Autism, it’s just a 6 letter word.

Alien0n3arth said:

Made up words, own language and echolalia were very strong in my whole childhood and teenage.

Likewise ~ only I ended up having to do the echolalia internally, often getting to the stage with single words where they seemed so strange I best not use them, i.e., had I made them up or were they actual words? I got rather stuck with the word 'the' at one stage, I remember that one particularly. There were lots of others, and I later met other divergents who were also as such inclined.

Excellent user name, by the way, and excellent avatar image too!! :)

Made up words, own language and echolalia were very strong in my whole childhood and teenage.

Coppo said:

Autism is just a word it’s the things that you seem compelled to do I hate. 

Autism is self-centricism, hence the thing with:

"Idiosyncratic speech refers to unique expressions used by individuals on the autism spectrum, which can include made-up words or unconventional phrases that reflect their personal experiences." www.advancedautism.com/.../idiosyncratic-phrases

And thus the thing with saying that autism is just a word ~ whilst autism is a 'subjective' term describing 'objective' states of individual behaviourism, if it were just a word ~ there would be no subject to object relativity.

I am though heinously tempted to answer that I am feeling somewhat "apple~sandwich" on occasion! :)

Coppo said:

But if you choose to take away the negative things that actually make you autistic, as you’ve said, then if you did you wouldn’t be diagnosed surely? 

Two traits I love are geometric pattern recognition, and the narrow (not so much) or singular (very much) range of focus that involves all my sensibilities articulating and facilitating a much longer range of focus ~ i.e., perseverance, with my current fascination being neural linguistic networks and vectorial geometries in large language models ~ involving distributive semantics, or in simpler terms working out how to increase subject to object relativities.

I think it depends because being autistic also means looking into things deeply, caring about justice, etc. It can just be more incompatible with neurotypicals. It depends what traits you are looking at. But, I cried and hated myself for a while after my diagnosis- it has been almost 4 years since I was diagnosed.

I think I’d take my chance in not being autistic despite not knowing how things eoukd have turned out. 
I’m not sure what behaviour Elon Musk has/does that got him diagnosed so cant  comment on that one. 

Coppo said:

can’t stop reading car number plates which jump out at me, phone numbers, going in graveyards and each grave to work out how old someone was when they died etc etc 

Half my working life was built on this. I was trained as an investigator and would train graduate trainees how to analyse data like dates of birth (how old are they? What do the surnames of people living in the house and their ages tell you about their relationships? I could take a person's business bank account entries over a year and show you how they disproved the stories they told me about their business. That gave me a career until I retired.

I also write novels and the plot of the latest thriller is built on a mystery revealed by one family tree. The heroine has to piece together the information revealed purely by names, birth/death/marriage dates and where those occurred.

I wouldn’t say cured, I’d say not having it in the first place, never having it to start with is different from being cured. 

If I wrote the positives on one sheet of paper and the negatives on another, the negative sheet would be full, the positive sheet may say something like” I’m good with numbers, calculations, times tables” 

The negative sheet would be full, even the one positive has negatives to it, can’t stop reading car number plates which jump out at me, phone numbers, going in graveyards and each grave to work out how old someone was when they died etc etc 

You wouldn't be diagnosed no. But you wouldn't be you either. And you'd lose any positives that your autism causes. Because autism is a difference in the brain. You can't just take negatives away. You would have to have a neurotypical brain. So therefore you'd be an entirely different person, you'd just look the same.

I will forever now imagine a little grey hippo rolling in mud living in my brain and he shall be called autism. I don't know why I love this but I do.

I felt almost euphoric at receiving my diagnosis of ASD. I think that people celebrating late diagnosis are not celebrating their strange lifelong traits and difficulties, they are celebrating having a reason for them at last. I look on my own autism as having both negative and positive aspects. While I wish that the negative aspects could be ameliorated, I would not want to lose the positive aspects as a consequence. Being a sparkling socialite with off-scale charisma and an ability to let my mouth freewheel would not, for me, be enough of a consolation for losing my abilities in lateral thinking, problem solving and attention to detail. A mundane interest in football would not compensate me for losing my obsession with Byzantine history.

I get that, there is a lot about my autism I hate. I would love to be able to have a fan on me and for it not to feel like sandpaper. I would love for there to be more clothing I could wear without wanting to claw off my own skin. I'd love to not be so sensitive to smells or sounds. I would love to be able to communicate clearly with people.

