I've taken a bunch of self-reporting Autism Spectrum tests and I always come out borderline (like, just under whatever the threshhold is, or just under half of a list of items) but I'm really starting to wonder... (detailed thoughts under the cut).
I guess really the most practical thing to do about it is continue to lurk in autistic spaces and maybe see if their tips for alleviating masking stress/communicating with others are useful to me? Idk I just really felt like a space alien who does not know how to human at work this week, and it's starting to get to me.
One of my autistic friends has said that the way I think makes sense to her, which means I must be non-neurotypical, because she doesn't get how neurotypicals think. It's possible that I'm just open-minded and empathetic towards others, and that reads as non-neurotypical to autistic people because they're used to hostility or confusion from neurotypical people. My therapist told me a story about a straight female friend of hers who kept getting hit on by wlw, and when she finally asked why she was pinging everyone's gaydar, someone explained that this straight person wasn't homophobic /at all/ and that was so rare in straight people, in their experience, that they'd assumed it meant the person was queer. So like. It could just be that. But this year I feel like I've accumulated a lot of little hints that maybe it's more than just the bare minimum of drinking my respect autists juice?
There seem to be a lot of triggers in common between 'what makes me anxious' and 'what triggers autistic burnout', as well as symptom overlap. I find descriptions of what happens when you stop masking (in terms of emotional/social consequences and anxiety about that), or what masking looks/feels like, uncomfortably relatable. I once got really excited talking about something I love with a stranger at a party, and they were really supportive and nice about it and in fact were like 'wow you're so genuine and interesting, I never have conversations like this with strangers' and on the way home and at home afterwards I felt so anxious about having someone see me unfiltered- and recognize that I was unfiltered, and point out that I wasn't following a normal social script- that I had anxiety nausea afterwards thinking about it. The experience was completely positive in the moment, and the feedback about it was totally positive, but being *seen* and *called out* like that really shook me afterwards in a way that I found very difficult to understand. But it sounds *a lot* like what happens if you're afraid someone's caught you being your real self when you are normally always masking.
Another thing that seems masking-related is that I'm really good at cover letters (and explaining how to write them to both my neurotypical and autistic friends) because I have developed a script for them and know what they are supposed to accomplish and why. I've had people tell me after an interview that I wasn't actually qualified for the job, but they brought me in because they liked my cover letter so much. Which like... what. Who does that? And friends who adopt my cover letter formula have gotten more interviews afterwards. I'm also suspiciously good at writing to a set structure and aping a set style, once I can see an example to imitate, which tells me that I'm pretty analytical and have a vested interest in mimicry.
I've had employers tell me that I picked up on the house writing style and content rules much quicker than other people in my role, and my creative hobbies tend to involve parodies and riffing on other people's ideas (filk music) or surrealist or part-to-whole juxtaposition (collage, mosaic). In both cases I'm kind of jamming existing structures and ideas together to make something new, that has direct and inescapable relations to what it came from, but is also internally coherent. But the fact that I need referents for both content and structure, and that exploring part-to-whole relationships is incredibly key to my creative experiences, suggests that on some level my creative practice is 'arranging things I like in an idiosyncratic, complex, and pleasing way', which also seems somewhat characteristically autistic?
I have also always felt like my friends 'rub off on me' and that I absorb their beliefs/mannerisms/skills etc. I feel like I can't control the fact that I'm porous at all, but I can control what I absorb insofar as I pick who I hang out with pretty carefully and with an eye to self-improvement. That could have other explanations than 'I'm conciously or unconciously imitating people who seem to have their shit together', but it seems like part of a pattern when I put it with all of the other things.
Also in my professional life the stuff I get told I need to work on and the stuff I'm good at seem to be autistic-coded things. I tend towards systems thinking (good and bad, I can grasp complex systems, but can't always turn it off and I feel like people call out that I always want to put stuff in context.) I need a lot of preliminary information about a task before I can do it, but I'm also pretty reluctant to get that preliminary information if it involves actually talking to someone else, especially someone I don't interact with regularly. I tend to assume I have the information I need about their motivation up front, and it's just the technical details that I might need to follow up on, when often it turns out I was misled about what they wanted. That's either because I wasn't aware of something about their context (and didn't think to ask), or because they used a technical term that is very meaningful and specific for me, so I assumed they knew what they were talking about, but it actually means something totally different to them and maybe wasn't the correct term for what they really wanted.
I also want to stick to past precedent/established routine/previously used patterns and formulas in a professional context so strongly that I've been chided for my lack of flexibility when new situations come up a couple of times at my current job, although in my super-chaotic toxic former workplace it was a huge asset, because it was my job to develop the standards and make people stick to them and not use 3 different formulas 3 different times to calculate the same metric. I have tendency to infodump on technical stuff that sometimes gets me in trouble, because I feel like I'm providing all of the info needed to explain and contextualize my decision, but it sometimes comes off as overexplaining, which can make you sound less confident/authoritative, or it can just confuse people because all they really need is your decision. It's especially bad in person or if I'm writing a response fast and don't have a chance to edit for that specific audience (or I misjudge what my audience is).
One thing that gives me pause on any kind of self-diagnosis (beside the fact that it seems you have to be traumatized to really fit any of the formal diagnostic criteria fully, which is horrifying and sad) is that I've never had much of the sensory stuff as far as I can tell, and most autistic people I know do tend to have unequivocal sensory neurodivergence. I do really like textures, tend to talk with my hands, and am usually unconsciously jiggling my legs when left to my own devices, and my anxiety results in nausea, but that's about it for sensory stuff.
