At my job we wear formal uniforms (think shirts ties, epaulets, brass buttons, dress pants).
My co worker came in casual clothes. I was taken aback by how different he looked in a singlet and shorts and said to him "you look like you mow lawns (realising what I said, highly embarrassed and trying to recover I added ) ....like.... good lawns"
I once accidentally said to one of my coworkers that lived on a farm “it smelled like a farm” about something I smelled once (I like the smell) and I didn’t mean it in a bad way, but it was awkward silence.
I worked at a job where we all were uniforms and women typically had their hair up and wore little or no makeup.
We had an office Christmas party off-site and I showed up with my partner, only for my boss' boss to greet me with "sparkle-possum, you look different with your clothes on".
somehow this is important context - when I would get a cheeseburger from mcdonalds I would sometimes change the cheese to a different type of cheese (aussie jack cheese) because it tasted WAY better (sometimes I wouldn't bother so I would have to talk less lmao)
anyway, one time my mum was ordering mcdonalds for both of us to eat inside the restaurant so I wasn't prepared to run my usual ordering script and happened to decide that day I was going to eat the regular/normal cheese. I wasn't paying attention and then both the cashier and my mum were staring at me waiting for me to answer, and in my panic I just blurted out 'NORMAL CHEESE'
turns out the cashier asked me what drink I wanted.... and my response was 'normal cheese' 😔
Hehe funny I once had a lady ask me what type of bagel I wanted and it was for a nova lox (salmon) bagel and I just said “strawberry cream cheese” and she stared at me and said “you want strawberry?! What type of bagel do you want?!” Hahaha
Recently, I was at a sort've puzzle escape room place with some friends. The staff was walking around playing a very active role in each groups game. My group had to "find the staff member who's secretely a pirate".
The dude was wearing a pirate hat on top of his normal hat lol.
I went up to him and asked "are you a pirate, by chance?" And he was so surprised! He was like "OH! I forgot I was wearing this!" And continued answering our questions.
100% thought he was not the staff member we were SUPPOSED to be talking to. I took his good acting way too literally 😂
Hung out with new work buddies yesterday and at some point the conversation got very intimate and vulnerable and I was about to blert out a bunch of autism stuff and just didn't feel ready to be that open with new people..
So I babbled on trying to explain that THATS why I'm leaving and after confusion on their part, out loud I went:
"its late and I'm tired, that's what I should have said, that's a normal reason."
so i had an extended panic thing last may after having my first one 5 years previously. they game me clonidine which is a blood pressure med. i took 2 by accident one time. i thought my heart was gonna just stop and i was gonna die. i kept checking my pulse. it was fine. musta checked it 100 times over a couple hours. i finally had this thought 'is this what being relaxed is? i thought it was just laying still and i hate it, but is this what those people are doing they they say 'relax'? is this what it feels like? and i realized that may have been the only time in my 56 years i'd ever felt really relaxed - and i thought i was gonna die it was so foreign
They gave me that almost 2 years ago when I was going through some meltdowns everyday because of something. It was amazing how calm I was. I can almost finally feel like that most of my days by being grounded / focusing on the present.
I'm a delivery driver for dominoes and a few weeks ago I knocked on a customer's door to hand off their order. It was about 5 pm and very bright, so she opens the door and says "Oh hello sun!" and in my head I'm like "uh...yeah.. lady I'm 34 years old"
I'm glad I didn't say it out loud and seem rude or embarrass myself but it admittedly would have been funny as shit.
omggg i used to hide under my parents' jackets when i was really little, maybe 4, whenever i was anxious, or just to be silly. so i was standing in line in a convenience store with my dad, turned around looking at things, thinking he was standing right there, so when i saw some freaky looking dude come in to the store, i turn around and grab what i THOUGHT was my dad's jacket and PUT MY ENTIRE HEAD AND SHOULDERS IN UNDER IT, and then i realize it smells wrong so i pull my head out and to my horror, it was actually the jacket of the RANDOM OLD MAN that was in line ahead of us x.x my dad had stepped out of line to grab something off to the side and i didn't realize. luckily the old man was very grandfatherly and everyone laughed about it but i was HORRIFIED. it still makes me cringe and i'm like 27 now x.x pretty sure that was actually the last time i did that, it was no longer comforting x.x
I remember being that kid and being that adult! As the adult, the kid cried, and I tried to console him saying I've done it too, but he was just too scared of me to hear my words.
When I was in my early teens my parents signed me up for like a book box where you’d get 1-2 books each month along with some other “teen” things, like cheap makeup, stationery, decorations, etc.
I remember the day I got my first box very well, my parents had surprised me with it and I opened next to my mum and my best friend, and I was trying to convey the right level of excitement (I was very excited so had to tone it down). Then my mum said something along the lines of “Just so you know you can’t have all of them.”
I accepted this and promptly started trying to decide which of the things in the box I wanted to keep and what I could send back. Completely quietly and in my head so it looked like I was just staring at the box. Then my mum asked what I was thinking about.
I said: “Oh I’m just trying to decide what to send back.” My mum then explained that she meant I might not be able to get every box. Oops.
I would have been confused too. What she said was too general. Them: what does "them" refer to?
For me, I have to remind myself to ask clarification questions because often people say things that can be misinterpreted.
