Tell us that you discovered you were autistic as an adult without directly telling us that. Imply it by sharing personal experiences.
I’m not diagnosed, only lately suspecting, but well, one experience that stuck with me, was on a communications training at my workplace, which is an IT company, so the participants were a whole sack of nerds.
The trainer gave us instructions to stand in a line next to each other, she’d read forms of communication and we should take a step forward, if we did not like that form of communcation.
So, “e-mail” → 3 people take a step forward,
“phone call” → 7 people take a step forward etc…
At the end of it, I turned around to see where the others ended up and realized I had walked almost twice as far as everyone else. And I felt like I was rather conservative about it, too…
"I don’t like communicating through e-mails, phone calls, video calls, group calls, group video calls, and I feel awkward in a group chat like Slack. I dread group meetings, I get nervous one-on-one in the open office and during private conversations in a separate room. I can’t hold a presentation for a group, or for a single person. I also get anxious when writing replies to text messages and end up with a wall of text, I then have to spend up to an hour editing it down to not sound insane, seriously considering every single sentence and whether I can comfortably leave that information out. Oh, and snail mail and fax are ridiculous. “Talking it out over lunch” makes me distracted as I worry about eating incorrectly.
But I am comfortable posting anonymously on a forum…?"
Ok, so this is an autistic thing too? I thought it was just my training from lab work seeping into real life.
My whole life, I have lived by adhering to rules and protocols. Nearly everything I do is based on a decision flow chart that follows internal protocols I have developed throughout my life that I consciously think about when making decisions and then, of course, lessons learned after the event. When I’m alone, I explain these processes out loud to my imaginary audience.
There are only 2 areas in which I do not do this: art and sex. For some reason, in those two areas, I just disconnect and go with feeling. It’s like I’m not even thinking. However, everything else is a consciously thought out process.
When work is slow and stable I’m bored out of my fuckin mind but when shit hits the fan and I’ve got minimal staffing I can cover 4 stations at once faster than most people could cover 1
omg! Before I was discovered as autistic, I got got put on buspar for anxiety per my complaints. It worked so well, that I had no desire to do anything. I told the doc that I needed to come off of it because I needed anxiety to keep me motivated to accomplish tasks. Really, I just needed the stimulation. 😆