World Autism Awareness Day 2018

[Harambey180]

So today is World Autism Awareness Day 2018. Look it up if you don't believe it.

I've got autism myself and it's played a big part in my life so far even though it's not even that long yet. I've had struggles because of my autism - together with giftedness and several other things that have happened in the past. This goes from feeling lonely, to suicide thoughts, to social anxiety, to depressions (caused by multiple factors).
Because of my 'fear' of talking to others, or just a fear of anything that has to do with communication, it has made me feel very bad/sad at some times.

All I ask today is to show your awareness of people with autism and what they are dealing with, and showing respect for that. The world's a much more peaceful and happier place if people showed their respect more often, no matter what way it's shown.
Also, I think it's reasonable to ask for your thoughts and opinions about autism, and people with autism - people like me, for example. This will probably help me understanding the way you think, and this could help you understanding the way I think and do things.

Greetings and have a nice day.

[CooLDoG]

My heart goes out to you. I'm glad that you seem to be making the most of life even though you have this condition. My cousin has a severely autistic child, non-lingual and completely dependent. He can barely write his name, and this breaks my heart every time I see him. I'm taking a moment today to think about all of the caregivers and people working to help people with this disorder as well as those suffering from it.

Godspeed Harambey!

[Plotinus]

I'm autistic too! I've been reading a lot of fiction with autistic characters lately, stuff that I really wish existed when I was a kid, but didn't. I don't know what kind of stories you like but there's a ton of recomendations here.

Of those, I particularly liked:

Inappropriate Behaviour

Iron Aria

Iwunen Interstellar Investigations

The scrape of tooth and bone

You have to follow the rules

What are your interests? What kinds of things do you really like to do and lose yourself in doing? I like trees and hyperbolic geometry and perfect squares and sierpinsky triangles.

Talking is really hard! I've been working on my speech some this year but my speech still isn't very reliable and writing is much easier and less stressful. The words stay put and they don't get lost when they're written down. I've had some successes in the past year with using AAC in public but I'm too shy to use it most of the time.

[McMenno]

same tbh

[Brandi]

Spoiler:

My therapist suggests I have Asperger's in addition to my add but I'm really gonna need to research this deeply for myself. I know I do some "stim" things like pacing and leg shaking and flappy or bouncy or rocking stuff, sometimes echo or repeat a whistle but I do it rarely and feel strongly compelled not to do it when I do though it helps with anxiety when I forget to stop myself.

Still that stuff can be on its own.

I could not really be autistic I think, because my memory is too terrible. Like literally if I don't write out certain things literally as I say it I won't retain it and won't be able to repeat.

I can't replicate anything more complex than a bowl of cereal lol.
I just hear many autistics have a great memory storage and so idk.

Would be nice to have an explanation tho as to why I'm such a weirdo who apparently says strange things unwantedly and is always in everyone's way, and maybe I'm not the r slur every caregiver has ever shoved down my throat???

Hope this is okay to post here.

[McMenno]

I could not really be autistic I think, because my memory is too terrible. Like literally if I don't write out certain things literally as I say it I won't retain it and won't be able to repeat.

I can't replicate anything more complex than a bowl of cereal lol.
I just hear many autistics have a great memory storage and so idk.

this is definitely not true

source: autistic, don't have uhm "great memory storage" whatever that means

[Brandi]

Yeah I'm not sure what it's called, to be able to retain things shortly after hearing it and being able to reliability recall it later..

[McMenno]

maybe you're thinking about eidetic memory?

[Postie]

this is definitely not true

source: autistic, don't have uhm "great memory storage" whatever that means

[Plotinus]

The line between autistic and add is pretty blurry, there's a lot of overlap. you could totally have both.

the eidetic memory thing is more common in hollywood than outside of it. Some of us do have really good memories but it's not an important trait. It's more of a harmful stereotype from movies like Rainman and tv shows like Sherlock. In Barriers and Supports to Autistic success, Sparrow talks some about how autistics are portrayed in the media.

