to "feel" autism

Post Reply New Topic

I felt my entire live pretty much the same way since I'm little, but other people they just "feel" different to me, but most autistic people I met I have this same feeling I also have.
I can't even describe it and most of the time it happens very fast even.

Who also has this?
Why is this like this?

Ever since I was old/cognitively developed enough to realize I had a disability, I felt different and disconnected from others. I also had more difficulty interacting with others, because my grade-level peers (I entered kindergarten a year late) no longer tolerated parallel play.

Perhaps it's due to an understanding of how your experience does not fit with that of others around you or how you can't seem to socially blend in with the crowd? I do know what you mean though. It's sort of almost a form of social anxiety stemming from a lack of innate understanding of what is going on.

Actually, I wonder how many NTs have that same feeling--that they're different from everybody else in some fundamental way. Disconnected. After all, nobody actually has the ability to share their mind with anybody else. We all have to cross the gaps with words, images, touch... all that gets from me to you, whether we're autistic or not, is symbols. You don't feel someone else's anger--you see them tense up and yell and stomp when they walk. If you're NT, maybe that sparks your own anger--but it's not their anger, and can never be, because human beings are all isolated to their own brains. We're stranded on our own desert islands, bobbing messages in bottles to each other--it's just that for some of us, the currents are more favorable and the messages travel more easily. But we're all isolated.

The only time I don't feel "wrong" is when I'm alone. Being lonely isn't any fun either, but at least it feels like a natural part of the human experience, even if it is one that is undesirable.

If I'm in my yard and I know that a neighbor is watching me my body starts to tense up and my movements become kind of jerky and twitchy, it's very strange.

Well I find with the people in my ASD support group even though I still make social mistakes there's more of a connection in the sense that we have more similar daily struggles and thoughts and concerns and more similar childhood experiences. With my NT friend a lot of the time when she mentions something like loving to go on family vacations or to amusement parks I can't relate to this at all because I would throw tantrums and want to go home when taken to amusement parks, festivals, parades, ect because they were too noisy or crowded. Also her daily concerns are things like how her boyfriend's friends' girlfriends think of her when they all hang out whereas mine are more like I forgot to eat and went to bed too late because I was too absorbed in reading. Also not knowing about basic pop culture stuff like celebrity gossip makes you look like you were born yesterday with NT's sometimes. In these ways I relate to other autistics and feel alien with NT's ..............but with either ASD or NT groups I still feel socially awkward and "off"...............

I often feel like the Man Without A Country; I'm not quite cut out for the NT world and yet I practically have trained professionals asking me "well why do you think you're autistic?" It seems in recent times, most of my new interests don't have me memorizing every minutia and I don't read books as voraciously as I once did. I stopped following a particular horror author after I noticed he began 'repeating' himself in a series of supposedly unrelated novels. At the same time, I rather used to enjoy amusement parks and family vacations as a kid but for a good part of adulthood I've tried to actively avoid most of that. Some days I just feel like I don't know which side of the fence to jump down from