Thread by @Aella_Girl

I sometimes reference myself as autistic as shorthand, but I try to say "probably autistic"; I'm not totally sure if I am, and the whole thing is very confusing.
For example, I have some aspects of autism but not others; my sensory issues are very intermittent 1/

As in a small % of time noise/crowds/stimulation makes me need to go have a freakout in a corner, but *most* of the time they don't. I am *not* easily bothered by things like small repetitive sounds, and am only moderately bothered by scratchy clothes compared to most people 2/

I also seem to have greater social perception/skill than is common with autism, though it's unclear how much of this is top-down brute forced. I don't have the comorbid depression or anxiety (tho I do have IBS!), I don't freak out if routines aren't followed or plans change. 3/

Some things are unclear - does my fascination with data count as a special obsession? Or my difficulty with eye contact, given that I can do eye contact really hard if put into a structured setting? Does hand flapping count if I only do it when very stressed, which is rare? 4/

I really like having a specific seat when at friends houses, and am a lil bothered if I can't have the spot. I often miss jokes, I have a super strange relationship to food, and my dad is autistic. But doesn't everybody have weird quirks, and you can always find some if you look?

I also have a *lot* of difficulty with unnamed expectation changes, to the extent it can make me nonfunctional; e.g. if we have a meeting to talk about x and then we chat about things that aren't x without explicitly stating we're not talking about x, this is extremely upsetting

Some things are like, does everyone have this problem and I just notice them more? I don't like physical contact or hugging from friends, but I'm okay with it from strangers if it's in a structured setting like social dancing. I don't like being comforted or touched when sad. 6/

I remember as a teen telling my mom it felt like everyone else had access to some social script that I couldn't see, like they were tapped into a telepathy I'd never figured out how to do. I have a *lot* of difficulty talking to strangers, is why I built askhole.io

I don't know why people do conversations and often spend the first part of the conversation with someone asking why we're having the conversation. This feels normal to me but seems to be abnormal for others? I feel much more at ease typing than talking.

I have a *weird* relationship to facial expressions, like I've only recently started feeling like I wasn't moving my facial muscles consciously. I feel like I'm supposed to do things with my face in order to not freak people out, so I've learned to do them correctly

And of course, the obvious one, I seem to have a bad sense of/don't integrate deeply that things I say make other people mad at me. I kind of get, but am still regularly confused by why I'm not supposed to say certain things. I seem to be kind of culturally immune in that way.

I tried to get an official diagnosis once and it was really terrible; I finally got on the phone with a doctor and he was like "why do you want to know if you have autism" and "you are a sex worker so I don't think you're autistic." He didn't ask me *any* diagnostic questions.

I tried to be like "but here's my reasons for thinking I might-" and he was like "nah, you sound normal on the phone to me, like we're having a normal conversation. You had a bad childhood and then became a sex worker so any symptoms you have are just cause of that"

All of this in general is confusing to me; am I just overfocusing on minor details? Am I blowing things out of proportion? How severe does a difference have to be before it "counts"? How much of autism is just a trendy label for people, or am I being too self-doubting?

My point is that reaching a definitive conclusion about my autism feels pretty hard to me here. When I'm around rationalists I feel really not-autistic, normal, fluid, skilled, but then I go into the outside world and I'm like 'oh god I am extremely different holy shit'.

Honestly, my suspicion is that I have something "autism-adjacent" - something weird quirk of human brain that might be a cluster of things that we figure out how to describe one day in the future. There's probably tooons of these!

But I find myself using the phrase 'probably autistic' in order to quickly convey to someone that they can predict my behavior better if they model me as someone who has autism.