Published on 12, July, 2020
Hi, I just signed up here, I'm going for an assessment in a couple of weeks
amongst many other things, that has made me consider going for an assessment, for as long as I can remember I have had an obsessive behaviour in my mind to count letters in words and arrange sentences so that the words make even lines; for example, "thank you" has 5 letters and 3 letters and a space inbetween, so that's a count of 9, if someone said " thank you very much" very has 4 letters and much has 4 letters and with a space inbetween the letters that makes 9, so "thank you" sits above "very much" and they both come to 9 ... this process goes on while I'm listening to people talk, I count letters when I see signs outside shop windows, it's particularly difficult when I'm driving as I'm counting letters of words on the sides of lorries, etc, and it puts me off my driving. This all gets more intense when I'm stressed and it gets quite loud in my head, like I'm trying to block out the stress.
As well as this I have the awkardness in social situations, not knowing what to say to people, not understanding why people say the things they do, and when people use metaphores my imagination gets totally stuck on visualising "raining cats and dogs" etc. If I don't understand the metaphor I can spend a few minutes wondering what they mean and by then the conversation has moved on and I'm lost again. I often don't know when people are joking, or why they laugh at the things they do. I get by by looking for visual cues, if they smile I smile back and hope that's right. I tend to talk about myself a lot and miss the cues where I'm supposed to ask about them and get an awkward silence. On the phone I talk over people a lot; it's more difficult to pick up on the visual clues here.
I used to love playing pretend games when I was a child and I would get lost in my imagination of fairies and dragons and read my fairy stories over and over again, wishing I was one of those characters because some how their lives seemed to make more sense than mine! I found it hard to make friends at school but I didn't understand why this was. I had one friend but she left when her family moved away and then I was on my own and I didn't understand why the other kids weren't happy and friendly like in my books! I also took things quite literally. I used to watch musicals on the telly like "Oliver" and think if I went to London that's how everything was, with people dancing in the streets, singing and smiling, I was sad to find out this wasn't the case!
anywhere, there I go again, talking just about me, does this sound like anyone else out there?
Welcome buffy,
Naturally, we can't give you a definite diagnosis here, but you certainly have some traits which could be explained by autism and/or OCD. It's probably worth mentioning that having a multiple diagnosis is not uncommon - so neither of those diagnoses necessarily exclude the other.
If I were to give you one bit of advice it would be this. Immerse yourself in the experiences of other autistic people that you see here (or any of the other sites that you can find in the 'other contacts' page). If you keep an open mind, you will see fairly quickly which aspects of autism feel familiar to you or not. The experiences of people living the autistic life for real are much more telling than the lists put together by the "white coats".
That will prepare you much better for your assessment - identifying your own traits will provide plenty of leads to investigate, and the explanations you hear will make much more sense to you if you do a little preparation first.
Also, don't worry that you might be mimicking things that you have read on line, or that you have a very good "normal person" camouflage - as long as you are honest, the evaluation process is designed to see those things for what they are.
Best wishes.