Ask Lemmy

I've had a lot of autistic friends; including a childhood friend, someone I dated, and a current housemate. (For clarity, those are three different people.) So I have a pretty positive general impression: these are folks I've gotten along well with, often better than I've gotten along with other people in the same social environment.

One recurring theme I see is people who are often deeply into writing, one way or another. All three of the people I mentioned above fit this pattern: whether with an interest in writing-systems (like runic, hieroglyphics, or shorthand), calligraphy, computer font design, asemic writing, or other variations on the theme. Two out of three are also ambidextrous, and make use of that in writing.

Another thing I see is people who tend to have been run-over by schooling and other institutions, even more than the rest of us "weird kids". One of those three people much more so than the others; they went through institutionalization and a range of wrong diagnoses (schizophrenia, really?!) before getting better medical & life help.

Two of the three people mentioned above went through periods of being really into psychedelics, often with powerfully positive experiences and few or no bad trips. (In one case they got curious about psychedelics because NTs kept asking them if they were tripping when they weren't!)

I've encountered the stereotype that autistic people can't or don't lie. This is not really true, but seems to point at something. I'm not sure whether it's really an inherent tendency towards non-deception, or whether it's from learning that lying doesn't work out very well for them. Autistic people are as capable of self-deception as everyone else.

Also, alexithymia is real; but once someone knows they have it they can certainly learn how to work around it with explicit reasoning about their own physiological responses.

To be clear, I'm not entirely sure I'm in the target audience for this question. On diagnostics such as the Autism Spectrum Quotient test, I get values that are in between clearly NT and clearly AS. However, I don't have the same sort of sensory "stuff" that my diagnosed-autistic friends have had — things that those tests often don't even ask about.