This was posted recently on the 'Autism From The Inside' channel and I found myself agreeing to so much of it. It's light hearted and worth a watch, far better than any pathological lists of autistic traits.
- Always wearing bright colours.
- Hating phone calls.
- Not realizing you're hungry or thirsty.
- Not replying to a text message, but thinking about it for a week until eventually deciding that it's kind of probably too late to reply anyway.
- Hating wearing socks or just seams in clothing in general.
- Having an atypical sense of humour.
- Telling the truth even when you probably shouldn't.
- Feeling out of sync with everyone else in your group.
- Having an aversion to or an obsession with popular culture.
- Over-planning everything.
- Not having a strong sense of gender.
- Feeling tired all the time for no good reason.
- Not liking being told what to do.
- Did you teach yourself to read before your first day of school?
- Finding comfort in repetition and routine.
- Struggling with crowds.
- Seeing people as people and kind of forgetting about social class and expectations and all that kind of stuff.
- Having super sensitive hearing.
- Having a high pain tolerance.
- Over apologizing and assuming everything must be your fault.
- Not caring what people think.
- Being really good at something that is completely useless.
- Being deadpan sarcastic all the time.
- Preferring face-to-face communication to avoid misunderstanding.
- Struggling to find an appropriate gap in group conversation.
- Constant background anxiety.
- Being overly empathic.
- Relating to animals better than you relate to humans.
- Avoiding trying new things.
- Eating the same food every day.
- Finding inappropriate things funny.
- Not liking to be touched.
- A tendency to notice small details.
- Hating fluorescent lights and downlights.
- Always wanting to understand why.
- Enjoying repetition.
- Thinking in pictures.
- Having a flat affect, also known as resting *** face.
- Preferring to pace up and down instead of sitting still.
- Liking to imitate other people.
- Having a favourite thing that goes with you everywhere.
- Getting excited and interrupting people.
- Going over social interactions again and again in your head even after they've happened.
- Seeing patterns in everything.
- Having a very, very good memory for some things and a terrible memory for other things.
- Preferring nonverbal forms of communication.
- Hating to brush your teeth.
- Having a monotone voice.
- Difficulty identifying your emotions because they feel like they're all jumbled together.
- Getting overwhelmed by too many tasks at once.
- Watching the same movie or TV series over and over again.
- Feeling awkward in groups.
- Loving to think outside the box.
- Having brilliant ideas that no one else seems to be able to understand.
- Struggling to read between the lines in complex social situations.
- Preferring written communication because you can spend hours and hours perfecting and saying exactly what you want to say, in an attempt to try and avoid miscommunication.
- Two-speed productivity. Either super fast, super efficient, or nothing at all.
- Compartmentalizing experiences from different parts of your life.
- Feeling comfortable being alone.
- Being happy with very few material comforts.
- Always finishing what you start even when you should probably stop.
- Scripting conversations in advance or spending hours thinking about what you could have said even after the moment has passed.
- Being the kind of person who people think, how could someone so clever be so stupid?
I have counted 53 which apply to me, including the last one
Feel free to add your score, discuss any of the items or suggest new additions to the list.