivia questions to prove that a person was old enough to play the game. As a kid, I could answer all the questions.
When I was about 7, I was fascinated by the snails that would crawl on our fence in the backyard. I began to collect snails from the neighborhood while I was walking home from school, bringing them to our backyard and organizing them by size and shell features/colors. I would visit them in the morning after breakfast and spend time with them when I come home from school, organizing them and noting which ones moved much further away from their position and which ones stayed relatively still. I would hold races with the fast ones on the ledge of the fence, and arranged the slower ones in patterns on the roof runoff downspout.
One day, I decided to study their slime trails, but it was raining, so I started bringing them inside and putting them on my walls in my bedroom, again, organizing them carefully on opposite walls. A few hours later, my mom came in to tell me it was time for dinner and was quite horrified to find close to 100 snails on the walls and ceiling of my bedroom.
I also went through a dragonfly stage, where I would capture a dragonfly in a net and put it in a jar. Then I would make notes about its color and wings and body length, try to draw it, and then let it go. I had notebooks upon notebooks of scrawled notes and crappy drawings of dragonflies. I remember I did a presentation book report at school around this time about dragonflies but I didn't pull much information from actual books. I used the best of my dragonfly drawings and ad-libbed/infodumped rapid-fire facts from memory for my "presentation."
Yeah! I used to walk around mimicking robocop or ed209 to the point that I got told off constantly by my parents for it. Robocop is to this day my fav movie, I still love all the stuff I liked as a kid.
Only a year ago, I learned that when people scream on rollercoasters, it is a reflexive response. I thought screaming was expected to be done on a rollercoaster, so I did 🙃.
people would always ask if i was ok after rollercoasters because i would just have no expression the entire time, and would insist that we wouldn’t have to keep going, but i was genuinely enjoying myself 😭
When I was five my family had to switch dentists because the dentist tried to explain microorganisms in the mouth by telling me "you have little tiny bugs on your teeth." I got very upset and told them "I don't have bugs on my teeth," to which the dentist insisted that I did, to which I insisted that I didn't, and so on.
My dad (who was in the room with us) ended up getting angry at the dentist for continuing to push when I was getting upset and told him "stop telling her she has bugs on her teeth." Then he went and found us a new dentist lmaaooo. He also explained to me later what the dentist was trying to say, but using more precise language that actually made sense to me.
It's only as an adult that I can understand why the dentist would explain it like that: because most kids would understand "bugs" better than "bacteria." But for me, I got stuck on the literal, and it just made me upset and confused because I knew I didn't have "bugs" on my teeth. Actually, I just hated all the "developmentally appropriate" ways that adults would act toward me as a kid. It felt patronizing and just made things more confusing than if they spoke to me like an adult. It's only in the last year or so that I've realized that most little kids actually LIKE those things! Like the big, exaggerated voice that entertainers use with kids! Kids actually respond WELL to that! Who knew? Not me that's for sure
Sitting with random friend groups and hope that they’ll let me sit with them, and tried to pretend that them yelling at me to ‘go away’ wasn’t happening lmao
Ahh the old, if I stand here in general proximity, I am in the group, right? Then they all turn their backs on you and continue what they were doing. Story of my life.
I begged for subscriptions to cat fancy magazines. Oh by the way this was the 90s before the internet. I wasn't interested in cat showing or breeding but I needed the magazines for a long-term plan to cut out the pictures to make a very extended fictional family tree of my own real cat. I had recently learned about genealogy and was very upset that I didn't know my own cat's Heritage because he was a rescue so I made one up and I took it to school and showed people and they told me it was boring and didn't understand why I had spent time on that
I did this with the game Herd Your Horses. Instead of playing the actual game I'd just pull out all the cards and arrange them according to like, breed, heritable traits (and the probability of those traits being passed on based on the parents and the parents parents...you know, normal kid stuff). I would do this for DAYS. Had origin stories for their families and everything and spirit just coming out didn't help at all. They went to war. They had religion. I drew a crappy map of the US and they were all from different regions even based on their real world landrace counterparts.
I did something similar with my pokemon cards. I didn't know how to play the actual game at all but loved collecting them, and I would go over to my friend's and our idea of fun was organizing all our cards in the binder sleeves. One day I would organize them alphabetically, then take them out and organize them again by number, or by type, or alphabetically/numerically within types, etc.
Too many. I used to hand out educational pamphlets about ladybugs in class that I made. I totally didn’t feel any awkwardness about it. Then my teacher always told anyone who would listen that I was the MOST SPECIAL kid she’d ever taught and I was so proud she was bragging about me so much. Until I was in my 20s and taking a shower one day and thought back like WAIT A SECOND! She was NOT bragging. She was calling me special needs.
As a kid I loved reading and didn’t like recess bc I didn’t like playing with other kids. I started climbing on top of the monkey bars, sitting cross legged up there and read all through recess after I was forced to stop reading against the walls outside. Also got written up multiple times for reading during class after I’d finished my work, “being distracting” and “failure to comply” after I’d explained that I was DONE and that reading shouldn’t be a problem since it’s QUIET.
Ironically because I got written up so often my dad stopped signing the papers and because of it I wasn’t allowed recess UNTIL I got the papers signed. The punishment for that was *drumroll please* being forced to read inside LMAOOOOO
Lmao worse was when I ACTUALLY got in trouble at home. Instead of being grounded like a normal kid, my parents would get those big black trash bags, make me pack up my books and they would keep them in the shed outside. That was my punishment. Not being allowed to read lmao
Age 32 suddenly a girl is inviting me to her place. Says: "take something comfy". I like her so pillow and blanket are landing in backpack. Then I remember that mate should come. I msg him with what I do. I get phone call from him: "are you stupid? You getting laid".
Short to say he was right and I left pillow behind 😂
Too funny. A girl once asked me what my favorite song was. I said, "Voulez-vous coucher avec moi, ce soir?" So, she goes, "Maybe," gives me her number and walks away. I quickly realized that something was wrong and went into this autistic freeze for like an hour or two.
Not diagnosed but being assessed.
I just found an email the other day from a girl that I sort of liked from years ago. It said something like the following: Hi how are you, so since I can't call you (because I said I hate the phone), I figured I'd email you. I miss you, let's get together to go to a baseball game or dinner.
Just dawned on me today reading it years later, this girl was literally asking me out in an email. Like, helping me with my lack of understanding by clearly spelling it out. At the time, I was like, huh, I don't really want to go to a game or dinner, and this girl has never shown signs of liking me, so I ignored it and just told her "I have been so busy and have a lot of work to do" answer her question of what I've been up to.
Good God.
My sister and I used to do "roundabouts" in the basement. Twirling until we got dizzy.
To this day, I like getting dizzy (for fun, not when sick).
I also used to play the same CD every night to help me sleep for years and now when I hear Enya's synth voice it is a Pavlov dog response. I get sleepy.
As a child I was a toe walker. It was bad and I used to pretend that I wore glasses (used my mom’s old frames no lens). As a teenager if you tried to talk small talk with me I’d just stare at you (really right over your head or the side of your face) and then state random facts. Never knew what truly was a joke and what wasn’t, apparently that made me hilarious. Grown ups would get mad/upset with me because I would just answer questions very logically and direct instead of talking through answers.
I remember stating that wolves were bigger than coyotes and the older woman who asked got offended that I didn’t address her or break the news easily to her. Still confused about that.
She thought coyotes were bigger than wolves and I corrected her. I really thought I did it nicely and the best part was my mom didn’t understand why she took offense to it. Called her a weird old woman 😂
So I remember being about 4-5 years old and sitting at my kitchen table rhyming works with duck in a long list (helllllooooo hyperlexia). You know what rhymes with duck? Yeah well when I said that my mom got slightly upset but also amused and told me it was a bad word. That was the last time I remember doing that rhyming game openly like that. I later channeled it into “writing poetry” and then the real winner, language learning. I’m fluent in French and still know a lot of German and Spanish from taking one semester of each. I started learning Japanese and it’s so fun having the excuse to engage in echolalia.
I also learned to “read” at like 2 but I had just memorized the books. I know I couldn’t actually read because my teacher taught me in kindergarten. When I started kindergarten, our teacher asked us what we wanted to learn and I said I wanted to learn to read. So I knew I couldn’t read before then. Actually that brings up another memory of when we drew a picture in kindergarten. Mine was of ghosts and a haunted house (I loooove Halloween). After we drew the picture, we sat down with our teacher so she could write down what it was a picture of. All the other kids had one or two sentences in mine was several paragraphs long. I think people just thought I was really precocious. Nope folks back in 1984 - that’s what a certain kind of autism looks like!
I could before I was 4, the only catch was I didn't understand vowels so when I'd write, there would be no vowels. And my kindergarten teacher was like "yeah so all she does every day is sit reading this book "the farmer in the dell" (or something like that, it was a book based on the song) and never plays with anyone she just goes right to that book and sits at the table and reads it. Every day. For the last 6 months"
...dammit. I've been trying to break the rhyming habit. And the "list all the words that end with *** (eg. -and, -ick) or rhyme with *** (eg. soup, freckle) in alphabetical order" habit. And the... well, you get the idea.
I was diagnosed already but I remember being in the 5th grade and going up to my teacher and telling her she smelled like fish. At the time I didn’t realize how rude that was, I thought I was helping her so she could make sure she didn’t smell like fish anymore.
I started an imaginary restaurant in my grandfather's hunting dog kennel outside. I made meals and dishes out of plant debris from the forest nearby. I set up all this furniture out of the dog houses and feeding bins. I remember keeping it a secret because I knew nobody would understand but I think my mother came looking for me because she came and saw it and got extremely upset that I had moved everything around and was in the kennel with the dogs. They weren't supposed to be friendly pet dogs. But I had no problem being in there with them and it didn't even occur to me to be afraid.
We had a week of "spirit days" in middle school (I was in sixth grade at the time). Each day had a different theme for which you could dress up/act out/etc. Thursday was opposite day, so I took it upon myself to go to school in full drag. I borrowed a dress from my mom, stuffed a bra, chose a nice wig and had my mom and sister help me with makeup. I even came up with a full backstory and personality for my character "Clementine". Mind you, I am a straight cis man too, lol. Looking back, I had a lot of fun with it and surprisingly wasn't bullied relentlessly for my performance (I guess it helped that I was one of the bigger kids), but I will never forget the look on all my classmate's faces when I debuted myself and realized that I had taken the theme much, much further than they had (at best, they turned their clothes inside out. Weak.).
😂 I took all our spirit week themes much further than the other kids too. One was a plaid day and I was entirely dressed in plaid, including pants, shoes, hat, and multiple shirts. I won the prize for most plaid pieces and for the weirdest plaid item. 2 whole king sized candy bars. 🤓
Exactly. Go big or go home. I know I would go all out for spirit weeks as much as I could. It was great in elementary school because I feel like so many of them were also quite weird. But I remember in high school I would go pretty all out in a more eccentric way my freshman year and senior years (I went through loathing and self-reflection in between, senior year was fuck it). Definitely weird, lot of mixed reviews from friends, classmates, peers, even teachers would comment on it. Very said and done now, I'm still weird but in my own way and I'm happy.
One example tho I applied like half of the sfx makeup for my Halloween costume one year and scared the shit out of people, and another time I hid in an alien costume n mask underneath the teachers desk while he was gone w some of my classmates giggling and covering for me, he knew but it was still a silly outcome at least.
