This new book by a young author about nature study and autism might be of interest to some:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/07/books/dara-mcanulty-diary-of-a-young-naturalist.html
If the link doesn’t work, google Dara McAnulty and “Diary of a Young Naturalist.”
Wonderful book! He expresses the joy we find in the natural world in a way that really reflects my experience. Highly recommend.
yes great recommendation, i read this right when it came out and loved it
I read that article in the paper and immediately thought of this thread. :)
i wonder if Dara is on iNat :)
Hi Ben, I’m not a Twitter person but Mary Kennedy mentioned that you’d commented about Aphantasia here.
I have zero images in my head and I also have SDAM (Severely diminished Autobiographical Memory). I’m 71 now and only just realized in my mid-60s that others could see things in their heads. I thought counting sheep for example was metaphor.
I take photos obsessively. I find it hard to make ID’s as I cannot visualize things I have seen in books or on-line. If I’ve seen a bird and look away from it to a book, that bird doesn’t exist in my head so unless I can see the book and the actual bird. It makes learning about what I’ve observed very hard.
I think I have an extreme version of Aphantasia.
BTW my adult daughter has recently been diagnozed with Autism.
However I tend to be VERY social and chatty.
Should you wish to chat further Ben your best bet would be to “friend” me on FB.
Sybil Nunn
Autistic extroverts exist! I am one of them!
Thanks for sharing your experiences!
@charlie
What a great topic! Hello to my fellow autistics and neurodiverse people! <3
I am autistic (I also have OCD and a laundry list of other diagnoses-- & suspect ADHD). iNaturalist has absolutely served as a place to dive into my favorite SPIN (special interest), observing and cataloguing the natural world. I have many neurodivergent friends within the community, several who are also autistic.
Hi and great to meet you, this is awesome :D
Definitely. While I happen to be very introverted, I have met my share of autistic extroverts!
I don’t have children, but I do have wild furchildren and a partner who works from home (and happens to speak rather loudly during his scheduled meetings). I have to take breaks from all of them, and I do wear noise cancelling earbuds pretty often. If I don’t, meltdowns and shutdowns occur a lot more often than I’d like.
Oh yeah, i had plenty of sensory issues before i had kids of course, though i did not know i was autistic so didn’t understand them.
Also thanks for all the IDs!
I didn’t find out I was autistic until I was 35, so I’m still having those AHA! moments pretty often! Do you also find yourself remembering things from your childhood that were very obviously autistic traits/behaviors?
I’m in a very similar situation, diagnosed at 33. For a long while, I was constantly asking myself “Did I do that because I’m autistic?” every time I noticed anything about myself, whether it was odd or normal, common or rare. In most cases it was easy to think of equally convincing scenarios supporting each answer, which was confusing. At times I found myself thinking everything I did was the result of autism, at others I found myself doubting my diagnosis was correct.
The more severe a case of autism is, the more likely the symptoms will be noticed early. If you make it into adulthood before being diagnosed, you’re pretty much guaranteed to be on the high-functioning end of the spectrum, with symptoms less obvious and more subtle than many of the examples you read about. Much of what’s written about autism is known from the study of children, who generally haven’t learned how to compensate, which makes their symptoms easier to observe, and the examples most frequently reported are usually the most severe or bizarre ones. I’ve seen very little written about typical symptoms in adults, or about typical coping strategies and common methods to compensate for symptoms, possibly because there are a very large variety of ways which work well enough.
So it helps a lot if you can identify the most fundamental symptoms of autism in yourself, the ones that aren’t side-effects, coping strategies, coping strategies for the side-effects, coping strategies for the side effects of the coping strategies, etc. Also, it helps to read up on what’s normal, since that isn’t always obvious. (Not just because you have autism, although that too. Even normal people often don’t appreciate how diverse “normal” people are, often assuming most people are more similar to themselves than they really are. This is a bias you’re just as likely to be affected by - yes you, reader.) A lot of the time you’ll find yourself questioning a facet of yourself which later turns out to be within the normal range of variation and not related to autism at all.
In my case, I eventually settled on intense sensory experiences being fundamental symptoms, and that worked well enough to explain the other symptoms I have as side-effects, coping strategies, or unrelated, and let me stop questioning whether every single facet of my personality was related to autism. I’m not, however, convinced my model corresponds to reality. It might be a clever but ultimately incorrect theory which explains most but not all of the facts. I may have inverted the direction of a chain of causation somewhere. Even if I’m correct about myself, there’s a good chance many people diagnosed with autism have similar surface symptoms with fundamentally different causes. Certainly there are a wide variety of proposed causes in the literature, many of which appear to explain symptoms equally well while completely contradicting each other. So, as much as possible, keep in mind facts grounded in reality. Theory about autism hasn’t gelled yet, and will lead you astray. (Which necessarily includes my theory, even though it pains me to admit that.)
