How many of these 63 autistic traits apply to you?

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.
  1. Always wearing bright colours.
  2. Hating phone calls.
  3. Not realizing you're hungry or thirsty.
  4. 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.
  5. Hating wearing socks or just seams in clothing in general.
  6. Having an atypical sense of humour.
  7. Telling the truth even when you probably shouldn't.
  8. Feeling out of sync with everyone else in your group.
  9. Having an aversion to or an obsession with popular culture.
  10. Over-planning everything.
  11. Not having a strong sense of gender.
  12. Feeling tired all the time for no good reason.
  13. Not liking being told what to do.
  14. Did you teach yourself to read before your first day of school?
  15. Finding comfort in repetition and routine.
  16. Struggling with crowds.
  17. Seeing people as people and kind of forgetting about social class and expectations and all that kind of stuff.
  18. Having super sensitive hearing.
  19. Having a high pain tolerance.
  20. Over apologizing and assuming everything must be your fault.
  21. Not caring what people think.
  22. Being really good at something that is completely useless.
  23. Being deadpan sarcastic all the time.
  24. Preferring face-to-face communication to avoid misunderstanding.
  25. Struggling to find an appropriate gap in group conversation.
  26. Constant background anxiety.
  27. Being overly empathic.
  28. Relating to animals better than you relate to humans.
  29. Avoiding trying new things.
  30. Eating the same food every day.
  31. Finding inappropriate things funny.
  32. Not liking to be touched.
  33. A tendency to notice small details.
  34. Hating fluorescent lights and downlights.
  35. Always wanting to understand why.
  36. Enjoying repetition.
  37. Thinking in pictures.
  38. Having a flat affect, also known as resting *** face.
  39. Preferring to pace up and down instead of sitting still.
  40. Liking to imitate other people.
  41. Having a favourite thing that goes with you everywhere.
  42. Getting excited and interrupting people.
  43. Going over social interactions again and again in your head even after they've happened.
  44. Seeing patterns in everything.
  45. Having a very, very good memory for some things and a terrible memory for other things.
  46. Preferring nonverbal forms of communication.
  47. Hating to brush your teeth.
  48. Having a monotone voice.
  49. Difficulty identifying your emotions because they feel like they're all jumbled together.
  50. Getting overwhelmed by too many tasks at once.
  51. Watching the same movie or TV series over and over again.
  52. Feeling awkward in groups.
  53. Loving to think outside the box.
  54. Having brilliant ideas that no one else seems to be able to understand.
  55. Struggling to read between the lines in complex social situations.
  56. 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.
  57. Two-speed productivity. Either super fast, super efficient, or nothing at all.
  58. Compartmentalizing experiences from different parts of your life.
  59. Feeling comfortable being alone.
  60. Being happy with very few material comforts.
  61. Always finishing what you start even when you should probably stop.
  62. Scripting conversations in advance or spending hours thinking about what you could have said even after the moment has passed.
  63. 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 Grin

Feel free to add your score, discuss any of the items or suggest new additions to the list.

Parents
  • I got about 34. I don't have an exact score as I felt some of the questions weren't entirely clear or easily quantifiable. Most of the ones I did get seemed to be applicable to many allistics (shy people, social phobics, trauma survivors, or just plain introverts).

    This is the kind of thing which makes me worry they're going to come and take away my autism card one day, by which I mean, there's a lot on this list, and elsewhere on this forum, that doesn't fit me at all, even though everyone seems to think "This is autism!" I don't like animals, for example. Actually, I'm mostly scared of them and avoid them, although I do quite like watching them from a distance. I can "pass" pretty well, I'm not obviously routine-bound to an outsider, at least until there's a sudden change of plan, and I don't have sensory super-powers, or any other super-powers. I feel like these kinds of lists are more about making autistics understand and feel good about themselves than actually providing reliable alternative diagnostic guidelines. That's not a bad thing, but I think it's something to be aware of, particularly as I, and presumably people like me, would probably be judged allistic by these criteria. My autism just doesn't manifest in the way this list thinks it "should."

  • As Autonomistic said - this is just a bit of fun.....as with any online test, always take with a large pinch of salt.  Diagnosing an autistic mind is not a "list based activity"....it's more akin to divination!

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