Did your speech change after diagnosis?

Try noticing how you talk when you have a topic you are passionate and interested about. Also notice how expressive you are if you are relaxed and calm and rested, compared to something more pressured.

When mental energy is available, you may be more natural. At the moment you are under strain. After my diagnosis the first 6 months were hard. It has been 15 so far and I am not fully there yet.

Try to relax and be calm. As you become comfortable with yourself it may change.

I did not change my speech after diagnosis, but I did change it at some point during my early adulthood, when I realised that I was putting too much effort on it.

Since you commented about SMS, I will add that a few times I was told that removing WhatsApp was selfish, and I thought they were wrong.

But I took an intermediate path. I offered the closest people the chance to contact me through Signal, and I only use WhatsApp once every two weeks.

This made a big positive difference for me.

Thank you everyone for your replies!! 

I don't think I have a 'get out of jail free card' (although that would be nice :), but in a way I feel that I should be allowed to spend less energy on everything that is draining me. I still use 3 hours to write an SMS to get it right, and I still suppress extreme amounts of anger/frustration I experience in daily life (such as perfume on the bus). But my voice ... that should not be offensive to others, if they know why? My partner knows me for 11 years, and I have always gotten a sort of robotic voice when I was very tired, not even myself understanding why. With the diagnosis I understood. Robot is probably my 'normal', I have just adjusted my voice to how I heard others speak. Like I adjust everything about me to what is expected. And now I am tired. And it pains me when I feel my partner does not like that I am 'different' than before the diagnosis (I think he did not really see me before ... like my robot voice was the exception before, when I had no more energy left ... and now I see that my system prefers speaking like that ... but still I shouldn't because of him ... I am afraid he feels embarrassed about me ... painful thoughts). 

Hi Stressed Penguin, 

I am glad you have received your diagnosis and it has provided clarity for you. 

it is a common experience to allow yourself to unmask after receiving your diagnosis and it should be a period of allowing your self to discover your needs and strengths. You may find it helpful to read more about this on our After Diagnosis page. 

You and your partner may also find it useful to read through Autism and Communication and our guide for partners of autistic people.

I hope the advice and comments from the community will also be helpful.

Best wishes, 

Alice Mod

My personal view is that an autism diagnosis is not a 'get out of jail free card'. Society still expects the same of you. If you want to interact with the allistic majority in the most optimal way, continued effort is still required. If you are content for your ability to communicate with people worsening and their appreciation of you becoming less favourable, then not putting effort into how you present will certainly result in this. It isn't ideal, in an ideal world all communication styles would be acceptable, unhappily we live in the world as it is, not an ideal one.

Virtually all socialising takes a degree of effort for autistic people. Allistic people tend to slide through social interactions frictionlessly with close to zero effort.

Hi, yes, for NTs social interaction and speech with emotion come naturally. For autistic people it needs energy - attention on both - speech and gestures separately. I'm not diagnosed,  suspected. For me it's like that- if I put my energy and consciously try to make an expression- I do. Usually it results in people staring me in a weird way. When I'm tired, the first thing that dissappears are my social skills and body language. I tend to concentrate on what to say, structure of the sentence,  I repeat it in my head before saying and few times afterwards often angry at myself, because I could say it differently. 

Once I made a picture to explain to my therapist. On one side I drew few lines with equal width, there I wrote separately - speech, expression, other stimuli. They fit perfectly together. On tge other side I drew one wide line and there I wrote "what I want to say, how to say that, at what moment, structure of the sentence". There was no more place for any additional information coming in. It's a focus on one thing excluding other things. That's why I usually speak flat and I used to hear from my managers in different companies, in retail and customer service,  that I have to modulate my voice, that I speak too monotonously. My husband knows me the way I am but it happened in the past to tell me that my voice or tone somehow changes. It was long before I got any suspicion about autism. The suspicion didn't change my tone or behaviour, I'm not sure how will that be after the diagnosis. If I get positive autism diagnosis. Maybe it's something else.

Hey,

I was also recently diagnosed and I can definitely relate to the "seeming more autistic". For me my voice and speech has gotten a little more child like if that makes sense, my reactions and showing my emotions has definitely gotten more intense as I unmask more. Skill regression is usually what these kind of things are referred to as, although it doesn't mean you are going backwards in fact you are probably getting better at being more yourself, unmasked. It is definitely allowed and you shouldn't feel bad for communicating however you feel is best for you, maybe explaining to your partner that communicating that way is less draining might help.

I find that the person I probably appear most autistic to in the stereotypical sense is my partner because they know you the most and are who you are most comfortable around. I hope that helps at least a little.