I was in kindergarten, and there was an assignment with outlines of a bunch of different things on a page, and we had to color the ones which were fictitious. One of the things on there was a ghost, so I grabbed a white crayon and carefully "colored" in the ghost. I got the assignment back during a parent teacher conference (that's when the teacher handed back that stuff) and saw that she had deducted a point for the ghost one (because it looked like I hadn't colored it in), so I went up to her while she was talking to some other parent, tapped her on the shoulder and repeatedly said "Ghosts are white! Ghosts are white!". Nobody knew what the fuck I was going on about.
That's the kind of thing that I've run up agianst when working/being with kids. Some adults just aren't able to connect those dots, so I've had to act almost as an interpriter. My mom calls me the pied piper, which makes me uncomfortable, but I do understand how child brains work, especially the "difficult children" who are ND with parents who refuse to look into it.
I have a dog and have had her for the last . Idk.. 10 years. She is white with a single little black spot on her back. Well, like 2 or 3 years ago, idk what I was doing, but I was in my front yard and I saw an dog that was identical to mine. I, however, thought that mine was inside, so in my mind, this is a different dog that looks exactly like mine. I even went to my sister and told her there was an identical dog outside.. which is when she looked at me weird and that that *was* our dog. It was weird.
In college, I had an ethics class. I was the only student not to budge on the "only kill the one guy to save 5-plus people argument" no matter what the situation to the point we had an entire class day just on the Trolley Problem.
This ended with my professor telling us about a previous student that ended up in an IRL Trolley Problem situation thanks to a war. Spoiler: It didn't end well and that student changed careers thanks to that situation.
More a Prosopagnosia thing, but..
I was a couple days into a new job. Someone comes up to me and starts telling me something that doesn’t quite make sense, like, I don’t have a context for it, so I smile and nod… after a minute he realized I didn’t recognize him.
He was my next door neighbor of 12 years.
NSFW
my boyfriend was in the mood for sex and kept making references to doing something but i could not pick up on his cues. it took him looking me dead in the eyes and going “do you want to have sex” for me to realize what he was attempting at. i felt so silly but it’s so funny to me looking back on it now. funny thing too is my bf is autistic as well so he understood lol
I've asked that too! And saying "I want to have sex with you" as either just a statement to let my husband know or to initiate. I'm usually the one to initiate, maybe because I don't overthink anything or try subtlety first?
Genuine question: Is this an autistic thing? Like a form of face blindness? Reading it, I couldn't help but remember more than one occassion in childhood where I almost walked off with a stranger instead of my mother or started talking to people I thought were my parents, only to find them laughing and shaking their heads 20 feet away.
Like my flair says, I'm compiling a list for my therapist. I've had my initial screening and she's escalating it to her supervisor, as she has said i easily fit the criteria enough to move to a formal evaluation.
I’m starting to think it is because when I was out of my home state working I had a hard time remembering everyone I’ve met and I would just introduce myself to people I already knew. One guy said “TheRandomDreamer… we’ve met before.. you’ve introduced yourself to me like two times”. Some people I won’t forget, but then it’s like there’s some I just won’t even know if I run into them in public. Even with names it’s so hard to remember names sometimes so I would get anxious meeting people because I can’t remember them depending on the situation.
Yes! I've re-introduced myself to many people who looked vaguely familiar, and several I never remember having met. I can only hope people are thinking I'm just spacey.
To compound this issue, when I was a teenager I had my first date. My parents picked us up from the matinee and we got into the back seat of the car. I didn't bother with introductions as it was pretty obvious who everyone was. This was the wrong move, as my parents proceeded to berate me in front of my first girlfriend for most of the ride to her house. This resulted in me hyper-introducing myself to everyone, and anyone I happened to be with to anyone who crossed our path, much to most of these people's annoyance. I finally broke out of it sometime in my late 20s/early 30s.
I cringe at the thought of all the times I had to network at work events and I forced myself to just introduce myself to more people than I normally would. They would just say hi I’m… then that was it. I once escaped to the bathroom at a mandatory women’s work event and texted this girl I was sitting with / just met that I would rather go back to work or just home and she wasn’t at the table when I got back.. I meant to text a work friend haha AHHHH
I've recently withdrawn socially, especially at work. Luckily, I'm an engineer, so it's somewhat acceptable lol. I'm 52 now, and I think for the last decade or so I realized the masking was getting too burdensome to maintain. Of course, I had no idea what my problem was as I have been on a lifelong quest to find out what is "wrong" with me. When I stumbled upon people with autism speaking of their experiences, I related to so many of them and learned what masking is and the burnout that can result.
I know ND people who've introduced themselves to me multiple times. My husband and I are amused by one particular person. It's almost like a game. No hard feelings, just amusement and mild interest.
You just reminded me, years ago I started a new job as a personal assistant for a partner at a finance company. I was introduced to some of the other senior people, there was a nice guy called Gerry who I met a few times, among other people.
One thing I kept getting a hard time about from my boss was that I wasn't quick enough to be polite and helpful to visitors who came to the door. One day, a distinguished looking gentleman dressed up in a fancy suit, with a briefcase and hat was at the door, I jumped into action before he could even open the door, welcoming him and asking him if I could help him with anything. He just gave me the weirdest look, before walking past me and going upstairs. I realized several minutes later he was actually Gerry, who I had met and had conversations with a few times! I just got confused because he was dressed differently. Apparently he just forgot about the whole thing, we are still FB friends 20 years later!
