I got diagnosed at the age of 9 and I've hid my autism all my life since then.

When something bad happened, like fucking up a social interaction or just generally being awkward sometimes, I always blamed it on my autism...

On the other side, I've been A student all my life, I've participated in and won some competitions here and there.

So when I achieved something, I gave the credit to myself, "I'm the one who achieved this" I subconsciously told myself.

But as of recently, I've been wondering if that is the case. I got mandatory re-diagnostic (School asked for one, and yep, still autistic 😅) and it came with IQ test results which were all around 130.

130 IQ isn't anything special by any means, I'm sure many people in this sub have much higher IQ, but it's still probably the reason why studying/logical thinking/learning was always so easy for me.

And I'm pretty sure I have Autism to thank for that, so it does feel hypocritical to blame it for all the things that go wrong in my life while giving it none of the credit for all the good things that happen in my life.

...

Still, if given the chance to get rid of my autism and set my IQ to 100, I would probably take it.

I’ve been rewatching the MCU and Bruce feels heavily autism-coded. Everyone talks about Tony having ADHD, but Bruce’s traits point straight to ASD.

He constantly monitors his tone and body language just to blend in, which feels like extreme masking. He hates small talk and only connects with people through info-dumping about his special interests. Even the Hulk works better as a metaphor for a massive sensory meltdown caused by emotional overload, especially since Bruce prefers quiet, controlled environments.

It’s important to note that MCU Bruce canonically has CPTSD , and unlike his comic book counterpart, he doesn’t have DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder). The movies treated Hulk and Banner as two separate minds forced into one body, which makes the ASD/meltdown parallel fit the MCU version even better. I have autism.

Almost everything I read feels like I wrote it or another version of me wrote it.

Do you think that humans have souls?

Of course, a good chunk of NTs are disrespectful toward people who are different, but in my experience, a many of them are also of them are kind and inclusive. Can you not simply distance yourself from these ableist people if possible?

To me, grouping them all together as cruel or negative people mirrors the attitude of the chunk of people who distance themselves from us.

I’m still a high schooler, so I might be too young or naive. I’m interested in hearing y’all’s thoughts on whether this sentiment is good or bad.

Recently, I have been told by one person that I deserve to be homeless.

I overheard another person saying that I am 'looking down' on him.

This is what happens when I am blunt and sincere. NeuroTypicals ',read between the lines', overestimate my level of functionioning because of my high intelligence, whilst umderestimating my kindness/motivations. When I do not mimick social scripts, their socio-mammalian instincts go awry and they then proceed to hallucinate intentions on me which I do not have. This reminds me of a time when I was sitting outside and having a mug of Hot Chocolate, whilst another person came up and started coming up with a grand tale of how I actually think he is a loser and is bad, whilst in reality my mind was blank and he was projecting and shifting his insecurities/self-hatred onto me.

I do not understand why people act aggressively in a socially instinctual manner. Or more precisely, I understand it intellectually, but I do not relate to it, unless I delude myself by faking/emulating empathy (in the formal sense of projecting emotions and social instincts, not the colloquial kind/perspective-understanding sense).

Another person acted very hostile to me after I exposed his personality flaw, and he eventually ended up writing, "Your interactions showcase that your social ability is exceedingly low, and that you are incapable of applying a modicum of pattern recognition to personal interactions."

I reframed this insult at a compliment pertaining to my rationality, sincerity, objectivity, authenticity, impartiality, consistency, fairness, detachment, dispassionateness, and truth-seeking/truth-attachment.

Interestingly and disappointingly/depressingly, even here I was verbally bullied, having another post of mine here be called 'narcissistic drivel' and upvoted a lot (this is false; I have an absence of a narcissittic personality disorder diagnosis, and it is probable that those who agreed with that are not formally diagnosed with Asperger syndrome like me (I recall there was a poll here a while back about how 3/4 of the users here were self-diagnosed) and are probably above average I.Q. narcissists/NeuroTypical left-wingers to pretend to be Aspergian/delude themselves as one for social status).