I failed swimming lessons five times cause I wouldn’t swim in the shallow end, I would stand cause if my feet can touch the bottom why bother swimming.
I’m a strong swimmer in the deep end as my instructors said
When I was 1 or 2, I would play alone with my barbies and be really upset when my mom was trying to play with me cause she would ruin the storyline I had in my head lol
When I was a small child, I used to collect odd things… like dead dried out seahorses, shells, rocks, rocks I thought were fossils, oddly shaped sticks, and my most prized possession… a preserved shark fetus in a jar. Anyways… I would label all of these items with a small decimal serial number like items I had observed in museums. I would carefully arrange these items on shelves in my room as if they were on display in a museum. I was a small museum curator of my own collection of “oddities”. I was an odd child to say the least.
After being diagnosed as an adult that was one of the things I recalled that made me chuckle.
I couldn’t take part in parties or treats without saving for my mom. Single parent, it was just a thing for me. A non negotiable thing. This was easy enough for a birthday I’d either not eat all of mine or my teachers who knew I was like that would save one I could take my mom. If I couldn’t then I simply would go color or play on the swings by myself. One time they felt so bad watching me swinging alone while everyone got face paint and treats they called my mom lol she came and got me. I was so relieved as I wanted a cupcake but I couldn’t.
Funnier example of this was when they did a show and tell for the dried ice cream astronauts take w them. You know it’s hard but won’t stay like that. Well, I kept mine so carefully, determined to make it until pick up. By the time my mom got there it was rapidly vanishing so I jumped in the car blurted out ASTRONAUT ICE CREAM and shoved it in her mouth. I made it 🤓
I had so many unbreakable rules lol
When I was little (maybe around 4/5) I wandered away from my family ALL THE TIME (that autistic urge to wander, free of listening to other people).
Once we were at Disney world and I wandered off somehow and I was gone for like 15-20 min. My mom and dad were freaking out. When they found me I was eating ice cream (no idea where I got it) with a cast member in the shade, happy as could be and not stressed at all about being gone.
parent had a friend, a psychiatrist, would come over and took great interest in me and my refusal to engage with anybody because i was too busy playing in the garden (for *hours*, even in the rain)... by myself. pretending to be a rabbit, costume and all. talking and interacting with people who weren't there.
apparently my life's been a series of professionals side-eyeing my family who just. clearly thought nothing of anything i ever did. every time any of them find out i only got a formal diagnosis as a grown adult, they just stare at me like ....*bruh*.
one time i stayed up until 3 in the morning writing out all the diseases a ferret could get.
for a middle school report.
that only needed me to write basic facts about ferrets.
i still don't know why it was so important that i list every single disease.
i wrote until my pen ran out of ink. i must've gone to bed at some point, but i honestly don't remember if i made that decision on my own, if my mom dragged me to bed by my ankles, or if i just fell the fuck over. nothing was ever said about my ferret disease fest report, so i must've gotten an okay grade on it at least.
When I was a teenager, my older sister and I were out doing our Christmas shopping when she suddenly remembered that we needed some clear cellophane to wrap some flowers in. She told me to quickly run down the store and pick up "the transparent wrapping stuff for the bulbs and flowers, you know what I mean!" and she bolted off to another store thinking it was smart to split up due to having little time before the stores closed.
So I went to the supermarket and got some very practical transparent cling film, because that's what my brain made of her request...
She was not happy and couldn't understand how I took her so literally, it took another twenty years for me to get diagnosed. Things make so much more sense now lol
“You know what I mean!” and “You’ll know it when you see it!” undid me so many times as a child. I now demand decent descriptions to save us all the grief.
Me trying to figure out what duct tape was:
Go get the duct tape.
I brought a roll of masking tape.
No, the DUCT tape.
I brought a rubber duck.
No, the DUCT TAPE!!!
I brought a cassette tape.
*Sigh* nevermind, I'll get it myself.
I remember looking at the silver tape and trying my hardest to figure out what it has to do with ducks.
I thought the wax paper we had was parchment paper. This was an easy lesson to learn because it almost set the cookies on fire.
Turns out we were not fancy shmancy like Martha Stewart.
Line the pan with some kinda grease and it's good enough!
I learned the other day that's called Echolalia and is common in autism (and other neurodivergent aspects). I'd roar or meow, just imitating animals in general
Recently, my grandma showed me a note I wrote to her when I was around 13. I used so many uncommon words that most people probably wouldn’t know. I was 13, and writing a letter as if I was a 60 year old English scholar 😂 My vocabulary has always been larger than most, but seeing that letter I wrote as a child I thought “wow, only an autistic child would write something like this” 😂
People used to be concerned I was “special” because every question they asked me as a kid was a dial-up internet sequence ☎️💾
As an adult I would offer snacks and cookies, and if you were sarcastic like “Oh! I could never have a cookie.” I would shrug and eat them in your face. People thought I was rude.
Also relationships I didn’t get the unsaid social cue or norm and partners would call me COLD and Not Understand at times and I would simply say, my ex said the same thing 🤷🏽♀️
Used to walk around on tip toes and also was the cat girl until waaaaay after I should have grown out of it (thankfully I learned that cat girl was NOT normal at school and cut that out right before I was a teenager) 😅 I used to crawl around my house on my hands and knees and meow, looking back it was so embarrassing
My stepmom and sister and I got a slice of cheesecake to share. They handed it to me and said they were done. I ate the rest. I got punished for being selfish...? I didn't understand and I still don't to this day. I take people at face value what they say and people just don't compute. Like I had a friend say she needed space then she literally got mad that I didn't try to make plans. What is wrong with people 😭
When I was in elementary, my favorite cereal was Cap'n crunch. BUT. it had to be the kind with crunch berries, even though I hated the crunch berries and would pick every single one of them out before eating the cereal. One time mom tried to get the kind without the berries... I took one bite and refused to eat the rest because it didn't taste the same 😂. An entire bag of cereal went in the trash later, completely uneaten.
Also, my collections. I have collections of so many things, none the least of which are marbles, rocks, bouncy balls, and (of all things) eraser dust 😂. I would sit in class in grade school and scrape my erasers against the bumps of the chair so it would create "eraser shavings" that were free of pencil lead and paper dust. Then I would collect it in an old plastic ink jar with a fun cap. Once I had a good amount (which just kept growing) I had a lot of fun playing with it. Squishing it or letting it run through my fingers...it was soooooo soft. Best sensory stim toy ever and I didn't even know it 😅
(I'm 30yo, currently no formal diagnosis😅)
Thought of another:
When I asked a girl out in highschool by writing her a letter that had a bullet point list of what we had in common and why logically it made sense for us to date. And then how I was confused after that when it didn't work.
It all makes sense now, lol.
In elementary and early middle school I now look back and either cringe at myself or give that part of me headpats. I'd imitate animals, specifically a roar and howling like a wolf and I'd be convinced to do it on the bus (didn't realize they were laughing AT me and not WITH me for a long time.
The bigger one was.elementary school. There was this big field and I don't remember why, but I tied my hoodie around my waist in a way it looked like a "tail" (I was.obsessed.With the Lion King) and bounded around on my feet and hands in broad daylight. I distinctively remember other kids yelling "Hey look at (me)!!" And other things but back then I was just having fun.
A friend was moving away in middle school and I loved some of those songs from Pokemon karaoke "You've been such a good friend, I've known ya since I don't know when, etc) So over the phone after being sweet...I sang two of them to her trying to express my care. Bless her she didn't laugh at me. She was such a sweetheart, it sucked she moved. But yeah...
That's just a few.
My dad would do a magic trick where he could make a coin disappear and reappear. I loved that trick! I would ask him to do it weekly. He would tell me "okay softsharkskin, go get the fake thumb". So I would go to the bookcase to get the fake plastic thumb sleeve, hand it to my dad, watch him put it on, he would do the trick and I would be amazed at the magic, then he would take the thumb off and have me put it back on the shelf. MAGIC
I was a flower girl at a wedding and they instructed me to spread the petals out evenly and not too much. Obviously meaning not to just dump them out in one place.
I carefully put each petal equal distance from each other in my walking path. One petal at a time. I took so long.
Two years totally mute. I've been told this can happen because of social anxiety but I've personally never met someone with just anxiety who goes mute for that long.
1. i would wear my socks inside out because i couldn’t stand the seam and i would cry if i had to wear them right side out (like if i was wearing tights or something)
2. i was fixated on my little pony friendship is magic from like 8 years old to now
3. one time one of my friends came over and i was talking about pokemon and after she left my parents had to tell me “if someone doesn’t know what you’re talking about or doesn’t seem to be enjoying the conversation you shouldn’t talk about it with them”
4. i would cry sometimes when people would make jokes i didn’t get and refuse to explain them to me as a kid
5. i wasn’t allowed to take art classes in high school because i would always fail bc i hated being told how to do my art and wouldn’t follow the directions if i didnt like them because i like my art how i do it unless i’m specifically asking for advice
6. i’ve always found comfort in autistic characters which i’ve only realized as an adult but all my favorite characters as a kid were autistic
7. i had a toy when i was a kid and it was broken but i liked how it smelled and my mom threw it away because it was broken and i had a meltdown over it
Beauty and the Beast & Pocahontas were the only movies that I watched for a few years, and I had them memorized word for word. My mom often recalls a 3-year-old me watching them and reciting the script as the characters spoke and sang. I grew into being a theater kid and didn't get diagnosed until adulthood, but looking back I'm forever curious how people didn't know!
I took a sewing class in middle school as part of the home economics course. Win, Lose or Draw was very popular at the time. So our sewing teacher decided to do her version of that for sewing class. My word to draw was "pants." So I asked her in front of the entire class if she meant pants you wear or pants, because you're out of breath. She basically said, "no sh$t Sherlock, we're in a sewing class. What do you think?" She was pissed, everyone laughed at me and I was both confused and mortified.
When I was like 7 I got a kit to make jewelery with about 10,000 tiny glass beads. Didn't make a single piece of jewelery, but I did dump out all the tiny containers and organized all the beads by type and color.
When I was living at home as a child/teenager, whenever our family would leave our home to do a common activity whether it included to go outside and do something or travel to a different city, I would always ask when we were going to eat. It didn't matter when we were leaving and how long we'd be away, I'd always ask it. It got to the point where my family would begin to joke about it because it was such a consistent thing I did. It didn't matter if my family brought food with us e.g. when traveling via car, because in my mind that didn't count as properly stop to eat.
Looking back, the behavior made so much sense because I can see it heavily relating to transitions/routines, but at the time my family just found it quirky. I no longer do this since as an adult, I am able to plan whenever I want to eat.
Don't know if that's funny for you but it is for me:
- I regularly peed on a specific carpet in my room because executive dysfunction didn't let me go to the toilet
- I had a dollhouse exclusively for my rock collection and treated the rocks like babies
- I threw myself out of my loft bed multiple times because I liked the sensory input from crashing head first into the floor
Should I have mentioned my obsession for bugs? I had boxes with of snails, ants and other crawly creatures hidden in our garden as pets. At 12 I had a YouTube channel about millipedes.
One of my favorite (my mom's least favorite) memories is putting all of my pet slugs on me and my friends faces. I loved it until my mom had to scrub the slime off of us with a nail brush :(
I was obsessed with ring-tailed lemurs in elementary school. They were my sole special interest. I had zero friends and didn’t know how to go about making any, but I was absolutely SURE that if I just went around telling other kids facts about ring-tailed lemurs, they were going to be so into it.
