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Being autistic and other occurences
Feb. 20th, 2026 11:40 amHonestly when I first heard about it I didn't really care. It was a little under a month ago, and I think I was in denial when it happened and it's only starting to hit me now that maybe I should contextualize this diagnosis into why I'm so socially inept.
I have a lot of health problems so I guess I've been desensitized to new diagnoses and have begun to treat them with a bit of flippancy. I also get irritated when people over-identify with specific labels (not that it's entirely a bad thing, I'm just being overly trenchant), so I also shoved the diagnosis out of my mind out of embarrassment.
It's a little strange that I didn't notice the symptoms in myself sooner, because I'm so into psychology and the diagnostic process, and I tend to be very introspective, so I came up with a theory on why I was so self-blind in terms of recognizing autism in my own mind, which is that I spend so much time on self-centered scrutinization that I don't really have any real-life examples to compare my own thoughts and feelings to.
Or I just read outdated case-studies of white male children with severe autism and found it hard to relate to.
One of the driving factors of why I thought I didn't have autism was my perceived lack of symptom manifestation in my early developmental period, but in retrospect, there were a lot of symptoms that I missed throughout my life. One of my earliest memories was reading a picture book when I was in preschool, and having a strong aversion to ocular imagery. Maybe this could allude to a theory about unpleasant amygdala over-arousal in autistics that is a reaction to direct eye contact. (Stuart et al., 2022) I also remember having an extremely strong fixated interest on science (I still do actually hahaha), and collecting chemistry books and science paraphernalia like test tubes and posters. I think I also memorized the periodic table as well (I forgot it, unfortunately, which sucks because now I actually have a necessity for it in my science classes).
I could talk more, but I don't want to embarrass myself by prattling on and on about my bizarre mannerisms. I'm sure you can figure some of them out by the way I type (ha ha). Maybe I'll reflect on this in a later post, or maybe one of my autistic eccentricities (that are famous for being extremely desirable and charming and has never caused me any social trouble ever!!!) will become relevant in a future entry.
Edit: The hyperlink to the NIH article doesn't work!! https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10123036 hopefully this one works.
I have a lot of health problems so I guess I've been desensitized to new diagnoses and have begun to treat them with a bit of flippancy. I also get irritated when people over-identify with specific labels (not that it's entirely a bad thing, I'm just being overly trenchant), so I also shoved the diagnosis out of my mind out of embarrassment.
It's a little strange that I didn't notice the symptoms in myself sooner, because I'm so into psychology and the diagnostic process, and I tend to be very introspective, so I came up with a theory on why I was so self-blind in terms of recognizing autism in my own mind, which is that I spend so much time on self-centered scrutinization that I don't really have any real-life examples to compare my own thoughts and feelings to.
Or I just read outdated case-studies of white male children with severe autism and found it hard to relate to.
One of the driving factors of why I thought I didn't have autism was my perceived lack of symptom manifestation in my early developmental period, but in retrospect, there were a lot of symptoms that I missed throughout my life. One of my earliest memories was reading a picture book when I was in preschool, and having a strong aversion to ocular imagery. Maybe this could allude to a theory about unpleasant amygdala over-arousal in autistics that is a reaction to direct eye contact. (Stuart et al., 2022) I also remember having an extremely strong fixated interest on science (I still do actually hahaha), and collecting chemistry books and science paraphernalia like test tubes and posters. I think I also memorized the periodic table as well (I forgot it, unfortunately, which sucks because now I actually have a necessity for it in my science classes).
I could talk more, but I don't want to embarrass myself by prattling on and on about my bizarre mannerisms. I'm sure you can figure some of them out by the way I type (ha ha). Maybe I'll reflect on this in a later post, or maybe one of my autistic eccentricities (that are famous for being extremely desirable and charming and has never caused me any social trouble ever!!!) will become relevant in a future entry.
Edit: The hyperlink to the NIH article doesn't work!! https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10123036 hopefully this one works.
