Hey,
So briefly: I'm new here. Mid 40s. No formal diagnosis - both children have now been diagnosed ASD - first (youngest) a couple of years ago and eldest a month since.
I've had no idea about autism at all until recently looking into everything with the children and have realised now that it's most likely I'm autistic. Viewed through this new lens now it's like so much has finally clicked into place regarding my childhood and ongoing difficulties. The youngest child is like a small mirror of myself in many ways. Just feels like finding a piece of a puzzle.
Anyway. Before all this appeared on my radar, I'd been scratching my head about another few problems I've been having some of which I've only recently discovered are not normal and now I'm at the point where I'm wondering how I've got into my mid 40s without realising.
So I have had tinnitus for as long as I can remember. It's constant, both ears, about 15kHz so very high frequency. Never goes away, sometimes gets worse but not too much variation.
About a year and a half ago I started to notice visual snow. I have it all the time now when dark or on an evening when I'm in the house and have lights on. I didn't know what it was at first and it's been causing me a lot of anxiety. I mentioned it to the GP and was told to seek an optician but I was trying to describe how it doesn't feel like it's a problem with the eye but neurological (like the tinnitus) however the eye tests were done and everything checked out fine. Eventually I found out about visual snow and landed on this page http://visualsnowsyndrome.com/symptoms/
I have the visual snow which at the moment is always there but fine, blue dots, not very noticeable in the day time but I'm struggling to make details out in certain indoor lighting situations and on an evening, say when I'm putting the kids to bed, the darkened room is just a mess of blue fuzzy dots.
Having found the page above however, I'd realised that there's a load of other symptoms which I have had in advance of the actual snow some of them for decades.
Palinopsia (afterimages, indoors doesn't need to be bright light for this to happen, constant thing), floaters, Blue-field entoptic phenomenon (indoors looking at anything bright like a white wall), closed-eye hallucinations (which I didn't even think to be abnormal at all before) - so when I close my eyes it's never dark, it's always blue or red clouds moving about. Been like this since I can remember as a small child. I'm getting some of the spontaneous photopsia and have been on and off but only very slightly for the last ten years but has got worse recently. Halos have always been there for me, glare and to some extent starbursts (although I confuse this with halos). pulsating in so much as I can sometimes see my own heartbeat when I've been exercising (again thought this was all normal). I don't have problems with the pattern stress in general but I'm completely unable to deal with repeating characters in text etc, say if 00000000000000 appears and I'm asked to count the 0s it's a virtually impossible task for me. 1234567 wouldn't be a as much of challenge at all.
When I was a child I had some proper weird stuff going on. I'd had the closed eye hallucinations back then too and every night and I'd watch the blue / red clouds as I was going to sleep, but quite often I'd be unable to sleep properly for quite some time, I'd be stuck in a kind of half sleep half awake stress state where I'd "see" two outlines (squares with rounded corners) next to each other which I'd slowly zoom into on of the corners until the curvature of it took up the whole field of view and I could somehow sense I was really near to it which would set off some weird but incredibly uncomfortable sensation which I honestly can't find words for whereby I'd be trying to wake myself up. This was a recurring thing, happened lots of times, same thing every time. Sometimes when I'm in a stressful situation for example starting a new job, sat talking to someone and being blasted with information more quickly than I can take it in, I kind of gloss over / zone out and sometimes see like mental pictures across what I'm looking at like some kind of cartoon or moving pattern or something coming out of my imagination.
I also have some other weird things, like recall of dreams from years ago as if they were normal memories. Sometime's I can think back to specific places and all the detail etc then realise it hadn't actually happened, it was a dream, but one from like 20 years ago. I can remember, vividly some of the dreams I'd had when I was a really small child, at the start of infant school.
Anyway, I've gone a bit off on a tangent here. I was wondering about the visual disturbances (which I've honestly only just realised aren't there for most people) and if this is related to or common with autism / neurodivergence or if it's something else entirely. I'd heard tinnitus might be a common overlap with ADHD for example. Just interested really as it's not really something that comes up in conversation with people very often.
It doesn't look like there's much they can do regarding the visual snow so sadly appears like this is probably here to stay now like the tinnitus.
Anyway, sorry for cluttering up the forum with this stuff.
Thanks.