Mastodon gave me autism

The background is probably familiar to a lot of you: precocious reader, identified as a gifted child, loved computers, socially awkward, and in general a very anxious childhood where anything new and unfamiliar was a potential threat. Familiarity meant comfort and safety, and stepping outside the bounds of the known was scary, and meant the potential for failure. Not immediately excelling at something wasn’t allowed, because excelling meant love and approval instead of shame. Sensitivities and social faux pas were dismissed as the “absent-minded professor” quirks of a gifted child. Giftedness seemed to explain everything, good or bad.

I had previously considered the possibility of autism more than a decade ago, and brought it up with my mum, who worked with autistic children herself as a primary school teacher’s aide. She shot down any suggestion that this could be the case, and thinking that she’d know better than me, I didn’t pursue it further. But all the same niggling signs remained: the feeling that everyone else understood social rules I’d never fully picked up, the anxiety, the exhaustion at navigating adult life. But life is hard work for everyone, right?

Then a year or so ago I saw a post on mastodon where an autistic person had shared the results of a study on autistic behaviour. I can no longer find it, but it was something along the lines of using charity donations as the means to compare autistic to neurotypical behaviour. The study found something like: in public, neurotypical people gave a greater amount, keeping a smaller remainder for themselves, than when they were allowed to donate privately, where the opposite was true. In essence, when their behaviour wasn’t perceived by others, they weren’t as worried about appearing good, so they kept more for themselves. In contrast, autistic participants gave about the same amount publicly as privately—they acted according to their principles regardless. The study concluded that this was a negative outcome for the autistic people, that this was less than optimal behaviour, presumably as they missed out on keeping a bigger share.

The person sharing the post was incensed, and I found I was too.

I kept coming back to this post in the weeks to come. It’s hard to feel that same sense of indignation now, but at the time I just couldn’t believe that it was considered unacceptable to have principles that you upheld even when nobody was watching.

I started doing online autism tests and reading about signs that show up in adults. I saw myself in Love on the Spectrum daters. I talked it over endlessly with my partner. Incidentally, she was considering upgrading her own ADHD diagnosis to full AuDHD, and when she took the plunge and began the process of getting an autism diagnosis, I was asked to participate to give corroborating evidence and, strangely enough, found that I too had positive examples for a lot of what was being asked of her.

I owe a lot to that serendipitous timing, as it made it easy to say “same for me, thanks” and go through it all again as the main player, receiving my own positive diagnosis. But what really kicked off the whole process was a post I saw on masto that I couldn’t stop thinking about.

Mastodon gave me autism. And I am so grateful it did.

Looking back, so many signs were there. Extreme sensitivity to sounds and bad sleep. Constantly quoting my favourite media and mimicking accents and voices as a kid. Love of routine, and inability to cope with last-minute changes. A love of precision and correctness that goes well past pedantry. A strong sense of ethics that constantly gets in the way of earning a living.

I’m angry that nobody noticed; not even the child psychologist, who saw me for anxiety, or the adult psychologist, whom I saw for anxiety—those supposed neuro-professionals. I made it to forty-one years of age before someone took the idea seriously. But I’m relieved to have an explanation for the struggle that I’ve felt and for the effort it took to do things that seemed to come effortlessly to others. It doesn’t fix things, but it at least gives it a name.