That said, the initial surge of questioning everything about yourself does slow down as you gradually finish examining most of your own personality traits and behaviours. A decade after I was diagnosed, I still occasionally notice something unusual about myself and find myself curious about how (or whether) it might relate to autism, but I’m no longer constantly re-evaluating everything about myself.
oh my God yes so much stuff. My situation was a little different maybe as i was misdiagnosed but knew i was neurodivergent in some way, however due to trauma and other factors tried to completely hide and ignore it… until i couldn’t any more. It was too bad since the community is so great and the information has been so useful. Once i started looking at it, the floodgates opened. I also had a ton of childhood home video to review and surprise! i was autistic AF as a kid too and you can really see it in these videos. It’s … not subtle. The first video i saw was the hand flapping one, and it wasn’t even sent in that context, just my dad sent it saying ‘hey this is cute’. I was out in the field and my jaw dropped so hard. like what the heck, is this really me? But yeah there’s a lot. I can share in great detail if you want in messages/twitter/wassap/etc too, and connect you with tons of resources but it sounds like you’re already part of the autistic community so probably have the same stuff
it’s pretty much a classic autistic trait to think about this in detail. I have never come across a neurotypical person who would spend extensive amounts of time obsessing over whether they were autistic.
Most of us in the autism community that i’m part of don’t use the ‘high functioning’ and ‘severe’ language. I mean i am not telling you not to of course. However, it doesn’t hold up very well, it’s a really complex multi variate spectrum and things like comorbid conditions, specific sensory profile, and trauma response and such seem to affect ‘function’ way more than anything else. I am i guess ‘high functioning’ in most cases but was not really as a kid and sometimes not now either. The function labels tend to exclude ‘high functioning’ people from support and exclude ‘low functioning’ people from pretty much anything. But anyhow, there is a lot out there about autistic adulthood written by autistic adults but very little in terms of medical/diagnostic resources within the ‘system’.
I actually think autism rather than having a bunch of different causes but similar symptoms is the other way around - varies a LOT but with a similar thread of neurodivergence which has a LOT of commonalities and also includes ADHD and other neurodivergences in some way. But, you know, i could be wrong.
I’ve got tons of resources if you want them, just let me know! I don’t want to assume you do if you might not
for what it’s worth, extreme sensitivity to physical and/or psychological stimuli of various kinds is a common trait across the neurodivergence spectrum. a lowered sensitivity is also possible, although less in the ADHD and autism groups I think. I wish I knew more.
it’s a little hard to express how much a stimulus can be. It’s not that I “don’t want” to eat X, I cannot eat X because the sensory experience is so much too much NO that my body freezes itself. It is physically repelled.
Yeah, I’m not really a part of any autism-related community. Most of my information is from reading literature from the medical/diagnostic perspective. Which, honestly, rarely ignores the complexities. But they certainly do talk about the aggregate “function” axis more than people who don’t have to make decisions about diagnosis and treatment, so I’ve probably absorbed some of that.
I would like to think there’s a common cause hiding behind the multitudinous variations of autism and similar syndromes, because that would make it so much easier to reason about. But sometimes I suspect since we’re observing a very complex system, there are lots of fundamentally different ways to degrade the performance of the system along axes we can observe. I haven’t yet seen anything which rules out the single-cause scenario, but neither have I seen any regularities pointing towards a single cause, aside from it being inheritable.
yeah unfortunately in my experience the medical/diagnostic literature for autism in particular is REALLY bad. I have gotten 99% of my useful helpful information, coping strategies, community, etc etc from the autistic community directly. I was glad to get an official diagnosis for various reasons but after that i stopped interaction with the medical community about autism at all except my therapist.
I am just one autisto, but my experience is you are right… about the inheritance except i think that is literally it. It’s a genetic trait. Autism and ADHD are 100% heritable. There is no other factor that can cause or remove the neurotype. That being said, ‘autism’ in the medical community is defined as ‘autism related problems and trauma’ in the autistic community. Autistic people who aren’t struggling don’t get picked up, we all get diagnosed after meltdown, shutdown, burnout, anxiety, etc make us unable to live our normal lives. And within one autistic genotype, the environment - trauma (which we nearly all have quite a bit of unfortunately), sensory environment, social environment, etc etc, influence how and when we stim, meltdown, shut down, have sensory overwhelm, dive into special interets and do other autistic things that other humans can notice. I think a lot (though not all) of the so called severe autism is autism plus trauma. But the trauma can be caused by something a neurotypical person could never even realize, such as a sensory issue that no one else has, so trauma can sneak in all kinds of places.
But yes absolutely some of us have it harder than others. Absolutely.
@JeremyHussell I appreciate your detailed reply and respect your viewpoint. I was simply curious if any other late-diagnosed individuals related to my experience.
I’ve known I’m autistic for ~5 years now. I don’t try to draw a relationship between autism and every aspect of my life, but I do have surprise AHA! moments on a regular basis. Just as an example: my mother always tries to embarrass me by retelling “the sailor dress story”. It involves a 2-year old me, an itchy sailor dress that I was supposed to wear to church, and my refusal to wear it as a result. It ends with me hiding in a hallway closet and carefully ripping off the red bow. My mother finds me and I exclaim “I can’t wear it now, can I?” There are a multitude of stories like this (paired with things like hyperlexia, selective mutism, etc) that make me ponder why my early traits were not detected. I think there can be many factors at play when it comes to late diagnoses/misdiagnoses. Socioeconomic background and access to medical care, gender, and race are just a handful of examples.
@charlie I’m in agreement that “high functioning” is outdated language. Not only are many of us masters at masking (and then shutting down and/or melting down later), but many of us don’t even present in the classical sense. The criteria are obsolete, based on data gathered from VERY young white males, and in need a complete overhaul. It is truly a SPECTRUM of individuals out there.