But on the other hand I don't know who that other person would be. Would they appreciate stories and their structure like I do? Would they know the happiness of infodumping about a special interest? Would they collect the things I collect and love them the way I do? Would they understand and love my husband or my child the way I do? 

There are negative aspects of my autism that I could do without, but I also wouldn't be me without it. And I wouldn't have the relationships and joys I have in my life without it. I'm not my autism, but my autism is a part of who I am and I don't know how I could separate myself from my autism and still be the same person. I could lose my chronic pain and be a happier, but still the same, person. I couldn't lose my autism without losing some of what makes me me. 

I would have to say that's also true of my CPTSD. I don't want to have CPTSD or to have gone through trauma. But the person who didnt' go through trauma isn't me. I don't know who that person is either. 

It's also true of my love of reading or the gender I was born as. My experiences have created who I am and I can't separate out myself completely from those experiences. 

Obviously opinions vary, some say autism defines them, others say they won’t let it define them. For me putting a name to my condition was life saving. I had gone through decades of not knowing who or what I was, I had got to the point of checking out.

To actually know I’m not broken or faulty is everything, I never knew there was others like me, that in itself is still mind blowing. It is very similar to finding your tribe, I don’t celebrate autism, it just describes how I function.

What any uneducated person thinks of me is irrelevant, my reply is “Whatever, don’t let the door hit you on the ar*e on your way out.”

I’ve never been neurotypical so I don’t know if it’s any better, I wouldn’t be me, my personality would be totally different. I don’t think they have a brilliant time of it, they seem to be noisy and arguing most of the time.

I won’t pretend life is brilliant, it’s not, I am now able to get by, so for all  those reasons I will not put autism in Room 101.

For me autism is grey and heavy like a hipo in dirt. It is a word. I prefer the grey word "autism" than tourette, I was misdiagnosed with tourette previously. Because of motor movements that were identified as tourette tics. Only later extensive examination in a specialised clinic proved that neurologist was wrong. Anyway, tourette is brown and smells like beef. I hate this smell, to the point of not being able to breathe. Yes, autism is just a word. For me the diagnosis is not a word, bur description of symptoms. It's important to describe my symptoms properly. So if my set of symptoms and behaviour gets the name "apple sandwich " then it is what it is. 

I don't understand celebrating these "autism parties" but I think it's Important to be properly diagnosed. I don't know who I would be if I was "normie", on one hand I love my inner world, on other hand I hate how I have to cope with the outside world.

I do pace a room for hours since my childhood. Till today. I must do it to be able to regulate and function. 

One of the things that confuses me when people talk about their dislike of autism and the stuff "it makes you do", and how life would be better if they could be cured of autism, is what do they want, really, how do they see life as being?

I'm not bothered by the word, as all conditions recognised by medics have names to describe a set of symptoms. I need names for things as it's quite difficult to (for example) buy a bed when you have to describe the thing to a salesperson or a search engine rather than use a word that has already done that work. I may not have chosen to be autistic, but I don't think I've suffered more than many NTs because of it. It gives me a slightly more objective view, free of the influence of social pressure. I have managed a good career in a variety of jobs within a large organisation and had a number of long-term realitionships. 

Studying psychology really helped me over the years. Apart from anything else, it made me realise how insecure most NT people are, even though they try to hide it. My friendships have shown me that few people have truly happy childhoods and everyone goes through tough periods in their lives. Some never experience long periods of contentment. The downside is that those years of observation made me assign different causes to explain my own symptoms. When I finally realised I am [call it what you want], I felt relieved to know I wasn't the failed fish I thought I was, but a successful duck.

What do you see as the positive sides of autism?

1. Well, the thing is, not being born autustic doesn't guarantee you would have had a wonderful life. There could have been other problems that you might have had, for example, one if the personality didorders that exists or been born into an abusive household, etc. You might even have been born with some physical disability, so I think we should always keep things in perspective when we bemoan our lot in ife because there are people who are far worse off and also, It's knowing who you are and getting thr best out of your strengths rather than concentrating on the drawbacks. Elon Musk is autistic, apparently, and it doesn't seem to have done him much harm!

No matter what you call ASD, it doesn’t change things.

My diagnosis was a relief because it explained why I struggled with some things. I stopped blaming myself for things out of my control.  

Yes, not being autistic might mean I would have been spared the trauma that can go along with it — if I had been born into a different family I might have done better at school, got a highly paid job and married the man of dream — or I could have been born into a poverty stricken family in a poor foreign country run by an oppressive dictator.

For me, there is no point in magical thinking when it can’t change anything. I’d rather spend time on what I can do.