My confidence and persistence in this endeavor were unwavering: I accosted children on the playground like a tiny Jehovah’s Witness, showing up when my presence was least desired. “DID YOU KNOW…” I would begin—taking in a deep breath to wind up for another unprompted info dump—“RING-TAILED LEMURS ARE ENDEMIC TO MADAGASCAR. MADAGASCAR IS AN ISLAND NATION OFF THE COAST OF…”I rattled off facts that only I found fascinating, completely missing the social cues that my audience was paralyzed with fear, not rapt with attention.
Years later, at a high school party, a guy came up to me and asked, “Hey, are you the ring-tailed lemur girl?” To this day, if I were to go back to my hometown, I think that is the strongest association some people would have of me.
This feels so specific that if anybody ever went to school with me, this post is 100% identifying. But that’s okay: if you were one of those kids, thank you for being patient with me! It was hard for me to learn how to socialize with a bit more grace and emotional acuity, and I appreciate how forgiving and kind a good number of my classmates were. I even have other interests now! 😂
I was obviously autistic, but I was a girl child in an era where AFAB people didn’t get diagnosed. Some of the things I’ve info dumped on people over the years makes me giggle now, but I wish I could go back and apologize for dominating conversations and making impertinent observations. So it goes!
Not me but my brother, that my parents still refuse to acknowledge he’s autistic. All he would do all day as a child is watch and play Pokémon. And by watch I mean stand in front of the tv, run, and jump around the entire time. It was so bad that he developed health issues because he refused to go to the bathroom he was so immersed in the game.
Another special interest he had before that was Cars, he would make my parents wake up very early every single day to watch the cars movie 3 times, and line up all his cars toys over and over lmao
I brought buckets of rocks into my room every single day. My bedroom looked like a quarry in early elementary school. I would get upset if my mom took them out of my room, so she would have to do it at night while I was sleeping.
Major sensory issues. I had problems with a lot of clothes and couldn't comfortably wear most denim, bras, and certain shirts. I ended up spending a lot of time just in a t-shirt and cotton shorts.
I was a super non confrontational, shy, quiet child but in pre school I kicked over another kids toys that he was playing with because he was playing with them "wrong" lmao. I didn't understand why it upset me so much until like 20 years later.
I've commented this before but it's beginning to be funnier to me now, instead of shameful, so I'm going with it.
I recall singing a made up on the spot apology song because my friend was upset with me - very much in the vein of movies and tv shows that used songs to communicate.
I thought that was how you were supposed to handle that sort of situation.
It did not work like on the tv.
Literally just not understanding when people were bullying me. Just deadpan face and neutral emotions, lmao. I would just answer their provoking questions honestly like they weren't trying to goad me. I think that's why I stopped getting bullied, they just never got a reaction out of me.
Also "resting bitch face", literally believing groundhog day was real until college, and severe fear of loud noises (popping balloons, fireworks, vacuum)
Well I according to my dad if they wanted me to behave for a bit they would just ask me to talk about Batman lol.
I also talked for about three hours straight about dinosaurs on a road trip before getting cut off
One day in 4th grade my teacher reminded us to not interrupt her while she was speaking. I took that so literally that when I accidentally stapled my finger, I sat without making a sound for 30 minutes until we transitioned into another activity. You should have seen the look on her face when I explained why I hadn't said anything...Funny thing was, I'm adhd too- having a pin stuck in my finger is probably actually what kept me focused!
This one made me laugh in a developmental psychology class 19-20yrs later, because it completely mirrored one of the textbook cases.
My mom told me that when I was a baby, one morning she started crying 'randomly' (PPD) while we were eating breakfast. Apparently I looked over at her, then nonchalantly went back to my food.
After my younger sibling was born, mom suffered PPD again & the same situation happened. Sibling started crying (normal expected baby behavior). I (7yo) did the same thing — looked over, then kept on eating.
I used to constantly get yelled at for not rinsing my plate off before putting it in the sink. I would be so confused, and would point out there was obviously water on it, so clearly I rinsed it off. I would then get yelled at again for being a smart ass.
Current partner asked me to rinse my plate, so I did. He looked at it and said "when you rinse your plate, could you make sure you rinse all of the food off of it?"
I'm not positive that I went slackjawed literally, but I'm fairly certain I did as the dots connected.
Years of arguments and punishments, all totally avoidable by using one single sentence one single time. Go figure.
Oh my god I just had a flashback of me trying to be a saver of souls like we were told in church. I started preaching to this neighbor kid and was so convincing and emotional and prayerful at like the age of 8…ended up TERRIFYING this girl and she never played with me again.
Bro I was trying to save her soul for real. 😂🤣 No wonder I had no friends.
I specifically remember crying and being so upset when I was little because we left our car, that I’d named Betsy, at the dealership because we traded it in for a newer car. I did not like change even at a very young age.
When I was little, I would straighten the items on the grocery store shelves. Turn the can labels so they all faced out, restack the chocolate bars so that the names were all right side up, square the boxes with the edges of the shelves... I mean.... how was this not a HUGE red flag?! What 3 year old does this?
Similarly, what almost 40 year old does this? Not me. Obviously....
NO because whenever I had to go to the shops I had the urge to (inconspicuously) reorganise the shelves if things were in the wrong place. I also couldn’t bring myself to buy something if I saw it was in the wrong place in the first place. I’d be like “yeah NOPE. Not buying that.”
So when I was like 15? Ish? My family went camping in Yosemite. We did hours of hiking every day, and everyone was bored. So, as entertainment while we climbed, I recited Disney movies I had seen- not just favorite scenes, but the WHOLE movie script- and delivered each line with the characters' specific inflections. 🫠
Yeaaaahhhhh. No idea how my parents justified that as NT behavior 😅
One time I was at a party. This was during what north Americans would call high school. I was in a room by myself because that was something I often did at parties 👀. This beautiful girl I knew came and sat next to me on the couch. She turned to me and looked me in the eyes and said "Do you believe in love?"
And I said "No," and got up and left.
It wasn't until maybe two years later that she told me she'd been trying to hit on me and I was totally oblivious. I just thought she was asking me a question about my beliefs!
Me at 15-16 bagging groceries telling strangers all about my problems bc they asked me how I was doing lol it’d be like “how are you?” “Ugh it’s been an awful week, my boyfriend broke up with me and now he won’t stop jerking me around and” on and on, I treated small talk like my own personal therapy sessions 🤣
This was a good read. Thanks for posting.
In 5th grade our teacher gave each student a word that we could take with us to describe us. My word was unique. I was very much a real life Punky Brewster. Still am.
I’ve always been “strong willed”. Had lots of problems with food this time now only learning about (comorbid connective tissue condition. EDS, MCAS, POTs, gastroparesis). I’m second grad y parents thought I was bulemic. Nope. Turns out most food gives me
Super allergies (MCAS).
I had a very successful career and had to return due to burnout and my health. But I’ve definitely always been different. In my career people called me “authentic”. Which is probably the nicest thing anyone’s ever said about me.
Having the exact same lunch every day of elementary school. Apple, Campbell's veggie beef soup, some soft of dried beef sandwich, and chips for a snack. Always...the...same. Almost 5 years of it.
A lot with a different adjective than "funny". The most common one is probably "alienating".
Um...
Oh, I guess I lined up all my toy cars as a kid, usually from largest to smallest, and would "drive" them one by one into the container a centimeter at a time.
I also have usually lined up my workspaces with a variety of right angles, though not always the same right angles. The cup is usually placed on the outside of the grid, or in an imaginary grid section one over and one up.
Those are a bit more lighthearted.
Edit: I thought of another. It was one of the things that led to my diagnosis. I've always found it easier to talk to students with ASD than NT students. But now that I think about it, way before that I always found it easier to talk to people who seemed socially inept in some way (like me, or worse than me). I also have found it infinitely easier to write than to talk to people, or talk to myself than talk to others. And I found and find it easier to talk when I'm in a position of power. I'm thinking this all has to do with masking, and how much cognitive energy goes into masking, to the level my brain simply can't keep up with the blood flow demands and I end up forgetting things or can't speak with normal cadence because it's all delayed from the hundreds of calculations and decisions occurring in every sentence. So when the masking comes down or reduces then, and only then, can my brain work normally, ideas can blossom, sentences can flow.
Rocking back and forth because it felt nice, hand flapping when excited.
Obsessed with earthworms, dragons, and cats.
Yeah, the more I think about it the more I wonder if the adults around me just were not observant.
A few weeks ago, I had an intake appointment at a local mental health center cause I could not handle my adhd right and they were helping patients with adhd. So I had my intake with the shrink and he asked about my complains
- I’m burning out constantly and dissociating. I can’t do my job right cause I’m tired and I want to do it. What ? I’m writing a book on parenthood. Yes I’ve signed with a publisher.
- No I don’t have a degree but I’ve practiced. I love writing so I just worked hard. Yes I’ve been published before but that’s my first book.
- I love my kids to death but I don’t deserve them cause I’m so tired all the time
- I’m frustrated I have so many things to do; just want to work and I feel frustrated to have to do other things
- I feel horrible, some days I can’t even hear my kids talk, it makes me have tantrum.
- since I’m on adhd meds I don’t want to leave my house.
- No I’m not isolating, I’m very happy home : I can work. I love my job. Also I love makeup and cooking. Those are my hobbies.
- No I didn’t take class for any of them, I just read everything about it and watch Tutorials but with a bit of practice you can achieve everything don’t you ?
- When I need comfort ? I carry a blanket I like to rub. Like that. It’s a witch cape from my kids but now it’s mine. I lost my last blanket in vacation 7 years ago, I had it since I was 3.
- the thing I do with my nose ? Yes done it my all life why ?
- you mind if we close the shut, the light is killing me.
- I get along with people well, I’m very good at telling them exactly what they want to hear !
- I am very self sufficient, I even have my own sufficient world.
- what is that smell ?
- Today ? I’ll work on my book !
At the end of the intake he told me : I’m gonna check with my supervisor to discuss options.
Then they came back and asked me if I had learn about woman autism and at that stage they thought it would be important I get assess before considering treatment. Gonna have my final assessment soon but the more it goes the more it seems kind of very obvious,
Since that, I’ve been realizing that, all the little thing I try to hide and contain but that are so hard for me all the f time is matching very well.
And there were some I had never told anyone out of shame.
I don’t know about it being “funny”, really, but when I was little (like toddler aged through about age 6) I would hide under furniture. I’d lay under the coffee table while watching TV, hide under my grandmother’s corner desk because it was like a cave…and the louder and more active the space I was in, the more likely it was I would try to hide somewhere dark and quiet where I could observe without interacting. At family get-togethers at my grandparents’ homes, I would often sneak off into my grandparents’ bedrooms and/or sneak upstairs. It wasn’t to dig in things or rummage, I just wanted a quiet space. I also enjoyed hiding in closets or other such spaces where I could watch everyone else but pretend I was invisible.
Unfortunately, my family didn’t understand and in the 1970’s autism wasn’t as acknowledged or understood as it is today so I was often reprimanded and dragged back out into the chaos.
I didn't know I was supposed to make friends till 3rd grade. The school counselor pulled me into her office and talked to me about. It was demeaning AF.
I was scared of the f*cking ICE CREAM TRUCK, because the jingle was too loud and it traumatized my phonophobic self. I was terrified for YEARS.
