How Autistic Are You?

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Mild, mild to the point where it's barely noticeable. I think over the years I've focused hard on masking symptoms just like how I fooled people into thinking I was straight. Constantly losing friends is a problem, though. I've always been the oddball - no relationships or kids at all. I do like being unique but I've got to admit - not being able to associate with my peers suck.

I'm moderately autistic according to my total scores on my diagnostic report and other questionnaires. But it's such a multi-faceted condition that I wonder how valid it is to reduce it to a single parameter.

Do I want a cure? A complete cure for the whole shebang, probably not, unless it was reversible and of course free of side effects. I would imagine there would at least be some negative psychological side effects, and to some extent it might well be like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Brains are complicated machines, and if they were simple enough to understand, we'd all be too simple to understand them, so I don't believe the brain-cure merchants fully grasp the gravity of what they're messing with.

But I'm less averse to therapies for alleviating my individual problematic traits. Again, I'd be somewhat nervous about anything irreversible, and about side effects, which is probably why I've limited my "therapies" to studying my traits and looking for behavioural solutions, which are often more to do with coping strategies than an actual cure.

I seem able to become good at most things if I practise diligently, so if I can get my brain round where the weaknesses are in my thinking style, I might (e.g.) be able to acquire some of the executive function skills I seem to lack, though the process is horribly confounded by the fact that I find it hard to fathom what exactly goes wrong when my executive function fails, and it might require more creative ingenuity than I'm usually capable of. It sounds like the kind of problem a really good autism counsellor could be very helpful with, but I believe they're very rare and I doubt they work cheap.

Ditto for social difficulties, though it's often difficult and unwise to practise on unsuspecting, real people. So for social things I just study psychology and I try to get into the habit of seeing people as emotionally-driven, to generally enhance my awareness of feelings and their importance. Sometimes I really seem to get it when a person feels this or that, and I feel I'm growing when that happens, though I sometimes hyperfocus on the feeling at the expense of the wider context, so the operation may be successful but the patient dies. A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. But as long as I stay aware of that, I think the good often outweighs the harm. I think it's legitimate to see such activity as a kind of (partial) cure.

I'd like to try hypnotherapy for my sensory issues, perhaps a placebo would work, though placebos seem to work best when the client is initially fooled into thinking it's a real drug, so it's hard to know how it could possibly work if I were to seek it myself.

I don't have much faith in sitting in bathtubs of gypsum or any of the other substance remedies, including dietary changes (apart from eating healthy). I don't say none of them can possibly work, but somehow I think that most of them wouldn't. I did try the gypsum bath, but as I expected, it had no effect. Strong pharmaceuticals may alter some of the traits (Ritalin for attention problems, for example), but I really don't trust strong pharmaceuticals.

I answered other, because I can't put myself into one of the standard categories.
My brain is verry merry berry different from normal, even after IQ matching, I am so different from the smart people around me on objective tests of cognition and brain, while they cluster tightly together.
This is somewhat isolating for me, as I had thought that they were more similar to me, but they are not.
On some tests, I am the only outlier with a completely opposite response of equal magnitude.
Amongst HFA research participants, I am one of the people farther along the autism spectrum based on objective tests.
But I am verry merry berry high-functioning in certain non-social areas such as pursuing my special interests and independent living.
In social areas, I don't think I have as much spontaneous social cognition or social-emotional understanding as most people on wp, but people around me seem to accept me as me, my personality doesn't come across as annoying or offensive eggsept to eggstremely neurotypical women who generally dislike and reject me for reasons that I don't understand.
I think I have verry merry berry autistic brain, so much so that some of its traits ackshuly help me adapt by allowing me to do things in highly atypical ways.
I behaved in a verry merry berry autistic way as a child, but I learned to communicate at a crappy level by my teenage years, and now my communication is functional while abnormal.

I think I am mild for the most part. I can take regular classes at school and have good speech. I understand most social rules, even if I don't always follow them.

Professionals keep information somewhat simple for me (I couldn't understand). I have run off continuously since I was about 5.