Published on 12, July, 2020
...of being autistic.
Just finished a short online meeting, where I didn't have to do much except say one thing for AOB at the end. Thankfully meetings are rare in my job, just every couple of months. But by the end of this thing, I was so tense in my core that I had to lie on my bed for five minutes to relieve the intense pain. Never sure if the online ones are better or worse than in person. Maybe better. I don't have to repress a stim, it's out of frame!
Related thing: I tried, a while back, to do one of those online tests in which you're evaluated by the time you take to click on the correct image(s). I didn't even know where to begin - I couldn't even understand the similarity or difference between what were simple lines and basic shapes. I even get flustered by the task of building coloured blocks, the kind a child plays with. And also those 'Identify which photo shows a residential house/skyscraper/car'-type captcha things. I'm so ignorant about autistic behaviours bar the standard ones that I don't know if these examples are relevant. God help me if I ever have to do that 'Tell a story using objects' test you once wrote (very well) about, Shard (I was using the forum's search facility last night and one of the related results was that thread).
Possibly unrelated thing: I don't know whether autism's responsible for this, or something else: today, the world seemed 'frozen' to me for a couple of hours. No noises outside, no traffic or people around whenever I looked outside, no new emails arrived, and even no new posts on this board. It was like the world had stopped. I would put all this down to mere coincidence or something like that but this kind of thing happens quite regularly to me. It's, perhaps, like the silence and stillnesss some people report when witnessing what they consider to be supernatural phenomena. Or - very loosely - a variation on the build-up before an epileptic fit. My aunt suffered those but I haven't.