If your therapist is still calling it Asperger's though, she might not be qualified to diagnose it. The distinction between aspergers and autism is basically whether you could speak at 3-4 or not. The reason aspergers was removed from the DSM was that there's no predictive value in whether a person can speak in early childhood or not, you don't know whether they'll be able to speak as an adult -- many who could speak regress at puberty, many learn to speak later on. It doesn't predict the kind of supports you'll need later in life or how successful you'll be. There are different kinds of autism but the kinds don't match the diagnostic labels very well and therapists recognised it and removed it from the DSM. It's still in the ICD-10, but that's not used in your country and I wouldn't be surprised if it were removed from the ICD-11. So you might want to talk to your therapist about how recent her knowledge about autism is and what kinds of sources she uses.

If you're autistic, you might not be the Sherlock Holmes type. Maybe you're the Luna Lovegood type or some other type.

I did used to have an almost eidetic memory but I don't anymore, I lost it in an illness last year.

[Postie]

Oh, Angel, do you mean like how some autistic people can recall a lot of information about topics they're interested in?
Like when I was a kid I remember being obsessed with cats and knowing the names of nearly every breed of cat in existence.

From an outside perspective it can seem like that's down to having a really good memory but when you actually get down to it that's not really how it works. I couldn't remember all those cat breeds because I read their names and they just magically stuck in my brain; I remembered them because I spent hours reading every single book on cats in our school's library and re-read my cat encyclopedia over and over until the names stuck. When you have a special interest you can get so absorbed in it that you end up treating it like revision for a test that doesn't exist. There's also the fact that you're just more likely to remember information when it's something you enjoy and that makes you think "woah that's so cool/interesting".

[Vijarada]

hey genuine question for the autistic community of this website um what's the difference between obsessive interests in things being a symptom of autism spectrum stuff and obsessive interests in things being a symptom of uh... not being really boring?

[Harambey180]

There's very different forms of autism. Someone at my school has no problems with communicating with others.

Basically you could see autism as a disorder and all the people have most of the things that come with autism, but not all.
Unless you're me, because they literally diagnosed me with 'a combo of everything'...

@Plotinus: I really like to play darts and play games. I'm switching my games very often, usually I don't stick to one particular game for more than two weeks. Right now, I'm playing Drawception and it's very cool. I'm also extremely good at maths. My score right now is 9,92/10 and I'm nearing the end of high school and this hardly ever happens.

@Brandi: Autism isn't only about having good memory or not. This actually feels so irrelevant to me (sry to say), I can't recall a time to have heard the words 'autism' and 'memory' in one sentence before. It's more about other things.
One of my personal coaches once explained it with two big differences between people with autism and people without. The first thing is that people with autism interpret things a whole lot differently than people without. Resulting often in miscommunication and communicational problems but not always. Second thing is that people with autism easily become overstimulated by noises or any other stimulus.
If you feel like these two things are also the case for you - thinking differently and becoming overstimulated easily - then I'd definitely say you have autism. My coach would too. Things like having good or bad memory would then just distinguish the type of autism you'd have.

@Plotinus 2: I don't know about how therapists that don't know enough about autism can even become therapists, but it's of course a good thing to ask. Probably the parents of the child would need to do that (if you're a child ofc, don't ask your parents if you're in your forties).

Thanks for all the comments (even tho they came a bit late after World Autism Awareness Day, but still they came in the end)

[Plotinus]

@vijarada: Intensity, I think. It's good to have things you're passionate about but I think it's rare outside of autism/add to have things you can get completely absorbed in 16 hours a day 7 days a week. When I'm really gripped by a special interest I don't have the attention span to think about anything else. I got obsessed with a certain language about a decade ago and I went from 0 to reading harry potter in 2 months because from day 1 I was spending 16 hours a day practicing my cyrillic handwriting and copying out texts as I read them and listening to nothing but music in that language and thinking exclusively in that language. I think most people just don't have the attention span for something like that, even if you're passionate about something, even if you really care about i dunno Tori Amos, you have portions of your life that aren't Tori Amos being asked to take a break from Tori Amos wouldn't feel like taking a break from breathing.

