When I first met a therapist she asked me if I had ever been diagnosed with autism. I hadn’t and was a bit surprised that she would ask. I wasn’t offended but my ideas of autism didn’t seem to match my own experience (to be fair, they didn’t match autistic people’s experience either). It was actually an excellent question and opened up the door to start understanding neurodivergence.

I don’t have autism but I do have considerable overlap in some of my behaviors. If it helps somebody understand me then autism is maybe a more familiar word, but it is the wrong word for me.

It took me a while to discover how I was different – for half a year I said I was “autism adjacent” as that was the best description I had. I debug software for a living and this was like a very complex system that had mysterious behaviors. I finally discovered the mechanism behind my behavior: no Social Salience and this explained why my experience was different than autism but still had overlap.

Autism, or autism spectrum disorder as it is called in the DSM-5 and have to satisfy a specific criteria (A and B below) and have to have an impairing effect on everyday life to be considered autism (at least by the DSM-5). After I looked this up I found that I had huge overlap on A and none on B.

A: Social Communication and Interaction

Overlap: high, phenotypic similarity

I hit pretty hard here.

• social-emotional reciprocity
  • flat affect (yes)
  • emotional reciprocity - mirroring (yes)
  • abnormal social approach (sometimes)
  • failure to initiate or respond to social interactions (sometimes)
• nonverbal communication
  • lack of eye contact, gesture, and prosody (some, especially the last)
• developing/maintaining relationships
  • adjusting behavior to suit social context (yes)
  • absence of interest in peers (yes, but really social situations)
  • but generally I do maintain relationships fairly well (I think)

B: Restricted, Repetitive Patterns of Behavior

Overlap: none

And had none of these.

• repetitive motor movements (stimming)
  • repetitive motor movements, e.g. moving hands
  • use of objects objects
• sameness/routines
  • adherence to routines, sameness
• restricted, fixated interests
  • so called “special interests” – used as a pressure relief
• sensory input sensitivity
  • auditory, visual, smell, etc.