TLDR: Hi.

Hey (sorry this is gonna be super long but wanna get this all out even if no one reads it, haha...),

I'm Rhi. I'm 19 and a Design student in London. I love music and going to gigs, I write songs for guitar which is possibly my favourite thing to do in the world. I've always known I'm a bit out of the ordinary in some way, and if I was an animal I would for sure be a chameleon due to the way I've always had to observe and adopt other people's ways of dealing with social situations.

Last year I started reading a bunch of research about how females tend to present differently than males with autism, read through a list of symptoms out of curiosity and found that they were identical to my own experiences. This was a shock, but also somehow not...

I was a very independent kid, always playing imagined fantasy games by myself and writing stories. Up until very recently (until I met my great SO, when I was 17) my head was occupied with one particular cast of characters I'd invented who I could always rely on when I was bored or fed up of real people (pretty often while I was at school)- and they still crop up very occasionally. My mum tells me I was the least self-aware child ever; I didn't care about what I looked like until maybe high school, when I finally realised that all the other girls had been wearing make up for about 10 years.... I had one good friend at a time and didn't bother about anyone else really. Even now I basically stick to two (plus my SO).

Throughout school I was always an outcast or "hanger-on"- not because I desperately wanted to be a part of any one friendship group or "clique" but because it everyone else seemed to hang around in packs too. It didn't work and I spent 4 years (at middle school) not realising that the girls I hung around with and thought were my friends were laughing at me behind my back. I always knew they had a lot of in jokes I didn't know about, and were always round eachothers' houses, never inviting me; but I assumed that was just life. Now I realise, after the humiliation in year 9 of them outright, finally, telling me they didn't like me because I was clingy and weird and followed them around, it must have taken some kind of superhuman effort not to ever notice their pretty blatant disrespect for me before that...

 I've always had weird little idiosyncrasies, like the way I love the way certain words sound (like idiosyncrasies!); I react over-emotionally to music (walking to college, I'll often well up just from the sounds); I hit myself in the head or hit my head against things when angry, frustrated or stressed; I'm constantly making lists and categorising things; I'm awful at multi-tasking; I can't do small talk; can't take compliments; don't understand when people put themselves down (pretty sure I've offended people many a time by leaving them hanging when they're being self-derogatory); and have meltdowns when I feel people are angry at me, because I never understand why. This was a pretty common occurrence at home, as my mum (although we have a great relationship generally) would get offended by my tone, use of words or even facial expression, which would in her shouting or being upset, and me banging my head/ kicking and punching things/ screaming into pillows; all because I didn't understand what I'd done and felt like a terrible person for it.

Nowadays I'm more likely to meltdown over my own mistakes or technology being crap;  However all of this has always been in private, other than my SO seeing me do all this, more recently. Understandably it seriously freaks him out, but he's very good at calming me down (eventually), although I usually get very unresponsive and sit there rocking for a bit first...

Speaking of SO, I've always found it difficult to approach people I liked; and although I'd only ever had one other big attachment (I'd physically shake and sweat when he was near me, not the nicest thing), it had almost put me off completely. I only became interested in guys at about 16, when I went to sixth form; before that I genuinely didn't give a crap. This first guy: I hinted very unsubtly at one point that I'd like to be with him and he didn't really respond. So... naturally I kept trying. For about a year. :L I was very persistent. Because I was incredibly, heart-wrenchingly attached to him. It was like nothing I'd ever experienced before and I actually found it very scary. So about a year later, we went on what I thought was a "date" (it wasn't), and outright asked him out. He said no. (Obviously.) But that we could still be friends, which I assumed we could be. (We couldn't.) My asking-out of my SO was similarly splurge-y, except he appreciated it!

 So, not the queen of sublety.

I find it weirdly relieving to have the possibility of a diagnosis ahead of me; sometimes I feel like I'm a pretty awful person because of all this, and it would be great to know why I feel all these things when no one else around me seems to.

There's probably lots of other things I could add, but right now I can't think of any and this definitely seems long enough!

Rhi