Also sometimes the topic. Like a lot of people are really passionate about football or music [in general] or a fan of something in particular but it's rarer outside of the autism community to be passionate about sidewalk quality in your city, to be able to hear any street name in your city and know which side of the street has a higher quality sidewalk. But less stereotypically sometimes we do have interests that aren't in the "memorise tons of obscure facts about the thing" category like I'm really obssessed with trees but by sight I can identify only some common ones: yew, weeping willow, maple, oak, spruce, pine, maybe a few others, my tree obsession is a nonverbal thing but trees are just really captivating for me and I store a lot of metaphorical meaning in them and looking at trees reminds me of things that I have trouble remembering on my own but it's hard to talk about. I have a deep and personal connection with trees but it's not something I can really share with other people very easily. If I'm taking pictures outside, I'm mostly taking pictures of trees, but if I tried to show them to people I think people would lose interest after a picture or two. I'd be like the lady who wants to show you 20 pictures of her grandkids when she buys a train ticket.

When I was a teenager, I was trying to talk to an autistic guy and we both had a special interest in computers but mine was in computer programming and his was in computer parts and we just couldn't find any common ground at all. He asked me what kind of motherboard I had and I was embarrassed that I didn't know it off the top of my head and he spent like 10 minutes talking about different kinds of motherboards and I just couldn't pay attention to any of it. I was able to install RAM and stuff on my own but what kind of motherboard i have is information that I look up before going to a store and then write down and forget about it immediately. And similarly I couldn't hold his interest with talking about BASIC (I'm dating myself here lol); our interests were too narrow and neither of us had any interest in what the other person was saying.

Some of us have special interests that can be turned into careers and it can be a real source of strength; we're able to focus passionately on things that other people would get burned out.

One of my main interests right now is hyperbolic geometry and I'm trying to find a way to talk about it to people who are afraid of math, because I want to be able to talk about how cool it is in a way that other people don't find intimidating. "But what is it good for? What is the use of it?" someone asks of the purple...object... I'm creating and I could talk about how you can have two intersecting lines on its surface and a third line that is parallel to both of them or I could talk about how you could draw a triangle on it ... a regular one with straight edges and no tricks ... and the sum of the interior angles would be less than 180° or I could talk about how János Bolyai discovered hyperbolic geometry in the 19th century and his father warned him that this math obsession could be as much a vice as being obsessed with women and how it was considered to be completely useless and purely theoretical until a woman came around in the 70s and pointed out hyperbolic surfaces do too exist in nature, in coral and in textiles, that it's actually very easy to recreate this purely theoretically hyperbolic surface with a bit of string, that this "impossible to imagine shape" that her professor was rambling about was actually just a gusset such as everyone in the room has on their clothes. I could talk about differentiability and essential singularities in three dimensions by showing with a pen how the slope of a surface varies at each point depending on which angle you're approaching it from. But none of that answers the question asked. I don't know how to answer "what is this purple unidentifiable object good for". But it's important to me and I care a lot about it.


I guess that's one difference between our interests and the not-being-boring interests of other people -- neurotypical people find our interests boring or hard to understand or don't get why we care so much about the things that we care about and they write opinion pieces about how autism means that we can't tell what's important or not so that's why we care so much about unimportant things and don't care about important things.

[Plotinus]

@Plotinus: I really like to play darts and play games. I'm switching my games very often, usually I don't stick to one particular game for more than two weeks. Right now, I'm playing Drawception and it's very cool. I'm also extremely good at maths. My score right now is 9,92/10 and I'm nearing the end of high school and this hardly ever happens.

I used to play Drawception! That was fun, I should get back into it. That's cool that you're good at maths. What's your favourite kind of maths? When I was in school I liked algebra and calculus best and I didn't understand geometry or logarithms at all, and trig was hard for me too, but then later in life it finally made sense. I like combinatorics too, and mental maths. What kinds of maths careers are you looking at?

@Plotinus 2: I don't know about how therapists that don't know enough about autism can even become therapists, but it's of course a good thing to ask. Probably the parents of the child would need to do that (if you're a child ofc, don't ask your parents if you're in your forties).

