losing my autism?

Post Reply New Topic

Hi all,
This may seem kind of stupid, but I think I may be losing my autism.
I have always been very methodical and detail-oriented, interpreting the world through the little things I see. I have always been socially awkward, and still am a little today. I used to be able to find something I was interested in and work on it for hours at a time. I would always be able to impress people with my ability to do math problems in my head and with my almost perfect spelling even from a young age.
More recently I became interested in typography. In fact, just yesterday my friend from school said I was "obsessed with fonts." This is one of the things I can still usually do for a long period of time.
But more recently it seems like my mind has been becoming a little more NT: My thoughts have become more scattered and less focused, I don't see the world quite as much through small details (although I still notice them quite a bit), and I have been getting bored with what I enjoy doing much more easily. But what finally caused me to realize what was happening was yesterday when I got a C on my math test: A subject I usually get As in. The mistakes I made on the test were mostly not because I didn't know the material; they were mostly because of things like syntax errors (putting a + where a - should be, switching secant & cosecant, &c).
I have been working on a term paper for English class about how someone can use computers to make them smarter. One of the articles I found says that spending a lot of time on the internet can rewire your brain over time to make people think in a "scattered and superficial" way. I do spend a lot of time on the internet, not on sites like Facebook or WP, but I do play a lot of online games and look up random articles/pictures/videos online, and I admit even some things that I really shouldn't have. Sites like this are VERY disorganized. Is all my web surfing taking my autism away?
Also, my parents have been taking me to an alternative medicine specialist in Columbus who believes autism is caused by exposure to heavy metals and is treating me for them. I'm also on Zoloft but I plan to stop taking it as soon as I can.
Has anyone else had a problem like this? I don't want to lose my autism, it's the way I am and I can't imagine life any other way.

Thanks,
truth14ful

...it's just that you're being affected by the nature of digital environments. It happened to me a few years ago. You're still going to have the symptoms you had in terms of sensory/social issues, but remember that hyperfocus can be countered by ADD and ADHD-style inability to focus sometimes. Both the ability to focus too much and the inability to focus are spectrum traits. (Heck, hyperfocus is even an ADD trait--it's what leads parents to get frustrated because "he can focus just fine when he's interested in the topic".) The inability to focus actually has nothing to do with whether you're interested in the topic sometimes--it can have to do with stress levels, other sensory distractions (this is where animations/banner ads/automatically updating information affects it), and even with harder to measure factors like medicine interactions and hormonal changes. It's fairly unpredictable, but I can tell you that it is "normal" sometimes. I spend my life swinging back and forth between long stretches of hyperfocus and the complete inability to hold a train of thought, with frequent stops at "ultrafocus in bursts" where I will concentrate totally on a series of short tasks for just a minute or two at a time.

When it comes to alternative medicine, I'm skeptical about the results. There's still enough that's unknown about ASDs that I don't want to scoff, but if a link between two factors has not been clinically proven, then I'm cautious. Have you been tested for heavy metals in your blood or organs? It's possible to get levels on many of them with a blood test. If you haven't been tested, then I would seriously question how your practitioner knows you have heavy metal poisoning. Chelation therapy is dangerous if you are not actually suffering from heavy metal poisoning.

You can't lose your autism. But autistic people, like NTs can learn to cope and adapt to changing environments in their lives. Your symptoms will just present differently and/or they will become so subtle that you cover them up. Also, lternative medical treatments such as chelation are extremely dangerous. If you look it up on mayoclinic it is typically used for lead poisoning.