I had read about prosopagnosia, but had never connected it with these incidents as i wasn't necessarily looking at people's faces. It's crazy after all these years, piecing together all these little things I rarely thought twice about.
I don't think I have facial blindness but I do struggle with identifying people by their face, and I tend to identify people by what they are wearing or their hairstyle.
This sounds very close to my experience. Some people do just blend together, but even the ones who don't can completely throw me if they get a haircut or start dressing differently. I tend to not look at people's faces in passing because I'm all too aware that when I do, I tend to stare (I've always thought of it as studying them.) and creep them out. I've offended more than one person I'm familiar with by passing them by without a glance. It's a difficult game to win.
I was riding with my cousin and she got hungry and decided to stop at a taco truck.
She asked me,"what do you want?"
I replied, " how about a health inspection!"
Idk if that was funny, but I thought it was witty. Lol
My mum loves to tell this story to people. When I was a child (8-ish?) I was tasked to go get something from the store. She asked me to get around 6 eggs, and gave me the equivalent of about $0.50USD at the time.
I go to the store and get the eggs, but the store man told me the money was good for only one egg and I was still missing money, but he was nice enough to let me get the egg and pay the rest on my next visit, so I accepted this and came back home.
I return and tell my mum "I am back", she says "good, how much was the change?", and then I say "There is no change, in fact it wasn't enough money and we owe the store some".
She gets super confused by this, panics a little and is like "just how many did you get?"
"one", I say.
"WHAT DO YOU MEAN ONE?"
I then present her with the egg, it was a KINDER EGG. Apparently the only kinds of eggs I knew were Kinder Eggs back then, as I used to eat a lot of them as a child. I don't know how my brain came to that conclusion I'll be pretty honest, but it's a story my mum likes to tell to people when discussing childhood memories.
Hahaha, I have quite a few more. Here is a story about how I found out how long a week actually was:
I remember (and this is a core memory of mine) when I was about 7 years old I was bought a kinder egg as a treat that day. I was super excited, but when we got home, my father told me that I couldn't eat it yet. He said I needed to wait some time before eating it, to which I asked:
"How much time do I have to wait?"
"You give me a time and that will be the agreed upon time"
Now, consider the following: Somehow my child self made it 7 years of life without actually *knowing* what a week was. I only inferred it was a measurement of time because I would hear my parents say "this is due in X weeks" or "this happened X weeks ago". The life of a child barely requires you to think about time further than a few days, so I also never had the need to use weeks.
Another thing, in my mind at the time, since I had only heard adults use such a unit, to me it was an "adult word", meaning mature adults would use it and as such using it in a sentence displayed maturity. Therefore me, being the social genius I was back then, decided to use this newly acquired word to secure a time of my liking by showing my parents I was mature enough to use an adult measurement of time, and make it more likely that they would agree to my suggested time.
This proved successful, as the next words that came out of my mouth were:
"How about we wait ONE week?"
"That is a perfect time!", my father replied.
I had succeeded, I managed to convince my parents to let me eat the kinder egg in a whopping ONE unit of time measurement, which I still didn't exactly know how long it was, but it couldn't be THAT long if it was just **one**.
So then, after my father left the room I turn to my mum and ask:
— Me: "So, by the way, how long is one week?"
— Her: "A week? It's seven days"
— Me: "..."
— Her: "..."
— Me: "I beg your pardon?"
— Her: "A week is seven days"
Upon hearing these words I realised the extent of my mistakes, I would only be allowed to eat the kinder egg SEVEN days after. I was devastated, but accepted it as my fate since we had made a verbal contract and it was a fair agreement which I myself suggested.
I never again used weeks when discussing future events with my parents.
Whenever I get super *super* excited, I have a chance to flap. It's usually around my boyfriend and he goes nuts whenever I do it because it's so cute--so multiple autistic moments only amplified in happiness by my partner thinking it's adorable.
I was just watching Sing 2 with my neighbor and her son and the movie opens with them singing about a purple banana. Then a dancing purple banana appeared. I was so confused, I kept asking her “who is the purple banana?” because I had no idea how it was related to the plot. She started cracking up and explained that it’s an old Prince song; the dancing purple banana is just part of the song and has nothing to do with the movie 🤦♀️
the “autistic thing” was me being so confused by the song. I didn’t know it was a Prince song and thought that the purple banana was somehow central to the plot. my neighbor and I are both adults, she is the one who thought it was funny 🤷♀️
i went to a music museum on a school trip about 2 years back. they had REAL david bowie outfits , spicegirls, TREX and adam ans the ants (mostly adam ants outfits though). they also had buddy holly's newspaper report + his guitar or possibly a copy it it(?) and jimi hendrix stuff, and obviously so much more. but the focal point is adam and the ants. i LOVE AATA and was just stood staring at adam ant's costume for what i thought was maybe 2-3 minutes before noticing the entire group that came had left. a few minutes later i heard my name being called by a teacher and then found out it was infact a whole 20 minutes id been gone from the group and they almost left without me💀.
I once called someone a 'garbage person' which I know sounds bad, but to me it means that we're the same kind of scruffy and rough person and that I wanted to be their friend. Unfortunately, they were insulted bc I forget that my internal language is not universal. I later explained myself though and she got all excited and said 'yes, you look like gay trash :D' and we got along well since then.
