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From an Ask on my Tumblr.
Oct. 11th, 2012 05:16 pmAnon asked: Are you autistic?
I answered:
Yes, I am on the autism spectrum. Fairly high functioning. People still baffle me a lot, though. I have to recharge after being around other people for a long time, and I have almost no tolerance at all for mundanes. (Or as I prefer to call them, Cabbages.) I can only hang out with pagans, Satanists, and other similar folk. Though only the open-minded sort of those. I've met some pagans who are as bad as many Christians, and I can't tolerate that type.
I don't flap my hands, but I do rock back and forth if I have to stand up. The longer I stand, the more I move around. Sometimes when I sit down, I shake or bounce my leg up and down. Drives some people frakking nuts.
I tend to think of offline strangers in terms of either part of the background, possible threats, possible tools (in the sense of being able to make use of them), annoyances, or obstacles. Sometimes mundanes I know personally still get put in one of those categories. My landlord currently fits under three of those categories: tools, annoyances, and obstacles.
I also go through occasional phases of being twitchy in my own skin. Clothes can bug me to varying degrees. Normal men's shirts and T-shirts bug the everloving fuck out of me, so I have to shop in the women's section at times to get unisex-ish blouses, since the lower cut removes the annoyance. I can't wear rings anymore, they drive me crazy. I can only wear necklaces for a few hours at a time before I have to take them off. At home, I prefer nudity.
Sometimes I stim. I try not to do it very often, though; the sorts of things I stim on get very addictive for me and I end up sitting there doing it for hours and hours. Mostly sounds stim me; I have one of those noise-making tube things, a kid's toy, that is an especially addictive sound for me. Bagpipes are another. I could listen to bagpipe music for hours and not get tired of it.
But I'm on disability for a combo of my autism and lifelong depression. I tried like Hell for a decade to make a normal life work. But forms like job applications give me literal headaches as I try to twist my brain into a shape that can understand it. The SSDI form took me three hours to complete and I had the mother of all migraines afterward.
Once in a job, I gave 110% but I've always burned out faster and needed frequent short breaks. I have a degree of face blindness, too, and a crappy memory for certain things, so a frequent problem in many jobs was not recognizing a customer from one minute to the next. Then, too, I'm hard of hearing and my brain has a hard time distinguishing foreground voices from background voices. Add that to the high noise level of some jobs (like my last one), and I couldn't hear worth shit or remember what I'd heard for long. I also find it difficult to think when people are talking in the foreground, to the point where reading is almost impossible when someone is talking close enough to me to be understood.
Then my depression sucks the energy from me rapidly, causes mysterious aches and pains, and generally just fucks me over.
It took me about 25 years of my life to figure out that no, this wasn't normal, and it wasn't laziness. It is so frustrating when you think what you're going through is perfectly normal and wondering why you can't do the things other people are doing. It was so liberating to finally realize that my experience isn't normal, that most people have a lot more energy than I do, that most people are energized by other people and understand other people, as opposed to being constantly annoyed, frustrated, and baffled by these energy vampires everywhere. I swear, it really is like being a human in a society full of psychic vampires.
And that was probably a lot longer of a response than you wanted or needed. But yes, I am on the autism spectrum.
I answered:
Yes, I am on the autism spectrum. Fairly high functioning. People still baffle me a lot, though. I have to recharge after being around other people for a long time, and I have almost no tolerance at all for mundanes. (Or as I prefer to call them, Cabbages.) I can only hang out with pagans, Satanists, and other similar folk. Though only the open-minded sort of those. I've met some pagans who are as bad as many Christians, and I can't tolerate that type.
I don't flap my hands, but I do rock back and forth if I have to stand up. The longer I stand, the more I move around. Sometimes when I sit down, I shake or bounce my leg up and down. Drives some people frakking nuts.
I tend to think of offline strangers in terms of either part of the background, possible threats, possible tools (in the sense of being able to make use of them), annoyances, or obstacles. Sometimes mundanes I know personally still get put in one of those categories. My landlord currently fits under three of those categories: tools, annoyances, and obstacles.
I also go through occasional phases of being twitchy in my own skin. Clothes can bug me to varying degrees. Normal men's shirts and T-shirts bug the everloving fuck out of me, so I have to shop in the women's section at times to get unisex-ish blouses, since the lower cut removes the annoyance. I can't wear rings anymore, they drive me crazy. I can only wear necklaces for a few hours at a time before I have to take them off. At home, I prefer nudity.
Sometimes I stim. I try not to do it very often, though; the sorts of things I stim on get very addictive for me and I end up sitting there doing it for hours and hours. Mostly sounds stim me; I have one of those noise-making tube things, a kid's toy, that is an especially addictive sound for me. Bagpipes are another. I could listen to bagpipe music for hours and not get tired of it.
But I'm on disability for a combo of my autism and lifelong depression. I tried like Hell for a decade to make a normal life work. But forms like job applications give me literal headaches as I try to twist my brain into a shape that can understand it. The SSDI form took me three hours to complete and I had the mother of all migraines afterward.
Once in a job, I gave 110% but I've always burned out faster and needed frequent short breaks. I have a degree of face blindness, too, and a crappy memory for certain things, so a frequent problem in many jobs was not recognizing a customer from one minute to the next. Then, too, I'm hard of hearing and my brain has a hard time distinguishing foreground voices from background voices. Add that to the high noise level of some jobs (like my last one), and I couldn't hear worth shit or remember what I'd heard for long. I also find it difficult to think when people are talking in the foreground, to the point where reading is almost impossible when someone is talking close enough to me to be understood.
Then my depression sucks the energy from me rapidly, causes mysterious aches and pains, and generally just fucks me over.
It took me about 25 years of my life to figure out that no, this wasn't normal, and it wasn't laziness. It is so frustrating when you think what you're going through is perfectly normal and wondering why you can't do the things other people are doing. It was so liberating to finally realize that my experience isn't normal, that most people have a lot more energy than I do, that most people are energized by other people and understand other people, as opposed to being constantly annoyed, frustrated, and baffled by these energy vampires everywhere. I swear, it really is like being a human in a society full of psychic vampires.
And that was probably a lot longer of a response than you wanted or needed. But yes, I am on the autism spectrum.
