Grrrr.
My mother was fond of “Earth to Noah.”
Ha ha ha, Mom. I inherited this from you.
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I wrote a Quora answer summarising a lot of what I’ve learned over the last while. It was as much a way to process everything and put it into words as a way to inform others, but those who have known me at different times of my life say that it’s accurate to their impression of me. It’s been good to go over this with my parents, who have always been very supportive. As I mentioned to my mum, people remember psychological abuse, selfishness, unreliability, manipulation and animosity from their parents toward them and each other, and that’s what really messes them up. Honest mistakes from loving parents are not on the same level at all.
ETA: Rookie error – now my mum’s following me.
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I loved this! Your description of your early life sounds like how I’d describe mine. I spent a lot of time just trying to sort out the overwhelming sensory input, and weird feelings that I still don’t understand. I’m still like that to a degree, but at that age, it absolutely dominated everything.
As for school, I have no study habits to speak of. I do well when I’m interested, don’t do well when I’m not. The instant it turns from creative exploration into drudgery is when I lose focus and stop caring and start underperforming. The bad news is, our education system seems to favor drudgery, because it promotes diligent focused study. Society tends to put too high a priority on boring drudgery and bullshit “character building” and protestant work ethic and all that. I get the point, because even the fun stuff in life occasionally stops being fun and starts being work, but I think we overdo it, and overdo it way too early in life.
My parents tried to give me a good life, and they were successful. However, they were old-school Silent Generation first-generation Americans, and when all you’ve got is a hammer everything looks like a nail. Plus, Lovaas is the devil. I’ve got my issues I’m working through, but I don’t blame my parents at all.
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Oh, yes. Oh yes indeed.
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When I first found out that I was autistic, I went through a period where I wondered how things could have been different if I had been diagnosed earlier. Then I read about the different methods at the time, and started to think that I’d dodged a bullet. My parents were quite hands off and didn’t think much of homework or busy work, but they did care about us spending time outside, reading and developing our interests. They were also relatively early computer users in Ireland – I think we got our first Amstrad PCI about 1987 (which probably doesn’t seem as odd in the US).
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I always think it’s interesting to compare cultural acclimatisation to autistic behaviours. People assume that many cultural elements beneath the surface are rational and universal, yet if you travel to a different culture (or even meet people of the opposite gender) the differences can be quite profound. When I was in school, we’d sometimes have exchange students who would visit for a while. They would often come off as socially awkward, inappropriate or naive compared to other students, and might be quite reserved. But if you met them in their own culture, you could see that they were actually neither – they just had too much arbitrary and vague information to process, and this takes up a lot of mental effort.
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This.
Theory Of Mind isn’t real. It’s just that people relate better to those whose experiences and thought processes are close to their own.
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I’ve seen it mentioned that autistics who’ve moved abroad to work get accepted much better, because social awkwardness (and everything else you described) gets taken as ‘immigrant who doesn’t know all the rules’ - it’s the same effect.
‘Wrong planet’, indeed.
It’s been a source of some bemusement to me [to say the least] that while I’m supposed to be the one with the impaired theory of mind (and so who’s internal models of others are apparently simpler and less complete than others’), that I take people and differences more at face value, in part because I’m aware that people come in a wider range of neurologies, and am used to lots and lots of others not thinking in the same ways I do.
When you go past what they’re used to, lots of people’s theory of mind goes right to pot. And not usually to our benefit, either. 
The sadly defunkt ISNT website made that same point far more strongly (of course), so this isn’t new thought just to us, either.
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Yup. We went on a joint family trip to another country with the German family who took my daughter as an exchange student. The mom in that family told me she was shocked and amazed at how different my daughter was, when around her own family in an English-language environment.
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I had the opportunity to take over ISNT after it ran out of money, but I didn’t have the spoons. I should have done it anyway. It’s a voice we needed but no longer have.
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Really? Goodness.
That’s a shame in the abstract, but overextending yourself wouldn’t have helped anyone in the long term, not least yourself.
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I thought it was very thoughtful that a psychiatrist I spoke with last month asked me to switch to English for a while and show her some of my writing, to see how much of a difference this made. People are often more open and at ease in their own language, so she thought that it would be good to eliminate any disadvantage if possible.
@Archon, @LearnedCoward What is/was ISNT?
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Institute for the Study of the Neurologically Typical.
A satire site. Basically would would happen if autistics treated neurotypicals like they had a disease, which is exactly how they treat us.
It’s not even mirrored anywhere anymore. Maybe you can Google Image search for Curebie Bingo cards
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It looks like that went down this year. It’s still accessible on the Wayback Machine though:
https://web.archive.org/web/20160424071026/http://isnt.autistics.org/
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Institute for the Study of the Neurologically Typical
(http://isnt.autistics.org - now RIP)
Central statement is about the pathologisation of differences, which are best made by a tone-perfect DSM entry for Neurotypical disorder, making the point that perfectly reasonable differences can be made to sound pathological by choosing the starting position for ‘normal’.
(It’s also where they refer to (lack of) ‘theory-of-theory-of-mind’ (not a typo) to label what I/we’ve discussed above.)
Some of the ancillary parts of the site were a little too barbed for me, but I don’t doubt for a second that that’s borne of lived experience, and useful for people who’ve had those particular experiences too. And well, lots and lots of it helped me find a balance and much dry laughter at a point when I needed it. (With some ‘whooping’ involved too, I must admit).
If someone buys into the social model of disability even a little, they’d find lots of dry humour and satire therein.
[ETA: And of course @LearnedCoward answered in the time it took for me to compose this. Leaving it up as my perspective, however. 
]
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Oh. And now that I’m actually posting, there was previous discussion about the term ‘Autist’ upthread - I don’t think I’d seen the idea that it possibly/probably came over as a loanword from Dutch or German, where ‘Autist’ is the noun, and ‘autistisch’ apparently the adjective.
I’d dug into that myself previously after I found I was using the term after I’d picked it up osmotically.
( http://wrongplanet.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=245825#p5767359 was my initial pointer for this idea.)
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Your post was very well put though
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I can at least confirm that that much is true. The Online Etymology Dictionary claims that the word came from the German Autismus, coined 1912 by Swiss psychiatrist Paul Bleuler (1857-1939) from Greek autos- “self” + -ismos suffix of action or of state. The notion is of “morbid self-absorption.” It initially referred to a condition in which fantasy dominates over reality, as if that’s a bad thing.
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Thank’ee.
I liked yours for saying in ten words what it took me 100. This is often the case for me, though 
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It could still be accidental convergence in action, but historically, stealing loanwords is what the English language does best!
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