Am I Autistic?
If you read all of this, thank you. Forgive me if this is not coherent and feel free to ask any questions if you are interested in helping me understand myself.
Sigh. For many years I always felt that something was wrong with me but chalked it up to a troubled childhood. Over the last few years I've learned that I possess many traits/behaviours that someone with high functioning autism has. I'm a 27 year old male from a middle class household. I've only recently been told that my parents 'took me in' to get diagnosed when I was a child, mainly because of my repetitive behavior and inability to stand still (this was beaten out of me...). I believe that I was diagnosed and my parents made the decision to hide this from me and tried to 'fix' me.
As a child, I was horribly behaved, despised schoolwork but was gifted in terms of being able to quickly calculate in my head. I took pride in not showing my work and receiving worse grades, because to me it was silly to show work that wasn't actually done... When I was in the first grade, in a class or 35, the teacher had two students stand up at a time and posed an addition/subtraction/multiplication/division question and the first to get it right advanced while the other sat down. I was in the initial pairing and went on to defeat the entire class. However, I struggled in just about everything else, had illegible writing that my teachers eventually gave up on trying to correct it... I was also the last student to learn how to tie their shoelaces aside from the mentally challenged child.
Anyways, I'm happy to answer more questions about my childhood, but here are some traits that I have that I believe are common to people with high functioning autism:
Terrible social skills
Unable to focus on more than one conversation
Don't make eye contact
Unable to read facial expressions
Tend to isolate myself
Few friends (despite being very popular in school)
.....
Excellent pattern recognition (horrible elsewhere)
Horrible sense of direction (used to get lost a mere 15 minutes from my home even as a teenager...)
Limited interests that I obsess over. I spend almost all of my free time analyzing sports/tracking stats/predicting outcomes of games. Other then this I literally have no interests and there is no job that I want to do... I work as a security guard and am often isolated aside from the fee pleasantries that I try my best not to make awkward.
Extremely organized. Everything in my room is set down/up perfectly straight, is clean and placed appropriately. For example, every book on my bookshelf is meticulously placed.
.....
Sensory overload:
a loud tv or certain pitches (not necessarily loud) are straight up debilitating. I'll plug my ears, close my eyes and hunch over and mentally shut down
Cannot eat certain foods indoors if an outdoor window is open... I'm always embarrassed by this around friends, but I cannot eat many foods (eggs in particular) if a window is open and air is interacting with it, the smell/taste is revolting to my otherwise lack of pickiness.
When I see green leafy vegetables, I cannot help but snarl like a vampire lol... It's the weirdest thing but it's a facial expression I don't ever make except for when crunchy green vegetables are I'm sight.
Thank you. I've done many online autism tests and without fail I'm extremely likely to have autism, apparently. However, it is possible that I have some other issues and outside of going to see a professional you all are the best answer I will get.
If you read all of this, thank you. Forgive me if this is not coherent and feel free to ask any questions if you are interested in helping me understand myself.
Sigh. For many years I always felt that something was wrong with me but chalked it up to a troubled childhood. Over the last few years I've learned that I possess many traits/behaviours that someone with high functioning autism has. I'm a 27 year old male from a middle class household. I've only recently been told that my parents 'took me in' to get diagnosed when I was a child, mainly because of my repetitive behavior and inability to stand still (this was beaten out of me...). I believe that I was diagnosed and my parents made the decision to hide this from me and tried to 'fix' me.
As a child, I was horribly behaved, despised schoolwork but was gifted in terms of being able to quickly calculate in my head. I took pride in not showing my work and receiving worse grades, because to me it was silly to show work that wasn't actually done... When I was in the first grade, in a class or 35, the teacher had two students stand up at a time and posed an addition/subtraction/multiplication/division question and the first to get it right advanced while the other sat down. I was in the initial pairing and went on to defeat the entire class. However, I struggled in just about everything else, had illegible writing that my teachers eventually gave up on trying to correct it... I was also the last student to learn how to tie their shoelaces aside from the mentally challenged child.
Anyways, I'm happy to answer more questions about my childhood, but here are some traits that I have that I believe are common to people with high functioning autism:
Terrible social skills
Unable to focus on more than one conversation
Don't make eye contact
Unable to read facial expressions
Tend to isolate myself
Few friends (despite being very popular in school)
.....
Excellent pattern recognition (horrible elsewhere)
Horrible sense of direction (used to get lost a mere 15 minutes from my home even as a teenager...)
Limited interests that I obsess over. I spend almost all of my free time analyzing sports/tracking stats/predicting outcomes of games. Other then this I literally have no interests and there is no job that I want to do... I work as a security guard and am often isolated aside from the fee pleasantries that I try my best not to make awkward.
Extremely organized. Everything in my room is set down/up perfectly straight, is clean and placed appropriately. For example, every book on my bookshelf is meticulously placed.
.....
Sensory overload:
a loud tv or certain pitches (not necessarily loud) are straight up debilitating. I'll plug my ears, close my eyes and hunch over and mentally shut down
Cannot eat certain foods indoors if an outdoor window is open... I'm always embarrassed by this around friends, but I cannot eat many foods (eggs in particular) if a window is open and air is interacting with it, the smell/taste is revolting to my otherwise lack of pickiness.
When I see green leafy vegetables, I cannot help but snarl like a vampire lol... It's the weirdest thing but it's a facial expression I don't ever make except for when crunchy green vegetables are I'm sight.
Thank you. I've done many online autism tests and without fail I'm extremely likely to have autism, apparently. However, it is possible that I have some other issues and outside of going to see a professional you all are the best answer I will get.