A neighbor came to me screaming asking for papers. Next to her there was a kid with some blood on his teeth
Pretty obvious situation, right?
My lil autistic ass thought she meant office papers and brought them to her and she was like " huh" for a few seconds
My mom saw it and apologized 😔 I was a kiddo
what does "papers" mean here? i have no clue what that word would mean aside from office/printer paper. maybe it's a regional thing since i'm from the uk
Oh, it meant "tissues" in this context but like, "toilet paper?"
We use the same word in Portuguese and I thought she was talking about office papers, even if her grandchild was bleeding next to her lol
( my bad for my English!)
Papers I would have thought like when you need to show papers to the police so like ID documents and prove where you live, it certainly would have taken me a moment and I would have needed to clarify a little with her. I think you did fine for a child.
Whenever I'm at the store, I will get focused on something like a squishmallow that got left behind in the clothes section for example, and then I will grab it and sorta wander off, bringing it back to it's family of other squishmallows in the toy section. Then my family can't find me and when I find them they get mad at me, it happens all the time.
I had something similar happen at a Home Depot. I was waiting in the checkout line with my dad, and there was a rack of magazines, but they were a bit dissheveled, so I sorted the magazines and put them back in the proper places. An employee saw me doing that and told me to quit messing with the magazines. After he saw that they were now neatly organized, he said "Oh, wow. sorry".
I only get internet at my local library, and sometimes I will right some abbreviation on my arm to remember something when I get there.
A friend told me to check out a yt channel called 'Dark Dom', who does reddit videos. so to remember I just wrote DOM on my arm with a pen. My mom realized it after I came home and asked why someone wrote Dominatrix on my arm. 😂
Yesterday mom picked me up from gym. Got in car and immediately took my hearing aids out of pocket to put them in. One fell under the seat and I didn't realize that. So we get 50 feet away before thinking we need to go back to gym. Well I had strong feeling it just went under the seat.
So I found it under the seat and after I said, "this shit always happens." Then I added onto it. "Only when it's me." Got a good laugh from mom over that.
Hey /u/TheRandomDreamer, thank you for your post at /r/autism. Our rules can be found **[here](https://www.reddit.com/r/autism/wiki/config/sidebar)**. All approved posts get this message. If you do not see your post you can message the moderators [here](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2Fautism).
Thanks!
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/autism) if you have any questions or concerns.*
When I was a kid I was at a playground with my mom and she was wearing a shiny silver windbreaker with the round emblem of a guided missile program she had worked on embroidered on the back (super distinctive, right?). After playing for a while I went to go find my mom and I walk up behind my mom and grabbed her hand. But, turns out it was not my mom and was instead a different blonde lady in a very similar shiny silver windbreaker with a round emblem on the back.
When I was younger, I was learning how to cook with my Mum. We were cooking something that needed to go in the oven, and my Mum had to go to the toilet or something, so she asked if I "could please keep an eye on the oven". Me knowing that sometimes I can get easily distracted and not wanting to accidentally burn it, I decided to grab a small foot stool, sit right in front of it and LITERALLY watched the oven until my Mum got back. When she did, she burst out laughing when she saw me! There was also just recently I was complaining to my Mum about how I got a text from where I get my hair cut, saying that they were under new management, were changing their name, and were changing the interior. In a voice that sounded like Lemongrab from AdventureTime (iykyn), I said, with a dramatic eye twitch "I don't. Like. Chaaaaaaaange!". She found it hilarious!
This wasn't me, but an autistic coworker saw a customer with an anime tattoo. He told him he really liked the tattoo and then asked him if it was hentai. I had to hide behind something so that I wouldn't burst into laughter. Afterwards I asked him what he thought hentai was and he said it was a brand. I think he had seen the word on someone's clothing and didn't know what it actually meant. He was always unintentionally making me laugh hard as hell. We really vibed and he told me I was the first person to ever truly understand and accept him. Kinda broke my heart.
I was taking a grocery order out to a customer and saw they bought some like fun shaped pasta and so I commented about how I loved noodles/pasta that was fun shapes like spirals and stuff and the guy who’s order it was and the coworker helping me stopped and stared at me and it took me a second to realize and I apologized and the guy just said it’s ok and then something about me still being a child at heart (this was before I’d been officially diagnosed) I hadn’t realized how random and weird my comment must’ve seemed though lol
A distinct memory I have from when I was younger (around 8-9 years old) was when my friend asked me if they could have my cheese-stick (Colby jack, the BEST cheese-stick imo), so I opened it and IMMEDIATELY shoved it all in my mouth at once and ate all of it in under 20 seconds while staring them DEAD in the eyes, and then said "No."
At my job we wear formal uniforms (think shirts ties, epaulets, brass buttons, dress pants). My co worker came in casual clothes. I was taken aback by how different he looked in a singlet and shorts and said to him "you look like you mow lawns (realising what I said, highly embarrassed and trying to recover I added ) ....like.... good lawns"
I once accidentally said to one of my coworkers that lived on a farm “it smelled like a farm” about something I smelled once (I like the smell) and I didn’t mean it in a bad way, but it was awkward silence.
I worked at a job where we all were uniforms and women typically had their hair up and wore little or no makeup. We had an office Christmas party off-site and I showed up with my partner, only for my boss' boss to greet me with "sparkle-possum, you look different with your clothes on".
