is it really aspergers/ autism

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hello i am new and struggling to figure out where i fit in on the autism spectrum if at all or if i have a different diagnosis. i have so many of the typical autism symptoms BUT i do NOT have the problem of being unable to read social cues. so is this still autism??????????

When you say

, do you mean:
I've never had any difficulty in social contexts or
I run a bit behind the action, but I know what's going down?

id say i am really good at reading people's body languages and facial expresions and do well with understanding boundaries. however i have a very hard time with things like making new friends or looking people in the eye and i hate small talk and think it is tiresome. i find social interaction stressful.

Welcome to WP!

I'm a bit like that myself, I usually don't have a problem with facial expressions or social cues but what I do have a problem with is reading everything you have to read- what the person is saying to you, his body language, his facial expressions, his tone of voice, and putting it all together and processing it in time to understand what they're saying. It's usually so overwhelming for me to put together everything and pay attention to everything that a lot of times I miss some important things.

I used to think that there's no way I have AS because I can understand many things, but a lot of what I know I learned as I got older. When I was younger I had absolutely no clue what was going on around me in terms of social cues. It's very possible that you just have anxiety around social situations but AS usually isn't so black and white, everyone expresses symptoms differently. I would look into how you were when you were younger.

Welcome!

thanks everybody!

Hello and welcome to the WP forums, britto.

Hi

Welcome to WP.

Are you sure you can do those things well? I have always assumed that I was good at reading facial expressions but I did an test recently (I think it was linked from Simon Baron-Cohen's site) where you have to choose the emotion/mood of someone by just the top section of the face. There are 30 questions, an NT would be expected to get about 25 correct, someone with an ASD around 20 but I only scored 15! This came as a bit of a shock

No idea if this is an accurate test of course but it's something to think about.