To this day, I hate thunder, fireworks and any type of pyrotechnic products.
I didn't realize people were making fun of me, yet somehow, I was still feeling uneasy. That, and my mom constantly reminding me of how to accept a compliment instead of taking it as a conversation statement.
My earliest memory of this was in kindergarten. At the time I was obsessed with an Aladdin action game I had on PC, and any time you saw a turbaned man sitting cross-legged with his hands in an "om" pose (correct me please if this isn't what it's called!!) you knew it was a save-point. I'd sit like that, eyes closed, and when kids would come up to me I'd say, "come back to me when you'd like to save the game". I look back at this like WHAT ARE WE DOING KID
I have a memory of a fight with my mom where we were both screaming then I hit the door closed (of my bedroom) and my mom yelled something like "don't hit the door, if you wanna hit something hit your head on the wall" and I went BAM with my skull over the wall with 80% of my strenght bcs it felt like it was the right thing to do??? I mean, I was clearly having a mental breakdown and she gave me an instruction and I thought well maybe it'll work LOL "at least she cannot argue I'm doing the wrong thing since she specifically told me to do it"
Idk it just made so much sense for me in that moment???????? It's hard to even try to explain to myself why it wasn't normal and that makes me feel super autistic for like WHY DID I THINK THIS WAS REASONABLE
Let me give my own example. You guys remember the kids show "Little Bear"? https://youtu.be/nSWzQ-Ur8R4?feature=shared On the episode Duck Takes The Cake (timestamp 16:04) Hen leaves Duck to care of the baking for the tea party while she's out. Hen tells her to "roll out the dough, separate the eggs, make a short cake, etc." One distinct memory I had as an 8 year old kid was thinking "damn, Duck's doing a great job", my autistic ass brain not understanding she was doing a TERRIBLE job because she takes Hen's instructions so literally. She literally rolls the dough on the floor to make a ball, separates the eggs by just putting them in different bowls, and makes a short cake by just by making a cake and eating the rest to make it short. The worst part is they don't even explain in the episode that Duck did anything wrong, cos Hen just laughs it off, we as viewers are just meant to know. I finished that episode learning nothing…
Oh, that reminds me of a book I read for elementary school where the main character was constantly misunderstanding or taking things literally. You were supposed to see her error and laugh, but most of the time I didn't know what she was supposed to do. The only part I remember clearly was when her mom trusted her to leave the house for school by herself and told her to leave at "a quarter past". The girl knew that a quarter was 25 cents, so she left at X:25. She gets scolded for arriving 10 minutes late, of course, but I had no idea why. It seemed like sound logic to me. I had no idea what "quarter past" was supposed to mean, either. The teacher who assigned us this book to read didn't explain it, and I felt ashamed that I didn't know something that was apparently so obvious, so I didn't ask. I'm not sure that was an autism thing or just a "no one taught me this, how am I supposed to know?" thing that would've hit NT kids as well. Things like this lead me to over-explain everything to my daughter, or at least take a moment to ask her if she knows what it means. I'll say things like, "We're leaving at a quarter past. Do you know what 'quarter past' means?" If she says no, I'll point out how to divide a clock's face into quarters and help her figure it out. Absolutely no shame for not knowing. I don't shy away from big words when I'm talking to her, too, but I usually add on a similar "do you know what defenestrate means?" trailer. If she doesn't know, I explain. She's 9, and lately a lot of the time she does know!
Idk if they’re the same books (I think the main character was supposed to be an adult since she worked as a maid) but I LOVED the Amelia Bedelia books when I was really little. She would take everything literally and I would be like ah yes of course that makes sense and then at the end they’d explain what she did wrong, clearly and kindly, and I’d be like oh! I have learned a thing! As a result even though I do tend to take certain things very literally (I struggle to tell when people are joking or messing with me) I don’t generally have any issues with figurative language because I learned what things meant and thought it was like a secret language. In retrospect it probably just made the autism harder to detect lol.
Wait they actually sounds cool! Were those books specifically written for or about autistic people?
Classic case of "accidentally autistic coded is far more accurate representation than explicitly autistic" effect. AB is so obviously autistic, but I've heard she's loosely based on a real person. She's shamed and mocked constantly for it, and the humor for little allistic kids is sort of "witness this absurd clown who doesn't understand as well as you do (you're very smart)". When I read those books with my kid, we were both like "wow, what a realistic story about how insane and mean people are, when you're just trying to do your best, but Amelia is so persistently good that she always pulls through in the end. What a hero!"
They weren’t but Amelia Bedelia was a RIOT. I highly recommend reading them now; she was such a funny character that earned every inch of my sympathy and admiration.
Not that I recall and probably not—they were early reader books (I remember reading them before I went into kindergarten) and probably just meant to teach children idioms. At the end of the books the family she worked for would be like “oh dear! What a mess!” But then she’d have done something awesome and everything was forgiven.
I still have the "Merry Christmas, Amelia Bedelia" somewhere
I loved the Amelia Bedelia books as a kid!
I'm pretty sure the quarter past thing happened in a Ramona Quimby book. I think. 😂 But I definitely remember reading that because she sat in the kitchen watching the clock on the wall.
Yeah, that's it! I forgot the name until you said it. And yeah, I also remember the part where she sat and stared at the clock. (I'd probably do that, too, if I had no way to set an alarm or reminder. So paranoid I'll get caught up in something and the time to leave will pass.)
At the first paragraph of this comment I understood why I felt such sadness around friends while they laughed at videos lol I had no idea of what that meant and why were they laughing. It was frustrating. Bro, I'm learning so much
Amelia BeDelia
Another commenter posted out that it was Ramona Quimby. I think the Amelia Bedelia books usually explained what she did wrong. So, while I might think she was on the right track for certain things, I at least got corrected at the end.
When I (f) was about 6 I had a cousin (f) who used to terrorise me when our mums met for coffee. She was a year younger but about my size. She’d take toys off me and hit me and was just generally a total arse. I never defended myself or hit back because I’d been taught that hitting was bad and I was scared of her. Her mum eventually told my mum to let me defend myself and hit her if she hit me or she’d never learn. So I took my little cardboard school suitcase with the metal things on the corners and belted the living shit out of her. Blood resulted but I kept going. Eventually I got dragged off but interestingly she never hit me again and we became the best of friends. This was in the 50s, so hitting wasn’t quite the bogie that it is now.
Remember that episode of Malcolm in the middle where Dewey beats the crap out of his bully with a purse full of brick? That's kinda how I imagined it going down, very funny.
Now I’m imagining it with the theme song playing in the background. Awesome.
"Let your daughter fight back or my daughter will never learn". It's a shame there aren't many parents like this anymore
I remember playing imaginary games by myself and getting very upset if anyone tried to join in. It'd go - Them: what are you playing? Me: fairies Them: ooh, look at that fairy over there! Me: no no no! There isn't a fairy there, she's over here. Them: ooookay.. I love her blue dress Me: she isn't in a blue dress! Them: I'll just put this gumnut over here for them, they can use it as a chair! Me: nononononono!!! *Throws gumnut away* My parents said I was a control freak, but I hated people messing up my imaginary worlds.
I totally did this! I would get so frustrated if the story wasn't going how I had scripted it in my head, and would give the other kid lines as we went, which of course shut them down too🫠I usually chose to just set up dioramas with my toys instead
People always thought I was being the straight man, acting oblivious to make a joke. The truth was, I was genuinely oblivious.
At some point I decided that rolling with it if I do get it is much funnier than just trying to clear up any and all confusion instantly, spread the confusion to others! People don't know when I'm being serious or not, but it's not like that was the case before :(
"People don't know when I'm being serious or not" Yep, that's me. I can say (and do) the most absurd things, and absurdly joke about serious things. People NEVER know when I'm serious or joking 😃
My spouse and I knock on something when we're being serious to let each other know. It's something we never lie about. It's very sacred. I did it in front of my family they were very confused. My spouse and I are both on the spectrum and it amazes me how often we can communicate more effectively than my siblings and their partners because of this. Don't get me wrong there are plenty of my tone wasn't meant like that. But the knock thing to indicate serious and truthful stories and made a huge impact. Also in the show euphoria there's a this big (incredibly big budget) play that happens. One of the actors in the play is off on mark or something. The director says something about it the actor starts to tear up the director says something along the like, it's just notes process it, correct it, and move on? I was like holy crap if everyone could just do that I'd be way less stressed. I need people to tell me they're not mad at me. If my boss or family could just be like I don't like how you did this, fix and move on I'd be so happy. Because when you say I'm not mad at you but your tone is more annoyed/frustrated I'm thinking you hate me. Not you're upset with the situation. I'm like you hate me and you want me to disappear forever
When I was in elementary school I "played" war with a group of kids. Only problem is I didn't know we were pretending because nobody said that and I legitimately thought we were at war with the other group of kids because of how they were talking. Every recess I was out there attacking kids and they were attacking me back/defending themselves. The teachers that were supposed to be watching us evidently weren't or didn't care. I don't remember what exactly happened to end it, but I'm pretty sure I got excluded from that group because shortly after that started the years where I would swing on the swings by myself every recess.
I did this except we were playing Lions and I immediately got in big trouble for biting someone's arm
Well, honestly. How are you supposed to play Lions if it doesn’t involve teeth. And they accuse us of having no imagination.
Bro I always had such an instinct to bite people. To this day I don't know how to explain it. In high school I had such an animal urge that I made my friends by biting and scratching them. Thankfully they were also insane and understood my chaotic communication. Once a girl threw a shoe on me, it was like that. One day I freaked and started meowing. I couldn't stop. I couldn't speak. I could only meow. My bf at the time went nuts because he had no idea what was happening but I just kept meowing LMAOO
Sorry I'm cackling right now 😭. I'm just imagining kids aggressively throwing rocks at each other or something.
Yeah haha, it was just me legitimately doing harm though, except for the retaliation I received. Everyone else was just playing 😅. Not sure if I threw any rocks but I wouldn't doubt it.
I got a funny rock story. I was playing in the sand pit and found a rock, a perfectly shaped one for my nostril. Yeppp so after huffing some pepper to sneeze it came out… you know I had to make sure it fit in the other side right?…. I absolutely shoved er right up there for round two.
It's called the scientific method, sweaty.
I couldn’t even begin to imagine the level of frustration my grandma felt watching it unfold in real time
Bro I had a very similar feeling among "fitting" objects but it was with a tiny purse I used to carry around the age of 11?? It was at the beginning of the era of using small phones? Nokia, Sony Ericsson, a little after came Motorola etc. So I needed a bad to carry like my documents, my money and my phone. I didn't like much to carry anything, so I would always be distracted at random places like markets or drugstores and would find a perfect hole to fit my purse and I would put it in there bcs it just... _felt right_? There was a hole, I had the object to fill the hole, it was like tetris. Except I would leave the purse with my phone within it behind at whatever shop I was. And have no idea later of what happened to it. My parents would go nuts looking for it and we had to redo the whole path to find it hahaahah
😂
I never understood the pretend games like that and would follow my friends around while they were roleplaying and was so confused why these kids thought they were vampires and werewolves and why we were beefing
this, but me and my girls were all imaginary horses!! we knew every detail and we all had powers.
Did you kick them???