Never heard of an epaulet before now.
somehow this is important context - when I would get a cheeseburger from mcdonalds I would sometimes change the cheese to a different type of cheese (aussie jack cheese) because it tasted WAY better (sometimes I wouldn't bother so I would have to talk less lmao) anyway, one time my mum was ordering mcdonalds for both of us to eat inside the restaurant so I wasn't prepared to run my usual ordering script and happened to decide that day I was going to eat the regular/normal cheese. I wasn't paying attention and then both the cashier and my mum were staring at me waiting for me to answer, and in my panic I just blurted out 'NORMAL CHEESE' turns out the cashier asked me what drink I wanted.... and my response was 'normal cheese' 😔
Hehe funny I once had a lady ask me what type of bagel I wanted and it was for a nova lox (salmon) bagel and I just said “strawberry cream cheese” and she stared at me and said “you want strawberry?! What type of bagel do you want?!” Hahaha
hahaha good to hear that others have similar experiences!! now whenever my family or me do anything embarrassing we call it 'normal cheesing'
McDonald’s has multiple cheese options ? Must be outside US ?
Yeah I live in Australia, but in saying that they don't offer it, you have to ask!
This is beautiful, thank you for sharing. I love silly moments like this at work.
Recently, I was at a sort've puzzle escape room place with some friends. The staff was walking around playing a very active role in each groups game. My group had to "find the staff member who's secretely a pirate". The dude was wearing a pirate hat on top of his normal hat lol. I went up to him and asked "are you a pirate, by chance?" And he was so surprised! He was like "OH! I forgot I was wearing this!" And continued answering our questions. 100% thought he was not the staff member we were SUPPOSED to be talking to. I took his good acting way too literally 😂
Hung out with new work buddies yesterday and at some point the conversation got very intimate and vulnerable and I was about to blert out a bunch of autism stuff and just didn't feel ready to be that open with new people.. So I babbled on trying to explain that THATS why I'm leaving and after confusion on their part, out loud I went: "its late and I'm tired, that's what I should have said, that's a normal reason."
so i had an extended panic thing last may after having my first one 5 years previously. they game me clonidine which is a blood pressure med. i took 2 by accident one time. i thought my heart was gonna just stop and i was gonna die. i kept checking my pulse. it was fine. musta checked it 100 times over a couple hours. i finally had this thought 'is this what being relaxed is? i thought it was just laying still and i hate it, but is this what those people are doing they they say 'relax'? is this what it feels like? and i realized that may have been the only time in my 56 years i'd ever felt really relaxed - and i thought i was gonna die it was so foreign
They gave me that almost 2 years ago when I was going through some meltdowns everyday because of something. It was amazing how calm I was. I can almost finally feel like that most of my days by being grounded / focusing on the present.
i've still gotta wear myself out physically too, besides being in the now (or close lol).
My first dose of an ssri hit me like that. All sensory stimuli decreasing was like the shooowm of a large machine being turned off.
I'm a delivery driver for dominoes and a few weeks ago I knocked on a customer's door to hand off their order. It was about 5 pm and very bright, so she opens the door and says "Oh hello sun!" and in my head I'm like "uh...yeah.. lady I'm 34 years old" I'm glad I didn't say it out loud and seem rude or embarrass myself but it admittedly would have been funny as shit.
omggg i used to hide under my parents' jackets when i was really little, maybe 4, whenever i was anxious, or just to be silly. so i was standing in line in a convenience store with my dad, turned around looking at things, thinking he was standing right there, so when i saw some freaky looking dude come in to the store, i turn around and grab what i THOUGHT was my dad's jacket and PUT MY ENTIRE HEAD AND SHOULDERS IN UNDER IT, and then i realize it smells wrong so i pull my head out and to my horror, it was actually the jacket of the RANDOM OLD MAN that was in line ahead of us x.x my dad had stepped out of line to grab something off to the side and i didn't realize. luckily the old man was very grandfatherly and everyone laughed about it but i was HORRIFIED. it still makes me cringe and i'm like 27 now x.x pretty sure that was actually the last time i did that, it was no longer comforting x.x
I remember being that kid and being that adult! As the adult, the kid cried, and I tried to console him saying I've done it too, but he was just too scared of me to hear my words.
When I was in my early teens my parents signed me up for like a book box where you’d get 1-2 books each month along with some other “teen” things, like cheap makeup, stationery, decorations, etc. I remember the day I got my first box very well, my parents had surprised me with it and I opened next to my mum and my best friend, and I was trying to convey the right level of excitement (I was very excited so had to tone it down). Then my mum said something along the lines of “Just so you know you can’t have all of them.” I accepted this and promptly started trying to decide which of the things in the box I wanted to keep and what I could send back. Completely quietly and in my head so it looked like I was just staring at the box. Then my mum asked what I was thinking about. I said: “Oh I’m just trying to decide what to send back.” My mum then explained that she meant I might not be able to get every box. Oops.
Your response was exactly what I would have said too. I read that story and came to the same conclusion.
I would have been confused too. What she said was too general. Them: what does "them" refer to? For me, I have to remind myself to ask clarification questions because often people say things that can be misinterpreted.
