How often do people come here, thinking they might be autistic, when they aren't?

And good luck in yours!

It occurs to me that perhaps my experience of determining that I am not autistic might be helpful for you as you figure out whether you are or not, as well.

I have a cautious cadence to my speech, particularly when I am stressed or in a social situation I’m not entirely comfortable in. I also hyperfocus, have special interests, and am fairly easily overwhelmed. I tend to not meet people’s eyes when I’m thinking hard or when I’m feeling uncomfortable (Though I think I do it due to a combination of cutting down visual distraction (ie I’d straight up close my eyes I’d that would be a bit less weird) and social anxiety). I’m a bit socially awkward. While I can read people very easily I’m not always fantastic at adjusting my own behaviors to the expected norm - I get focused on whatever I’m thinking about and neglect to control my facial expressions. I also had an unusual social upbringing without some of the pressures and collective traumas that most people expect as normal and that train most people to conform. The above, basically, describes someone who has significant (but not steriotypical) ADHD, a bit of anxiety, noticeable hypervigilance, an unusual upbringing, and a brain that processes a lot of information rapidly.

When I take tests designed to capture people who are autistic who mask well I test as either bordering on autistic (based entirely on overlap between adhd and autism symptoms) or as neurotypical (which I’m not, but the tests aren’t looking at a full range of things).

I definitely see why people superficially think I might be autistic and masking well, rather than adhd with atypical social behaviors/ masking poorly; but it does not appear to be the case.

While people with autism, like a range of other sorts of neurodiverse people, are over-represented in my social and professional world, and I have multiple friends with autism, I understand what it’s like to be autistic about as well as I understand what it‘s like to be neurotypical: ie from the outside. I’m a good observer, but in this case I understand behaviors, not internal experiences.

Often, in order to connect, I need to think the way I would if I were speaking to someone from a different culture - someone for whom the words have different meanings than they do for me. I can code shift in this way, but it is a deliberate choice I make, and an additional filter I put on my behavior (which ironically makes my behavior seem more autistic, as the translation necessary changes the cadence of my voice and takes a level of effort that exacerbates my poor physical behavior masking tendencies).

When I talk to someone who’s brain is more like my own I can just let it run wherever it wants to go, without consciously thinking about whether what I mean to say and what they understand me to mean will be the same thing.

One of my special interests, to use the language of autism, is social dynamics and how other people think, and thanks to my 2E ADHD I am abnormally good at pattern recognition. With that combination of traits in myself I can recognize the signs of autism easily in others in my community when interacting in person (though not as easily as I can recognize adhd - which I’m good enough at spotting that I can generally tell from the sentence and paragraph structure of someone’s Reddit comments).

I have a (possibly unusually) good grasp of what autism looks like from the outside, and generally can understand how my actions will be seen by someone who is autistic. Adding in the shared hyperfocus and oddness and experience of being “other” and joy in exploring an idea or an interest, and there is often a ton to of similarities and shared interests to build a friendship on. At the same time, there is always a gap in understanding somewhere, and I can only adjust so far, just as the other person can only adjust so far.

I’ve also had an experience a couple of times with autistic coworkers in particular where I will do or say something that upsets or bothers them, and I will not be able to find a way to repair things. It feels as if if I can’t be consistent in my communication or behavior to the degree that they expect of me. I can do it for a while, but eventually it will always fall apart, if only for a moment or a day, and that when it does something changes in how they see me in a way that it would not with another adhd person or a neurotypical person. And perhaps that because I feel similar (I have had autistic people tell me - insist, even - that I am autistic) my actions, even when minor, when I don’t behave the way someone who is autistic would are more jarring or even alarming than they would be if I had always been someone they saw as dissimilar from themselves.

So... what I’ve written here are the thoughts of a non-autistic person who tests as just barely bordering on autistic, and has been told several times by acquaintances that they think she might be autistic (and repeatedly by people who know me well, and who know autistic people well, that they do not think I am autistic). I am also deliberately code shifting in this comment to make my language more literal. And I’ll likely make several more edits to this in the half hour after I comment.

Perhaps this comment will be a helpful comparison point for someone here - whether you or someone else - of someone on the questioning line who falls into the “not autistic” category in the same way that reading the posts here and not recognizing myself has been helpful for me.

/r/AutismTranslated Thread Parent