A lot more is known about autism now than was known in the 80s and 90s or even ten years ago so a therapist who got her degree some time ago might not have kept up to date with the new findings. Also, most therapists usually specialise and learn a lot about a certain topic, so a therapist who is really good at marriage counselling might not know very much about eating disorders or a therapist who mainly deals with depression might not know much about autism. They might be really good at what they do and then pretty decent about a range of other topics and then might not realise how much has changed in an area they haven't had a lot of experience with. Her therapist might need to do some more reading and research to update her knowledge.

The same thing can help to doctors and general practitioners -- there's a lot of medical research being done and by the time a doctor gets old, maybe half of what he's learnt at school is outdated, proven wrong by new studies. For example when my grandmother was pregnant, her doctor advised her to start smoking to calm her nerves, even though back then some doctors did know better already, her doctor wasn't up to date. Doctors and therapists have to do a lot of continued education and research to keep up with all of the changes and new findings, but even a good doctor might not realise they need to do that in a particular area until they get a patient with a certain condition.

[Harambey180]

@Plotinus: I really like to play darts and play games. I'm switching my games very often, usually I don't stick to one particular game for more than two weeks. Right now, I'm playing Drawception and it's very cool. I'm also extremely good at maths. My score right now is 9,92/10 and I'm nearing the end of high school and this hardly ever happens.

I used to play Drawception! That was fun, I should get back into it. That's cool that you're good at maths. What's your favourite kind of maths? When I was in school I liked algebra and calculus best and I didn't understand geometry or logarithms at all, and trig was hard for me too, but then later in life it finally made sense. I like combinatorics too, and mental maths. What kinds of maths careers are you looking at?

I'm thinking about doing something in relation to economy because I'm doing pretty good at that subject as well. (surprisingly, a 7,96/10 is the highest of the class)
I'm not really having a favorite type of maths, I just like maths in general and I don't care what type of maths I need to work with. Probably I like probability maths the most. I think because I can use that for, for example, prediction games for certain sports (like darts).
Talking about prediction games; I lately won a prediction game with 50+ people in it about a darts tournament last weekend. I got by far the most points by using numbers to my advantage. And there were multiple types of contests; I got first in all of them!

[Plotinus]

Probability is fun and economics will pay well too I think. Congrats on the tournament!

Do you know about Art of Problem Solving? They have some fun probability problems to work out, I went through them some years ago. If you have an android phone, there's a game called Probability Puzzles that has three different groups of puzzles, from pretty easy stuff like the birthday paradox to

Spoiler: medium problems like this one

"You're again confronted by a coin-filled jar. There are ten coins this time: one has two heads, the other nien are normal. All are equally likely to come up on either side when tossed. Someone picks a coin uniformly at random from the jar and tosses it three times. If it comes up heads on all three tosses, what's the probability you're dealing with the double-headed coin?"

and

Spoiler: hard problems like this one

"Five foxes and seven hounds run into a foxhole. When they're inside, they get all jumbled up, so that all orderings are equally likely. The foxes and hounds run out of the hole in a neat line. On average, how many foxes are immediately followed by a hound?"

(don't tell me the answers to those if you work them out, I'm meaning to solve them myself and just haven't got round to it. I just wanted to recommend the app because it's pretty fun)

[Harambey180]

Probability is fun and economics will pay well too I think. Congrats on the tournament!

Do you know about Art of Problem Solving? They have some fun probability problems to work out, I went through them some years ago. If you have an android phone, there's a game called Probability Puzzles that has three different groups of puzzles, from pretty easy stuff like the birthday paradox to

Spoiler: medium problems like this one

"You're again confronted by a coin-filled jar. There are ten coins this time: one has two heads, the other nien are normal. All are equally likely to come up on either side when tossed. Someone picks a coin uniformly at random from the jar and tosses it three times. If it comes up heads on all three tosses, what's the probability you're dealing with the double-headed coin?"

and

Spoiler: hard problems like this one

"Five foxes and seven hounds run into a foxhole. When they're inside, they get all jumbled up, so that all orderings are equally likely. The foxes and hounds run out of the hole in a neat line. On average, how many foxes are immediately followed by a hound?"