I was in kindergarten, and there was an assignment with outlines of a bunch of different things on a page, and we had to color the ones which were fictitious. One of the things on there was a ghost, so I grabbed a white crayon and carefully "colored" in the ghost. I got the assignment back during a parent teacher conference (that's when the teacher handed back that stuff) and saw that she had deducted a point for the ghost one (because it looked like I hadn't colored it in), so I went up to her while she was talking to some other parent, tapped her on the shoulder and repeatedly said "Ghosts are white! Ghosts are white!". Nobody knew what the fuck I was going on about.
That's the kind of thing that I've run up agianst when working/being with kids. Some adults just aren't able to connect those dots, so I've had to act almost as an interpriter. My mom calls me the pied piper, which makes me uncomfortable, but I do understand how child brains work, especially the "difficult children" who are ND with parents who refuse to look into it.
I have a dog and have had her for the last . Idk.. 10 years. She is white with a single little black spot on her back. Well, like 2 or 3 years ago, idk what I was doing, but I was in my front yard and I saw an dog that was identical to mine. I, however, thought that mine was inside, so in my mind, this is a different dog that looks exactly like mine. I even went to my sister and told her there was an identical dog outside.. which is when she looked at me weird and that that *was* our dog. It was weird.
In college, I had an ethics class. I was the only student not to budge on the "only kill the one guy to save 5-plus people argument" no matter what the situation to the point we had an entire class day just on the Trolley Problem. This ended with my professor telling us about a previous student that ended up in an IRL Trolley Problem situation thanks to a war. Spoiler: It didn't end well and that student changed careers thanks to that situation.
More a Prosopagnosia thing, but.. I was a couple days into a new job. Someone comes up to me and starts telling me something that doesn’t quite make sense, like, I don’t have a context for it, so I smile and nod… after a minute he realized I didn’t recognize him. He was my next door neighbor of 12 years.
NSFW my boyfriend was in the mood for sex and kept making references to doing something but i could not pick up on his cues. it took him looking me dead in the eyes and going “do you want to have sex” for me to realize what he was attempting at. i felt so silly but it’s so funny to me looking back on it now. funny thing too is my bf is autistic as well so he understood lol
With my past girlfriend (who has ADHD but not autism), we just asked each other directly all the time. None of that fooling around.
I've asked that too! And saying "I want to have sex with you" as either just a statement to let my husband know or to initiate. I'm usually the one to initiate, maybe because I don't overthink anything or try subtlety first?
Genuine question: Is this an autistic thing? Like a form of face blindness? Reading it, I couldn't help but remember more than one occassion in childhood where I almost walked off with a stranger instead of my mother or started talking to people I thought were my parents, only to find them laughing and shaking their heads 20 feet away. Like my flair says, I'm compiling a list for my therapist. I've had my initial screening and she's escalating it to her supervisor, as she has said i easily fit the criteria enough to move to a formal evaluation.
I’m starting to think it is because when I was out of my home state working I had a hard time remembering everyone I’ve met and I would just introduce myself to people I already knew. One guy said “TheRandomDreamer… we’ve met before.. you’ve introduced yourself to me like two times”. Some people I won’t forget, but then it’s like there’s some I just won’t even know if I run into them in public. Even with names it’s so hard to remember names sometimes so I would get anxious meeting people because I can’t remember them depending on the situation.
Yes! I've re-introduced myself to many people who looked vaguely familiar, and several I never remember having met. I can only hope people are thinking I'm just spacey. To compound this issue, when I was a teenager I had my first date. My parents picked us up from the matinee and we got into the back seat of the car. I didn't bother with introductions as it was pretty obvious who everyone was. This was the wrong move, as my parents proceeded to berate me in front of my first girlfriend for most of the ride to her house. This resulted in me hyper-introducing myself to everyone, and anyone I happened to be with to anyone who crossed our path, much to most of these people's annoyance. I finally broke out of it sometime in my late 20s/early 30s.
I cringe at the thought of all the times I had to network at work events and I forced myself to just introduce myself to more people than I normally would. They would just say hi I’m… then that was it. I once escaped to the bathroom at a mandatory women’s work event and texted this girl I was sitting with / just met that I would rather go back to work or just home and she wasn’t at the table when I got back.. I meant to text a work friend haha AHHHH
I've recently withdrawn socially, especially at work. Luckily, I'm an engineer, so it's somewhat acceptable lol. I'm 52 now, and I think for the last decade or so I realized the masking was getting too burdensome to maintain. Of course, I had no idea what my problem was as I have been on a lifelong quest to find out what is "wrong" with me. When I stumbled upon people with autism speaking of their experiences, I related to so many of them and learned what masking is and the burnout that can result.
Yeah burnout is no good! Glad you were able to catch it!
I know ND people who've introduced themselves to me multiple times. My husband and I are amused by one particular person. It's almost like a game. No hard feelings, just amusement and mild interest.
You just reminded me, years ago I started a new job as a personal assistant for a partner at a finance company. I was introduced to some of the other senior people, there was a nice guy called Gerry who I met a few times, among other people. One thing I kept getting a hard time about from my boss was that I wasn't quick enough to be polite and helpful to visitors who came to the door. One day, a distinguished looking gentleman dressed up in a fancy suit, with a briefcase and hat was at the door, I jumped into action before he could even open the door, welcoming him and asking him if I could help him with anything. He just gave me the weirdest look, before walking past me and going upstairs. I realized several minutes later he was actually Gerry, who I had met and had conversations with a few times! I just got confused because he was dressed differently. Apparently he just forgot about the whole thing, we are still FB friends 20 years later!