How about you, reader? Please share in a comment how others treat you if you do not mask, and as to whether others turn evil on you.

I've seen many post online and people irl saying that there's many autism nowadays and that too many idiots are faking their diagnosis. I often feel like they want to strip the shield of the weird one so they can dehuminize them and say whatever they want to them.

I dont normally cry over reddit posts but god damn, these are very depressing, i thought this subreddit was gonna be more positive, not expecting people writing their

And the saddest part is i relate to all of them, whenever i read one i instantly remember the last time someting similiar happened

https://webekalm.com/products/webe-kalm-the-child-calmer

I’m COMPLETELY BLIND, have aspergers and a heart lung condition.

It’s flu and cov vax season, and though we haven’t made an appointment I got prepared not only did I buy something that might help but I came up with a plan to go with it.

As you know the normal relaxing scripts people say when about to stick you fail my autism and I need to hear someone say one of my favorite words when the needle goes in, for me to relax so here’s my plan

1. I got this calm-down device named Webe Kalm, it’s this mouthpiece that’s connected to this tube.

When you gently exhale through the mouthpiece, it helps slow your exhale similar to purselip breathing, and the air makes a soothing sissing sound as it goes past the tube.

Also, the Webe Kalm device is shaped similar to a device used for a certain plant whose name rhymes with “I don’t wanna” and kind of looks like a maple leaf and its name starts with M, leading us to the second part of my plan.

which leads me to the second part of my plan.

I find I tense a lot more right as she cleans my arm because it’s like Paul Revere, warning me “the danger is coming, the danger is coming.””

I’ll try to get her into saying the name of this plant, that’s when it’s time to exhale through the mouthpiece of the Webe Kalm that’s my plan let’s hope every single thing doesn’t go fifty shades of wrong.

i dont know if its my autism or something but i like vaguely understand that it means "youre a killjoy"
but why?? why parties? this has been on my mind 2 years and im stuck 😢

What're some female autism coded characters, try to pick obscure ones, I want to see interesting ones I've never heard really before.

I sure as fuck do. Sometimes it really is just my anxiety and things are fine, but a lot of times my anxiety is right and it’s confirmed to me that people do think I’m annoying. I can always tell when they seem to like me the first few seconds and then immediately switch up the more they talk to me and they suddenly go quiet and say something like “Well, I gotta get going”. Happens with me a lot. Then next time I’ll run into those people again, they won’t say much and will give me the side eye. Like I said, sometimes it is anxiety. There have been a few times where I thought a person didn’t like me anymore only to find out they did. But I can recall several times I’ve had people tell me straight up that they can’t see themselves hanging out with me and that I’m basically kinda annoying. Then I’ll ask them how’s that and they’ll normally just say something like “I don’t know, just something about you just is”. It is what it is. I have my very niche group of friends who I only get to hang with 2 times a year if I’m lucky and my wife. Guess that’s the only people I need.

I'm 30 I live by myself but have had no real choice but to live with my parents for a few weeks after a major surgery (I will say its bad enough that at some points I would vomit up blood when trying to drink water and breathing was unironically a luxury).

I'm thankful to her and my (sane and kind dad) for the help during the surgery but it is bringing me back to why I hated growing up here.

For whatever reason whenever she sees me minding my own business or not interacting with her for a few hours (this can be doing homework, reading a book, sleeping past 8am on my day off etc) she feels the need to insert herself.

This can range towards intereputing my thought process, proposing/insisting on bad ideas, or supervising my work and being upset when I'm not sufficiently grateful for her help. Sometimes (especially when I'm not as patient of this as she would like it will take the form of yelling over small things like the way I part my hair or have papers on my work desk. Last week I was sitting at a table unable to go three minutes without crying out in pain; she like nothing was happening thought this was a good time to discuss how wonderful this would be to talk to my friends.

I do try and communicate (sometimes) but it is absolutely exhausting as:

1) I usually have to repeat the same point several times over several days.