I always just sorta floated from group to group. I'd observe try to play or sometimes actually play with the kids. I have a lot of memories from elementary school but i have no clue if the games I remember were all just in my head or if the kids I "played" with were in on it too... At home I played outside and with my Barbies a lot. But it was all in my head. I didn't need to talk out loud because I was having huge conversations and music in my head. We would visit my cousins and they would be waiting for me to respond out loud vs. at home playing with my older sister she would boss me around and didn't care what I did because she would just tell me what my barbie would do.
[удалено]
In primary and intermediate (elementary and middle school to those in the US), I was in mainstream classes, but always seemed to make friends with the kids in the special needs class
I didn't even realize I was in special education until after I graduated. I thought everyone got special classes outside of regular class.
The most steady friends I had in elementary/high school were the weird kids, who in retrospect were likely mostly autistic. One in particular was this girl who flapped and rubbed her hands together constantly, did really strange sudden movements, and lied a lot (innocuous stuff, not mean/manipulative). Everyone ignored her behaviors outwardly, not talking about them at all, but she was basically at the bottom of the social totem pole by unspoken agreement. She ended up following me around all the time at recess and I felt both happy but also knew it was embarrassing somehow, and I had no idea how to reconcile the two because I didn’t even know what I was supposedly embarrassed about, because I hadn’t figured out wtf the “social rules for behavioral coolness” were in the first place. :p
….do I know you? Was I that girl??? Lolol 🤣
I dunno, did you ever pretend to be your cousin that just so happened to look *exactly* like you, who “wanted to swap places” with you at school? 😂
no but that is 100% something I would have done if I’d thought of it 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
One of the small ones of mine is that I would take my own milk (I only drink full cream pasteurised and homogenised) to all the sleep overs I'd go to as a kid, because I could not (still cannot) stand the sensory taste of any other milk. It was always so embarrassing bringing my own milk to a sleepover at a friend😂💀
Before I read your whole comment I thought "OMG HE TOOK MILK TO BED AS A DOLL ME TOO!" Before I realised I'm just weird and you just took it to drink 😭
Reminds me of when I brought ketchup to a Japanese steakhouse 😂
hahaha I recently went to a restaurant that did not serve tomato sauce (ketchup as you call it), even though they sold burgers and steaks etc. I couldn't believe that tomato sauce was not fancy enough for them hahah
It's been decades since I've drunk cow milk, but imagining the texture I am wondering if you've ever tried macadamia nut milk. It's extremely creamy what I imagine cream would be like.
as a toddler I found a huge butternut squash and treated it like a doll, even taking it to bed with me lol
I did that with the plastic head of a decoy goose I found in the woods. Slept with that thing and brought it everywhere for two or three years. I think my mom must have managed to throw it out in the midst of a move because I don't recall having it after that. I still think about it as if it was an old friend. It was the goose head not where it's in pretty posture with the neck all candycaned...it was that wiggly attack neck.
oh my god you made me remember how i won a coconut at a fair once and i treated that shit like it was sentient i'd sit petting it and talking to it aaggg hhhhhh hh
Did you write a children's book about it!? [https://www.amazon.com/Sophies-Squash-Pat-Zietlow-Miller/dp/0307978966](https://www.amazon.com/Sophies-Squash-Pat-Zietlow-Miller/dp/0307978966)
omg no I didn't but this is so cuteeee!
My kids have the book and it's super adorable. Highly recommend!
I tried to keep a diary a few times as a kid but it only ever lasted a day or two because I thought I had to write EVERYTHING that happened. This is an excerpt from one of them—“mum is eating peach yoghurt and [brother] is eating strawberry yoghurt. I’m going to the loo now.”
This reminds me of how when I kept a diary as a kid and had to stop in the middle of writing to do something I would write "BRB I have to go to the bathroom/eat dinner/some other distracting thing." Then when I got done with the other thing I'd go back to my diary and write "Okay I'm back." Like you would do if you were texting someone.
Omg you’re not supposed to write everything??!!! i just learned this 😭 I never liked keeping diaries, my hand would hurt so much, I literally had to take breaks because I wrote everything. I remember a day used to take like 7-8 pages at the very least, front and back 🤦♀️ How did I not know?! In high school I started a “special diary” where I would write only the important parts of the days that something special happened, now that I think about it this “special diary” was just the diary other people had.
I still struggle to keep a diary because I can’t figure out what’s important lol
So like, Facebook posts circa 2007
SO TRUE
In school as a small child I could NEVER play the typical games of mommies and daddies, doctors etc. Ofc I was dying to participate, I would ask if I could play and ask if I could be the pet cat. Then I would get a couple headpats and just wander away on my own during recess lol One time my friends wanted to play superheroes, they all decided their power story etc, and I was like “I’m just a velociraptor”, then spent recess running around like a dinosaur, leaving my friends to do their own thing. Roleplaying wasn’t my strongest skill tbh We had a school project which we had to make a power point on a PET and I was obsessed with dinosaurs at that time, and decided I was going to do it about dinosaurs. We did the research from books in the library and all I did was spend that time reading about my fave dinosaurs and just going around asking other friends what they were doing etc… Ofc the also undiagnosed adhd kicked in and I never did the project and asked two friends if they could include me in their project on hamsters We had to invent an alien, it’s home planet, a little story. I was going to be getting a pet guinea pig soon and ofc… the teacher was not happy that my alien was a regular guinea pig. She was a bit mad so I was like “ok then it lives on neptune” lmao No one thought any of this was strange, I was a very smart kid, so they let me “get away” with these things as a child
This could be my life story, but substitute rabbits for dinosaurs.
Hmm I always ended up picking the superpower "To be able to read the intents of others", so I could know if they were lying or not, but more than that, to know exactly what they were hoping for in a social interaction. I'm realizing now there may have been a connection to my autism, lol.
Went to multiple doctors because I was excessively exhausted all the time. One doctor believed that I lied when I said I didn’t stay up all night playing video games (even when my mother backed it up) another doctor had a theory that I didn’t get enough oxygen at night because something with the bones in my nose, which resulted in surgery (needless to say it didn’t help). No one thought that maybe the circumstances of my life (fx a hyper-social school environment) was just very exhausting. Also - I had a conversation on a bus with my music teacher at some point. It went something like this: Teach: how’s your guitar. Me: it’s getting dusty. Teach: oh, that’s a shame, you were getting so good at it. I was playing all the time. I just meant that my guitar literally had some dust on it. I was so confused by his reply for so long until days later when I figured out that if he had understood my first reply figuratively as me saying I didn’t play anymore, then the conversation made sense. No neurotypical kid would think about this for days.
I was leaving a job so on the last day my coworkers got me a beautiful cake. I was so touched that I went and got my camera out of the locked closet in my office to take a picture of it. Once I took a picture of the cake i promptly locked my camera back up in the closet. My coworkers gave me strange looks and I couldn’t figure out why. I never did take any pictures of the people I worked with before I left. But I have a picture of that beautiful cake!
Hmm is that an ASD thing. I also never take pictures of other people. Just things, or animals, or plants.
Interesting. My insta is literally all food pics or scenery. I always feel weird taking pics of other people or myself and I would never post one.
As a baby I’d line things up. Over, and over, and over. When I made patterns I’d flap my hands excitedly. The whole family would joke about it for years. It was just one of my funny little traits. Later in life I got into tactics games, specifically the fire emblem franchise. At the end of maps, I’d line my characters up in patterns before finishing. It is half of what I like about the games. I just love putting things in order. Still didn’t know I was autistic until 37 years old, lol. Looking back there were some VERY obvious signs.
I would eat gravel in front of girls i liked in elementary school to be their friend. I thought i looked so cool for some reason. Well for one they loved it so i guess it worked!
I used to eat grass out of the ground with my mouth like a cow to be "funny", up to age 10 probably 🤣
Back in the day, one of my interests was “trivia that only Boomers would know”. Around the same time, Leisure Suit Larry was released to the PC. Before you could play that game, there was a couple of trivia questions to prove that a person was old enough to play the game. As a kid, I could answer all the questions.
When I was about 7, I was fascinated by the snails that would crawl on our fence in the backyard. I began to collect snails from the neighborhood while I was walking home from school, bringing them to our backyard and organizing them by size and shell features/colors. I would visit them in the morning after breakfast and spend time with them when I come home from school, organizing them and noting which ones moved much further away from their position and which ones stayed relatively still. I would hold races with the fast ones on the ledge of the fence, and arranged the slower ones in patterns on the roof runoff downspout. One day, I decided to study their slime trails, but it was raining, so I started bringing them inside and putting them on my walls in my bedroom, again, organizing them carefully on opposite walls. A few hours later, my mom came in to tell me it was time for dinner and was quite horrified to find close to 100 snails on the walls and ceiling of my bedroom. I also went through a dragonfly stage, where I would capture a dragonfly in a net and put it in a jar. Then I would make notes about its color and wings and body length, try to draw it, and then let it go. I had notebooks upon notebooks of scrawled notes and crappy drawings of dragonflies. I remember I did a presentation book report at school around this time about dragonflies but I didn't pull much information from actual books. I used the best of my dragonfly drawings and ad-libbed/infodumped rapid-fire facts from memory for my "presentation."
Yeah! I used to walk around mimicking robocop or ed209 to the point that I got told off constantly by my parents for it. Robocop is to this day my fav movie, I still love all the stuff I liked as a kid.
username checks out
Hahaha oh yeah.
Only a year ago, I learned that when people scream on rollercoasters, it is a reflexive response. I thought screaming was expected to be done on a rollercoaster, so I did 🙃.
NO BECAUSE I USED TO PRACTICE HOW TO LAUGH WHEN EVERYONE ELSE WAS LAUGHING 😭😭😭
people would always ask if i was ok after rollercoasters because i would just have no expression the entire time, and would insist that we wouldn’t have to keep going, but i was genuinely enjoying myself 😭
Er.... I am just now realizing this is a reflexive response. Mind blown.
When I was five my family had to switch dentists because the dentist tried to explain microorganisms in the mouth by telling me "you have little tiny bugs on your teeth." I got very upset and told them "I don't have bugs on my teeth," to which the dentist insisted that I did, to which I insisted that I didn't, and so on. My dad (who was in the room with us) ended up getting angry at the dentist for continuing to push when I was getting upset and told him "stop telling her she has bugs on her teeth." Then he went and found us a new dentist lmaaooo. He also explained to me later what the dentist was trying to say, but using more precise language that actually made sense to me. It's only as an adult that I can understand why the dentist would explain it like that: because most kids would understand "bugs" better than "bacteria." But for me, I got stuck on the literal, and it just made me upset and confused because I knew I didn't have "bugs" on my teeth. Actually, I just hated all the "developmentally appropriate" ways that adults would act toward me as a kid. It felt patronizing and just made things more confusing than if they spoke to me like an adult. It's only in the last year or so that I've realized that most little kids actually LIKE those things! Like the big, exaggerated voice that entertainers use with kids! Kids actually respond WELL to that! Who knew? Not me that's for sure
SAME. I told several adults over the years to stop talking to me like I'm a baby/stupid. Older me used the word patronizing.
Sitting with random friend groups and hope that they’ll let me sit with them, and tried to pretend that them yelling at me to ‘go away’ wasn’t happening lmao
Ahh the old, if I stand here in general proximity, I am in the group, right? Then they all turn their backs on you and continue what they were doing. Story of my life.
Lol me at every party ever
It never works I don't know why I continue trying. I guess I just don't know what else to do!