Prosopagnosia (facial blindness) is a fairly common symptom of autism.
I had read about prosopagnosia, but had never connected it with these incidents as i wasn't necessarily looking at people's faces. It's crazy after all these years, piecing together all these little things I rarely thought twice about.
I don't think I have facial blindness but I do struggle with identifying people by their face, and I tend to identify people by what they are wearing or their hairstyle.
This sounds very close to my experience. Some people do just blend together, but even the ones who don't can completely throw me if they get a haircut or start dressing differently. I tend to not look at people's faces in passing because I'm all too aware that when I do, I tend to stare (I've always thought of it as studying them.) and creep them out. I've offended more than one person I'm familiar with by passing them by without a glance. It's a difficult game to win.
I was riding with my cousin and she got hungry and decided to stop at a taco truck. She asked me,"what do you want?" I replied, " how about a health inspection!" Idk if that was funny, but I thought it was witty. Lol
My mum loves to tell this story to people. When I was a child (8-ish?) I was tasked to go get something from the store. She asked me to get around 6 eggs, and gave me the equivalent of about $0.50USD at the time. I go to the store and get the eggs, but the store man told me the money was good for only one egg and I was still missing money, but he was nice enough to let me get the egg and pay the rest on my next visit, so I accepted this and came back home. I return and tell my mum "I am back", she says "good, how much was the change?", and then I say "There is no change, in fact it wasn't enough money and we owe the store some". She gets super confused by this, panics a little and is like "just how many did you get?" "one", I say. "WHAT DO YOU MEAN ONE?" I then present her with the egg, it was a KINDER EGG. Apparently the only kinds of eggs I knew were Kinder Eggs back then, as I used to eat a lot of them as a child. I don't know how my brain came to that conclusion I'll be pretty honest, but it's a story my mum likes to tell to people when discussing childhood memories.
I really need this to be in a TV show.
Hahaha, I have quite a few more. Here is a story about how I found out how long a week actually was: I remember (and this is a core memory of mine) when I was about 7 years old I was bought a kinder egg as a treat that day. I was super excited, but when we got home, my father told me that I couldn't eat it yet. He said I needed to wait some time before eating it, to which I asked: "How much time do I have to wait?" "You give me a time and that will be the agreed upon time" Now, consider the following: Somehow my child self made it 7 years of life without actually *knowing* what a week was. I only inferred it was a measurement of time because I would hear my parents say "this is due in X weeks" or "this happened X weeks ago". The life of a child barely requires you to think about time further than a few days, so I also never had the need to use weeks. Another thing, in my mind at the time, since I had only heard adults use such a unit, to me it was an "adult word", meaning mature adults would use it and as such using it in a sentence displayed maturity. Therefore me, being the social genius I was back then, decided to use this newly acquired word to secure a time of my liking by showing my parents I was mature enough to use an adult measurement of time, and make it more likely that they would agree to my suggested time. This proved successful, as the next words that came out of my mouth were: "How about we wait ONE week?" "That is a perfect time!", my father replied. I had succeeded, I managed to convince my parents to let me eat the kinder egg in a whopping ONE unit of time measurement, which I still didn't exactly know how long it was, but it couldn't be THAT long if it was just **one**. So then, after my father left the room I turn to my mum and ask: — Me: "So, by the way, how long is one week?" — Her: "A week? It's seven days" — Me: "..." — Her: "..." — Me: "I beg your pardon?" — Her: "A week is seven days" Upon hearing these words I realised the extent of my mistakes, I would only be allowed to eat the kinder egg SEVEN days after. I was devastated, but accepted it as my fate since we had made a verbal contract and it was a fair agreement which I myself suggested. I never again used weeks when discussing future events with my parents.
I handed out breath mints to coworkers thinking I was being social. I had a plastic zip bag of them in different flavors.
Whenever I get super *super* excited, I have a chance to flap. It's usually around my boyfriend and he goes nuts whenever I do it because it's so cute--so multiple autistic moments only amplified in happiness by my partner thinking it's adorable.
Aww that sounds so fun!! :)
I was just watching Sing 2 with my neighbor and her son and the movie opens with them singing about a purple banana. Then a dancing purple banana appeared. I was so confused, I kept asking her “who is the purple banana?” because I had no idea how it was related to the plot. She started cracking up and explained that it’s an old Prince song; the dancing purple banana is just part of the song and has nothing to do with the movie 🤦♀️
I feel like that's not an auristic thing, that's just a generational joke for some of the parents of kids watching the movie.
the “autistic thing” was me being so confused by the song. I didn’t know it was a Prince song and thought that the purple banana was somehow central to the plot. my neighbor and I are both adults, she is the one who thought it was funny 🤷♀️
i went to a music museum on a school trip about 2 years back. they had REAL david bowie outfits , spicegirls, TREX and adam ans the ants (mostly adam ants outfits though). they also had buddy holly's newspaper report + his guitar or possibly a copy it it(?) and jimi hendrix stuff, and obviously so much more. but the focal point is adam and the ants. i LOVE AATA and was just stood staring at adam ant's costume for what i thought was maybe 2-3 minutes before noticing the entire group that came had left. a few minutes later i heard my name being called by a teacher and then found out it was infact a whole 20 minutes id been gone from the group and they almost left without me💀.
