Who, me?

Last night I stayed up way too late exploring oddizm, and had a few revelations about myself. Firstly, that I was thick for taking so long to get the pun of the website's name. Secondly, a number of experiences in my past became more clearly "autistic". Since my daughter's diagnosis, my husband and I have been playing the game of pointing out each other's autistic behaviors and sensory problems. I had always been smugly thinking to myself that he was really much more autistic than I was. He may still be, though neither of us has a diagnosis, but I am much more autistic than I had realized.

The first symptom I recognized in myself was auditory sensitivity. I had always believed that I was sensitive to loud noise because I was a musician. When a group of my colleagues are on the street when a fire truck passes with its siren blasting, we always cover our ears, while the general public barely seems to notice. I also have a terrible time understanding people's speech when there is any kind of background noise, and do a lot of lipreading.

Which leads to my next symptom--I have always felt uncomfortable looking at people's eyes. I've always looked at their mouths when they are talking. I feel as though looking into someone's eyes is like really looking into them, and that they can see into me, which feels overwhelming. I had attributed this to my insecurities, but now I wonder.

Last night, reading the jokes on oddizm--You Might Be An Aspie If...--and I realized that I was laughing an awful lot, and that actually a lot of those things sounded like me, and some memories were brought to mind. I remember being a freshman in high school, having found a great group of friends, all overintelligent misfits who hung out in the gifted counselor's office in the library. I was well known among this group for being gullible. One day one of the group told me that gullible was actually not in the dictionary, and I got the dictionary out to prove them wrong. I used to tell this story later on as a funny anecdote, but now I wonder if my literalism is more than that.

This weekend at the symphony we're playing an Oktoberfest pops program, complete with a group that yodels and plays alpenhorns. For one piece they encourage the audience to link arms and sway, and I've been swaying, too, to get into the spirit of things. I realized that the swaying actually feels good--comforting somehow. Maybe I'll start stimming intentionally.

I doubt I could be diagnosed as having Aspergers, but these things (and others) confirm my belief in the spectrum--that even those who don't fall on the spectrum really do in some way or another. That we are not really so different from one another.