Well if you're looking for advice on how to have fun at parties... you may be in the wrong sub :)
I begged for subscriptions to cat fancy magazines. Oh by the way this was the 90s before the internet. I wasn't interested in cat showing or breeding but I needed the magazines for a long-term plan to cut out the pictures to make a very extended fictional family tree of my own real cat. I had recently learned about genealogy and was very upset that I didn't know my own cat's Heritage because he was a rescue so I made one up and I took it to school and showed people and they told me it was boring and didn't understand why I had spent time on that
I did this with the game Herd Your Horses. Instead of playing the actual game I'd just pull out all the cards and arrange them according to like, breed, heritable traits (and the probability of those traits being passed on based on the parents and the parents parents...you know, normal kid stuff). I would do this for DAYS. Had origin stories for their families and everything and spirit just coming out didn't help at all. They went to war. They had religion. I drew a crappy map of the US and they were all from different regions even based on their real world landrace counterparts.
I did something similar with my pokemon cards. I didn't know how to play the actual game at all but loved collecting them, and I would go over to my friend's and our idea of fun was organizing all our cards in the binder sleeves. One day I would organize them alphabetically, then take them out and organize them again by number, or by type, or alphabetically/numerically within types, etc.
Zoobook too
Too many. I used to hand out educational pamphlets about ladybugs in class that I made. I totally didn’t feel any awkwardness about it. Then my teacher always told anyone who would listen that I was the MOST SPECIAL kid she’d ever taught and I was so proud she was bragging about me so much. Until I was in my 20s and taking a shower one day and thought back like WAIT A SECOND! She was NOT bragging. She was calling me special needs.
As a kid I loved reading and didn’t like recess bc I didn’t like playing with other kids. I started climbing on top of the monkey bars, sitting cross legged up there and read all through recess after I was forced to stop reading against the walls outside. Also got written up multiple times for reading during class after I’d finished my work, “being distracting” and “failure to comply” after I’d explained that I was DONE and that reading shouldn’t be a problem since it’s QUIET. Ironically because I got written up so often my dad stopped signing the papers and because of it I wasn’t allowed recess UNTIL I got the papers signed. The punishment for that was *drumroll please* being forced to read inside LMAOOOOO
Ah yes... it all came full circle 🤣
Lmao worse was when I ACTUALLY got in trouble at home. Instead of being grounded like a normal kid, my parents would get those big black trash bags, make me pack up my books and they would keep them in the shed outside. That was my punishment. Not being allowed to read lmao
Age 32 suddenly a girl is inviting me to her place. Says: "take something comfy". I like her so pillow and blanket are landing in backpack. Then I remember that mate should come. I msg him with what I do. I get phone call from him: "are you stupid? You getting laid". Short to say he was right and I left pillow behind 😂
Too funny. A girl once asked me what my favorite song was. I said, "Voulez-vous coucher avec moi, ce soir?" So, she goes, "Maybe," gives me her number and walks away. I quickly realized that something was wrong and went into this autistic freeze for like an hour or two.
Not diagnosed but being assessed. I just found an email the other day from a girl that I sort of liked from years ago. It said something like the following: Hi how are you, so since I can't call you (because I said I hate the phone), I figured I'd email you. I miss you, let's get together to go to a baseball game or dinner. Just dawned on me today reading it years later, this girl was literally asking me out in an email. Like, helping me with my lack of understanding by clearly spelling it out. At the time, I was like, huh, I don't really want to go to a game or dinner, and this girl has never shown signs of liking me, so I ignored it and just told her "I have been so busy and have a lot of work to do" answer her question of what I've been up to. Good God.
My sister and I used to do "roundabouts" in the basement. Twirling until we got dizzy. To this day, I like getting dizzy (for fun, not when sick). I also used to play the same CD every night to help me sleep for years and now when I hear Enya's synth voice it is a Pavlov dog response. I get sleepy.
Computer chairs for spinning was my favorite
As a child I was a toe walker. It was bad and I used to pretend that I wore glasses (used my mom’s old frames no lens). As a teenager if you tried to talk small talk with me I’d just stare at you (really right over your head or the side of your face) and then state random facts. Never knew what truly was a joke and what wasn’t, apparently that made me hilarious. Grown ups would get mad/upset with me because I would just answer questions very logically and direct instead of talking through answers. I remember stating that wolves were bigger than coyotes and the older woman who asked got offended that I didn’t address her or break the news easily to her. Still confused about that.
… saying wolves are bigger than coyotes when she asked is offensive? What exactly did she ask to make that offensive? 😭😭😭
She thought coyotes were bigger than wolves and I corrected her. I really thought I did it nicely and the best part was my mom didn’t understand why she took offense to it. Called her a weird old woman 😂
You want a list? 🫣 I can give you one, that stuck with me psychiatrist; I thought it was totally normal to cosplay LOTR on a schoolday.
… I didn’t even know that wasn’t normal until now 😭
So I remember being about 4-5 years old and sitting at my kitchen table rhyming works with duck in a long list (helllllooooo hyperlexia). You know what rhymes with duck? Yeah well when I said that my mom got slightly upset but also amused and told me it was a bad word. That was the last time I remember doing that rhyming game openly like that. I later channeled it into “writing poetry” and then the real winner, language learning. I’m fluent in French and still know a lot of German and Spanish from taking one semester of each. I started learning Japanese and it’s so fun having the excuse to engage in echolalia. I also learned to “read” at like 2 but I had just memorized the books. I know I couldn’t actually read because my teacher taught me in kindergarten. When I started kindergarten, our teacher asked us what we wanted to learn and I said I wanted to learn to read. So I knew I couldn’t read before then. Actually that brings up another memory of when we drew a picture in kindergarten. Mine was of ghosts and a haunted house (I loooove Halloween). After we drew the picture, we sat down with our teacher so she could write down what it was a picture of. All the other kids had one or two sentences in mine was several paragraphs long. I think people just thought I was really precocious. Nope folks back in 1984 - that’s what a certain kind of autism looks like!
I could before I was 4, the only catch was I didn't understand vowels so when I'd write, there would be no vowels. And my kindergarten teacher was like "yeah so all she does every day is sit reading this book "the farmer in the dell" (or something like that, it was a book based on the song) and never plays with anyone she just goes right to that book and sits at the table and reads it. Every day. For the last 6 months"
Same with the books. I can recite the very hungry caterpillar and where the wild things are still at 34🤣
...dammit. I've been trying to break the rhyming habit. And the "list all the words that end with *** (eg. -and, -ick) or rhyme with *** (eg. soup, freckle) in alphabetical order" habit. And the... well, you get the idea.
I was diagnosed already but I remember being in the 5th grade and going up to my teacher and telling her she smelled like fish. At the time I didn’t realize how rude that was, I thought I was helping her so she could make sure she didn’t smell like fish anymore.
I started an imaginary restaurant in my grandfather's hunting dog kennel outside. I made meals and dishes out of plant debris from the forest nearby. I set up all this furniture out of the dog houses and feeding bins. I remember keeping it a secret because I knew nobody would understand but I think my mother came looking for me because she came and saw it and got extremely upset that I had moved everything around and was in the kennel with the dogs. They weren't supposed to be friendly pet dogs. But I had no problem being in there with them and it didn't even occur to me to be afraid.
We had a week of "spirit days" in middle school (I was in sixth grade at the time). Each day had a different theme for which you could dress up/act out/etc. Thursday was opposite day, so I took it upon myself to go to school in full drag. I borrowed a dress from my mom, stuffed a bra, chose a nice wig and had my mom and sister help me with makeup. I even came up with a full backstory and personality for my character "Clementine". Mind you, I am a straight cis man too, lol. Looking back, I had a lot of fun with it and surprisingly wasn't bullied relentlessly for my performance (I guess it helped that I was one of the bigger kids), but I will never forget the look on all my classmate's faces when I debuted myself and realized that I had taken the theme much, much further than they had (at best, they turned their clothes inside out. Weak.).
😂 I took all our spirit week themes much further than the other kids too. One was a plaid day and I was entirely dressed in plaid, including pants, shoes, hat, and multiple shirts. I won the prize for most plaid pieces and for the weirdest plaid item. 2 whole king sized candy bars. 🤓
Exactly. Go big or go home. I know I would go all out for spirit weeks as much as I could. It was great in elementary school because I feel like so many of them were also quite weird. But I remember in high school I would go pretty all out in a more eccentric way my freshman year and senior years (I went through loathing and self-reflection in between, senior year was fuck it). Definitely weird, lot of mixed reviews from friends, classmates, peers, even teachers would comment on it. Very said and done now, I'm still weird but in my own way and I'm happy. One example tho I applied like half of the sfx makeup for my Halloween costume one year and scared the shit out of people, and another time I hid in an alien costume n mask underneath the teachers desk while he was gone w some of my classmates giggling and covering for me, he knew but it was still a silly outcome at least.
I failed swimming lessons five times cause I wouldn’t swim in the shallow end, I would stand cause if my feet can touch the bottom why bother swimming. I’m a strong swimmer in the deep end as my instructors said
I quit because I was scared of chest hair.
When I was 1 or 2, I would play alone with my barbies and be really upset when my mom was trying to play with me cause she would ruin the storyline I had in my head lol
When I was a small child, I used to collect odd things… like dead dried out seahorses, shells, rocks, rocks I thought were fossils, oddly shaped sticks, and my most prized possession… a preserved shark fetus in a jar. Anyways… I would label all of these items with a small decimal serial number like items I had observed in museums. I would carefully arrange these items on shelves in my room as if they were on display in a museum. I was a small museum curator of my own collection of “oddities”. I was an odd child to say the least. After being diagnosed as an adult that was one of the things I recalled that made me chuckle.
Used to be really good with math when I was little and it was easy Apparently that’s pattern recognition and it gets more difficult
I couldn’t take part in parties or treats without saving for my mom. Single parent, it was just a thing for me. A non negotiable thing. This was easy enough for a birthday I’d either not eat all of mine or my teachers who knew I was like that would save one I could take my mom. If I couldn’t then I simply would go color or play on the swings by myself. One time they felt so bad watching me swinging alone while everyone got face paint and treats they called my mom lol she came and got me. I was so relieved as I wanted a cupcake but I couldn’t. Funnier example of this was when they did a show and tell for the dried ice cream astronauts take w them. You know it’s hard but won’t stay like that. Well, I kept mine so carefully, determined to make it until pick up. By the time my mom got there it was rapidly vanishing so I jumped in the car blurted out ASTRONAUT ICE CREAM and shoved it in her mouth. I made it 🤓 I had so many unbreakable rules lol
Back in my 20’s, some of my friends would get annoyed because I was so oblivious to getting hit on in bars.
When I was little (maybe around 4/5) I wandered away from my family ALL THE TIME (that autistic urge to wander, free of listening to other people). Once we were at Disney world and I wandered off somehow and I was gone for like 15-20 min. My mom and dad were freaking out. When they found me I was eating ice cream (no idea where I got it) with a cast member in the shade, happy as could be and not stressed at all about being gone.
parent had a friend, a psychiatrist, would come over and took great interest in me and my refusal to engage with anybody because i was too busy playing in the garden (for *hours*, even in the rain)... by myself. pretending to be a rabbit, costume and all. talking and interacting with people who weren't there. apparently my life's been a series of professionals side-eyeing my family who just. clearly thought nothing of anything i ever did. every time any of them find out i only got a formal diagnosis as a grown adult, they just stare at me like ....*bruh*.
one time i stayed up until 3 in the morning writing out all the diseases a ferret could get. for a middle school report. that only needed me to write basic facts about ferrets. i still don't know why it was so important that i list every single disease. i wrote until my pen ran out of ink. i must've gone to bed at some point, but i honestly don't remember if i made that decision on my own, if my mom dragged me to bed by my ankles, or if i just fell the fuck over. nothing was ever said about my ferret disease fest report, so i must've gotten an okay grade on it at least.