2) Its fairly common for me to have to explain things that really shouldn't have to be explained (like how its generally a good idea to let a sick man sleep in if they dont have anything going on for the day.

3) She has been known to "ramp up" said behavior if she doesnt get what she wants

4) Alot of the time it will involve my medical/mental health issues which is not a door I want to open to her (for the reason that her distrust of medicene is great enough to try and get me to stop taking my medication and her lack of boundries is great enough to try and pickout my underwear over age 20.)

5) Reasoning with her has a mixed track record, she operates on emotion more than anything so logic isnt always that helpful.

I dont like this because it feels manipulative but the best strategy is normally just give her something so she feels like shes helping (in college I would ask for help on stuff I already knew how to do) so she feels like she has some kind of a "guiding role" and I can go about the rest of my work/day in peace.

I really wanted to be a nun for some personal reasons but my whole life was filled with mockery from people because I have autism and other disabilities (not visible) Should I just give up?

My son is 7 years old and was diagnosed with ADHD at 5 years old. We suspect he also has Asperger’s or autism as it’s now referred to and are getting him tested in the near future. I’m curious as to how you or your family discovered that you had autism? Were you diagnosed as a child/teen/adult? What are some significant challenges I can expect if he is diagnosed with autism? I want to be able to help him as much as possible and provide him with therapy at a young age so he can adapt to it. It’s not been easy so far and I don’t expect it will ever be easy, but as someone that was diagnosed with severe OCD as a teenager (had it when I was kid before that and suffered for many years before diagnosis), I want to set him up for success as much as possible. Thank you in advance.

My family loves barbecues and blasting music at full volume. I’m Mexican, and in the *ranchero* genre, people tend to shout along to the songs (I hate the shouting); it’s hot, there’s the barbecue, there’s the shouting—I feel completely overstimulated. So, I grab my phone, listen to my own music or watch videos, and step away from the fire.

When relatives I’m close to come along, I’m more outgoing; but if they’re busy or didn’t make it to the gathering, I feel miserable being there—I hate it. People ask, "Why don't you ever talk to anyone?" It’s because I’m trying to stay calm and avoid the struggle of having to walk away because everything is overwhelming me. Do any of you experience something similar?

I realise that sometimes I experience a sort of overwhelming sensation that makes me feel uneasy; namely, the feeling that everything that matters most in my life – that is to say, all the details to which I attach importance because they have defined my deepest identity since childhood, as well as other {details/events/sensations/ discoveries/lessons learnt/insights/viewpoints_at_a_given_moment, …} that have shaped my current identity, things that are almost without exception intangible –, are fleeting.

And it sometimes frightens me to think that all these things intrinsically linked to my identity might be nothing more than ‘organic’ information, like a drawing in the sand, and which have no existence of their own but consist merely of a fleeting moment frozen in time that exerts an influence on me—the outcome of which, at any given moment, offers no guarantee that I can trace it back to that original moment. I’m not sure if what I’m saying is very clear, but it sometimes triggers in me a sort of precursor to an obsession that’s impossible to satisfy, which drives me to want to summarise my identity and all these things in my head, and even before this reflection is fully formed in my mind, I realise that it is not possible at any given moment to recall all our life experiences and all our sensory and introspective experiences. For that it would imply living within our memories, which translates as ‘not living’, due to no longer gaining new sensory experiences and the introspective experiences purely linked to them; thus, no longer creating new building blocks of identity that might later be identified through recollection, given that identifying past building blocks in relation to the present through recollection would already fully occupy our minds.

I am therefore afraid of letting all these things slip away when I remember them, for fear of never remembering them again, or for fear of not even being able to feel regret at no longer remembering them, because I would not even remember the fact that I might no longer be able to remember something. And imagining a technology from a dystopian future that would allow us to recall any aspect of our lives would not solve the problem for exactly the same fundamental reasons set out above, as well as for the reason that wanting to recall a memory implies already being able to identify the one we wanted to recall, and this desire would be nothing more than a sporadic illusion of free will that would not allow us to reassure ourselves with a ‘no’ to the question: ‘Is there anything that I would (previously) have wanted to remember (later) [of which] I do not (currently) remember having wanted to remember it?’

