I don't know why people do conversations and often spend the first part of the conversation with someone asking why we're having the conversation. This feels normal to me but seems to be abnormal for others? I feel much more at ease typing than talking.
Conversation
I have a *weird* relationship to facial expressions, like I've only recently started feeling like I wasn't moving my facial muscles consciously. I feel like I'm supposed to do things with my face in order to not freak people out, so I've learned to do them correctly
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And of course, the obvious one, I seem to have a bad sense of/don't integrate deeply that things I say make other people mad at me. I kind of get, but am still regularly confused by why I'm not supposed to say certain things. I seem to be kind of culturally immune in that way.
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I tried to get an official diagnosis once and it was really terrible; I finally got on the phone with a doctor and he was like "why do you want to know if you have autism" and "you are a sex worker so I don't think you're autistic." He didn't ask me *any* diagnostic questions.
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I tried to be like "but here's my reasons for thinking I might-" and he was like "nah, you sound normal on the phone to me, like we're having a normal conversation. You had a bad childhood and then became a sex worker so any symptoms you have are just cause of that"
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All of this in general is confusing to me; am I just overfocusing on minor details? Am I blowing things out of proportion? How severe does a difference have to be before it "counts"? How much of autism is just a trendy label for people, or am I being too self-doubting?
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My point is that reaching a definitive conclusion about my autism feels pretty hard to me here. When I'm around rationalists I feel really not-autistic, normal, fluid, skilled, but then I go into the outside world and I'm like 'oh god I am extremely different holy shit'.
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Honestly, my suspicion is that I have something "autism-adjacent" - something weird quirk of human brain that might be a cluster of things that we figure out how to describe one day in the future. There's probably tooons of these!
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But I find myself using the phrase 'probably autistic' in order to quickly convey to someone that they can predict my behavior better if they model me as someone who has autism.
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some ppl have suggested HSP and i don't know much about it but I don't think so? The list of HSP stuff feels like it applies way less than the list of autism stuff