Transcription
Hang on a second. I think that's an autistic person.
To look out for if you think an adult in your life may be autistic. The first sign to spot an autistic adult is that they prefer alone time rather than the company of others. So while they may like spending time with you, you might be their partner or their friend, they prefer not to entertain others in their own home. As an autistic adult, our home really is our safe space, and that's no different for kids. But as you get older and there's more stressors thrown upon you, more demands placed upon you, your home really becomes this fortress of solitude. I'd also say autistic adults, including me, can be very protective in maintaining our safe place. And I'd go as far as to say to the detriment of others. Now, you might think, "What?" If this is our safe place and other people want to come into that, it doesn't really matter what effect we have on them to make that go away. We're super protective of this safe zone to the detriment of others, which really doesn't even appear on our radar. And the last thing I'd say about safe zones, or your home for an autistic adult, or someone you think may be an autistic adult is this disproportionate response, this overreaction in your mind to the simplest things like a door knock, or an uninvited guest. And for me, you could throw in just too many people in my home. These are the things that you might think, "Who cares? Someone knocked the door, someone just rocked up to say, 'Hello.'" Or there's lots of people here, we're all having fun. You might think that, but for me, that's not the case. This is not anything mere. This is a major intrusion on my safe zone. So yeah, there's gonna be different reactions, and they're gonna seem disproportionate.
Another sign to spot an autistic adult in your life is do they have communication challenges, or do they communicate in a very different way? Like I do, do you find them constantly asking questions, or interrupting you while you are trying to tell them something? Do you find yourself being peppered with follow up questions that aren't always even relevant to the topic of the conversation? Autistic adults often like to question every point of a conversation, dissecting every last word. I do this with my wife all the time. I do it to process what I'm hearing so I can understand it and I can contribute. Of course, that doesn't mean it's not incredibly frustrating for the people in the conversation with me, I get that. But critically, without the endless questions, for the most part, autistic people will tend to simply misinterpret what you are saying. So but for all these endless questions, we may never interpret correctly what you are trying to convey to us. So there's a point to them, they're just frustrating. So as an autistic adult, let's say with my wife, if I'm having a conversation, or she's trying to tell me something and let's say I decide I'm just gonna listen from start to finish, suppress all urges, the chances are, I'll misinterpret what she says, and I'll launch some sort of counter attack. So I'll take it the wrong way and attack. Anything that I don't understand is a personal attack on me and I must attack back, or I'll just go off on a tangent that's completely irrelevant. Autistic adults can also become disinterested in conversations really quickly. We can lose focus and patience. And honestly, sometimes I'll just say to my wife, "Can you just get to the point? What are you trying to tell me? Can you just tell me what you're trying to tell me?" And often, there is no point. See, as an autistic person, it doesn't occur to me that people would talk when they have no point to make. They would just talk. My wife is entitled to just vent, to just debrief, to just bitch. She's entitled to just tell me a story. No point, just a story she wants to share. For an autistic person, this can be very confusing. So it works both ways to understand it where it's coming from, from both sides.
The next sign to spot an autistic adult is that they seem to focus their time and energy inwardly as an inward focus, rather than say, outwardly focusing, like many neurotypical, non-autistic people. It's been said that women focus on people while men focus on things. And that may be right or wrong, but for autistic people, it's even more specific than that. Autistic adults tend to spend a lot of their time, if not all their time, focusing on their passions, their special interests. In other words, we adopt an inward focus by default. It's not something we've chosen to do, we just wake up and by default focus inwardly. So there's a clear favoring of our passions, our interests over everything else. And part of that inward focus is a tendency to mask, or suppress our true selves and our true emotions and feelings to keep them inside, while at the same time, though, struggling to interpret, to process, and deal with these emotions and feelings that we're trying to hide.
This next sign to spot an autistic adult is do they seem to live in a world of their own? Autistic adults can sometimes just appear clueless to what's happening around them, unaware of what's going on around them, stuck in their own of the world. I absolutely can struggle with the awareness of others around me or the awareness of others in general. And this would include a lack of awareness of presence, of wants, needs, feelings, and the intentions of people we're spending our time with. We can also lack an awareness of time and space and our surroundings, environment, and our own personal needs. We can also appear to be living in a world of our own, because we can really struggle with identifying body language, verbal and nonverbal cues, voice tone, and just generally language that can make us feel like we're an alien living on a foreign planet.
The next sign to spot an autistic adult is that they tend to struggle in multi-tasking. So managing multiple tasks, demands, or even interactions. For me as an autistic adult, I have a strong urge, or need that I must complete a task before moving on to another task. And there may not be any logical reason why one task is more important than other to other people. But for me, this must be done before I can do this. And I would put this sign under the banner of executive function. So we have executive function challenges, like for example, in my case, not being able to appropriately prioritize tasks. So an example for me is, I can put certain tasks first, I can make them a priority, while to others, they're not actually important or the priority, but in my mind they are. I can also feel like a strong sense of resentment towards other people or other tasks, things that are not remotely connected to my interest or passion, getting in the way of me doing tasks that are connected to my interests, passions that are a priority of mine. People, tasks come up and get in the way I'm doing what I want to do bad. At uni, when I was studying law and this was obviously very bad, I had to complete one assessment, or essay, or whatever you want to call those in-semester assessments, one at a time. It didn't matter if multiple assessments were due at the same time, I could only work on one at a time before moving on to the next assessment. I guess I struggled to switch from thoughts and themes, and I thought, well, if I'm doing an assessment on criminal law, how could I possibly, concurrently do an assessment on property law? I can't, whoa, that's no, that doesn't compute and even if they do at the same time.
Another sign to spot an autistic adult in your life is, they appear just generally super sensitive to things like smells and tastes and noises and light. And I'm talking sensitive to a level that doesn't seem right to you or other people. In other words, they may be sensitive to smells, or tastes, or noises, or lights that don't bother anyone else. So on the surface, it can seem unbelievable, disproportionate, just plain made up. But sensory processing challenges and hypersensitivity to senses like smell, touch, taste, noise, light, these are very common challenges for autistic people. A particular paradox that can really frustrate my family is I can be really hypersensitive to noises. So I can get really, I'm startled so quickly, I get startled all the time and a lot of times, I end up just putting my hands on my ears because I can't hear this noise anymore, or I don't know how to get it past this noise. But the paradox being hypersensitive to noise, "But why are you so bloody louder, Ryan? You're always talking loud, you're so loud, you're banging and clanging." It's funny. It's a paradox, I guess. It's interesting, and I think it's pretty common. As an autistic person, I am really super sensitive to banging and clanging and noises, but I am that person. Also, and this is a sign you may have noticed, certain voices, or noises, or actions can set off an autistic person straight away out of nowhere and it just makes no sense how that's possible. For me, a squeaky door, loud eaters, can't be in the room with loud eaters. You know what's worse, slurpy drinkers? Do you know what's worse than that? I'm a loud eater and I'm a slurpy drinker.
Having you a part of this community means so much to me. So thank you for clicking subscribe, joining the community, and supporting me, Orion Kelly, That Autistic Guy. Until my next video, we'll talk soon.