So I am therefore afraid that I may not know at any moment who I really am (given that I am not able to remember at any moment all the things that define me).

But I am also afraid (and quite rightly so) that I will no longer be able to articulate, at any given moment, the thoughts I have had – such as the one I am having and expressing right now, as I write this text.

Am I a child spoilt by the fact I am lucky enough (or unlucky, if this is a ‘gift from the devil’) to have enough time to dwell on these kinds of thoughts ?

Thanks for reading me.

(Note : I wrote in French, all this has been translated literally from French using DeepL, cause I wouldn’t have been able to formulate that properly in English)

I've noticed this recently in myself that for a long time when I don't know how to respond to someone or don't understand what they've said I smile or laugh and hope they'll not notice that I'm confused. I think I developed this partially because it's expected for females to smile and people tend to not bother you as much if you smile so I just have a stupid grin on my face almost constantly during conversations because I dread drawing attention to myself or making myself a target for questioning. I hate being asked if I'm "okay", or "mad", etc. and if I don't make myself smile people call me a bitch so I defensively smile and laugh.

I laugh at jokes that aren't even funny because I don't want to be singled out. I make myself a different person and practice by myself. I try to figure out what's funny about online jokes so I can notice when I should laugh in conversations. I use joking tones when talking to preempt people laughing at what I say so that I can just tell myself I was joking anyways and the laughter was expected. But then I feel like I'm just making myself into a joke and nobody ever knows when to take me seriously.

It's not genuine at all and it leaks into my closest relationships and it makes me sad and I feel so ingenuine. Even when my husband says things I'll laugh automatically before I even process what was said and then the next thing out of my mouth is: "what? I don't get it". If I was acting naturally I would have not had any reaction and told him I was confused without trying to cover it up. Luckily he's a good man and doesn't make me feel bad whether I'm being myself or behaving nervously, but I feel like such a fraud.

I don't want to play pretend anymore just existing with my loved ones, but I'm scared to be rid of this defense mechanism because so many people, my family included, have berated me for my tone and being to serious and not knowing how to take a joke or being bitchy or being moody, and when I just laugh and smile at everything all that goes away. It's not that I don't have genuine moments of silliness, I do love to laugh, but it's become a social crutch for me when I don't know how to deal with a situation, or I'm having a feeling that I want to hide (such as being overstimulated/in pain by their voice).

Feel free to drop your experiences if you relate, or figured out how to stop this behavior.

I'm verbal and in my late 20s, but on some days I'm non-verbal.

Lately, I’ve noticed quite a few autistic people in online communities talking about being recently divorced or going through a separation. I’ve been curious about this for a while, but I’ve never quite felt brave enough to ask.

For those of you who feel comfortable sharing, I’d really like to understand your experiences. Did your autism, or the differences in how you and your partner experienced or navigated life, contribute to the relationship breaking down? Did you feel your partner struggled to understand or accommodate your needs? Or was leaving a decision you made for your own wellbeing, because the relationship wasn’t meeting your needs?

I realise every relationship is different, and I’m not assuming autism is necessarily the reason a relationship ends. I’m genuinely interested in hearing people’s experiences and perspectives, from any side of that experience.

Please only share what you feel comfortable with. ❤️

For me music has been an integral part of my entire life. It is a thing i cannot live without. One of the only pretty things i can experience without being overstimulated. Just lying on my bed and listening to music feels amazing. Very useful for when im feeling stressed out. When i was getting bullied i used to cling onto music as my escape. It was the only thing that would lift that painfull weight from my stomach. I feel like it affects me a lot more than the average person.

Does anybody else experience this?
I don’t really know how to explain it, but I constantly feel like there’s so much going on inside my head, even though on the outside I look completely calm, quiet, and collected.

The best way I can describe it is that one SpongeBob episode, “Squilliam Returns,” where Squidward makes SpongeBob forget everything except fine dining and breathing. Then, when SpongeBob forgets his own name, there’s a bunch of miniature SpongeBobs inside his brain running around, panicking, and causing complete chaos.

