Do you stay up late at night wondering whether or not you’re autistic? Maybe an official autism assessment isn’t in your future, so you’re left with self diagnosis, but the self diagnosis process never ends and you always have imposter syndrome.
I have since been diagnosed by a psychologist, but let me tell you how I came to peace with my self diagnosis journey.
There are several excerpts I’m going to read to you from the following two books:
Almost all of the quotes are from Unmasking Autism by Devon Price, PhD
And then one of the quotes is from But You Don’t Look Autistic at All by Bianca Toeps
All of these quotes explain the central unifying brain chemistry of autism.
All Autistic people are going to have really different interests and personalities and might seem more or less stereotypically autistic, but these quotes explain what is common between all autistic people.
This first one is about the brain structures of autism:
“Autistic brains have unique connection patterns that deviate from what is normally observed in neurotypical people. When infants are born, their brains are typically hyperconnected; much of human development is a process of slowly pruning unhelpful connections and becoming more efficient at responding to one’s environment, based on life experience and learning. In Autistic brains, however, researchers have found that some regions remain hyperconnected throughout the life span, whereas other regions may be underconnected (relatively speaking).
So this is basically saying that there are millions of little daily thought processes that allistic people have on autopilot for the sake of efficiency, that our brains think through as if it’s the first time we’ve encountered the problem every time it comes up.
For example, an allistic person might have an internal algorithm for how to decide if a piece of clothing needs to go in the dirty laundry or can be put back in the drawer. This algorithm is so intuitive and efficient that they don’t even realize they use it. It’s a routine they go through on autopilot.
While a given autistic person, on the other hand, will have to step through a complicated decision making process every time they need to decide where a piece of laundry goes, as if they are a child learning how to put away clothes for the first time and being told all the factors that can go into whether something can be worn again or needs to go into the wash. Then they need to make a new decision based on all those factors and how this piece of clothing measures up to those factors. And they do this for every single piece of clothing every day.
Another classic example is deciding whether or not to throw away a nice box that an item came in, or keep it just in case it could be useful.
Back to the quote:
It is difficult to sum up these connectivity patterns because, as neurobiologists at the Weizmann Institute of Science have found, every Autistic brain exhibits a different connectivity pattern. Our brain wiring appears to actually be more diverse than the wiring of neurotypical brains, which researchers believe have a consistent pruning pattern.
So this means that there is a body of intuitive brain processes which allistic people all share in common with each other, including how to behave socially. While autistic people miss out on some portion of those intuitive brain processes.
And it says that autistic people differ more from each other than allistic people differ from each other. This explains why one autistic person will be in hell at a theme park, while another autistic person will seek out theme parks like they are the air they need to breathe.
This also means that for every specific example I or the book authors give, there will be autistic people who experience the opposite.
For example, in the laundry example I gave above, there will be autistic people for whom laundry is a hyper-intuitive process and who may be even better at sorting laundry than allistic people. However, there will still be other things that come intuitively to allistic people that don’t come intuitively to them.
Moving on to the next quote. This is further information about the brain structures inside all autistic brains
“Autistic people have differences in the development of their anterior cingulate cortex, a part of the brain that helps regulate attention, decision making, impulse control, and emotional processing. Throughout our brains, Autistic people have delayed and reduced development of Von Economo neurons (or VENs), brain cells that help with rapid, intuitive processing of complex situations.
Price
I definitely don’t have rapid and intuitive processing of complex situations. I have deliberate, stepwise processing of complex situations. In college, I couldn’t follow verbal lectures. I have to be able to read something at my own pace and then diagram it out in order to understand it. I see this pop up in my daily life when people give me instructions for what they think is a simple process and I have a million questions about the details.
Similarly, Autistic brains differ from allistic brains in how excitable our neurons are. To put it in very simple terms, our neurons activate easily, and don’t discriminate as readily between a ‘nuisance variable’ that our brains might wish to ignore (for example, a dripping faucet in another room) and a crucial piece of data that deserves a ton of our attention (for example, a loved one beginning to quietly cry in the other room). This means we can both be easily distracted by a small stimulus and miss a large meaningful one.
Keeping up a house with kids has been incredibly difficult because if something catches my attention, like a shelf that is messy in the front room and I’ve realized a better place where I can move it to, it consumes all of my mental energy and drives me crazy every time I see it. Meanwhile, the last meal sitting on the dining room table needs to be cleared and I can hardly notice.
Wellesley Kopsa 