(don't tell me the answers to those if you work them out, I'm meaning to solve them myself and just haven't got round to it. I just wanted to recommend the app because it's pretty fun)

I'll spoiler my tries to answer them Then, just don't click on the spoiler if you don't want to know the answer already.

Spoiler: medium problem answer

So there are ten coins. Each coin has a 50% percentage of flipping one side or the other. Flipping one normal coin three times means there are eight possible outcomes.
For the normal coins: There is only one outcome of the eight possible outcomes that is three times heads, so 1/8. For nine coins it is 9/72.
For the double-heads coin: All eight outcomes are three times heads, so 8/8.
In total that makes 17/80, or 17 possibilities out of 80 possibilities that a coin flips heads three times in a row. 8 of those 17 possibilities come from the double-heads coin, so the probability that you took the double-heads coin should be 8/17.

Here's a second strategy I realized to try as well when doing the first one:
There's a 90% chance you grab a normal coin, and each coin has a 12.5% chance of flipping heads three times. 90% times 12.5% becomes 11.25%.
There's a 10% chance you grab the double-heads coin, and that coin has a 100% chance of flipping heads three times. 10% for this one.
So 11.25% for a normal coin and 10% for a double-heads coin. 11.25% + 10% = 21.25%.
10% was the chance for the double-heads coin, so 10% divided by 21.25% is also 8/17. Now, I assume I was right.

Spoiler: hard problem answer

The chances of an H coming after an F, so an F-H combination, are 5/12 * 7/11 = 35/132.
For an H being able to follow an F, the F must be on spot 1-11 and not on spot 12 as it is the last one.
That would mean that the 35/132 chance appears 11 times. That would result in 11 * 35/132 = 385/132 which is about 3, so 3 times an F-H combination on average.

I'm pretty sure that I have the normal one right, but not so very sure about the hard one. Could you check for me?

P.S. I just looked up the hard one and it looks like I got that one right too. I don't even think I need to check the normal one because I got the exact same answer using multiple strategies so I think I passed this test.

[Plotinus]

The app is free in google play (no adds either) and it has over 80 different problems. they're pretty fun.

[Brandi]

man it should would be nice to get to hear stuff like this more often! It's almost as if autistics know a lot about autism! (Or at least some VALID and REAL experiences and not just interpretations and complaints about how difficult it is for the parents/caregivers)

i definitely have some stereotypes to unlearn :/

Also ty so muchuchuch y'all

this is so so so so helpful

i think i definitely definitely do the hyper get into an interest thing i can sit and research a topic in depth for an entire day and forget to eat or pee

i really do feel like i have issues retaining stuff, and i get distracted so often

but i also have a lot of depression, anxiety, C-PTSD, sometimes i hear stuff and stuffer visions that leave me emotionally vulnerable
i can go days just sleeping in bed
i feel like i do nothing good when my e motions spiral and im also physically always in pain and can't muster to shower (it HURTS my arms to wash my hair ...)
but im starting to think
if i were healthier
if things were better
I would definitely be doing all i can to learn about all the things i love
and actually working towards the things that i love
but right now im so lost from all this gunk in my head left by my abusers. I've only been "free" for nearly 1 year and I'm still powerless and poor and hungry and confused. Are all my likes/dislikes even my own? Or were they PLANTED there by all the gaslighting? I know for a fact some of it was... my ex literally made me stop liking certain things and my mom didn't like when i was 4 that my favorite color was green because that wasn't feminine and she wasn't gonna dress me up in green. She tried to get me to pick blue like my eye color but i picked purple. my fav color right now is

pink

though.

The healthcare system will not help me quickly or efficiently, they have made me struggle where i already struggle the most. I just can't deal with authorities it's been hard. My roomate/bestfriend accompanies me and relays my symptoms and issues to doctors, and i agree or disagree and try to correct when im near here.