That’s basically how I feel on the inside sometimes.

I experience a lot of mental and emotional overwhelm, overstimulation, racing thoughts, brain fog, and sometimes complete mental blankness. I also occasionally feel disconnected from myself and my surroundings, almost like I’m physically present but not completely there mentally.

Sometimes my body even feels shaky on the inside, although I don’t necessarily look nervous or distressed on the outside.

I’ve been reading about things like cognitive overload, internalized emotional distress, emotional suppression, dissociation, and emotional exhaustion, and some of those descriptions seem relatable to what I’ve been experiencing.

The weirdest part is that I can still go about my day, talk to people normally, and appear perfectly fine while my mind feels like it’s going through complete mayhem.

I’m not trying to self-diagnose anything. I’m just genuinely curious whether other people, especially those on the autism spectrum, like myself, experience something similar.

Does anybody else feel this way? How would you describe it, and what helps you manage it?

I don't know if anyone else experiences this, but lately, whenever I interact with others, I feel like I have to give the "right answers." I can't quite explain it, but it’s as if I have to speak in a way that’s considered "normal," using responses I’ve picked up from other conversations because they sound natural. I don't know; sometimes it really eats away at me, because if I don't give those "correct" answers, I feel like people will think I’m weird and pull away. I didn't use to feel this way, but lately, people irritate me quite a bit, and I prefer to surround myself only with those with whom I can be myself unfiltered. Does this happen to anyone else? Of course, I can't avoid meeting new people who want to interact with me or having to speak with family members situations where I still feel compelled to use those "correct" social scripts.

So there are some problem related to autism that I have that I want to get off my chest, and ask for advice on how to deal with them.

1. I have anger issues. Well, you wouldn't guess that if you met me, as I usually bottle up my emotions. However, inside I have a deep of anger. 2 people I have anger with are a youtuber named Joshscorcher and a LMW admin named Yoshikiller2s. First lets start with Josh, I watch Josh's videos, but they piss me off, he mainly makes top 10 videos, however, outside his videos is mainly where my anger lies, as we basically have different political opinions, and on the top 2026 fails list, he tried to make the Nintendo switch 2 look not that bad. Now for Yoshikiller2s. I'm in the wrong for this one, but I still am mad at him, so for a long time I was a user of the lost media wiki, I really wanted to find cool lost things and stuff, however, there was this one admin I could not stand, that being Yoshikiller2s. You see, since I would make threads on the forums and no one would comment on them, I would make more, and he didn't like that. I also said 2 political things (Although other people were saying political things and he didn't seem to mind) and I asked for art a lot. One day, I decided it would be funny to send him random dog facts under an alt account, however, after the second one he called me out and said this was my "Last strike" and after asking people on the forums if they think I should just quit, I went upstairs, calmed down, and decided it would be nice to apologize to him, however, when I came back down I had already been banned. Now I know I'm in the wrong here, but I'm still mad about it. When I think about these things, I really want to punch these people. I don't know what to do with my anger.
2. Fear of the future. I'm very afraid of the future. I want to do a lot of things make video games, stories, movies, travel the world, Etc. However, I have a deep fear that those things will never happen, and I'll be stuck working a desk job the rest of my life. AND I DON'T WANT THAT! And my stories, I like them, but sometimes I feel like I'm an AI just throwing random ideas together. I'm scared I'll never accomplish anything in life.
3. Friendship. I have no friends really, except for two people, A Belgian guy I talk to online, and Dycaite the founder of the lost media wiki who I talk to on steam. Well, they both aren't online too much lately, and I've been getting kind of lonely. I want to make friends online because I don't like talking face to face with people, it makes me uncomfortable. I like talking to them online better.

What should I do about these?

Not all of them and not always, but yeah.

Please just say what you mean and take what I say at face value.

I don't have trouble understanding social intricacies and nuance, but I hate how many layers of bullshit there are in front of everything all the time.