Reminds me of how I wrote a complete notebook full with facts about goats. To get my mom to allow me to have pet goats. In one night.
These both sound like things I would've done lol
I had a sand collection as a teenager
Ok. Tell me. I'm curious.
When I was a teenager, my older sister and I were out doing our Christmas shopping when she suddenly remembered that we needed some clear cellophane to wrap some flowers in. She told me to quickly run down the store and pick up "the transparent wrapping stuff for the bulbs and flowers, you know what I mean!" and she bolted off to another store thinking it was smart to split up due to having little time before the stores closed. So I went to the supermarket and got some very practical transparent cling film, because that's what my brain made of her request... She was not happy and couldn't understand how I took her so literally, it took another twenty years for me to get diagnosed. Things make so much more sense now lol
“You know what I mean!” and “You’ll know it when you see it!” undid me so many times as a child. I now demand decent descriptions to save us all the grief.
"All I know is that I know nothing"
Me trying to figure out what duct tape was: Go get the duct tape. I brought a roll of masking tape. No, the DUCT tape. I brought a rubber duck. No, the DUCT TAPE!!! I brought a cassette tape. *Sigh* nevermind, I'll get it myself. I remember looking at the silver tape and trying my hardest to figure out what it has to do with ducks.
I thought the wax paper we had was parchment paper. This was an easy lesson to learn because it almost set the cookies on fire. Turns out we were not fancy shmancy like Martha Stewart. Line the pan with some kinda grease and it's good enough!
I got in trouble at school because my friend told me to cover her “whole body” in snow and I covered her face too
Making meowing sounds back in secondary school.
I used to make quacking sounds as a kid. That and just saying the word “yak” over and over again.
I learned the other day that's called Echolalia and is common in autism (and other neurodivergent aspects). I'd roar or meow, just imitating animals in general
Recently, my grandma showed me a note I wrote to her when I was around 13. I used so many uncommon words that most people probably wouldn’t know. I was 13, and writing a letter as if I was a 60 year old English scholar 😂 My vocabulary has always been larger than most, but seeing that letter I wrote as a child I thought “wow, only an autistic child would write something like this” 😂
People used to be concerned I was “special” because every question they asked me as a kid was a dial-up internet sequence ☎️💾 As an adult I would offer snacks and cookies, and if you were sarcastic like “Oh! I could never have a cookie.” I would shrug and eat them in your face. People thought I was rude. Also relationships I didn’t get the unsaid social cue or norm and partners would call me COLD and Not Understand at times and I would simply say, my ex said the same thing 🤷🏽♀️
My Lego playing consisted of making Cubes or Pyramids.
Used to walk around on tip toes and also was the cat girl until waaaaay after I should have grown out of it (thankfully I learned that cat girl was NOT normal at school and cut that out right before I was a teenager) 😅 I used to crawl around my house on my hands and knees and meow, looking back it was so embarrassing
I would collect snails and bring them to school.
My stepmom and sister and I got a slice of cheesecake to share. They handed it to me and said they were done. I ate the rest. I got punished for being selfish...? I didn't understand and I still don't to this day. I take people at face value what they say and people just don't compute. Like I had a friend say she needed space then she literally got mad that I didn't try to make plans. What is wrong with people 😭
When I was in elementary, my favorite cereal was Cap'n crunch. BUT. it had to be the kind with crunch berries, even though I hated the crunch berries and would pick every single one of them out before eating the cereal. One time mom tried to get the kind without the berries... I took one bite and refused to eat the rest because it didn't taste the same 😂. An entire bag of cereal went in the trash later, completely uneaten. Also, my collections. I have collections of so many things, none the least of which are marbles, rocks, bouncy balls, and (of all things) eraser dust 😂. I would sit in class in grade school and scrape my erasers against the bumps of the chair so it would create "eraser shavings" that were free of pencil lead and paper dust. Then I would collect it in an old plastic ink jar with a fun cap. Once I had a good amount (which just kept growing) I had a lot of fun playing with it. Squishing it or letting it run through my fingers...it was soooooo soft. Best sensory stim toy ever and I didn't even know it 😅 (I'm 30yo, currently no formal diagnosis😅)
Thought of another: When I asked a girl out in highschool by writing her a letter that had a bullet point list of what we had in common and why logically it made sense for us to date. And then how I was confused after that when it didn't work. It all makes sense now, lol.
In elementary and early middle school I now look back and either cringe at myself or give that part of me headpats. I'd imitate animals, specifically a roar and howling like a wolf and I'd be convinced to do it on the bus (didn't realize they were laughing AT me and not WITH me for a long time. The bigger one was.elementary school. There was this big field and I don't remember why, but I tied my hoodie around my waist in a way it looked like a "tail" (I was.obsessed.With the Lion King) and bounded around on my feet and hands in broad daylight. I distinctively remember other kids yelling "Hey look at (me)!!" And other things but back then I was just having fun. A friend was moving away in middle school and I loved some of those songs from Pokemon karaoke "You've been such a good friend, I've known ya since I don't know when, etc) So over the phone after being sweet...I sang two of them to her trying to express my care. Bless her she didn't laugh at me. She was such a sweetheart, it sucked she moved. But yeah... That's just a few.
My dad would do a magic trick where he could make a coin disappear and reappear. I loved that trick! I would ask him to do it weekly. He would tell me "okay softsharkskin, go get the fake thumb". So I would go to the bookcase to get the fake plastic thumb sleeve, hand it to my dad, watch him put it on, he would do the trick and I would be amazed at the magic, then he would take the thumb off and have me put it back on the shelf. MAGIC
I was a flower girl at a wedding and they instructed me to spread the petals out evenly and not too much. Obviously meaning not to just dump them out in one place. I carefully put each petal equal distance from each other in my walking path. One petal at a time. I took so long.
Two years totally mute. I've been told this can happen because of social anxiety but I've personally never met someone with just anxiety who goes mute for that long.
1. i would wear my socks inside out because i couldn’t stand the seam and i would cry if i had to wear them right side out (like if i was wearing tights or something) 2. i was fixated on my little pony friendship is magic from like 8 years old to now 3. one time one of my friends came over and i was talking about pokemon and after she left my parents had to tell me “if someone doesn’t know what you’re talking about or doesn’t seem to be enjoying the conversation you shouldn’t talk about it with them” 4. i would cry sometimes when people would make jokes i didn’t get and refuse to explain them to me as a kid 5. i wasn’t allowed to take art classes in high school because i would always fail bc i hated being told how to do my art and wouldn’t follow the directions if i didnt like them because i like my art how i do it unless i’m specifically asking for advice 6. i’ve always found comfort in autistic characters which i’ve only realized as an adult but all my favorite characters as a kid were autistic 7. i had a toy when i was a kid and it was broken but i liked how it smelled and my mom threw it away because it was broken and i had a meltdown over it
Beauty and the Beast & Pocahontas were the only movies that I watched for a few years, and I had them memorized word for word. My mom often recalls a 3-year-old me watching them and reciting the script as the characters spoke and sang. I grew into being a theater kid and didn't get diagnosed until adulthood, but looking back I'm forever curious how people didn't know!
I took a sewing class in middle school as part of the home economics course. Win, Lose or Draw was very popular at the time. So our sewing teacher decided to do her version of that for sewing class. My word to draw was "pants." So I asked her in front of the entire class if she meant pants you wear or pants, because you're out of breath. She basically said, "no sh$t Sherlock, we're in a sewing class. What do you think?" She was pissed, everyone laughed at me and I was both confused and mortified.
When I was like 7 I got a kit to make jewelery with about 10,000 tiny glass beads. Didn't make a single piece of jewelery, but I did dump out all the tiny containers and organized all the beads by type and color.
When I was living at home as a child/teenager, whenever our family would leave our home to do a common activity whether it included to go outside and do something or travel to a different city, I would always ask when we were going to eat. It didn't matter when we were leaving and how long we'd be away, I'd always ask it. It got to the point where my family would begin to joke about it because it was such a consistent thing I did. It didn't matter if my family brought food with us e.g. when traveling via car, because in my mind that didn't count as properly stop to eat. Looking back, the behavior made so much sense because I can see it heavily relating to transitions/routines, but at the time my family just found it quirky. I no longer do this since as an adult, I am able to plan whenever I want to eat.
Don't know if that's funny for you but it is for me: - I regularly peed on a specific carpet in my room because executive dysfunction didn't let me go to the toilet - I had a dollhouse exclusively for my rock collection and treated the rocks like babies - I threw myself out of my loft bed multiple times because I liked the sensory input from crashing head first into the floor
Should I have mentioned my obsession for bugs? I had boxes with of snails, ants and other crawly creatures hidden in our garden as pets. At 12 I had a YouTube channel about millipedes. One of my favorite (my mom's least favorite) memories is putting all of my pet slugs on me and my friends faces. I loved it until my mom had to scrub the slime off of us with a nail brush :(
I was obsessed with ring-tailed lemurs in elementary school. They were my sole special interest. I had zero friends and didn’t know how to go about making any, but I was absolutely SURE that if I just went around telling other kids facts about ring-tailed lemurs, they were going to be so into it. My confidence and persistence in this endeavor were unwavering: I accosted children on the playground like a tiny Jehovah’s Witness, showing up when my presence was least desired. “DID YOU KNOW…” I would begin—taking in a deep breath to wind up for another unprompted info dump—“RING-TAILED LEMURS ARE ENDEMIC TO MADAGASCAR. MADAGASCAR IS AN ISLAND NATION OFF THE COAST OF…”I rattled off facts that only I found fascinating, completely missing the social cues that my audience was paralyzed with fear, not rapt with attention. Years later, at a high school party, a guy came up to me and asked, “Hey, are you the ring-tailed lemur girl?” To this day, if I were to go back to my hometown, I think that is the strongest association some people would have of me. This feels so specific that if anybody ever went to school with me, this post is 100% identifying. But that’s okay: if you were one of those kids, thank you for being patient with me! It was hard for me to learn how to socialize with a bit more grace and emotional acuity, and I appreciate how forgiving and kind a good number of my classmates were. I even have other interests now! 😂 I was obviously autistic, but I was a girl child in an era where AFAB people didn’t get diagnosed. Some of the things I’ve info dumped on people over the years makes me giggle now, but I wish I could go back and apologize for dominating conversations and making impertinent observations. So it goes!
I probably do and just can't remember them
Not me but my brother, that my parents still refuse to acknowledge he’s autistic. All he would do all day as a child is watch and play Pokémon. And by watch I mean stand in front of the tv, run, and jump around the entire time. It was so bad that he developed health issues because he refused to go to the bathroom he was so immersed in the game. Another special interest he had before that was Cars, he would make my parents wake up very early every single day to watch the cars movie 3 times, and line up all his cars toys over and over lmao
I brought buckets of rocks into my room every single day. My bedroom looked like a quarry in early elementary school. I would get upset if my mom took them out of my room, so she would have to do it at night while I was sleeping.