Sometimes I can be SO SO SO SO SOSOSOSO talkative

sometimes i will only want to hiss/growly use sounds to communicate

sometimes i will have no energy to say anything at all or just not feel comfortable enough to use words

The only thing that I know about myself is that nothing is consistent and nothing makes sense and i am so tired and i just wish i wasn't so unintelligent, i just wish i could figure this out

fsdkfjdls i'm sorry

I do think a lot of this is similar to stuff i know and have felt.

but i'm scared of that idea and exploring it more even though i really want to know everything about this

i brought up to a friend and she told me "do not worry, you definitely don't, you can hold a conversation just fine" :< idk my gut feels not good about talking about it to people but inevitably its gonna come up as it always does and i don't want ot be that person who is all "actually autistic aren't all unhappy with being autistic! Actually it doesn't mean they are stupid!" because then i'll be forced to defend my position alone against a crowd and that shit usually just makes me cry but i can't stop opening MY BIG MOUTH

[Postie]

It's almost as if autistics know a lot about autism! (Or at least some VALID and REAL experiences and not just interpretations and complaints about how difficult it is for the parents/caregivers)

You know those corners of the internet where men gather to talk/complain about how ~mysterious~ women are and share theories on why they do all those wEiRd things they do
I feel like that's pretty much the state of discussion around autism by most non-autistic people right now

"do not worry, you definitely don't, you can hold a conversation just fine"

Communication difficulties come in lots of forms, and the presence or lack of one shallow behavioural observation doesn't define autism.

Feel free to talk about stuff here or in the Neurodiversity thread any time. <3

[Plotinus]

Autistic blogs I follow:

Updated in April:
Real Social Skills - about disability in general but by an autistic writer and often talking about autism specifically
Liminal Nest - autism and chronic illness
Child Myths - this one isn't actually about autism except tangentially, it's by a psychologist and speaking out against attachment therapy, which is a therapy i was subjected to as a child, as a fair number of autistic people are.
autisticook
inner aspie - a blog by an autistic mother who has two autistic children.

Updated in March:
Rose Lemberg - is an autistic author and their blog links to stories they write, often featuring autistic characters. I really love their birdverse stuff.
Thinking Person's Guide to Autism - a group blog with stories by autistic people and also by parents of autistic children.
Unstrange Mind - an autistic guy who lives in a van
Ballastexistenz - an autistic adult with multiple disabilities. sie hasn't been writing as much lately and I miss hir. I've been following hir blog since 2004.
Respectfully Connected

People who haven't written in a while but their blogs are still up:
Radical Neurodivergence speaking
Iwonen Interstellar Investigations - a serial fiction story with a whole planet of autistic people in an autistic society and magic and trans stuff and it's so great
Gareeth - everytime they post I think oh thank god they're still alive. Their last post is in January.
Yes, that too
Emma's hope book - this started out as a mommy blog, you can see the early entries from when she was a little kid and her mother didn't know what to do and it was all doom and gloom and then as her mother got to know more autistic people, the tone changes and it gets better and then finally when Emma was a teenager she learns to type and now she writes the blog all by herself.

We are like your child -a lot of times, parents of autistic children point at autistic adults and say that we're not like their child because we are capable of using the internet but their 3 year old is not capable of using the internet. This is a group project with essays about yes we are like your child we're just not three anymore.

Just Stimming

NeuroQueer - i want to like neuroqueer but so much of it is written in a way that I find very hard to understand -- using a lot of academic language or a lot of complex sentence structures. Very few of the entries are cognitively accessible to me, but I like the ones I can understand.

The Third Glance

Musings of an Aspie


Did you know that it's possible to have a special interest in autism?

[Ectomancer]

I have all of these issues as well.

I've written a brief chapter in my book but upon my editor's advice I removed it. When I return to the topic it will be a much more in depth look into what I feel is happening. But a chapter wasn't enough to even begin that particular conversation yet. I'm writing the 2nd book now. It will allow me to lay the groundwork for assertions that I will be making at a later time. If you have autism and are interested in reading the first book, please send me a message and I will email a free copy (and a free copy of every book after that). I will be happy to share my thoughts in private but I am still curating the public ones.

[McMenno]

It's almost as if autistics know a lot about autism!

I know fuckall about autism lmao

[Plotinus]

you know about yourself though. you know more about what it's like to be you than anybody else does.