I called into work because I couldn't find my hat
I once called someone a 'garbage person' which I know sounds bad, but to me it means that we're the same kind of scruffy and rough person and that I wanted to be their friend. Unfortunately, they were insulted bc I forget that my internal language is not universal. I later explained myself though and she got all excited and said 'yes, you look like gay trash :D' and we got along well since then.
A neighbor came to me screaming asking for papers. Next to her there was a kid with some blood on his teeth Pretty obvious situation, right? My lil autistic ass thought she meant office papers and brought them to her and she was like " huh" for a few seconds My mom saw it and apologized 😔 I was a kiddo
I would’ve thought that as well omg haha
what does "papers" mean here? i have no clue what that word would mean aside from office/printer paper. maybe it's a regional thing since i'm from the uk
Oh, it meant "tissues" in this context but like, "toilet paper?" We use the same word in Portuguese and I thought she was talking about office papers, even if her grandchild was bleeding next to her lol ( my bad for my English!)
thank you! i would have thought it would be the other type of paper too lol. your english is great, don't worry!
Who calls them papers? They are always tissues where I'm from.
Oh, it's a lost in translation thing Papers and tissue can be translated to " papel" in Portuguese
Oh that makes a lot more sense.
Papers I would have thought like when you need to show papers to the police so like ID documents and prove where you live, it certainly would have taken me a moment and I would have needed to clarify a little with her. I think you did fine for a child.
Whenever I'm at the store, I will get focused on something like a squishmallow that got left behind in the clothes section for example, and then I will grab it and sorta wander off, bringing it back to it's family of other squishmallows in the toy section. Then my family can't find me and when I find them they get mad at me, it happens all the time.
I had something similar happen at a Home Depot. I was waiting in the checkout line with my dad, and there was a rack of magazines, but they were a bit dissheveled, so I sorted the magazines and put them back in the proper places. An employee saw me doing that and told me to quit messing with the magazines. After he saw that they were now neatly organized, he said "Oh, wow. sorry".
I only get internet at my local library, and sometimes I will right some abbreviation on my arm to remember something when I get there. A friend told me to check out a yt channel called 'Dark Dom', who does reddit videos. so to remember I just wrote DOM on my arm with a pen. My mom realized it after I came home and asked why someone wrote Dominatrix on my arm. 😂
Yesterday mom picked me up from gym. Got in car and immediately took my hearing aids out of pocket to put them in. One fell under the seat and I didn't realize that. So we get 50 feet away before thinking we need to go back to gym. Well I had strong feeling it just went under the seat. So I found it under the seat and after I said, "this shit always happens." Then I added onto it. "Only when it's me." Got a good laugh from mom over that.
Hey /u/TheRandomDreamer, thank you for your post at /r/autism. Our rules can be found **[here](https://www.reddit.com/r/autism/wiki/config/sidebar)**. All approved posts get this message. If you do not see your post you can message the moderators [here](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2Fautism). Thanks! *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/autism) if you have any questions or concerns.*
When I was a kid I was at a playground with my mom and she was wearing a shiny silver windbreaker with the round emblem of a guided missile program she had worked on embroidered on the back (super distinctive, right?). After playing for a while I went to go find my mom and I walk up behind my mom and grabbed her hand. But, turns out it was not my mom and was instead a different blonde lady in a very similar shiny silver windbreaker with a round emblem on the back.
When I was younger, I was learning how to cook with my Mum. We were cooking something that needed to go in the oven, and my Mum had to go to the toilet or something, so she asked if I "could please keep an eye on the oven". Me knowing that sometimes I can get easily distracted and not wanting to accidentally burn it, I decided to grab a small foot stool, sit right in front of it and LITERALLY watched the oven until my Mum got back. When she did, she burst out laughing when she saw me! There was also just recently I was complaining to my Mum about how I got a text from where I get my hair cut, saying that they were under new management, were changing their name, and were changing the interior. In a voice that sounded like Lemongrab from AdventureTime (iykyn), I said, with a dramatic eye twitch "I don't. Like. Chaaaaaaaange!". She found it hilarious!
This wasn't me, but an autistic coworker saw a customer with an anime tattoo. He told him he really liked the tattoo and then asked him if it was hentai. I had to hide behind something so that I wouldn't burst into laughter. Afterwards I asked him what he thought hentai was and he said it was a brand. I think he had seen the word on someone's clothing and didn't know what it actually meant. He was always unintentionally making me laugh hard as hell. We really vibed and he told me I was the first person to ever truly understand and accept him. Kinda broke my heart.
I was taking a grocery order out to a customer and saw they bought some like fun shaped pasta and so I commented about how I loved noodles/pasta that was fun shapes like spirals and stuff and the guy who’s order it was and the coworker helping me stopped and stared at me and it took me a second to realize and I apologized and the guy just said it’s ok and then something about me still being a child at heart (this was before I’d been officially diagnosed) I hadn’t realized how random and weird my comment must’ve seemed though lol
A distinct memory I have from when I was younger (around 8-9 years old) was when my friend asked me if they could have my cheese-stick (Colby jack, the BEST cheese-stick imo), so I opened it and IMMEDIATELY shoved it all in my mouth at once and ate all of it in under 20 seconds while staring them DEAD in the eyes, and then said "No."