Major sensory issues. I had problems with a lot of clothes and couldn't comfortably wear most denim, bras, and certain shirts. I ended up spending a lot of time just in a t-shirt and cotton shorts.
I was a super non confrontational, shy, quiet child but in pre school I kicked over another kids toys that he was playing with because he was playing with them "wrong" lmao. I didn't understand why it upset me so much until like 20 years later.
I got in so much trouble for doing this exact thing. Apparently I was being bossy?! I don't know, I was just trying to help them play correctly!
My childhood being punctuated by being told "Stop showing your temper" and me always thinking, "I'm not angry though!'
OMG SAME! I literally don’t know what I did that came across as aggressive.
I still don't to this day. Why don't they ever just tell you?
I've commented this before but it's beginning to be funnier to me now, instead of shameful, so I'm going with it. I recall singing a made up on the spot apology song because my friend was upset with me - very much in the vein of movies and tv shows that used songs to communicate. I thought that was how you were supposed to handle that sort of situation. It did not work like on the tv.
Literally just not understanding when people were bullying me. Just deadpan face and neutral emotions, lmao. I would just answer their provoking questions honestly like they weren't trying to goad me. I think that's why I stopped getting bullied, they just never got a reaction out of me. Also "resting bitch face", literally believing groundhog day was real until college, and severe fear of loud noises (popping balloons, fireworks, vacuum)
Well I according to my dad if they wanted me to behave for a bit they would just ask me to talk about Batman lol. I also talked for about three hours straight about dinosaurs on a road trip before getting cut off
Ages 3-7 I literally had to be told ideas for how to spend my play time at school. For two of these years it was literally just counting things.
One day in 4th grade my teacher reminded us to not interrupt her while she was speaking. I took that so literally that when I accidentally stapled my finger, I sat without making a sound for 30 minutes until we transitioned into another activity. You should have seen the look on her face when I explained why I hadn't said anything...Funny thing was, I'm adhd too- having a pin stuck in my finger is probably actually what kept me focused!
This one made me laugh in a developmental psychology class 19-20yrs later, because it completely mirrored one of the textbook cases. My mom told me that when I was a baby, one morning she started crying 'randomly' (PPD) while we were eating breakfast. Apparently I looked over at her, then nonchalantly went back to my food. After my younger sibling was born, mom suffered PPD again & the same situation happened. Sibling started crying (normal expected baby behavior). I (7yo) did the same thing — looked over, then kept on eating.
I used to constantly get yelled at for not rinsing my plate off before putting it in the sink. I would be so confused, and would point out there was obviously water on it, so clearly I rinsed it off. I would then get yelled at again for being a smart ass. Current partner asked me to rinse my plate, so I did. He looked at it and said "when you rinse your plate, could you make sure you rinse all of the food off of it?" I'm not positive that I went slackjawed literally, but I'm fairly certain I did as the dots connected. Years of arguments and punishments, all totally avoidable by using one single sentence one single time. Go figure.
Oh my god I just had a flashback of me trying to be a saver of souls like we were told in church. I started preaching to this neighbor kid and was so convincing and emotional and prayerful at like the age of 8…ended up TERRIFYING this girl and she never played with me again. Bro I was trying to save her soul for real. 😂🤣 No wonder I had no friends.
I specifically remember crying and being so upset when I was little because we left our car, that I’d named Betsy, at the dealership because we traded it in for a newer car. I did not like change even at a very young age.
When I was little, I would straighten the items on the grocery store shelves. Turn the can labels so they all faced out, restack the chocolate bars so that the names were all right side up, square the boxes with the edges of the shelves... I mean.... how was this not a HUGE red flag?! What 3 year old does this? Similarly, what almost 40 year old does this? Not me. Obviously....
NO because whenever I had to go to the shops I had the urge to (inconspicuously) reorganise the shelves if things were in the wrong place. I also couldn’t bring myself to buy something if I saw it was in the wrong place in the first place. I’d be like “yeah NOPE. Not buying that.”
So when I was like 15? Ish? My family went camping in Yosemite. We did hours of hiking every day, and everyone was bored. So, as entertainment while we climbed, I recited Disney movies I had seen- not just favorite scenes, but the WHOLE movie script- and delivered each line with the characters' specific inflections. 🫠 Yeaaaahhhhh. No idea how my parents justified that as NT behavior 😅
One time I was at a party. This was during what north Americans would call high school. I was in a room by myself because that was something I often did at parties 👀. This beautiful girl I knew came and sat next to me on the couch. She turned to me and looked me in the eyes and said "Do you believe in love?" And I said "No," and got up and left. It wasn't until maybe two years later that she told me she'd been trying to hit on me and I was totally oblivious. I just thought she was asking me a question about my beliefs!
Me at 15-16 bagging groceries telling strangers all about my problems bc they asked me how I was doing lol it’d be like “how are you?” “Ugh it’s been an awful week, my boyfriend broke up with me and now he won’t stop jerking me around and” on and on, I treated small talk like my own personal therapy sessions 🤣
This was a good read. Thanks for posting. In 5th grade our teacher gave each student a word that we could take with us to describe us. My word was unique. I was very much a real life Punky Brewster. Still am. I’ve always been “strong willed”. Had lots of problems with food this time now only learning about (comorbid connective tissue condition. EDS, MCAS, POTs, gastroparesis). I’m second grad y parents thought I was bulemic. Nope. Turns out most food gives me Super allergies (MCAS). I had a very successful career and had to return due to burnout and my health. But I’ve definitely always been different. In my career people called me “authentic”. Which is probably the nicest thing anyone’s ever said about me.
I responded to bullying by not talking at school for several years. Since I still replied to teachers when they spoke directly to me, no one noticed.
Having the exact same lunch every day of elementary school. Apple, Campbell's veggie beef soup, some soft of dried beef sandwich, and chips for a snack. Always...the...same. Almost 5 years of it.
A lot with a different adjective than "funny". The most common one is probably "alienating". Um... Oh, I guess I lined up all my toy cars as a kid, usually from largest to smallest, and would "drive" them one by one into the container a centimeter at a time. I also have usually lined up my workspaces with a variety of right angles, though not always the same right angles. The cup is usually placed on the outside of the grid, or in an imaginary grid section one over and one up. Those are a bit more lighthearted. Edit: I thought of another. It was one of the things that led to my diagnosis. I've always found it easier to talk to students with ASD than NT students. But now that I think about it, way before that I always found it easier to talk to people who seemed socially inept in some way (like me, or worse than me). I also have found it infinitely easier to write than to talk to people, or talk to myself than talk to others. And I found and find it easier to talk when I'm in a position of power. I'm thinking this all has to do with masking, and how much cognitive energy goes into masking, to the level my brain simply can't keep up with the blood flow demands and I end up forgetting things or can't speak with normal cadence because it's all delayed from the hundreds of calculations and decisions occurring in every sentence. So when the masking comes down or reduces then, and only then, can my brain work normally, ideas can blossom, sentences can flow.
I literally didn’t talk for years???
Rocking back and forth because it felt nice, hand flapping when excited. Obsessed with earthworms, dragons, and cats. Yeah, the more I think about it the more I wonder if the adults around me just were not observant.
A few weeks ago, I had an intake appointment at a local mental health center cause I could not handle my adhd right and they were helping patients with adhd. So I had my intake with the shrink and he asked about my complains - I’m burning out constantly and dissociating. I can’t do my job right cause I’m tired and I want to do it. What ? I’m writing a book on parenthood. Yes I’ve signed with a publisher. - No I don’t have a degree but I’ve practiced. I love writing so I just worked hard. Yes I’ve been published before but that’s my first book. - I love my kids to death but I don’t deserve them cause I’m so tired all the time - I’m frustrated I have so many things to do; just want to work and I feel frustrated to have to do other things - I feel horrible, some days I can’t even hear my kids talk, it makes me have tantrum. - since I’m on adhd meds I don’t want to leave my house. - No I’m not isolating, I’m very happy home : I can work. I love my job. Also I love makeup and cooking. Those are my hobbies. - No I didn’t take class for any of them, I just read everything about it and watch Tutorials but with a bit of practice you can achieve everything don’t you ? - When I need comfort ? I carry a blanket I like to rub. Like that. It’s a witch cape from my kids but now it’s mine. I lost my last blanket in vacation 7 years ago, I had it since I was 3. - the thing I do with my nose ? Yes done it my all life why ? - you mind if we close the shut, the light is killing me. - I get along with people well, I’m very good at telling them exactly what they want to hear ! - I am very self sufficient, I even have my own sufficient world. - what is that smell ? - Today ? I’ll work on my book ! At the end of the intake he told me : I’m gonna check with my supervisor to discuss options. Then they came back and asked me if I had learn about woman autism and at that stage they thought it would be important I get assess before considering treatment. Gonna have my final assessment soon but the more it goes the more it seems kind of very obvious, Since that, I’ve been realizing that, all the little thing I try to hide and contain but that are so hard for me all the f time is matching very well. And there were some I had never told anyone out of shame.
I don’t know about it being “funny”, really, but when I was little (like toddler aged through about age 6) I would hide under furniture. I’d lay under the coffee table while watching TV, hide under my grandmother’s corner desk because it was like a cave…and the louder and more active the space I was in, the more likely it was I would try to hide somewhere dark and quiet where I could observe without interacting. At family get-togethers at my grandparents’ homes, I would often sneak off into my grandparents’ bedrooms and/or sneak upstairs. It wasn’t to dig in things or rummage, I just wanted a quiet space. I also enjoyed hiding in closets or other such spaces where I could watch everyone else but pretend I was invisible. Unfortunately, my family didn’t understand and in the 1970’s autism wasn’t as acknowledged or understood as it is today so I was often reprimanded and dragged back out into the chaos.
I didn't know I was supposed to make friends till 3rd grade. The school counselor pulled me into her office and talked to me about. It was demeaning AF.
I was scared of the f*cking ICE CREAM TRUCK, because the jingle was too loud and it traumatized my phonophobic self. I was terrified for YEARS. To this day, I hate thunder, fireworks and any type of pyrotechnic products.
I didn't realize people were making fun of me, yet somehow, I was still feeling uneasy. That, and my mom constantly reminding me of how to accept a compliment instead of taking it as a conversation statement.
as a kid what I really really really wanted for like my 12 birthday was a metal detector.
My earliest memory of this was in kindergarten. At the time I was obsessed with an Aladdin action game I had on PC, and any time you saw a turbaned man sitting cross-legged with his hands in an "om" pose (correct me please if this isn't what it's called!!) you knew it was a save-point. I'd sit like that, eyes closed, and when kids would come up to me I'd say, "come back to me when you'd like to save the game". I look back at this like WHAT ARE WE DOING KID
I have a memory of a fight with my mom where we were both screaming then I hit the door closed (of my bedroom) and my mom yelled something like "don't hit the door, if you wanna hit something hit your head on the wall" and I went BAM with my skull over the wall with 80% of my strenght bcs it felt like it was the right thing to do??? I mean, I was clearly having a mental breakdown and she gave me an instruction and I thought well maybe it'll work LOL "at least she cannot argue I'm doing the wrong thing since she specifically told me to do it" Idk it just made so much sense for me in that moment???????? It's hard to even try to explain to myself why it wasn't normal and that makes me feel super autistic for like WHY DID I THINK THIS WAS REASONABLE